Summary The Waste Land PDF

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This is an extensive summary and exploration of the text 'The Waste Land' that is studied extensively in the course. The work has an extensive summary of the text in question, an in depth commentary on the structure and form of the piece, an analysis of the themes and motifs in the text and finally ...

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The Wasteland – TS Eliot – Revision Published in 1922, The Waste Land is regarded as one of the most important poems of the 21 st Century and a central text in Modernist Poetry. The Burial of the Dead (1) Overview: 

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Eliot’s poem is profoundly dark. He offers an exploration into the ‘Waste Land’ that he believes modern culture to have descended into and gives readers no way to return. Critics have offered that Eliot bases the narrative of the poem, insomuch as there can be said to have one, on Arthurian tales of healing a redemption. ‘The Golden Bough’ and ‘Ritual to Romance’. Each work has the suggestion of healing the ‘Fisher King’ to heal England. The Waste Land, however, has no offering of the Fisher King, with Eliot instead choosing to show a destitute land with no hope of redemption. Split in five sections, the poem is difficult to follow and has little to no over arching story line. It is rather a collection of short images that have some linking motifs. o The Punic war: An incredibly costly war that decided the fate of Carthage and Rome in the Mediterranean. We are still feeling the effects of the war today (example: how we often use Latin in our language and not an African based language as Carthage used) (A Phoenician is used to refer to the merchants in the Mediterranean in Roman times, so can be conflated with Carthage) o WW1: The scope of the death in WW1 is obviously part of the poem, having been published four years after the end of the war. This war is often combined with the Punic wars in the poem. o Allusions to classic Literature (and the Bible): Confusing and difficult, but illustrative of the difficult and confusing nature of the 20 th century.

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The destruction of Europe after WW1 o Eliot describes in his poem the confusing nature and the utter abolishment of the old Europe following the events of WW1. His poem is an exploration of how now he, and others are unable to understand or even communicate their understanding (or lack of) in terms of the 20th century Europe. War o Clearly, following WW1, the poem is concerned with human conflict. It focuses on more than just WW1, conflating it with the equally destructive Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome which itself upended the power balance in the Mediterranean for the next 2000 years. Life and Death o Eliot deals with death pretty much consistently throughout the poem. He uses it as a method of blocking communication and as a way of dealing with memory. It also adds to the morbid tone of the poem. The ordinary juxtaposed with the extraordinary

A very modernist trope anyway, Eliot uses this extensively. Example: he talks about London bridge and the crowds that move across it, but also how those crowds are dead. That whole section deals with naturalist authors (Dickens: ‘Brown fog’, Baudelaire: ‘Unreal City’) and then references Dante’s inferno with the ‘flowing crowd of the dead’. Memory o Eliot explores memory as a way of firstly looking back to the past with a fondness, demonstrated through the German woman’s monologue, but also with a sense of grim reality. Bringing up the past inevitably leads to remembering the events of the war(s) and the death that it brought. Eliot, being a modernist, intends to throw memory aside as an exploration of the dark and prefers to look to the future which is somewhat brighter (though never too bright, Eliot makes sure to show that all is dark and there is no chance of recovery. Utter disillusionment with modern culture). Broken religion/any sort of unifying force in the world o Everything in the world has become divided. There is nothing left between nations or people that allows a connection after the rifts caused by conflict. We are wandering a wasteland. Religion, the previous unifier, has caused uter destruction and has become the instrument to its own undoing. o

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Language: Eliot is a poet of many voices, and his poem demonstrates this 

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Distinct variety of languages o Designed to disorientate the reader. Not to demonstrate the intelligence of Eliot or to make the work unreasonably difficult, but rather to reflect the difficulty of the 20 th century and the impossibility of understanding the nature of the world after WW1 ripped apart the fabric of humanity. o Use of French and German indicates his influences from Baudelaire and his use of Sanskrit is demonstrative of the influences the Hindu religion has on the themes of the poem. (Life and rebirth, etc) Profoundly dark tone o The poem is not supposed to be enjoyable or light hearted. It is a grim study of the waste land of Europe. Literally hundreds of examples. Mix of archaic language and modern language o Eliot demonstrating the over-riding of the new over the old, as is the aim of modernism. It also links with the desire to move forward and not look back at the horrors of the past. An overarching sense of nothingness o Even when the speaker remembers a romantic involvement with a woman, the ‘hyacinth girl’, he fails to complete anything. ‘Living nor dead’, she isn’t even a memory any more, she simply does not exist to him anymore. Is it better to have loved then lost, rather than to have never loved at all?

