The Waste Land

     Thomas Stearns Eliot, author of The Waste Land, has been called the most influential poet of the twentieth century. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but became a British subject in 1927. For this reason, his works may be studied in British or American literature courses. In 1906 he attended Harvard, where he was influenced by student groups who were interested in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, the humanism of Irving Babbitt, and Indian mystical philosophy. He received additional education at the Sorbonne and at Oxford University. The Waste Land first appeared in October, 1922, in the Criterion, a periodical founded and edited by Eliot. In November of the same year it was published in the Dial, an American publication. At a later date it was published as a book with notes added, and it has also appeared in numerous anthologies. So, in this assignment I will analysis the Waste Land poem.

      The first section of The Waste Land (The Burial of the Dead) takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made of four vignettes and each one of them seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian. The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence (“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter”). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader something different from your shadow at morning striding behind 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 through quotations from Wagner’s operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, 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 London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World 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. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins. The poet in lines 1-2 use personification in giving that the ability to wake brilliance. In lines 4-5 he uses personification to give inanimate object, the heart ability to remake peace. Also, in line 5, there is imagery of (blaze), bright fire, radiating heat and crackling and popping, creates a contrast to the serenity she had been describing.

     The second section of the Waste Land (A Game of Chess) takes its title from two plays by the early 17th-century playwright Thomas Middleton, in one of which the moves in a game of chess refer to stages in a seduction. This section focuses on two opposing scenes, the first one of high society and the second one of the lower classes. The first half of the section describes a wealthy, highly groomed woman and her around the exquisite furnishings. As she waits for a lover, her neurotic thoughts become 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 third woman.  (The bar is closing for the night) one of the women recounts a conversation with their friend Lil, whose husband 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 doesn’t improve her appearance. Lil claims that the cause of her ravaged looks is the medication she took to induce an abortion; having nearly died giving birth to her fifth child, she had refused to have another, but her husband won’t leave her alone. The women leave the bar to a chorus of good night. He use literary device in this section as in lines (125) symbolize how modern souls have become hard and lifeless.

 The third section of The Waste Land(  (The Fire Sermon)  is taken from a sermon given by Buddha in which he encourages his followers to give earthly passion (symbolized by fire) and seek freedom from earthly things. 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 about Rats and garbage surround the speaker, who is fishing .The river-song begins in this section, with the refrain from Spenser’s Prothalamion: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.” A snippet from a vulgar soldier’s ballad follows, then a reference back to Philomela (see the previous section). The speaker is then propositioned by Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris’s tarot pack. Eugenides invites the speaker to go with him to a hotel known as a meeting place for homosexual trysts. The speaker then notes 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. 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 victorious. Tiresias, who has “fore suffered all,” watches the whole thing. After her lover’s departure, the typist thinks only that she’s glad the encounter is done and over.  

A brief interlude begins the river-song in earnest. First, a fisherman’s bar is described, then a beautiful church interior, then the Thames itself. These are among the few moments of tranquility in the poem, and they seem to represent some sort of simpler alternative. The Thames-daughters, borrowed from Spenser’s poem, chime in with a nonsense chorus (“Weialala leia / Wallala leialala”). The scene shifts again, to Queen Elizabeth I in an amorous encounter with the Earl of Leicester. The queen seems unmoved by her lover’s declarations, and she thinks only of her.  The next section an abrupt end with a few lines from St. Augustine’s Confessions and a vague reference to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon (“burning''). He use literary device as water which is symbol to death or life.

As you can see,  The waste land poem is critique of modern society. The main problems the modern world refer to the poem concern the loss of meaning and faith. In this condition, people look for meaning in the external and superficial. It explores this crisis in belief that pervaded twentieth century western culture. Eliot endorse traditional values. He wants return to religious values where individual live by their faith and this purportedly gives meaning.