If Eliot Were Alive to Read This It Would Kill Him All Over Again

T.South. Eliot was no stranger to classical literature. Early on in his life, due to a congenital illness, he found his refuge in books and stories, and this is where the classics-studded verse form The Waste Land stems from. Drawing allusions from everything from the Fisher King to Buddhism, The Waste Land was published in 1922 and remains one of the most important Modernist texts to date.

Modernist verse, itself a calling-back to older means of writing, and developing, in office, equally a response to overwrought Victorian poetry, started in the early years of the 20th century, with the intent of bringing poetry to the layman – similar to Wordworth'due south attempt over a hundred years before. Long poems were unusual in modernist poetry, withal, post the 1930s, longer poetry took over from the shorter sequences and sound poetry of the 1920s. The Waste product Land signified the motility from Imagism – optimistic, bright-willed to modernism, itself a far darker, disillusioned way of writing.

Some of the mythology used inside The Waste product State was, at the time, considered obscure – bits from the Hindu Upanishads, from Buddhist lore, and the lesser-known legends of the Arthuriana are woven throughout the narrative, bringing along several dissimilar voices, experiences, and cultures within the poem.

Summary

It is difficult to tie one meaning to The Waste material Land. Ultimately, the poem itself is about civilisation: the celebration of civilisation, the death of civilisation, the misery of being learned in a world that has largely forgotten its roots. Eliot wrote it every bit a eulogy to the civilisation that he considered to be expressionless; at a fourth dimension when dancing, music, jazz, and other forms of popular culture took the place of literature and classics, it must have felt, to Eliot, equally though he was shouting into the wind. Still, 'The Waste Land's merit stems from the fact that it embodies so much knowledge within the verse form itself. It serves equally a living testimony to the enmeshed design of homo spirit and human civilization.

Withal, the fragmented writing that Eliot was infamous for – see as well The Beloved Story of J. Alfred Prufrock – makes the poem a daunting one to analyse. Information technology is carve up into five sections, each of which has a different theme at the centre of its writing, as well as addendums to the poem itself which were published largely at the behest of the publisher himself, who wanted some reason to justify printing The Waste Land as a separate verse form in its own book.

Although not a part of the verse form quoted below, the allusions first before that: the poem was originally preceded by a Latin epigraphy from The Satyricon, a comedic manuscript written past Gaius Petronius, about a narrator, Encolpius, and his hapless and unfaithful lover. The phrase reads, in English, 'I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to hear, 'Sibyl, what do you desire?' she replied, 'I want to die'.'

Non a cheery fashion to first the poem: the oracle Sibyl is granted immortality by Apollo, merely not eternal youth or health, and so she grows older and older, and frailer, and never dies. The meaninglessness of the oracle of Sibyl's life is a testimony and an allusion to the meaninglessness of civilisation, co-ordinate to Eliot; by putting that item quotation from 'The Satyricon' at the start, he encapsulates the very sense of The Waste material Country: civilization has become meaningless, and dragged on for nothing.

Post-obit that quote, there is a dedication to Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro. Originally, The Waste Land was supposed to exist twice as long as it was – Pound took it and edited it down to the version that was subsequently published. However, il miglior fabbro can also exist considered to be an allusion to Dante'due south Purgatorio ('the best smith of the mother tongue', writes Dante, about troubadour Arnaut Daniel), besides as Pound's own The Spirit of Romance, a book of literary criticism where the second chapter is 'Il Miglior Fabbro', translated as 'the better craftsman'. Although originally written in ink, later versions of the poem included the dedication to Pound equally a function of the poem'due south publication.

Eliot also included the following quote, headed underneath 'Notes': "Not only the title, but the plan and a adept deal of the incidental symbolism of the verse form were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston'southward book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, then deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston'southward volume will elucidate the difficulties of the verse form much meliorate than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to whatever who recall such elucidation of the verse form worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, 1 which has influenced our generation profoundly; I hateful The Golden Bough; I have used specially the two volumes Attis Adonis Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies."

Notice more than T.S. Eliot poems.

