Shadow World Book Club: Companion Readings to City of Bones

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

"When Clary follows Hodge out of the Institute, she remembers a couple of lines from a poem: “I think we are in rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones.” She’s remembering T.S. Eliot’s classic modernist poem “The Waste Land” (1922) an incredibly complex poem very loosely structured on Holy Grail folklore."

From “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot

II. A Game of Chess

 The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,           

Glowed on the marble, where the glass           

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines           

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out             

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)           

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra           

Reflecting light upon the table as           

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,           

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;             

In vials of ivory and coloured glass           

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,           

Unguent, powdered, or liquid — troubled, confused           

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air           

That freshened from the window, these ascended             

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,           

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,           

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.           

Huge sea-wood fed with copper           

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,             

In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.           

Above the antique mantel was displayed           

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene           

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king           

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale           

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice           

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,           

“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.           

And other withered stumps of time           

Were told upon the walls; staring forms           

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.           

Footsteps shuffled on the stair,           

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair           

Spread out in fiery points           

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.           

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.