The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot Essay Example for Free

The decamp terra firma by T. S. Eliot EssayThe eat up polish is a modernist verse form by T. S. Eliot caused a sensation when it was published in 1922. It is today the most widely translated and studied English-language poem of the twentieth century. This is perhaps surprising aband mavend the poems length and its operosey, nevertheless Eliots vision of modern life as plagued by sordid impulses, widespread apathy, and distributive soullessness packed a punch when commentators first encountered it. Pounds influence on the final version of The Waste terra firma is portentous. At the time of the poems composition, Eliot was ill, struggling to recover from his nervous breakdown and languishing through an unhappy marriage. Pound offered him acquit and friendship his belief in and admiration for Eliot were enormous. Pound, like Eliot a crucible of modernism, called for compression, ellipsis, reduction.The poem grew yet more cryptic references that were previously clear now became more obscure. Explanations were out the window. The result was a more difficult work but arguably a richer unrivalled. Eliot did not take all of Pounds notes, but he did take note his friends advice enough to turn his sprawling work into a tight, elliptical, and fragmented piece. Once the poem was completed, Pound lobbied on its behalf, convincing others of its importance. He believed in Eliots genius, and in the impact The Waste Land would have on the literary works of its day. That impact ultimately stretched beyond poetry, to novels, painting, music, and all the other arts. John Dos Passoss Manhattan Transfer owes a signifi bathroomt debt to The Waste Land, for example. Eliots take on the modern world profoundly shaped future schools of thought and literature, and his 1922 poem remains a touchs woodland of the English-language canon.Major ThemesDeathTwo of the poems portions The inhumation of the breathless and Death by water refer specifically to this theme. What complicates matters is that wipeout can mean life in other ral manufacturing crys, by dying, a being can pave the way for new lives. Eliot asks his friend fedora That corpse you ingrained last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? reincarnationThe Christ images in the poem, along with the many other religious metaphors,posit rebirth and resurrection as profound themes. The Waste Land lies courseow and the Fisher King is impotent what is needed is a new beginning. Water, for unity, can bring rough that rebirth, but it can also destroy.. Hence the prevalence of Grail imagery in the poem that holy chalice can restore life and wipe the slate clean likewise, Eliot refers frequently to baptisms and to rivers both life-givers, in either spiritual or physical ways.The SeasonsThe Waste Land opens with an invocation of April, the cruellest month. That backlash be depicted as cruel is a curious choice on Eliots part, but as a paradox it inform s the rest of the poem to a great degree. What brings life brings also death the seasons fluctuate, spinning from one state to another, but, like hi recital, they maintain some crystalise of stasis not everything changes. In the end, Eliots waste land is almost seasonless devoid of rain, of propagation, of real change. The world hangs in a perpetual limbo, awaiting the cover of a new season.LustPerhaps the most famous episode in The Waste Land involves a female typists liaison with a carbuncular man. Eliot depicts the scene as something akin to a rape. This chance sexual encounter carries with it mythological baggage the violated Philomela, the blind Tiresias who lived for a time as a cleaning woman.LoveThe references to Tristan und Isolde in The Burial of the Dead, to Cleopatra in A jeopardize of Chess, and to the story of Tereus and Philomela intimate that love, in The Waste Land, is often destructive. Tristan and Cleopatra die, eyepatch Tereus rapes Philomela, and even the love for the hyacinth girl leads the poet to secure and know nothing.WaterThe Waste Land lacks water water promises rebirth. At the same time, however, water can bring about death. Eliot sees the card of the drowned Phoenician sailor and later titles the quaternionth section of his poem after Madame Sosostris mandate that he fear death by water. When the rain finally arrives at the close of the poem, it does suggest the cleansing of sins, the rinse away of misdeeds, and the start of a new future however,with it comes thunder, and therefore perhaps lightning.HistoryHistory, Eliot suggests, is a ingeminate cycle. When he calls to Stetson, the Punic War stands in for World War I this substitution is crucial because it is shocking. At the time Eliot wrote The Waste Land, the First World War was definitively a first the Great War for those who had witnessed it. in that location had been none to compare with it in history. The predominant sensibility was one of profound change the world had been off upside down and now, with the rapid progress of technology, the movements of societies, and the radical upheavals in the arts, sciences, and philosophy, the history of mankind had reached a turn point.Eliots poem is like a street in capital of Italy or Athens one layer of history upon another upon another.The five parts of The Waste Land are titled1. The Burial of the Dead2. A Game of Chess3. The attempt Sermon4. Death by Water5. What the windfall Said-The Waste Land office I The Burial of the DeadThe first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different verbaliser. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and deals that she is German, not Russian. The mho section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a cede waste, where the speaker will show th e reader something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding slowly you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you / He will show you fear in a handful of dust (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines). The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a hyacinth girl and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her.These recollections are filtered throughquotations from Wagners operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The tercet episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot adaptation, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a capital of the United Kingdom populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he erstwhile fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of Wo rld War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. epitomeEliots opening quotation sets the tone for the poem as a whole. Sibyl is a mythological figure who asked Apollo for as many years of life as there are grains in a handful of sand (North, 3). Unfortunately, she did not think to ask for everlasting youth. As a result, she is cursed to decay for years and years, and preserves herself within a jar. Having asked for something akin to eternal life, she knocks that what she most wants is death. Death alone offers escape death alone promises the end, and therefore a new beginning. Eliots poem, like the anthropological texts that stir it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in bind form these are an excellent source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Man y of the references are from the tidings at the time of the poems writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its apex in the Four Quartets.The Waste Land Section II A Game of ChessThis section takes its title from dickens plays by the early 17th-century playwright Thomas Middleton, in one of which the moves in a game of chess denote stages in a seduction. This section focuses on two opposing scenes,one of high society and one of the lower classes. The first half of the section portrays a wealthy, highly groomed woman surrounded by exquisite furnishings. As she waits for a lover, her neurotic thoughts go bad frantic, meaningless cries. Her day culminates with plans for an excursion and a game of chess. The second part of this section shifts to a London barroom, where two women discuss a leash woman.Between the bartenders repeated calls of HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME (the bar is closing for the night) one of the women recounts a conversa tion with their friend Lil, whose economise has just been discharged from the army. She has chided Lil over her failure to get herself some false teeth, telling her that her husband will seek out the company of other women if she doesnt improve her appearance. Lil claims that the cause of her ravaged looks is the medication she took to fuck off an abortion having nearly died giving birth to her fifth child, she had refused to have another, but her husband wont leave her alone.AnalysisThe first part of the section is largely in unrhymed iambic pentameter lines, or blank verse. As the section proceeds, the lines become increasingly irregular in length and meter, giving the touch of disintegration, of things falling apart. As the woman of the first half begins to give voice to her paranoid thoughts, things do fall apart, at least formally We read lines of dialogue, then a snippet from a nonsense song. The second half of the section is a dialogue interrupted by the barmans refrain. R ather than hobby an organized structure of rhyme and meter This is perhaps the most poetically experimental section of the good poem. Eliot is writing in a lower-class vernacular here that resists poetic treatment.This section refutes the prevalent claim that iambic pentameter mirrors normal English speech patterns Line length and stresses are consistently irregular. The two women of this section of the poem represent the two sides of modern sexuality while one side of this sexuality is a dry, barren interchange inseparable from neurosis and self-destruction, the other side of this sexuality is a rampant birth rate associated with a lack of grow and rapid aging.The comparison between the two is not meant to suggest par between them or to propose that the first womans exaggerated sense of high culture is inany way equivalent to the second womans lack of it rather, Eliot means to suggest that neither womans form of sexuality is regenerative.The Waste Land Section III The get up SermonThe title of this, the longest section of The Waste Land, is taken from a sermon given by Buddha in which he encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolized by fire) and seek independence from earthly things. A turn away from the earthly does indeed take place in this section, as a series of increasingly debased sexual encounters concludes with a river-song and a religious incantation. The section opens with a desolate riverside scene Rats and garbage surround the speaker, who is fishing and musing on the king my chum salmons wreck. The river-song begins in this section The speaker then proclaims himself to be Tiresias, a figure from classical mythology who has both male and female features (Old man with wrinkled female breasts) and is blind but can see into the future.Tiresias/the speaker observes a young typist, at home for tea, who awaits her lover, a dull and slightly arrogant clerk. The woman allows the clerk to have his way with her, and he leaves vict orious. Tiresias, who has foresuffered all, watches the whole thing. After her lovers departure, the typist thinks whole that shes glad the encounter is done and over. A fishermans bar is described, then a splendiferous church interior, then the Thames itself. These are among the few moments of tranquillity in the poem, and they seem to represent some sort of simpler alternative. Queen Elizabeth I in an amorous encounter with the Earl of Leicester. The queen seems unmoved by her lovers declarations, and she thinks just now of her mountain humble people who expect / Nothing. The section then comes to an abrupt end with a few lines from St. Augustines Confessions and a vague reference to the Buddhas Fire Sermon (burning).AnalysisThis section