Eliot also included the following quote, headed underneath ‘Notes’: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours Out of this stony rubbish? Unreal. Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours The wind under the door. In it, the narrator -- perhaps a representation of Eliot himself -- describes the seasons. What should I resent?”, “On Margate Sands. Who is the third who walks always beside you? Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. the Fisher King) and various other religious and literary traditions. If there were only water amongst the rock Eliot explores themes of death, rebirth, and history as a cycle through a fragmented dramatic monologue comprised of five sections. Where the dead men lost their bones. Der Heimat zu Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, The use of other poets’ words also helps to reinforce Eliot’s theory of impersonality, since his own voice (even if we could assume that the speaker of the poem is Eliot himself, which is dangerous in itself) is often interrupted by the words of others. The nymphs are departed. Unreal City My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, Like a taxi throbbing waiting, And still she cried, and still the world pursues, What is the city over the mountains A woman drew her long black hair out tight By regaining spiritual and psychological enlightenment and making peace with our demons. I’ll have to do Four Quartets next :). When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said, Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck And other withered stumps of time Eliot 819 Words | 4 Pages “The Waste land,” by T.S. O City City, I can sometimes hear Nothing again nothing. T.S. Eliot’s poem draws on a vast number of literary and religious texts and traditions. With the turning tide Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell His vanity requires no response, This can also reference the Chapel Perilous – the graveyard for those who have sought the Holy Grail, and failed. But at my back in a cold blast I hear 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. Mourning his lover, Apollo turned the drops of blood into flowers, and thus was born the flower Hyacinth. Here we see the insanity of the woman, thereby symbolising that all her wealth has not done a thing for her mind, lending the fragmented poem an even bigger sense of fragmentation, and giving it a sense of loss, though the reader does not yet know what we have lost. I am looking forward to future posts!! Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, If there were water we should stop and drink You are a proper fool, I said. The lack of purpose, lack of guidance, can be considered to be one of the causes of madness, and the further descent into fragmentation in the poem. I sat upon the shore And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit…. Ta ta. His early poems, such as ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Preludes’, and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ all show Eliot depicting cityscapes and urban scenes within his work. The Waste Land Analysis 1834 Words 8 Pages The Waste Land by T.S. What follows is a short analysis of this opening section, with the most curious and interesting aspects of Eliot’s poem highlighted. From satin cases poured in rich profusion; The shouting and the crying There is no reason given, ultimately, for the wreckage of the Waste Land; however, following the idea of the Fisher King, we can assume this – that as the narrator suffers, so too does the world. 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. The Waste Land by Alan Paton We will show you examples of elements in the text that will be relevant for your analysis. By Richmond I raised my knees Ruins, no matter where they are, are always ruins, and madness and death will never change regardless of the difference in place. The deeper lines of association only emerge in terms of the total context as the poem develops–and this is, of course, exactly the effect which the poet intends.”. He promised ‘a new start.’ Jerusalem Athens Alexandria The imagery of the fisherman sitting on the shore – ‘with the arid plain behind me’ – is a direct allusion to the Fisher King and his barren waste land. “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, You can read ‘The Burial of … I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.”. Although originally written in ink, later versions of the poem included the dedication to Pound as a part of the poem’s publication. In 1919, a British female poet named Hope Mirrlees wrote a remarkable avant-garde poem, Paris: A Poem, which was published a year later by the Woolfs’ Hogarth press and anticipated Eliot’s poem in startling ways. Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison What? ‘The Burial of the Dead’ is the first of five sections that make up The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot ’s landmark modernist poem. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours I who have sat by Thebes below the wall Winter kept us warm, covering “Are you alive, or not? And the profit and loss. Followed by a week-end at the Metropole. Twit twit twit For example, the poem opens with “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” At first glance, the opening might sound like we're being offered a more pessimistic take on April's 'sweet showers' in the prologue of Chaucer’s "Canterbury Tales." Your shadow at morning striding behind you And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; After the frosty silence in the gardens Something o’ that, I said. Eliot’s poem draws on a vast number of literary and religious texts and traditions. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, This is from a Hindu myth in the Upanishads. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot - An analysis of imagery and structure Irina Jauhiainen Theme, Form, Imagery and Symbolism in T.S. He asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted in his garden has begun to sprout, returning us to the imagery from the beginning of the poem. Had a bad cold, nevertheless Hardly aware of her departed lover; “Has it begun to sprout? Highbury bore me. Eliot himself noted that this is from Ecclesiastes 12, a book within the Bible that discuss the meaning of life, and the borne duty of man to appreciate his life. To sum up, all the central symbols of the poem head up here; but here, in the only section in which they are explicitly bound together, the binding is slight and accidental. DA A reference to Elizabeth I, and the First Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, who were rumoured to be having an affair. In these notes, we will focus on the summary, structure, characters, setting, narrator and point of view, language, theme and message. But there is no water. The final section of the poem opens up with a recounting of the events after Jesus was taken prison in the garden of Gethsemane, and after the crucifixion itself. Do you see nothing? There is always another one walking beside you Water is needed to restore life to the earth, to return a sterile land to fertility. Thank you. O Lord Thou pluckest. If there were the sound of water only However, 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 husband; here again is referenced the cloying and ultimately useless nature of love (‘And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said’). Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel Tiresias is from Greek Mythology, and he was turned into a woman as punishment by Hera for separating two copulating snakes. The pleasant whining of a mandoline Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. Michael H. Levenson puts the last stanza into perspective from a linguistic point of view: The poem concludes with a rapid series of allusive literary fragments: seven of the last eight lines are quotations. Rock and no water and the sandy road In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam. Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think “Jug Jug” to dirty ears. Eliot’s The Waste Land T.S. And fiddled whisper music on those strings But how can we fix this society? Journeys with The Waste Land, an exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate, is currently displaying artworks in sync with Eliot’s poem. But each of the details (justified realistically in the palaver of the fortune-teller) assumes a new meaning in the general context of the poem. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is considered the most influential, both directly or indirectly, piece of literature of the 20 th Century, as its presence is felt in just about everything that has come after. The hooded figure can be seen as 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. So how could Eliot find out how to move poetry forward? Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Prison and place and reverberation Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter Unlike traditional poems, tidy connections and neat organization are largely absent in "The Waste Land." April is the cruellest month, breeding But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling. The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, 02/04/2020 T S Eliot: The Waste Land, Analysis 2/3 Later on in the poem, Eliot revisits this theme of a dead, empty Nature and concretises its use as a metaphor for spirituality in early Twentieth “The river’s tent is broken; the last ±ngers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. Son of man, With a little patience. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Dragging its slimy belly on the bank On the surface of the poem the poet reproduces the patter of the charlatan, Madame Sosostris, and there is the surface irony: the contrast between the original use of the Tarot cards and the use made by Madame Sosostris. The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. After the torch-light red on sweaty faces The barges wash You can read our discussion of ‘The Fire Sermon’ here. Look forward to future enlightenment. Will it bloom this year? Vienna London The Georgians hadn’t really moved on from this, even though they’re writing in a post-Victorian world. The Waste Land was composed in 1922, a time of climactic political and social change. You can read our discussion of ‘A Game of Chess’ here. Frisch weht der Wind Memory and desire, stirring Nothing?” Like many modernists, Eliot was highly self-conscious about his relationship to literary tradition. When analysing larger poems it is always difficult to analyse with the sort of depth that we could if we were analysing, say for instance, a sonnet. The section opens with a long and detailed description of the upper-class woman’s dressing room, where she is using perfumes and other products to make herself look and smell nice. 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. They are so obviously the words of some ritual or other. Decadence and pre-war luxury abounds in the first part of this stanza. Thanks! The ‘golden 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, however the fact that it is glass and ivory and jewels seems to suggest a certain fragility in its wealth. Gathered far distant, over Himavant. (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, and so on.) Ringed by the flat horizon only He claimed that a great poem makes it necessary to understand all earlier poetry of the same tradition in a new light. (If you’d like to learn more about Eliot’s life, you might find our short biography useful.) The most popular poetry in England in the second decade of the twentieth century was ‘Georgian’ poetry (a group of poets who named themselves after King George V, who came to the throne in 1910). The Waste Land is a modernist poem because it broke new ground when it was first published in 1922. T.S. Subscribe to our mailing list and get new poetry analysis updates straight to your inbox. hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”. His notes to The Waste Land – added as an afterthought to the original poem – tend to confuse the reader as much as they assist. Like most modernist works from the first half of the twentieth century, the poem deals with the mass cultural disillusionment following World War I. This poem makes the reader feel that T.S Eliot also had the power of dialectical poetry and this poem also proves him like a great saint. In our empty rooms How should we interpret these? Past the Isle of Dogs. Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing The stern was formed When I count, there are only you and I together And walked among the lowest of the dead.) There are twofold reasons for the reference to Hyacinth: one, the legend itself is a miserable legend of death once more uniting thwarted lovers and, two, the allusion to homosexuality would have, itself, been problematic. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, Every single person that visits PoemAnalysis.com has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. Following that quote, there is a dedication to Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro. The brisk swell The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Here is no water but only rock He wept. The typist home at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights Beating oars Baudelaire’s influence in particular can be seen in The Waste Land: rather than writing about the rural world of villages and haystacks, Baudelaire (1821-1867) had often written about the modern city, the urban world of the metropolis. Bringing rain The last line references Ophelia, the drowned lover of Hamlet, who famously thought ‘a woman’s love is brief’. Or other testimony of summer nights. Peppered throughout the latter stanza of the poem is the phrase ‘hurry up please its time’ giving a sense of urgency to the poem that is at odds with the lackadaisical way that the woman is recounting her stories – it seems to be building up to an almost apocalyptic event, a dark tragedy, that she is completely unaware of. Eliot, (London: Thames and Hudson) 125. Another reference to tragic love, and uniting death, occurs in the use of the flowers ‘hyacinth’. Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. the never-changing and desolate landscape of the Waste land itself. O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, It’s so elegant Therefore, we know for sure that this particular stanza of the poem is referencing sex – the ultimate pleasure for a man, and a duty of the woman’s. Notice the almost apocalyptic language used in this part of the description, the way the language itself seems to emphasize the silence through the use of language words – ‘shouting’, ‘crying’, ‘reverberation’ are all words of noise, however this section of the poem brings about an almost deathly quiet, and an intermeshing of life and death that makes it difficult for the reader to tell whether the states exist separately or together. And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. He passed the stages of his age and youth There is not even solitude in the mountains Endeavours to engage her in caresses Under my feet. You cannot say, or guess, for you know only Which an age of prudence can never retract And dry grass singing Because of the war, he was unable to return to the United States to receive his degree. There is not even silence in the mountains In terms of subject matter as well as poetic form, Georgian poets were working largely in a well-worn tradition they’d inherited from the Victorians. He would soon find his answer, while still an undergraduate, when he encountered the work of a number of nineteenth-century French poets, chiefly Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue. C. i. f. London: documents at sight, 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. Below is a short video written and presented by Dr Oliver Tearle of Loughborough University, which introduces a few of the key themes of The Waste Land. Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— It is split 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 poem in its own book. Eliot's The Waste Land from the online course Classics of American Literature: T.S. A little life with dried tubers. In a series of fragmentary vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, From before the war – Marie and her cousin go sledding, that sense of excitement and adventure, ‘in the mountains, there you feel free’, and then the reference to ‘drank coffee, and talked for an hour’, which could stand for the post-war world, boring and sterile and emptied of all nuance, unlike the pre-war world. Eliot is a complex, epic and infinitely ambitious poem and as such, it is regarded as one of … Another speaker talks of a mysterious shadow rising to meet us, and then we have a woman’s voice, describing herself as the Hyacinth girl. Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, Others can pick and choose if you can’t. Murmur of maternal lamentation O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— Eliot, perhaps one of the most controversial poets of modern times, wrote what many critics consider the most controversial poem of all, The Waste Land. My people humble people who expect It wasn’t saying anything particularly new. What is that sound high in the air And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s, Clutch and sink into the wet bank. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee And I will show you something different from either A good place to start with an analysis of The Waste Land is to examine the importance of literary allusion. I do not find The surface irony is thus reversed and becomes an irony on a deeper level. Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.“, “My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart Pingback: A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ – Interesting Literature, Pingback: A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ – Interesting Literature, Pingback: reading-discussion-24 - expertnursingwriters, Pingback: Reading discussion - Nursingmodules.com, Pingback: Reading discussion - Studyaffiliates.com, Pingback: read-the-poem-and-complete-the-discussion - expertnursingwriters, Pingback: A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hippopotamus’ | Interesting Literature.