Detailed Analysis

I. The Burial of the Dead

Apr is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the expressionless land, mixing
Memory and want, stirring
Ho-hum roots with bound rain.
Wintertime kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A trivial life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised u.s.a., coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the curvation-duke'southward,
My cousin'southward, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And downwardly we went.
In the mountains, there you feel complimentary.
I read, much of the night, and get south in the winter.

Immediately, the poem starts with the recurring imagery of death: 'April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the expressionless country, mixing / Retention and desire, stirring / Deadening roots with spring rain'. Note the cadence of every –ing ending to the judgement, giving information technology a breathless, uneven sort of reading: when one reads information technology, there is a quick-slow pace to information technology that invites the reader to linger over the words.

The utilise of the word 'winter' provides an oxymoronic idea: the thought that cold, and decease, can somehow be warming – however, it isn't the celebration of death, as it would exist in other poems of the time, but a cold, difficult fact. Winter is the time for normal life to hibernate, to become suspended, and thus the anxiety of change and of new life is avoided. At the time of writing, Eliot was suffering from an acute state of fretfulness, and it could well exist the truth behind the poem that modify was something he was actively avoiding.

'Starnbergersee', and its shower of regenerating pelting, refers to the countess Marie Louise Larisch's native abode of Munich. The reference to 'Hofgarten' also calls dorsum to Munich; it is a garden in the center of Munich, located between the Residenz, and the Englischer Garden, and she stands as a symbolic reference to European decadence, and thus, unavoidably, of Imagism. Marie Louise Larisch's presence in the poem can exist put downwardly to quite a few reasons – after the crushing misery of the Showtime World War, Marie Louise Larisch was a symbol of Sometime-Earth decadent Europe, the kind from before the state of war.

The two experiences recounted here could too well be seen as the dualistic nature of the world. From before the state of war – Marie and her cousin go sledding, that sense of excitement and take chances, 'in the mountains, there yous feel free', and then the reference to 'drank java, and talked for an 60 minutes', which could stand up for the post-state of war earth, ho-hum and sterile and emptied of all nuance, different the pre-state of war globe. The separation of the 2 stanzas past High german further emphasizes the thought that, while both akin, the two worlds remain at parallels to each other – 'Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch' means 'I am not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, I am a existent German'. This phrase further emphasises the separation that the author, and the reader, then, feels.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches abound
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You lot cannot say, or gauge, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sunday beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry out stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow nether this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this cherry rock),
And I will show you lot something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to run into you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They chosen me the hyacinth girl."
—Notwithstanding when we came back, belatedly, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your artillery full, and your pilus moisture, I could non
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew zip,
Looking into the middle of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.

Here is another of Eliot'due south allusions 'son of man/ you cannot say or guess', which is directly lifted from The Phone call of Ezekiel, in the Volume of Ezekiel. This is how God addresses Ezekiel, and the utilize of it in the poem elevates Eliot to a god-similar position, and reduces the reader to cipher more than a follower; this could likewise have been put in equally a response to the vast advancements of the time, where science made great leaps of technology, all the same the spiritual and cultural sectors of the world lay forgotten, co-ordinate to Eliot.

'A heap of broken images' shows the fragmented nature of the world, and the snapshots of what the world has become further serves to pinpoint the emptiness of a world without culture, a world without guidance or spiritual belief. Eliot himself noted that this is from Ecclesiastes 12, a book within the Bible that discuss the significant of life, and the borne duty of homo to appreciate his life. The references to shadows seems to imply that there is something larger and far more than greater than the reader skulking along beside the poem, lending it an air of menace and the narrator an air of omnipotence, of beingness everywhere at once.

The High german in the center is from Tristan and Isolde, and information technology concerns the nature of love – love, like life, is something given by God, and humankind should appreciate it because it and then very hands disappears. In Tristan and Isolde, the chief thought behind the opera is that while expiry conquers all and unites grieving lovers, dear itself only causes problems in the outset place, and therefore information technology is death that should be celebrated, and not love. The use of it in Eliot's verse form adds to the idea of a welcomed death, of death needing to announced.

