Comparison of the Waste Land and Let America Be America Again

T.South. Eliot was no stranger to classical literature. Early on in his life, due to a congenital illness, he found his refuge in books and stories, and this is where the classics-studded verse form The Waste Country stems from. Drawing allusions from everything from the Fisher King to Buddhism, The Waste matter State was published in 1922 and remains one of the most of import Modernist texts to appointment.

Modernist poetry, itself a calling-back to older means of writing, and developing, in office, as a response to overwrought Victorian poetry, started in the early years of the 20th century, with the intent of bringing verse to the layman – similar to Wordworth's attempt over a hundred years earlier. Long poems were unusual in modernist poetry, however, post the 1930s, longer poesy took over from the shorter sequences and audio verse of the 1920s. The Waste Land signified the movement from Imagism – optimistic, vivid-willed to modernism, itself a far darker, disillusioned manner of writing.

Some of the mythology used within The Waste material Land was, at the fourth dimension, considered obscure – bits from the Hindu Upanishads, from Buddhist lore, and the lesser-known legends of the Arthuriana are woven throughout the narrative, bringing forth several different voices, experiences, and cultures within the poem.

Summary

It is difficult to necktie 1 meaning to The Waste Land. Ultimately, the verse form itself is most culture: the commemoration of civilisation, the death of civilization, the misery of existence learned in a world that has largely forgotten its roots. Eliot wrote it every bit a eulogy to the culture that he considered to be dead; at a time when dancing, music, jazz, and other forms of popular culture took the place of literature and classics, it must take felt, to Eliot, as though he was shouting into the wind. Still, 'The Waste material Land'southward merit stems from the fact that information technology embodies so much noesis within the poem itself. It serves as a living testimony to the enmeshed pattern of man spirit and man culture.

Nonetheless, the fragmented writing that Eliot was infamous for – meet too The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock – makes the poem a daunting one to analyse. Information technology is split upwardly into five sections, each of which has a different theme at the centre of its writing, too as addendums to the poem itself which were published largely at the bidding of the publisher himself, who wanted some reason to justify printing The Waste Land as a split up verse form in its own volume.

Although not a office of the poem quoted beneath, the allusions start before that: the poem was originally preceded by a Latin epigraphy from The Satyricon, a comedic manuscript written by Gaius Petronius, virtually a narrator, Encolpius, and his hapless and unfaithful lover. The phrase reads, in English, 'I saw with my own optics the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to hear, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to dice'.'

Not a cheery mode to start the poem: the oracle Sibyl is granted immortality past Apollo, but not eternal youth or health, and so she grows older and older, and frailer, and never dies. The meaninglessness of the oracle of Sibyl'southward life is a testimony and an allusion to the meaninglessness of culture, according to Eliot; by putting that particular quotation from 'The Satyricon' at the start, he encapsulates the very sense of The Waste product State: culture has get meaningless, and dragged on for zip.

Following that quote, there is a dedication to Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro. Originally, The Waste material Land was supposed to be twice as long as it was – Pound took it and edited it down to the version that was later published. However, il miglior fabbro tin can also be considered to be an allusion to Dante's Purgatorio ('the best smith of the mother tongue', writes Dante, about troubadour Arnaut Daniel), as well as Pound's own The Spirit of Romance, a volume of literary criticism where the second affiliate is 'Il Miglior Fabbro', translated as 'the amend craftsman'. Although originally written in ink, later on versions of the poem included the dedication to Pound as a office of the verse form's publication.

Eliot also included the following quote, headed underneath 'Notes': "Not simply the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested past Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much amend than my notes can exercise; and I recommend it (apart from the bully interest of the volume itself) to any who call up such elucidation of the poem worth the problem. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in full general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I hateful The Golden Bender; I accept used especially the ii volumes Attis Adonis Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the verse form sure references to vegetation ceremonies."

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Detailed Analysis

I. The Burial of the Dead

Apr is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead state, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Irksome roots with spring rain.
Winter kept usa warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A lilliputian life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised united states, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an 60 minutes.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, in that location you experience complimentary.
I read, much of the night, and become south in the wintertime.