of The Waste Land is notable for its inclusion of customary poetic forms, particularly musical ones. The more plot-driven sections are in Eliots usual assortment of various line lengths, rhymed at random. The Fire Sermon, however, also includ es bits of many musical pieces the use of such low forms cuts both ways here In one sense, it provides a criticalcommentary on the episodes described, the cheap sexual encounters shaped by popular culture (the gramophone, the mens hotel). But Eliot also uses these bits and pieces to create high art, and some of the fragments The opening two stanzas of this section describe the ultimate Waste Land as Eliot sees it.The wasteland is cold, dry, and barren, covered in garbage. conflicting the desert, which at least burns with heat, this place is static, save for a few scurrying rats. Even the river, normally a symbol of renewal, has been reduced to a dull canal. while Buddha can only repeat the word burning, unable to break free of its monotonous fascination. The poems next section, which will relate the story of a death without resurrection, exposes the absurdity of these two figures faith in external higher powers. That this section ends with only the single word burning, isolated on the page, reveals the futility of all of mans struggles.The Waste Land Section IV Death by WaterThe shortest section of the poem, Death by Water describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died, seemingly by drowning. In death he has forgotten his worldly cares as the creatures of the sea have picked his form apart. The narrator asks his reader to consider Phlebas and recall his or her own mortality. AnalysisWhile this section appears on the page as a ten-line stanza, in reading, it compresses into eight four pairs of rhyming couplets. Both visually and audibly, this is one of the most formally organized sections of the poem. It is meant to recall other highly organized forms that often have philosophical or religious import, like aphorisms and parables. The alliteration and the deliberately archaic language (o you, a fortnight dead) also contribute to the serious, didactic feel of this section. The major point of this short section is to oppose ideas of renewal and regenera tion. Phlebas just dies thats it. Like Stetsons corpse in the first section, Phlebass body yields nothing more than products of decay. However, the sections meaning is far from flat indeed, its ironic layering is twofold.The Waste Land Section V What the Thunder SaidThe final section of The Waste Land is outstanding in both its imagery and its events. The first half of the section builds to an apocalyptic climax, as suffering people become hooded hordes swarming and the unreal cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. A decaying chapel is described, which suggests the chapel in the parable of the Holy Grail. Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and the rains come, relieving the drought and bringing life back to the land. Curiously, no intrepid figure has appeared to claim the Grail the renewal has come seemingly at random, gratuitously.Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunders power. The medi tations seem to bring about some sort of reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting on the shore preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his threatening death or at least abdication. The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a childrens song.AnalysisThe final stanzas of The Waste Land once again link Western and Eastern traditions, transporting the reader to the Ganges and the Himalayas, and then returning to the Thames and London Bridge. Eliots tactic throughout his poem has been that of eclecticism, of mixing and matching and of diversity, and here this strain reaches a culmination. The relevant Upanishad passage, which Eliot quotes, describes God delivering three groups of followers - men, demons, and the gods - the sound Da. The challenge is to eviscerate some meaning out of this apparently meaningless syllable. For men, Da becomes Datta, meaning to give this order is meant to sway mans greed. For demons, dayadhvam is the dictum these cruel and sadistic beings must show compassion and empathy for others. Finally, the gods must get word control damyata for they are wild and rebellious. Together, these three orders add up to a consistent moral perspective, composure, generosity, and empathy lying at the core.The initial imagery associated with the revelation at this sections opening is taken from the crucifixion of Christ. Significantly, though, Christ isnot resurrected here we are told, He who was living is now dead. The rest of the first part, while making reference to contemporary events in Eastern Europe and other more traditional apocalypse narratives, continues to draw on Biblical imagery and symbolism associated with the quest for the Holy Grail. The repetitive language and uncut imagery of this section suggest that the end is perhaps near, that not only will there be no renewal but that there will be no survival either. Cities are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed, mirroring the orbitual downfall of cultures. The meditations upon the Upanishads give Eliot a chance to test the potential of the modern world.Asking, what have we given? he finds that the only time people give is in the sexual act and that this gift is ultimately short and destructive He associates it with spider webs and solicitors reading wills. Just as the poems speaker fails to find signs of giving, so too does he search in vain for acts of sympathythe second characteristic of what the thunder says He recalls individuals so caught up in his or her own fateeach thinking only of the key to his or her own prisonas to be oblivious to anything but ethereal rumors of others. The third idea expressed in the thunders speechthat of controlholds the most potential, although it implies a series of domineering relationships and surrenders of the self that, ultimately, are never realized.