Some other reference to tragic love, and uniting death, occurs in the use of the flowers 'hyacinth'. Hyacinth was a immature Spartan prince who defenseless the heart of Apollo, and in a tragic accident, Apollo killed him with his discus. Mourning his lover, Apollo turned the drops of blood into flowers, and thus was built-in the flower Hyacinth. There are twofold reasons for the reference to Hyacinth: 1, the legend itself is a miserable fable of expiry once more uniting thwarted lovers and, two, the allusion to homosexuality would have, itself, been problematic. Homosexuality was not tolerated at the time of Eliot'due south writing, and so he could exist attempting to give the silenced a vocalisation by referencing Hyacinth, one of the most obvious homosexual Greek myths. However, to continue with the same theme in the poem, the evidence of dear will exist lost to death, and there volition be null more existing.

The stanza ends with some other quote from Tristan and Isolde, this fourth dimension meaning 'empty and desolate the ocean'.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, withal
Is known to exist the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Crewman,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Hither is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And hither is the 1-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to meet. I do not find
The Hanged Human being. Fearfulness expiry by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thanks. If you see beloved Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must exist then careful these days.

Cleanth Brooks writes: "The fortune-telling of "The Burying of the Expressionless" will illustrate the general method very satisfactorily. On the surface of the poem the poet reproduces the patter of the adventurer, Madame Sosostris, and at that place is the surface irony: the contrast between the original use of the Tarot cards and the use made by Madame Sosostris. Only each of the details (justified realistically in the palaver of the fortune-teller) assumes a new meaning in the general context of the poem. At that place is then, in addition to the surface irony, something of a Sophoclean irony as well, and the "fortune-telling," which is taken ironically by a twentieth-century audience, becomes true every bit the verse form develops–true in a sense in which Madame Sosostris herself does non call up it true. The surface irony is thus reversed and becomes an irony on a deeper level. The items of her speech have merely one reference in terms of the context of her speech: the "man with three staves," the "one-eyed merchant," the "crowds of people, walking round in a ring," etc. But transferred to other contexts they become loaded with special meanings. To sum upward, all the central symbols of the poem head up here; but here, in the only department in which they are explicitly bound together, the binding is slight and accidental. The deeper lines of association just emerge in terms of the total context as the verse form develops–and this is, of grade, exactly the outcome which the poet intends."

The Phoenician sailor could be a reference to Shakespeare'due south The Storm; in this particular stanza, several images intermesh between water and rock, starting with the allusion to the storm (h2o being the symbol used past Eliot for rejuvenation and regeneration) and so moving on to the idea of Belladona, 'the lady of the rocks', i.east. the never-changing and desolate landscape of the Waste country itself. Once again, it moves to water – the 'homo with three staves' being the representation of the Fisher King, who was wounded by his own Spear, and is regenerated through water given to him from the Holy Grail.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a wintertime dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each homo fixed his eyes before his anxiety.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the terminal stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted concluding year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this yr?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that'due south friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—monday frère!"

'Unreal Urban center' references Baudelaire's The Seven Old Men, from Fleurs du Mal. It was written at the time when Paris was considered a decadent, overwrought paradise of scientific discipline, technology, and innovation, but not very much culture; thus, Paris, in Baudelaire's writing, takes on a nightmarish landscape. Here, Eliot uses information technology in much the aforementioned issue: a nightmarish landscape that is non quote Paris, and is not quite London, merely is meant to stand in for several places at once.

'Mylae' is a symbol of warfare – it was a naval battle between the Romans and Carthage, and Eliot uses it here equally a stand-in for the Offset World War, to show that humanity has never changed, that war will never change, and that expiry itself will never change.

'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men' is a paraphrasing of a quote from John Webster's The White Devil, a play about the Vittoria Accoramboni murder. In the play, a grapheme named Marcello is murdered, and his mother tearfully implores Flamineo to go on 'the wolf far thence, that'south foe to men / for with his nails he'll dig them up again'. If he is dug upwards again, and then his spirit volition never detect rest, and he will never be reborn – here, Eliot, capitalizing on the quote, changes it so that the try to disturb rebirth is seen equally a good affair. Afterward all, Eliot is implying, who would desire to be reborn in a world without culture?

II. A GAME OF CHESS

The second stanza moves on from the description of the landscape – the titular waste product land – to three different settings, and 3 more unlike characters. The title is taken from 2 plays by Thomas Middleton, wherein the idea of a game of chess is an practice in seduction.