Immediately, the poem starts with the recurring imagery of death: 'April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Retentivity and desire, stirring / Slow roots with spring pelting'. Note the cadence of every –ing ending to the sentence, giving it a breathless, uneven sort of reading: when one reads information technology, there is a quick-slow pace to it that invites the reader to linger over the words.

The utilize of the discussion 'winter' provides an oxymoronic thought: the thought that cold, and death, tin can somehow exist warming – however, it isn't the commemoration of death, equally it would be in other poems of the fourth dimension, but a cold, difficult fact. Winter is the time for normal life to hibernate, to become suspended, and thus the anxiety of change and of new life is avoided. At the time of writing, Eliot was suffering from an acute country of nerves, and information technology could well be the truth backside the poem that alter was something he was actively fugitive.

'Starnbergersee', and its shower of regenerating rain, refers to the countess Marie Louise Larisch's native home of Munich. The reference to 'Hofgarten' also calls back to Munich; it is a garden in the centre of Munich, located betwixt the Residenz, and the Englischer Garden, and she stands as a symbolic reference to European decadence, and thus, unavoidably, of Imagism. Marie Louise Larisch's presence in the poem can be put downwards to quite a few reasons – subsequently the crushing misery of the First Earth State of war, Marie Louise Larisch was a symbol of One-time-World corrupt Europe, the kind from before the war.

The 2 experiences recounted here could also well be seen as the dualistic nature of the world. From before the war – Marie and her cousin go sledding, that sense of excitement and take a chance, 'in the mountains, there you feel free', and and so the reference to 'drank coffee, and talked for an hour', which could stand for the mail service-war earth, dull and sterile and emptied of all nuance, unlike the pre-war globe. The separation of the two stanzas past German farther emphasizes the thought that, while both alike, the two worlds remain at parallels to each other – 'Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch' ways 'I am not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, I am a existent High german'. This phrase further emphasises the separation that the writer, and the reader, then, feels.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches abound
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
Y'all cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry rock no sound of water. Only
At that place is shadow nether this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this ruby rock),
And I volition evidence you something dissimilar from either
Your shadow at morning time striding behind you lot
Or your shadow at evening ascent to meet yous;
I volition evidence you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
"Yous gave me hyacinths beginning a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth daughter."
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms total, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my optics failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew naught,
Looking into the heart of calorie-free, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.

Here is another of Eliot's allusions 'son of human being/ you cannot say or guess', which is direct lifted from The Call of Ezekiel, in the Book of Ezekiel. This is how God addresses Ezekiel, and the use of it in the poem elevates Eliot to a god-like position, and reduces the reader to cypher more than a follower; this could also have been put in equally a response to the vast advancements of the fourth dimension, where science fabricated great leaps of technology, all the same the spiritual and cultural sectors of the world lay forgotten, according to Eliot.

'A heap of broken images' shows the fragmented nature of the globe, and the snapshots of what the world has become further serves to pinpoint the emptiness of a world without culture, a earth without guidance or spiritual belief. Eliot himself noted that this is from Ecclesiastes 12, a book within the Bible that hash out the pregnant of life, and the borne duty of man to appreciate his life. The references to shadows seems to imply that there is something larger and far more than greater than the reader skulking along abreast the verse form, lending it an air of menace and the narrator an air of omnipotence, of being everywhere at one time.

The German in the heart is from Tristan and Isolde, and information technology concerns the nature of dear – beloved, like life, is something given by God, and humankind should appreciate it because it then very easily disappears. In Tristan and Isolde, the main idea behind the opera is that while decease conquers all and unites grieving lovers, dear itself simply causes problems in the first place, and therefore information technology is death that should exist celebrated, and not honey. The use of it in Eliot'south verse form adds to the idea of a welcomed death, of expiry needing to appear.

