Write a critical
essay on “The Waste Land” written by T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land
- T.
S. Eliot
The Waste Land is a classical poem written by
T. S. Eliot the great English poet in the post modern style. The poem was published in the year 1922. This
poem combines the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King with a word
picture of contemporary British society.
First
World War broke out in the year 1914 in Europe which shook the entire world
by killing thousands of people and
spread poverty and unemployment
everywhere. The world was in the grip of spiritual darkness which frightened
all intellectuals including T.S. Eliot and “The Waste Land” is born out of his
desperation and dismay.
“The
Waste Land” symbolizes the war- torn Europe where millions of people were
cruelly butchered and large scale destruction transformed beautiful, peaceful
Europe into an waste land, a hellish land where trees dried out and the earth
is full of rocks and rocky mountains. Dead bodies floated on the River Thames. Fertility is lost. The land is barren and no
vegetation can grow on the earth because
of man’s cruelties to man. The war has destroyed everything in Europe. T. S.
Eliot introduces two crucial themes namely ‘Fertility’ and ‘Healing’. The
wasted land must be renewed. Eliot took inspiration from ancient vegetation
rituals. Besides human being needs healing. Healing for the land and humanity,
to experience rebirth, man and woman must come to terms with fear, sex and religion within
their own relationships between male and female.
T.S. Eliot believes that ‘historical sense’ is
the backbone of every mature poet and says that the past is altered by the present as well
as the present is directed by the past
which leads to future. The main themes of The Waste Land are the meaningful
link with the past. It is introduced in
the poem both as a mythic past and historical past. The past often merges with
the present and by juxtaposition, makes it look even more squalid and lifeless, the emptiness and
sterility of modern life style.
Eliot
employs many literary and cultural allusions from various famous texts quoting
hundreds of allusions from the texts of great writers such as Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Roman
poet Virgil, Ovid, Saint Augustine of
Hippo, Dante Alighieri of Divine Comedy, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser,
Gerard de Nerval, Thomas Kyd the English dramatist, Geoffrey Chaucer, the great
English poet, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Joseph Conard, the great English novelist,
John Milton the great English poet, Andrew Marvell, Charles Baudelaire, Richard
Wagner, Oliver Gold Smith, Herman Hesse, the great German novelist, Aldous
Huxley, Paul Verlaine, Walt Whitman, the great American poet and Bram Stoker.
The
main themes are the emptiness and sterility of modern life. Eliot presents
sterility at various levels. First Natural: the land is dry, rocky,
polluted and unfruitful; Second:
Social: People find it difficult to
communicate with each other and are unable to love;
Third: Spiritual: People are no longer believe in religious values and
in Jesus Christ as the spiritual Saviour. There is no plot in the poem, but
only sequence of images, sometimes ambiguous apparently unconnected and open to
various interpretations but linked to each other by the technique of
association of ideas. T. S. Eliot’s poem with its shifting scenarios, multiple
voices and changes speak to the reader the ugly state of modern man’s
consciousness. Uncertainty ruled. The peace of old pre-industrial life had gone
forever and in its place was the anarchy of war machine.
T.S. Eliot also freely borrows from Scriptural writings including the Bible, the
Hindu Brihadaraynaka Upanishad, and the Buddha’s Fire Sermon and of cultural
and anthropological studies such as
Sir James Frazer’s “The Golden
Bough” and Jessie Weston’s play “From Ritual to Romance”.
The Waste Land’s structure is divided into five
sections and they are disjointed poems with no plot at all. 1) The Burial of the Dead
2) A Game of Chess
3) The Fire Sermon
4) Death by Water
5) What the Thunder Said
The poem is considered as equivalent of James
Joyce’s novel “Ulysses”, the poem is the increasingly hallucinating description
of a vast “WASTE” landscape, both physical and symbolic, in which myth and
reality overlap.
In section II, “A Game of Chess” the characters
Albert the young man and his lover with the narrator.
“ If you don’t like it you can get on with it ,
I said,
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
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.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of
young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I’ve
never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it
is, I said,
What you get married for it you don’t want
children?”
“The Waste Land” combines the old with the new,
the present with the past, history, mythology and real life, symbolism and
psychic fragmentation.
In the first section of the poem titled “The
Burial of the Dead”
begins with the line “April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the
dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain/
Winter kept us warm, covering /Earth in forgetful snow, feeding” Here the poet
tells us that the natural cycle of the seasons reversed. April is cruel because
life cannot sprout up from the ruined
soil. All human expectations turned upside down. Dead bodies of humans buried in the Unreal
city (London). These lines are alluded to Geoffrey Chaucer’s opening lines of
the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.
The second section is titled “A Game of Chess”. T. S. Eliot speaks of two plays of the
English dramatist Thomas Middleton. They are “A Game at Chess” and “Women Beware Women. The Game of Chess is the allegory of sexual life of
the young man and woman of the Unreal
City (London). After sexual activities, the woman took pills and got aborted
not once but many times. It shows the spiritual darkness of modern life
style. “Well, if Albert won’t
leave you alone, there it is, I said/What you get married for if you don’t want
children?”
“The Fire Sermon” is the third section of the
poem which is taken from the Buddha’s fire sermon. It is
alluded to the Sermon on the
Mount by Jesus Christ in the Bible. Buddha tells us to liberate from
sufferings because desire is the root cause of suffering and one must root out
desire by eight fold path of detachment
from the five senses and the mind. The
poet also shows the sexual relations between a typist and a clerk and the role
of blind Tiresias. It is an allusion to the
blind prophet of the tragedy titled “Oedipus Rex” written by Sophocles,
the great Greek tragedian. Besides there are quotations and allusions from the
Bible and Shakespeare.
“Death by Water” is the fourth and also the
shortest section of the poem “The Waste Land”. These lines are alluded to James Joyce’s
book titled “Ulysses. Here the poet
speaks about Phlebas the Phoenician
merchant who was drowned while travelling on the ship. There is shocking
imagery in these ten lines. He was dead
a fortnight ago and is now the food for sea gulls and his profit and loss is
calculated by the violent waves of the sea. Water is the symbol of life. His spirituality is born
fresh by the transformation and he is
finally reduced to mere bones.
The final section of the poem The Waste Land is
titled “What the Thunder Said”. T.S. Eliot speaks of thunder which is related to a Hindu fable found in
the ancient text of the Upanishads. The Supreme deity (God) Prajapati speaks
with the force of thunder and utters a
special syllable to other Gods. “Da” meaning “be restrained” or disciplined”.
But to the human beings, the Supreme God Prajapati speaks “Datta” which means
‘give alms” and to the demons, Prajapati asks “Dayadhvam” which means “have
compassion”.
The first nine lines of this section titled “What the Thunder Said” begins with” After the
torchlight red on sweaty faces/ After the frosty silence in the gardens/ After
the agony in stony places/ The shouting and the crying/ Prison and palace and
reverberation…….With a little patience” speaks about Jesus Christ’s last days
painful trail and crucifixion on Mount Golgotha and His meditation and prayer
at night in the Gethsemane and finally after the resurrection Jesus appeared as
a stranger to two of his disciples namely St. Peter and St. John while they
were walking on the road to Emmaus.
Kjt/08-02-2020