The Chair she sat in, like a glassy throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held upwards past standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a gold Cupidon peeped out
(Some other hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting low-cal 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 foreign synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, dislocated
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 dark-green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which lamentable calorie-free a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The modify of Philomel, by the barbarous male monarch
And so rudely forced; even so there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable vox
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
"Jug Jug" to muddy 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, nether the brush, her pilus
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

Decadence and pre-war luxury abounds in the first function of this stanza. The references to 'throne' could be attempting to pinpoint to Europe, or England, more than specifically, but fifty-fifty without the remits of identify, the thought is of pre-war Europe, the seductive and vicious Old World that American writers harped on most in their works. Nonetheless, the luxury that is written about seems empty. The 'gold Cupidon' hides his face, and the reference to jewels, ivory, and glass seems to show an empty wealth – everything that is mentioned in the poem is a symbol of extravagance, still the fact that it is glass and ivory and jewels seems to suggest a certain fragility in its wealth. Even the colours seem muted, and the calorie-free seems to be fading throughout the get-go stanza, shedding light only for a moment; every bit we read, the extravagance seems to be withering.

'Laquearia' is a type of panelling.

The reference to Paradise lost – 'sylvan scene / The modify of Philomel, by the barbarous King' – can be a reference to everything that the earth has lost since the Start World State of war: innocent soldiers, innocence in full general, this sense of naught every quite being right again. It can also stand for the tearing death of culture, given abroad to the vapidity of the modern earth. There is a sense of altogether failure in this section – the references to Cleopatra, Cupidon, sylvan scenes, and Philomen, are references to failed love, to destruction of the status quo. The description of the woman moves from powerful, and stiff – her wealth is her shield – to weak, thereby showing again the divergence betwixt pre-state of war and post-war Europe, specifically pre-war and post-state of war England. Once a noble state, now information technology is sometime and doddering, aging ('pitiful low-cal / a carved dolphin swam'; 'withered stump of time').

"My nerves are bad to-night. Yeah, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do y'all never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what y'all are thinking. Think."

Here nosotros see the insanity of the woman, thereby symbolising that all her wealth has non done a thing for her listen, lending the fragmented poem an fifty-fifty bigger sense of fragmentation, and giving it a sense of loss, though the reader does non yet know what nosotros take lost. As this was written at the height of spiritualism, 1 could imagine that it is trying to depict an allusion to those grief-maddened mothers and mistresses and lovers who contacted spiritualists and mediums to try and come into contact with their loved ones. Alternatively, one can have information technology as the embodiment of England, trying to accomplish out to her expressionless.

I think we are in rats' aisle
Where the dead men lost their bones.

Reference to the First World War over again – the trenches were notorious for rats, and the use of this imagery further lends the poem a sense of decay and rot.

"What is that noise?"
The wind nether the door.
"What is that noise now? What is the current of air doing?"
Nada once more nothing.
"Do
You lot know zip? Do you see nothing? Practise you lot think
Goose egg?"
I call up
Those are pearls that were his optics.
"Are you live, or non? Is at that place nothing in your caput?"
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
Information technology'south so elegant
Then intelligent

Further fragmentation of the poem, to the indicate where even the grammar seems to be suffering; 'Shakespherian Rag' was a renaming of the 'Mysterious Rag', and it is furthermore emphasising the expiry of culture for popular, high lodge dances and popular culture in full general. Yet, it is interesting to annotation that he mentions Shakespeare again – once more than, the reader thinks of the Tempest, a drama assault a little island, beset by ferocious storms.

"What shall I practice at present? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we practice to-morrow?
What shall we always do?"
The hot water at 10.
And if it rains, a airtight car at four.
And nosotros shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless optics and waiting for a knock upon the door.

The lack of purpose, lack of guidance, can exist considered to be one of the causes of madness, and the further descent into fragmentation in the poem. In that location is a loose sense of time in this particular stanza – from 'the hot water at ten./ And if information technology rains, a closed car at four. / And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door'. It lends the poem a sense of suspended animation, as it did in the commencement, all the same here, the guideless manner of the people seems to be loosely defined by very small happenings – their days are structured through moments, rather than planned out.