Another reference to tragic love, and uniting decease, occurs in the utilise of the flowers 'hyacinth'. Hyacinth was a immature Spartan prince who defenseless the eye of Apollo, and in a tragic blow, Apollo killed him with his discus. Mourning his lover, Apollo turned the drops of blood into flowers, and thus was born the flower Hyacinth. There are twofold reasons for the reference to Hyacinth: one, the legend itself is a miserable legend of death once more than uniting thwarted lovers and, two, the allusion to homosexuality would have, itself, been problematic. Homosexuality was not tolerated at the time of Eliot's writing, so he could be attempting to requite the silenced a vox past referencing Hyacinth, one of the most obvious homosexual Greek myths. However, to go along with the same theme in the verse form, the evidence of love volition be lost to death, and at that place will be nothing more existing.

The stanza ends with another quote from Tristan and Isolde, this fourth dimension meaning 'empty and desolate the body of water'.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to exist the wisest adult female in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Crewman,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Hither is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Hither is the man with 3 staves, and here the Bicycle,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this carte du jour,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not notice
The Hanged Human being. Fear decease by water.
I come across crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Give thanks you lot. If you run into dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be then careful these days.

Cleanth Brooks writes: "The fortune-telling of "The Burial of the Dead" will illustrate the full general method very satisfactorily. On the surface of the verse form the poet reproduces the patter of the adventurer, Madame Sosostris, and there is the surface irony: the contrast betwixt the original use of the Tarot cards and the use made by Madame Sosostris. But each of the details (justified realistically in the palaver of the fortune-teller) assumes a new significant in the general context of the poem. There is then, in addition to the surface irony, something of a Sophoclean irony too, and the "fortune-telling," which is taken ironically by a twentieth-century audience, becomes true as the poem develops–true in a sense in which Madame Sosostris herself does not think it true. The surface irony is thus reversed and becomes an irony on a deeper level. The items of her speech communication accept only 1 reference in terms of the context of her spoken language: the "homo with iii staves," the "one-eyed merchant," the "crowds of people, walking round in a ring," etc. But transferred to other contexts they get loaded with special meanings. To sum up, all the central symbols of the verse form head up here; merely here, in the but section in which they are explicitly bound together, the binding is slight and accidental. 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."

The Phoenician sailor could exist a reference to Shakespeare'due south The Storm; in this particular stanza, several images intermesh between h2o and rock, starting with the innuendo to the storm (water being the symbol used by Eliot for rejuvenation and regeneration) then moving on to the idea of Belladona, 'the lady of the rocks', i.due east. the never-changing and desolate mural of the Waste state itself. Once more, it moves to water – the 'man with 3 staves' being the representation of the Fisher Rex, who was wounded by his own Spear, and is regenerated through water given to him from the Holy Grail.

Unreal City,
Nether the dark-brown fog of a wintertime dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not idea decease had undone and then many.
Sighs, brusque and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his optics before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead audio on the final stroke of nine.
At that place I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!
"Y'all who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you lot planted terminal year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"Oh keep the Canis familiaris far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it upward once again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!"

'Unreal City' references Baudelaire's The Seven Old Men, from Fleurs du Mal. It was written at the fourth dimension when Paris was considered a decadent, overwrought paradise of science, engineering, and innovation, but not very much civilization; thus, Paris, in Baudelaire's writing, takes on a nightmarish landscape. Here, Eliot uses it in much the aforementioned event: a nightmarish landscape that is non quote Paris, and is not quite London, but is meant to stand in for several places at one time.

'Mylae' is a symbol of warfare – it was a naval boxing between the Romans and Carthage, and Eliot uses it here equally a stand up-in for the Offset World State of war, to show that humanity has never changed, that state of war volition never change, and that decease itself will never alter.

'Oh go along the Domestic dog far hence, that'due south friend to men' is a paraphrasing of a quote from John Webster's The White Devil, a play about the Vittoria Accoramboni murder. In the play, a character named Marcello is murdered, and his mother tearfully implores Flamineo to keep 'the wolf far thence, that'southward foe to men / for with his nails he'll dig them upward again'. If he is dug up once more, then his spirit will never find rest, and he will never be reborn – here, Eliot, capitalizing on the quote, changes it then that the attempt to disturb rebirth is seen as a good thing. After all, Eliot is implying, who would want to be reborn in a world without culture?