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Modified dramatic monologue o Four speakers in the section each have their own ideas and their own themes they want to put forward and seem frantic to do so. They dive straight into what they are saying without an intro or an exit from the previous speaker. It is important to them to be direct and fast, as though this the only brief moment on contact they have. o They desire to speak to their audience, but through circumstance they cannot. Like wars, or death. Short, confusing sections. o Leaving the audience on first reading bewildered, unable to grasp anything other than the odd image that the poem throws at us. Intentional, as Eliot wants to demonstrate how communication, art and humanity in general has become unsalvageable after the rift caused by conflict. Readers are left in the same state as the speakers. Eager to communicate, but unable to, as all those around them are dead. Partial Rhyming Structure, mostly unrhymed free verse. o Aimed to rework literary past. Eliot achieves both a stabilizing and a destabilizing effect at the same time. He shows that The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier time, though cannot be approached in the same way. Readers also latch onto the rhyme that they see, allowing Eliot to promote certain images in his poem. ‘Each man fixed his eyes before his feet // … street’ for example shows the lack of communication and the inability to connect in a society. The addition of languages other than English also presents a difficulty and presents both the difficulty in communication and the now cosmopolitan nature of Europe in the 20 th century. We will never be able to communicate effectively.

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April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. (1-4) o Spring as a time of rebirth, or in this case not. Memory for Eliot is connected to the unfulfilled longing for the past, a simpler time. Memory in this case is a negative thing. Rather than be filled with a nostalgia, Eliot is filled with bitterness for a time lost after the conflict. Memory makes us feel numb. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. (17-18) o Eliot might open the poem with this passage about Marie to show us that society as a whole is too removed from its innocent and playful days. Now, people might want to be too safe, and simply read books about the world instead of experiencing it.

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What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images […] (19-22) o This passage brings up the image of a spiritual whole that's been shattered or broken into fragments by modernity, and in this sense, Eliot conveys the sense of spiritual uneasiness that dominates the modern world. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (30) o The logic here is that the more you think about your own mortality, the more you'll start seeking spiritual guidance. —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Yours arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing Looking into the heart of light, the silence. (37-41) o his scene could be a symbol for the fall of modern minds, which were once connected to each other with a sense of love, but then lost their ability to communicate or think straight, and this led them spiraling into an isolated silence. "The Waste Land" as a whole could be seen as Eliot's attempt to make sense of where this isolation has historically come from. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. (64-65) o For Eliot, there is a certain emotional deadness or numbness that has made people stop paying attention to one another, and this is something society will have to overcome if it's ever going to get out of the waste land.

The Wasteland – TS Eliot – Revision Published in 1922, The Waste Land is regarded as one of the most important poems of the 21 st Century and a central text in Modernist Poetry. A Game of Chess (2) Overview: 

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Eliot’s poem is profoundly dark. He offers an exploration into the ‘Waste Land’ that he believes modern culture to have descended into and gives readers no way to return. Critics have offered that Eliot bases the narrative of the poem, insomuch as there can be said to have one, on Arthurian tales of healing a redemption. ‘The Golden Bough’ and ‘Ritual to Romance’. Each work has the suggestion of healing the ‘Fisher King’ to heal England. The Waste Land, however, has no offering of the Fisher King, with Eliot instead choosing to show a destitute land with no hope of redemption. Split in five sections, the poem is difficult to follow and has little to no over arching story line. It is rather a collection of short images that have some linking motifs. o The Punic war: An incredibly costly war that decided the fate of Carthage and Rome in the Mediterranean. We are still feeling the effects of the war today (example: how

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we often use Latin in our language and not an African based language as Carthage used) (A Phoenician is used to refer to the merchants in the Mediterranean in Roman times, so can be conflated with Carthage) WW1: The scope of the death in WW1 is obviously part of the poem, having been published four years after the end of the war. This war is often combined with the Punic wars in the poem. Allusions to classic Literature (and the Bible): Confusing and difficult, but illustrative of the difficult and confusing nature of the 20 th century.  This section relates in particular to plays from 17th century playwrights (Thomas Middleton and Shakespeare in particular).

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Class division o This section takes place in two separate places: one a rich and wealthy woman’s house and the other a bar with two poorer women in. o The upper class woman is waiting for her lover and becomes neurotic, ranting and raving with meaningless cries. She then makes a plan for an excursion and to play a chess game. o The two women in the bar are gossiping about a third woman in between the bar mans repeated calls of ‘Hurry up please it’s time’. One woman recounts her friend Lil, whose husband has returned from the army and expects her to have a set of false teeth that he has paid for. Lil is accused of having awful teeth because of the abortion medication because her husband won’t leave her alone. The women leave the bar to a chorus of ‘goodnights’ reminiscent of Ophelia in Hamlet. Exploration of ‘nothing’ o The opening section makes interesting use of the word ‘nothing’, presenting in some ways nothing as a thing in itself. We are questioned ‘do you know nothing?’, but rather than this being a quasi-insult, it is more of a ‘do you know (something about nothing)?’. This perhaps alludes to Eliot’s idea of the empty and ruined society where nothing, (the vain and the pointless), are seen as something viable. The woman gets worked up over ‘nothing’ and the notion of nothing. Gossip and intrigue o Like ‘nothing’, the focus of the two women’s conversation in the bar revolves around relatively useless subjects. The doings of another man and his wife are firstly, not the business of the two women and secondly completely inconsequential. Again this links to Eliot’s feelings on the emptiness of society, but also on the idea that connections can no longer be made between people unless, in this case and perhaps in a wider sense concerning war and conflict, at the expense of other people. The women bond over the belittlement of ‘Lil’. o The cries of ‘hurry up please its time’ suggest how society itself wants to move forward from this dead-end way of living through others suffering, but the women do not want to leave. The final ‘goodnights’ also illustrate the sad melancholy feel that Eliot has surrounding memory and how it is only a way of making yourself numb to the present through a unfulfillable desire for the past.