When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said,
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
Hurry Upwards Please ITS Time
Now Albert's coming dorsum, make yourself a flake smart.
He'll desire to know what you done with that money he gave you lot
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You take them all out, Lil, and go a nice set up,
He said, I swear, I can't bear to expect at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and recollect of poor Albert,
He'due south been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others volition, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a direct look.
HURRY Upwards PLEASE ITS Time
If you don't like information technology y'all tin become on with it, I said,
Others tin can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't exist for lack of telling.
You ought to exist ashamed, I said, to look then antiquarian.
(And her merely thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long confront,
Information technology'south them pills I took, to bring information technology off, she said.
(She'due south had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, just I've never been the same.
Yous are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't go out you alone, there it is, I said,
What y'all go married for if you lot don't want children?
HURRY UP Delight ITS Fourth dimension
Well, that Sunday Albert was habitation, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP Please ITS Fourth dimension
HURRY Upwardly Delight ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Expert night, ladies, proficient night, sweet ladies, practiced night, good night.

'Lil' could reference Lilith, Adam's start wife, who was thrown out of Eden for beingness too dominant. All the same, in the poem, it could also be considered that Lil is merely a friend of the narrator's – a woman who was unfaithful to her married man; hither again is referenced the cloying and ultimately useless nature of love ('And if you don't requite information technology him, in that location's others will, I said'). This seems to be congenital upon the idea of sex as the ultimate expression of manliness, a theme that Eliot enjoyed exploring in his works. The fact that the woman hints that in that location are 'others who will' implies that she herself is sleeping with her friend'southward husband, however we cannot be certain of this.

This terminal role of the stanza seems to show the minutiae of the upper-class in shoddy lighting – with a difficult emphasis on the nature of womanhood, and on the trials of womanhood. Lil is 'merely thirty one' but looks much older; she took pills to 'bring it off', which nosotros later understand is to induce abortions, and throughout the poem, the other woman attempts to requite her communication, nevertheless, the irony is that the other woman is, too, miserable, and wrapped up in her own misery to the signal where her advice seems to be a little skewed.

Brindled throughout the latter stanza of the poem is the phrase 'hurry up please its fourth dimension' giving a sense of urgency to the poem that is at odds with the lackadaisical fashion that the adult female is recounting her stories – it seems to be building up to an almost apocalyptic outcome, a dark tragedy, that she is completely unaware of.

The last line references Ophelia, the drowned lover of Hamlet, who famously thought 'a woman's beloved is brief'. Therefore, nosotros know for sure that this particular stanza of the verse form is referencing sex – the ultimate pleasure for a man, and a duty of the woman's.

3. THE Burn down SERMON

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of foliage
Clutch and sink into the wet banking company. The air current
Crosses the brown country, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my vocal.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, accept left no addresses.
Past the waters of Leman I sabbatum downwardly and wept…
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweetness Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my dorsum in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

The line 'Sugariness Thames, run softly till I end my song' is from Spenser'south Prothalamion, and information technology references a spousal relationship song. In Spenser, water represents a joyous occasion, which is at odds with its usage in Eliot's Waste state. Here, the water once more represents a loss of life – although there is the sign of human being living, there are no humans effectually.

The reference to 'nymph' could be calling back to the overarching idea of sex.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was angling in the tiresome culvert
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse.
Musing upon the rex my brother's wreck
And on the king my father'south death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones bandage in a trivial low dry out garret,
Rattled past the rat's human foot just, yr to twelvemonth.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the bound.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their anxiety in soda water
Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

There is no reason given, ultimately, for the wreckage of the Waste Land; all the same, following the idea of the Fisher Male monarch, we can assume this – that as the narrator suffers, and then too does the world. The world, with the loss of civilization, is now a barren continent, and with the onset of wars, has simply served to become even more than ruined and destroyed.

'Sweeney and Mrs Porter in the spring' – the legend of Diana, the hunting goddess, and Actaeon. Actaeon spied on Diana in the bath, and Diana cursed him with becoming a stag, who was torn to pieces by his own hounds. Here, Eliot tries once again to show the ruin that beloved and lust can bring to the lofty spirit.

Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole – 'and O those children's voices singing in the dome', which is French and from Verlaine's Parsifal, about the noble virgin knight Percival, who can beverage from the grail due to his purity. Information technology stands in this poem equally a criticism of then-contemporary values; of the downwards-grading of lust.