II. A GAME OF CHESS

The second stanza moves on from the description of the landscape – the titular waste matter state – to iii different settings, and 3 more different characters. The title is taken from two plays by Thomas Middleton, wherein the idea of a game of chess is an practise in seduction.

The Chair she sat in, like a glassy throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up past standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a gold Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his optics behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabrum
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their fume into the laquearia,
Stirring the design on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-woods fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which deplorable lite a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the brutal king
So rudely forced; yet at that place the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And all the same she cried, and nevertheless the world pursues,
"Jug Jug" to muddied ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair,
Nether the firelight, nether the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, and then would be savagely still.

Decadence and pre-war luxury abounds in the commencement part of this stanza. The references to 'throne' could be attempting to pinpoint to Europe, or England, more specifically, but even without the remits of place, the idea is of pre-war Europe, the seductive and roughshod Former World that American writers harped on about in their works. However, the luxury that is written about seems empty. 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, all the same the fact that it is glass and ivory and jewels seems to propose a sure fragility in its wealth. Fifty-fifty the colours seem muted, and the calorie-free seems to be fading throughout the commencement stanza, shedding lite merely for a moment; as we read, the extravagance seems to be withering.

'Laquearia' is a type of panelling.

The reference to Paradise lost – 'sylvan scene / The change of Philomel, past the barbarous King' – tin can be a reference to everything that the world has lost since the First Globe War: innocent soldiers, innocence in full general, this sense of nothing every quite being right once more. Information technology tin can also correspond the fierce decease of culture, given abroad to the vapidity of the modern world. There is a sense of altogether failure in this department – the references to Cleopatra, Cupidon, sylvan scenes, and Philomen, are references to failed love, to destruction of the status quo. The description of the woman moves from powerful, and strong – her wealth is her shield – to weak, thereby showing again the difference between pre-war and post-war Europe, specifically pre-state of war and post-war England. Once a noble land, now it is old and doddering, crumbling ('sad light / a carved dolphin swam'; 'withered stump of time').

"My nerves are bad to-nighttime. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what yous are thinking. Think."

Here nosotros run into the insanity of the woman, thereby symbolising that all her wealth has non done a thing for her mind, lending the fragmented poem an fifty-fifty bigger sense of fragmentation, and giving it a sense of loss, though the reader does non all the same know what we have lost. Equally this was written at the top of spiritualism, one could imagine that it is trying to draw an allusion to those grief-maddened mothers and mistresses and lovers who contacted spiritualists and mediums to endeavour and come into contact with their loved ones. Alternatively, one tin have it equally the embodiment of England, trying to reach out to her expressionless.

I think nosotros are in rats' aisle
Where the dead men lost their basic.

Reference to the Beginning Earth War once again – the trenches were notorious for rats, and the utilise of this imagery further lends the poem a sense of decay and rot.

"What is that noise?"
The wind nether the door.
"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"
Nothing over again nothing.
"Do
You know naught? Exercise you see naught? Exercise yous remember
Nothing?"
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
"Are you lot alive, or non? Is at that place zero in your head?"
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It's so elegant
So intelligent

Further fragmentation of the verse form, to the point where fifty-fifty the grammar seems to exist suffering; 'Shakespherian Rag' was a renaming of the 'Mysterious Rag', and information technology is furthermore emphasising the death of culture for popular, loftier order dances and popular culture in general. However, it is interesting to annotation that he mentions Shakespeare again – once more, the reader thinks of the Tempest, a drama set up on a little island, beset past ferocious storms.

"What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair downwardly, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
What shall we e'er do?"
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed machine at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

The lack of purpose, lack of guidance, can exist considered to be 1 of the causes of madness, and the further descent into fragmentation in the poem. There is a loose sense of fourth dimension in this detail stanza – from 'the hot water at ten./ And if information technology rains, a airtight car at four. / And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door'. It lends the poem a sense of suspended animation, as it did in the beginning, however here, the guideless manner of the people seems to be loosely defined by very pocket-size happenings – their days are structured through moments, rather than planned out.

