A Lesson From T. S. Eliot

There is a passage in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that I return to frequently:

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

This is a fine piece of writing, because it looks so damned simple.  

Unlike much of The Waste Land, this section does not bend the reader’s mind with complex phrasings and allusions.  There aren’t even any big words here….  This passage is simply a demonstration of good writing.  For those interested in studying poetry, Eliot here "puts on a clinic" regarding effective use of repetition and varying line lengths.  The smooth flow of the first section, which establishes the image of a path through barren mountains, becomes the staggering dehydration of the second section, hence its shorter lines, and the passage concludes with the blunt and cruel acceptance of reality after a blissful vision of a stream amongst pine trees: “But there is no water.”

Like I said, it looks so damned simple.  Of the passage’s 175 words, only two contain more than two syllables.  Punctuation is nonexistent.  “Water” is repeated eleven times, “rock,” nine.  Even the subject matter, on its face, is very straightforward: somebody in a barren landscape wants water.  

But in the hands of a lesser poet, twenty-seven lines about wanting water would likely induce such thoughts as, “Yeah, yeah, I got your point a long time ago.”  

But most, if not all, great writing is deceptive.  Readers don't realize how good it is until they finish and think something like, “Wow.  I could never write anything like that.  Not because the writer has a large vocabulary.  Not because the work is so long I could never find the time.  Not because the sentences coil on for pages and lose me in their complexity….  But simply because every word was in its proper place."

Great writing.  It should seem so simple.