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
And so rudely forc'd.
Tereu

Unreal Metropolis
Under the chocolate-brown fog of a winter noon
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C. i. f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a week-stop at the Metropole.

'Mr. Eugenides' has a dual significant here – tying back to the merchant in Madame Sosostris' tarot cards, as well as standing in for the behaviour of soliciting gay men for affection. Canon Street Hotel and the Metropole were well known for this sort of behaviour among homosexual men, and thus once more, Eliot paints the cheapest possible sight of love.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and dorsum
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Similar a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, tin come across

Tiresias is from Greek Mythology, and he was turned into a woman as penalisation by Hera for separating two copulating snakes. In the poem, it just serves, again, every bit a symbol of the cheapness of love and amore.

At the violet hour, the evening 60 minutes that strives
Homeward, and brings the crewman abode from sea,
The typist dwelling at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out nutrient in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's terminal rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the remainder—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young homo carbuncular, arrives,
A small firm-agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the depression on whom assurance sits
As a silk lid on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at one time;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

The scene that plays out illustrates Eliot's thought about the decease of higher beliefs, such as the idea of romance and honey. Annotation the lack of intimacy evidenced in the description above.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his manner, finding the stairs unlit…

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'g glad it'south over."
When lovely adult female stoops to folly and
Paces about her room once again, alone,
She smoothes her pilus with automatic mitt,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

"This music crept by me upon the waters"

Reference to The Tempest.

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City City, I tin can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr concur
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and golden.

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges migrate
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Downwards Greenwich achieve
By the Island of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester

A reference to Elizabeth I, and the Get-go Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, who were rumoured to exist having an affair.

Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gilt
The brisk corking
Rippled both shores
South-west air current
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

"Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe."

"My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. Later the event
He wept. He promised 'a new starting time.'
I fabricated no comment. What should I resent?"

"On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken finger-nails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who wait
Nada."

la la

To Carthage so I came

Called-for burning burning burning
O Lord Thousand pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

called-for

'To Carthage then I came' references Augustine'southward journeying to overcome his secular and pagan lifestyle. Contrasting with the earlier function of the Burn down Sermon, where Buddha was preaching about abstaining, here the verse form turns to Western religion – however, regardless of their position, they're written into the poem with a slightly mocking overtone.

4. DEATH BY WATER

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight expressionless,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas dandy
And the profit and loss.
A current under bounding main
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and barbarous
He passed the stages of his historic period and youth
Inbound the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who plow the wheel and await to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall every bit y'all.

The circle of rebirth: the drowned sailor returns to the water, and will be reborn over again in time as he has 'entered the whirlpool', and thus re-entered the cycle of life.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

Later on the torch-light red on sweaty faces
Afterwards the frosty silence in the gardens
Afterwards the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and identify and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

The concluding department of the verse form opens up with a recounting of the events after Jesus was taken prison in the garden of Gethsemane, and subsequently the crucifixion itself. Discover the virtually apocalyptic language used in this part of the description, the style the language itself seems to emphasize the silence through the apply of linguistic communication words – 'shouting', 'crying', 'reverberation' are all words of noise, however this section of the poem brings almost an almost deathly repose, and an intermeshing of life and death that makes it difficult for the reader to tell whether the states exist separately or together. 'He who was living is now dead' also ties back to the thought of the rebirth sequence.

Here is no water just only rock
Rock and no h2o and the sandy road
The route winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If at that place were water we should finish and beverage
Amongst the stone one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and anxiety are in the sand
If in that location were only h2o amidst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one tin neither stand nor lie nor sit
At that place is not fifty-fifty silence in the mountains
Merely dry sterile thunder without pelting
There is non even solitude in the mountains
But crimson sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses
If at that place were water
And no rock
If there were stone
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If at that place were the sound of water merely
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But audio of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop baste drop drib drib drop
But there is no water

The apocalyptic imagery continues in the following section of the stanza. Once more, the poem returns to its description of the stone: the barren, desolate waste land of life that calls back to the cultural waste land that Eliot is then scornful of, the lack of life that corroborates to a lack of human faith. Water, the symbol of rebirth and regeneration, is surrounded on all sides by death, symbolized as rock, and thus leaving the idea of rebirth ambiguous.