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Sexuality o One side of the sex is dry, barren and unfulfilled, whereas the other is sexually rampant and associated with the lack of culture and aging. o The rich woman is oddly sinister, a remnant of a past sexuality where everything is repressed and forced down. Associations with Cleopatra or Dido, who both killed themselves out of frustrated love. Her despair is pathetic however, unlike the two queens, as she demands her lover stay with her. She is directly compared to Philomela from Ovid’s metamorphoses, who is raped by her brother in law, her tounge cut out so she cannot tell anyone and then gets revenge and is turned into a nightingale. The story alludes to the woman being unable to express herself emotionally to the readership and becomes another example of Eliot demonstrating the emotional death of society. o The section between the two women is also demonstrative of how sex and sexual relations cannot bring regeneration in either a cultural or personal context. It is free from cultural allusions. Eliot offers Lil as a demonstration of the destruction of sexuality because of the body. Though Lil has done everything right (married, kids, loyalty), she is still being judged for her teeth and her sexual inability. o Sexuality in both cases is no longer regenerative.

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The first part of the section is largely in unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse. The section moves to increasingly irregular length and disintegrates, reflecting the idea of the collapse of the modern world and ‘things’. The woman of the first half gives her voice to the lines, creating an even more broken and lost text before finally returning to some normality before the switch, suggesting at least a partial return to normality. The second section is poetically experimental. The text is essentially a conversation between the two women with the Barman’s refrain interjecting. The vernacular resists poetic treatment, suggesting that Eliot is challenging the claim that iambic pentameter reflects normal speech patterns. The grounding of ‘I said’ allows the conversation to flow naturally even with the Barman’s interjections.

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The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced […] (99) o In this image, Eliot brings up the connection between sex and reproduction, and it seems that he's not quite sure if physical lust should have any place in sex, especially when rape seems to be the only example of it that he offers. Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you don't want children? (163-164) o In this blunt statement, the woman in the pub tells her friend Lil that when it comes to sex and having children, she (Lil) doesn't really have any say in the matter. If her husband Albert wants to have sex, that's just the way it's going to be. In this passage, Eliot might actually express a bit of sympathy for Lil's situation. Although at the same

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time, he might also be suggesting that there's something wrong with her for not submitting more easily to her husband's sexual appetites. The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, (77) o At the very beginning of "A Game of Chess," Eliot quotes Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra to evoke thoughts of a classically beautiful woman. For the next ten lines, the scene seems to confirm this beauty. From that point on, the focus of the poem seems to be on the falseness of the woman's beauty, which is flimsily propped up by "Unguent, powde[r], or liquid" (88) From this point on in the poem, Eliot seems to be done with his celebrations of classic beauty. Instead, his poem will turn its attention to physical (and moral ugliness), as he walks farther and farther into the waste land of the modern world. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (156-159) o Here, Eliot draws a connection between Lil's loss of physical beauty with her choice to have an abortion. It's as if the moral universe of the poem has punished her for refusing her reproductive role, and it is important to remember that the person choosing to show us this connection is Eliot. In this instance, then, you might say that Eliot is at his least sympathetic. You could also argue, though, that the poem does show some sympathy for Lil.

The Wasteland – TS Eliot – Revision Published in 1922, The Waste Land is regarded as one of the most important poems of the 21 st Century and a central text in Modernist Poetry. The Fire Sermon (3) Overview: 

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Eliot’s poem is profoundly dark. He offers an exploration into the ‘Waste Land’ that he believes modern culture to have descended into and gives readers no way to return. Critics have offered that Eliot bases the narrative of the poem, insomuch as there can be said to have one, on Arthurian tales of healing a redemption. ‘The Golden Bough’ and ‘Ritual to Romance’. Each work has the suggestion of healing the ‘Fisher King’ to heal England. The Waste Land, however, has no offering of the Fisher King, with Eliot instead choosing to show a destitute land with no hope of redemption. Split in five sections, the poem is difficult to follow and has little to no over-arching story line. It is rather a collection of short images that have some linking motifs. o The Punic war: An incredibly costly war that decided the fate of Carthage and Rome in the Mediterranean. We are still feeling the effects of the war today (example: how we often use Latin in our language and not an African based language as Carthage used) (A Phoenician is used to refer to the merchants in the Mediterranean in Roman times, so can be conflated with Carthage)

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WW1: The scope of the death in WW1 is obviously part of the poem, having been published four years after the end of the war. This war is often combined with the Punic wars in the poem. Allusions to classic Literature (and the Bible): Confusing and difficult, but illustrative of the difficult and confusing nature of the 20 th century.

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Freedom from Earthly desires o The name ‘fire sermon’ is a reference to a teaching of Buddha about the seeking of freedom from earth things. A turn away from earth does take place in this section, as a series of increasingly debased sexual encounters takes place followed with a river song and a religious incantation. Debasement and immorality o There is depicted a rape of a woman by her ...