When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said,
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
Hurry UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert's coming back, brand yourself a flake smart.
He'll want to know what y'all done with that money he gave you lot
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was in that location.
You accept them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can't carry to expect at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He's been in the army iv years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there'south others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and requite me a straight look.
HURRY UP Please ITS Fourth dimension
If you don't similar information technology you can get on with it, I said,
Others can choice and choose if y'all can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't exist for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only xxx-one.)
I tin can't assistance information technology, she said, pulling a long confront,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had v already, and nearly died of immature George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the aforementioned.
Y'all are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't get out you alone, at that place it is, I said,
What you lot get married for if you don't want children?
Hurry UP PLEASE ITS Fourth dimension
Well, that Sunday Albert was dwelling, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
Hurry Upwards Please ITS Time
Bustle UP Delight ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Skilful night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good nighttime, good nighttime.

'Lil' could reference Lilith, Adam's first wife, who was thrown out of Eden for being too dominant. Nevertheless, in the poem, it could also be considered that Lil is simply a friend of the narrator'southward – a woman who was unfaithful to her married man; here again is referenced the cloying and ultimately useless nature of dearest ('And if you don't give information technology him, there'southward others will, I said'). This seems to exist built upon the thought of sex every bit the ultimate expression of manliness, a theme that Eliot enjoyed exploring in his works. The fact that the woman hints that there are 'others who will' implies that she herself is sleeping with her friend's hubby, however we cannot be certain of this.

This last part of the stanza seems to show the minutiae of the upper-class in shoddy lighting – with a hard emphasis on the nature of womanhood, and on the trials of womanhood. Lil is 'only 30 one' merely looks much older; she took pills to 'bring information technology off', which we subsequently understand is to induce abortions, and throughout the poem, the other woman attempts to give her advice, however, the irony is that the other woman is, as well, miserable, and wrapped upwardly in her own misery to the point where her advice seems to exist a niggling skewed.

Peppered throughout the latter stanza of the poem is the phrase 'hurry upward please its time' giving a sense of urgency to the verse form that is at odds with the lackadaisical fashion that the woman is recounting her stories – it seems to exist edifice up to an almost apocalyptic outcome, a dark tragedy, that she is completely unaware of.

The terminal line references Ophelia, the drowned lover of Hamlet, who famously thought 'a woman'south beloved is brief'. Therefore, we know for sure that this detail stanza of the poem is referencing sex – the ultimate pleasance for a man, and a duty of the woman's.

III. THE Burn down SERMON

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet banking concern. The current of air
Crosses the brown country, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, take left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…
Sugariness Thames, run softly till I terminate my song,
Sugariness Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
Simply at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

The line 'Sugariness Thames, run softly till I finish my vocal' is from Spenser's Prothalamion, and it references a marriage song. In Spenser, water represents a joyous occasion, which is at odds with its usage in Eliot's Waste land. Here, the h2o once more represents a loss of life – although there is the sign of human living, at that place are no humans around.

The reference to 'nymph' could be calling back to the overarching idea of sex.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening circular behind the gashouse.
Musing upon the rex my blood brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a piddling low dry out garret,
Rattled by the rat'south pes only, year to year.
But at my dorsum from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the jump.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her girl
They launder their feet in soda water
Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

There is no reason given, ultimately, for the wreckage of the Waste material Land; notwithstanding, following the idea of the Fisher King, we can assume this – that as the narrator suffers, and then too does the world. The world, with the loss of civilisation, is now a barren continent, and with the onset of wars, has but served to get even more than ruined and destroyed.

'Sweeney and Mrs Porter in the spring' – the legend of Diana, the hunting goddess, and Actaeon. Actaeon spied on Diana in the bath, and Diana cursed him with becoming a stag, who was torn to pieces by his ain hounds. Here, Eliot tries over again to show the ruin that love and lust can bring to the lofty spirit.

Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole – 'and O those children's voices singing in the dome', which is French and from Verlaine's Parsifal, about the noble virgin knight Percival, who can potable from the grail due to his purity. Information technology stands in this poem equally a criticism of then-contemporary values; of the down-grading of lust.

