THE WASTE LAND – T. S. ELIOT

THE WASTE LAND – T. S. ELIOT

Ø  T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a landmark in the history of English poetry. Though the poem has only about four hundred and forty lines, it is regarded as the epic of our age. The poem has five parts 1) the Burial of the Dead 2) A Game of Chess 3) The Fire Sermon 4) Death by Water 5) What the Thunder Said.

Ø  The poem has a very austere and dull atmosphere. There are several reason for this bleakness. Eliot wrote this poem at a time when his private life was passing through a predicament. The mental derangement and finally the death of his wife in a mental hospital, the breakdown of his own health and his slow, painful recovery in Lausenne, Switzerland, the nerve- shattering impact of World War I – all these factors combined together contributed to the gloomy feeling expressed in The Waste Land.

Ø  The poem was first published in serial form in The Criteron in October and November, 1922.

Ø  Before publishing the poem, Eliot sent the rough draft to Ezra Pound who suggested radical modifications. Pound asked Eliot to remove the quotation from Conrad which originally formed the Epigraph to the poem.

Ø  This makes the poem incoherent.

Ø  When the poem was published, it was severely attacked. Many critics condemned its incoherence and called it a pastiche.

Ø  The title The Waste Land is derived from the work of Miss Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance.

Ø  The epigraph of the poem come from the Satyrican a satire of the poet Petronius.

Ø  The poem narrates the story of the Sibyl of Cumae. The Sibyl of Cumae, the beloved of Apollo, was granted immortality by him, but without eternal youth. The result was that she grew old and withered but could not die. She longed for death. Like the Sibyl, the moderns also wish to die. So Eliot uses the Sibyl’s statement expressing her death-wish as the epigraph of his poem.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

Ø  The first part of the poem is entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead’. The title refers to i) the burial of the dead, fertility-god and ii) the burial service for the dead performed by the Christian church. In both cases, death is believed to be followed by rebirth. But the moderns have no faith in rebirth.

Ø  April, a month characterized by regeneration of plants and trees, is most unwelcome to the moderns, for it reminds them of their unpreparedness for spiritual regeneration.

Ø  The protagonist of this part of the poem is Tiresias and German princess called Marie.

Ø  Marie’s life represents the roothlessness of the people of our time. She keeps touring different parts of the world in the company of her uncle, an arch-duke, with whom she seems to have sex relations. Her activities have no unifying purpose- reading much in the night and going south in the winter are two disconnected activities of hers mentioned in the poem. Spirituality, symbolized by rain, is shunned by her – she is surprised by the shower of rain and runs away from it.

Ø  Tiresias looks around himself and sees only waste and barrenness. The stones, dead trees, dry stones without any sound of water, the hot sun- all these things symbolize the spiritual desolation of our time. Nothing spiritual can grow in this waste land. People have only broken images, that is wrecked hopes and ideals, to comfort them. Even ‘a handful of dust’ frightens them. The shadow which symbolizes death is another thing constantly terrifying them in youth; the shadow (thought of death) is behind them. In old age, the shadow is ahead of them – they feel that death is before them, ready to meet them. Tiresias invites the moderns to take shelter under ‘the red rock’. The red rock symbolizes Christianity. Eliot thus maintains that only Christianity can solve our problems.

Ø  The next section of the poem exposes the degeneration of our times. Madam Sosostris is famous clairvoyante, equipped with a pack of cards. This is reminiscent of the Terrot pack used in ancient times in Egypt to foretell the rise and fall of the river Nile. The Nile was the source of fertility. But Madame Sosostris seems to be involved in shady affairs.

Ø  The figures on her cards reappear in some of the later sections of the poem: The Drowned Phoenician sailor, symbolizes the fertility God whose image was thrown into the sea every year to symbolize the end of summer. Drowning is a process of transformation and so his eyes have been transformed into pearls.

Ø  Belladohna Lady of the Rocks: she is an expert in handling sex intrigues. She stands for the sexy society women of the modern waste land. She reappears in the section entitled A Game of Chess.

Ø  The man with three staves is the King Fisher himself. He symbolizes degenerate humanity, requiring threefold remedy – to give, sympathize and to control.

Ø  The wheel stands for the efforts of degenerate humanity to guide and control itself without caring for divine guidance. It may also stand for the flux of life and the cycle of seasons.

Ø  The one-eyed merchant is the Smyrna merchant who in the past brought both religion and sexuality to Europe. Now he has only one eye, that is , he has only sexuality and has lost religious function. The card which is blank represents the hollowness of religion in our time.

Ø  The Hanged man is either Christ crucified or the dead fertility god. He is ‘hooded’ and the fortune teller cannot recognize him, that is, Christ’s values are neglected in our time.

Ø  “The crowds of people, walking in a ring” are the London crowds going through their daily round of existence – dull, boring, monotonousng through their daily round of existence – dull, boring, monotonous.

Ø  Tiresias, the protagonist surveys the unreal city, London, and the crowd moving over the London Bridge. These people on their routine work without worrying about any spirituality. They start their work at nine, which was also the hour of Christ’s crucifixion. But the hour means nothing to people. The stroke of nine does not remind them of Christ’s agony. These people are spiritually dead. The “brown for” of London reminds us of a similarly enveloped city in Bandelaire. Thus Eliot implies that all European cities, including London, are unreal. The crowds flowing over the bridge remind us of similar crowds in Dante’s Inferno.

Ø  Tiresias now stops one Stetson, an acquaintance of his whom he had first met at Mylea, an important naval battle. As Matthiessan points out, in the Punic Wars between Greece and Carthage. Cleanth Brooks says that Eliot, by having Tiresias address a man from the Punic wars and not from the world war; implies ‘all wars are one war; all experience one experience”. The ‘corpse’ and ‘the dog’ of this section have been interpreted in various ways. Cleanth Brooks takes the dog to mean ‘humanitarianism, rationalism and scientific mentality’ which in their concern for man, extirpate the supernatural – dig up the corpse of the buried fertility god and thus prevents the rebirth of life.

Ø  The French quotation at the end of the section, meaning “You hypocritical reader, my fellow-man, my brother” completes the universalisation of Stetson. Stetson represents Everyman, including the reader and Eliot himself.