Who is the third who walks e'er beside you?
When I count, there are but y'all and I together
Just when I look alee upwards the white road
At that place is always another one walking abreast y'all
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I practise not know whether a man or a woman
—Just who is that on the other side of you?

The hooded effigy can be seen every bit some sort of guardian, an allusion to the Biblical passage where Jesus joins two disciples in walking to the tomb in Sepulchre, and a guide through the chaotic mess of the world that is left behind. It is unclear if Eliot is implying that poetry should itself be the guiding principle which all people follow.

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in croaky globe
Ringed by the flat horizon but
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

Another reference to the total destruction rendered by war – 'falling towers' also calls the Biblical imagery of the tower of Babylon.

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and vanquish their wings
And crawled head down down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, merely the wind'southward home.
Information technology has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a erect stood on the roof-tree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, claret shaking my middle
The atrocious daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
Past this, and this merely, we have existed
Which is not to exist found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped past the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I accept heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn in one case just
We call up of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison house
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a cleaved Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the paw adept with sail and oar
The ocean was at-home, your middle would take responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To decision-making hands

Empty faith once more symbolized explicitly by the 'empty chapel'. This can too reference the Chapel Perilous – the graveyard for those who have sought the Holy Grail, and failed.

I sat upon the shore
Line-fishing, with the arid manifestly behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

The imagery of the fisherman sitting on the shore – 'with the arid plain behind me' – is a straight allusion to the Fisher King and his arid waste land. 'Shall I ate least ready my lands in order?' is a quote from the Cible, from the Book of Isaiah: "Thus saith the LORD, Ready thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live".

London Span is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow eat
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la bout abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit y'all. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

In the very last stanza, Eliot hints at the reason for the fragmentation of this poem: so that he could take us to different places and situations. Ruins, no affair where they are, are always ruins, and madness and expiry will never alter regardless of the departure in place.

Michael H. Levenson puts the last stanza into perspective from a linguistic indicate of view: The verse form concludes with a rapid series of allusive literary fragments: seven of the last eight lines are quotations. Merely in the midst of these quotations is a line to which nosotros must adhere great importance: "These fragments I take shored against my ruins." In the space of that line the poem becomes conscious of itself. What had been a serial of fragments of consciousness has become a consciousness of fragmentation: that may not be conservancy, simply information technology is a divergence, for as Eliot writes, "To realize that a bespeak of view is a point of view is already to have transcended information technology." And to recognize fragments as fragments, to proper noun them as fragments, is already to take transcended them not to an harmonious or final unity but to a somewhat higher, somewhat more than inclusive, somewhat more conscious point of view. Considered in this way, the poem does not achieve a resolved coherence, only neither does it remain in a chaos of fragmentation. Rather it displays a serial of more than or less stable patterns, regions of coherence, temporary principles of order the poem non as a stable unity but engaged in what Eliot calls the "painful task of unifying."

Historical Background

From the Modernism Lab at Yale University: "Eliot's Waste product State is I think the justification of the 'motion,' of our modernistic experiment, since 1900," wrote Ezra Pound before long after the verse form was published in 1922. T.S. Eliot'due south poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the commonage feel of the commencement world war and from Eliot'southward personal travails. Born in St. Louis, Eliot had studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford before moving to London, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on the philosopher F. H. Bradley. Because of the war, he was unable to return to the The states to receive his degree. He taught grammar school briefly and so took a chore at Lloyds Banking concern, where he worked for eight years. Unhappily married, he suffered writer'southward cake and then a breakdown soon after the war and wrote most of The Waste matter Country while recovering in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the age of 33. Eliot later described the poem every bit "the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant bickering against life…only a piece of rhythmical grumbling." All the same the verse form seemed to his contemporaries to transcend Eliot'southward personal state of affairs and stand for a full general crisis in western civilization. One of its major themes is the barrenness of a post-war globe in which homo sexuality has been perverted from its normal class and the natural globe also has get infertile. Eliot went on to convert to a High Church course of Anglicanism, become a naturalized British subject, and plough to conservative politics. In 1922, however, his anxieties about the modern world were still overwhelming.

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Source: https://poemanalysis.com/t-s-eliot/the-waste-land/

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