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.
Tereu

Unreal Metropolis
Under the dark-brown fog of a winter noon
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C. i. f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a week-end at the Metropole.

'Mr. Eugenides' has a dual meaning here – tying back to the merchant in Madame Sosostris' tarot cards, too as standing in for the behaviour of soliciting gay men for affection. Canon Street Hotel and the Metropole were well known for this sort of behaviour among homosexual men, and thus over again, Eliot paints the cheapest possible sight of honey.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and dorsum
Plough upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between 2 lives,
Onetime human being with wrinkled female person breasts, can come across

Tiresias is from Greek Mythology, and he was turned into a adult female as penalization by Hera for separating two copulating snakes. In the poem, it just serves, again, as a symbol of the cheapness of beloved and affection.

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist habitation at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched past the dominicus's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the remainder—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the swain carbuncular, arrives,
A small house-agent's clerk, with 1 assuming stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, every bit he guesses,
The meal is concluded, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which all the same are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring easily come across no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

The scene that plays out illustrates Eliot's thought most the death of higher beliefs, such equally the idea of romance and love. Note the lack of intimacy evidenced in the clarification higher up.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows i final patronizing osculation,
And gropes his style, finding the stairs unlit…

She turns and looks a moment in the drinking glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to laissez passer:
"Well now that'due south washed: and I'thou glad it's over."
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automated hand,
And puts a tape on the gramophone.

"This music crept by me upon the waters"

Reference to The Storm.

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City City, I tin sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gilded.

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Crimson sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Downward Greenwich reach
Past the Island of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester

A reference to Elizabeth I, and the First Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, who were rumoured to be having an affair.

Beating oars
The stern was formed
A golden shell
Red and golden
The brisk not bad
Rippled both shores
South-west wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

"Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe."

"My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. Later on the event
He wept. He promised 'a new start.'
I made no comment. What should I resent?"

"On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nada with nix.
The cleaved finger-nails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Zip."

la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

'To Carthage so I came' references Augustine's journey to overcome his secular and pagan lifestyle. Contrasting with the earlier part of the Burn down Sermon, where Buddha was preaching about abstaining, here the verse form turns to Western religion – however, regardless of their position, they're written into the verse form with a slightly mocking overtone.

IV. DEATH By Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas smashing
And the profit and loss.
A current under ocean
Picked his bones in whispers. Every bit he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his historic period and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and wait to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as y'all.

The circle of rebirth: the drowned crewman returns to the h2o, and will be reborn once again in fourth dimension as he has 'entered the whirlpool', and thus re-entered the cycle of life.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

After the torch-light reddish on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison house and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
Nosotros who were living are now dying
With a little patience

The last 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. Detect the virtually apocalyptic language used in this part of the description, the way the linguistic communication itself seems to emphasize the silence through the use of language words – 'shouting', 'crying', 'reverberation' are all words of racket, however this section of the poem brings about an almost deathly serenity, and an intermeshing of life and decease that makes it hard for the reader to tell whether united states be separately or together. 'He who was living is at present expressionless' also ties back to the idea of the rebirth sequence.

Here is no water only just stone
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The route winding to a higher place amongst the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If at that place were water nosotros should cease and drink
Amid the rock one cannot stop or recollect
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If in that location were just water amid the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one tin neither stand up nor lie nor sit
There is non even silence in the mountains
But dry out sterile thunder without rain
In that location is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And as well h2o
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of h2o only
Non the cicada
And dry grass singing
Only audio of water over a stone
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pino trees
Baste drop drip drop driblet drop drop
Only there is no h2o

The apocalyptic imagery continues in the following section of the stanza. Once again, the poem returns to its description of the rock: the arid, desolate waste state of life that calls back to the cultural waste land that Eliot is then scornful of, the lack of life that corroborates to a lack of human religion. Water, the symbol of rebirth and regeneration, is surrounded on all sides by decease, symbolized equally rock, and thus leaving the idea of rebirth cryptic.

Who is the third who walks always beside you lot?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking abreast you
Gliding wrapt in a brown drapery, hooded
I do not know whether a human or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of yous?

The hooded effigy can be seen every bit some sort of guardian, an innuendo 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. Information technology is unclear if Eliot is implying that poetry should itself be the guiding principle which all people follow.

What is that sound loftier in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

Another reference to the total destruction rendered by war – 'falling towers' as well calls the Biblical imagery of the tower of Babylon.

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with infant faces in the violet calorie-free
Whistled, and vanquish their wings
And crawled head downwards downward a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and wearied wells.

In this rust-covered hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones tin damage no one.
But a erect stood on the roof-tree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing pelting
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for pelting, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
So spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have nosotros given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The atrocious daring of a moment'south give up
Which an historic period of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be plant in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken past the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the central, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The gunkhole responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with canvas and oar
The sea was calm, your center would take responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To decision-making easily

Empty faith once more symbolized explicitly by the 'empty chapel'. This can also reference the Chapel Perilous – the graveyard for those who have sought the Holy Grail, and failed.

I saturday upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid apparently behind me
Shall I at least set up my lands in social club?

The imagery of the fisherman sitting on the shore – 'with the barren plain behind me' – is a direct innuendo to the Fisher King and his barren waste land. 'Shall I ate least set my lands in order?' is a quote from the Cible, from the Book of Isaiah: "Thus saith the LORD, Fix thine house in order: for m shalt dice, and not live".

London Bridge is falling downwardly falling downwardly falling down

Poi due south'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

In the very last stanza, Eliot hints at the reason for the fragmentation of this poem: so that he could take the states to unlike places and situations. Ruins, no matter where they are, are always ruins, and madness and death will never alter regardless of the difference in place.

Michael H. Levenson puts the last stanza into perspective from a linguistic point of view: The verse form concludes with a rapid serial of allusive literary fragments: seven of the last eight lines are quotations. But in the midst of these quotations is a line to which we must attach great importance: "These fragments I accept shored confronting my ruins." In the space of that line the poem becomes conscious of itself. What had been a series of fragments of consciousness has become a consciousness of fragmentation: that may not be salvation, merely information technology is a difference, for every bit Eliot writes, "To realize that a bespeak of view is a betoken of view is already to have transcended it." And to recognize fragments as fragments, to name them equally fragments, is already to have transcended them not to an harmonious or last unity but to a somewhat higher, somewhat more inclusive, somewhat more than witting point of view. Considered in this way, the poem does not attain a resolved coherence, only neither does it remain in a chaos of fragmentation. Rather it displays a series of more or less stable patterns, regions of coherence, temporary principles of order the poem non equally a stable unity but engaged in what Eliot calls the "painful chore of unifying."

Historical Background

From the Modernism Lab at Yale Academy: "Eliot's Waste Country is I think the justification of the 'movement,' of our modern experiment, since 1900," wrote Ezra Pound soon after the verse form was published in 1922. T.South. Eliot's poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the collective experience of the beginning globe war and from Eliot'south personal travails. Born in St. Louis, Eliot had studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford before moving to London, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on the philosopher F. H. Bradley. Because of the war, he was unable to return to the United States to receive his degree. He taught grammar school briefly and then took a job at Lloyds Bank, where he worked for eight years. Unhappily married, he suffered writer'south block and so a breakdown before long after the state of war and wrote virtually of The Waste Land while recovering in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the historic period of 33. Eliot later described the poem as "the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life…only a piece of rhythmical grumbling." Yet the poem seemed to his contemporaries to transcend Eliot's personal situation and represent a full general crisis in western civilisation. One of its major themes is the barrenness of a post-war earth in which human sexuality has been perverted from its normal class and the natural globe too has get infertile. Eliot went on to convert to a High Church form of Anglicanism, become a naturalized British subject, and plough to conservative politics. In 1922, however, his anxieties well-nigh the modern world were still overwhelming.

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Source: https://poemanalysis.com/t-s-eliot/the-waste-land/

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