The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot (born September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died January 4, 1965, London, England) American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Five section of The Waste Land
(1) The Burial of the Dead
T.S Eliot demonstrated the disturbing mindset of the people, they hate April, April is a symbol of spring and it’s about rebirth, and on the other hand, winter is a symbol of death. But for the people of the wasteland, April is the cruelest month because it reminds them of spirituality and they love winter because it always put a blanket over their thoughts.
(2) A Game of Chess
A Game of Chess is a device used by Middleton in the play entitled Women beware Women where this game is played to hide the seduction of a young girl by a noble man. In this section, the poet indicates the failure of sex-relationship in the modern world. Sex has become a purely physical kind of entertainment and has lost its moral and social purpose. Sex perversities both in high and low life, have become a matter of mechanical routine.
The first scene is laid in the drawing room of a fashionable lady called the lady of situations who is an expert in sex intrigues. Her drawing room is gorgeous and smells of voluptuousness. The paintings and other works of art refer to stories of ancient love and rape. The story of Philomel, the raped girl who was transformed into Nightingale - is a symbol of purification through suffering but in modern times, love has degenerated into lust and there is no hope of regeneration.
The lady of situation is waiting for her lover, who arrives after sometime. She complains of headaches which is representative of nervous break-down of a modern woman. After some petty conversation, the lady wishes to run out into the streets. Her empty, aimless routine represents the barren life of a modern woman. She has to follow the dull routine, hot water bath in the morning, a game of chess in the club in the afternoon and then rest. One is reminded of the aimless running of rats among the dead bones.
Sex in real life: The second scene shifts to a tavern where two ladies talk about the sex matters. Lil's husband has come back from the army after four years. He wants an active sex life. The lady of the Rocks advises Lil to look young and pretty to retain the love of her husband, otherwise, there are many other girls who will give company to her husband. Lil is getting old and she cannot satisfy her husband. Moreover, her last abortion has ruined her health. She is afraid of repeated motherhood. She is confused and frustrated.
(3) The Fire Sermon
The fire sermon is the longest section of the Wasteland poem by T.S Eliot. This section consists of 139 lines. The title is inspired by the confession of St. Augustine and the Sermon of Buddha “ The fire Sermon ” which is also the title of the section. He talks about prostitution, loveless relationship, and homosexual relationship in this section.
The section is starting with the Thames River. Poet is describing the devastating condition of the river that is polluted now. It’s Autumn season now and there is no voice of the wind. The Thames which was previously full of empty bottles and cigarettes ends up now empty there is no one. Now only sex is the meaning of whole life and relationships are standing on this union, the union is not a spiritual union now. 106- line is from Edmund Spenser’s poem “ Prothalamion Epithalamion ” in his poem Spenser is requesting the river to flow smoothly and slowly as he has to complete the song.
(4) Death by Water
In this section-Death by Water, Eliot shows the significance of water as a means of purification and re-birth. There are two associations-one from Shakespeare's The Tempest and the other from the ancient Egyptian myth of the god of fertility. The death of Phlebas, the Greek sailor, is an example of people who devote themselves to worldly pursuits. Their youth and strength ultimately will be consumed by death.
The poet tells the story of Phlebas, a young and handsome sailor who was drowned after leading a boring business career. He was caught in a whirlpool and passed through various stages. There is no chance of re-birth for the sailor who represents the modern man, because there is no desire to follow spiritual values. The rejection of higher values is the cause of the inevitable decay of modern civilization.
Phlebas, the Phoenician who died a fortnight back, forgot the cry of sea gulls and the tide of deep sea and profit-and-loss account of his business. The under-current of the sea picked up his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell among the waves, he passed the stages of old age and youth till he was swallowed by the whirlpool of death. Jew or non-Jew, whoever you are, who turn the wheel and look for the wind on your voyage, remember the fate of Phlebas, the worldly merchant who was as hand-some and tall as you and who died without any hope of rebirth or resurrection.
(5) What the Thunder said
The moral of the section is contained in the message proclaimed by thunder for the liberation of society from spiritual barrenness. There is a need for effort for the realization of the spiritual goal. The first example is the mythical journey of the knight to Chapel Perilous in the time of Fisher King who was successful in removing the curse from his land.
The second is the Biblical journey of Christ's disciples to Emmaus when they were accompanied by Christ in disguise and who disclosed his identity to confirm the truth of his resurrection. In contrast to the two journeys mentioned above, we have the march of uprooted humanity driven by war and by communist revolution to no particular destination and no peace in the end.
Meaning of The Waste Land :
T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land was published in 1922. Divided into five sections, the poem explores life in London in the aftermath of the First World War, although its various landscapes include the desert and the ocean as well as the bustling metropolis.
The Waste Land can be viewed as a poem about brokenness and loss, and Eliot’s numerous allusions to the First World War suggest that the war played a significant part in bringing about this social, psychological, and emotional collapse. Many of the characters who turn up in Eliot’s poem – such as Lil, the mother-of-five whose unhappy marriage is discussed by her friend in a London pub – lead unfulfilling lives and their relationships are lacking in intimacy and deeper meaning.
People’s lives in general are lacking spiritual significance. The typist in ‘The Fire Sermon’ is a good example of this: her job involves merely copying or repeating what others have said, and when she gets home from work her food is processed and comes in tins, and even her sex life is mechanical and repetitive, something Eliot neatly captures with his use of regular quatrains at this point in the poem. The music she listens to when her lover has gone is played on a gramophone: it’s a world away from the magical music Ferdinand heard on the enchanted island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Modern life has lost all sense of magic and meaning.
Eliot reinforces such an idea by overlaying his poem with a loose mythic structure, drawn from Arthurian legend and a work of comparative religious study, The Golden Bough by James Frazer. Specifically, Eliot uses the story of the Fisher King as a form of allegory for the modern world. The Fisher King has been wounded in the groin, and his wound has also affected the kingdom over which he rules. The once fertile and abundant soil has ceased to yield crops; the land has become a waste Land.
The Waste Land begins with a reference to a ‘heap of broken images’ and ends with a collage of quotations taken from various poetic traditions, as well as a snippet from the nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is falling down’. Art, literature, oral and written culture – civilisation itself – seem to be under threat. The poem ends on an ambiguous note, with the triple repetition of the Sanskrit word ‘Shantih’, which Eliot translates as ‘the peace which passeth understanding’.
The Second Section of The Waste Land
This section takes its title from two plays by the early th-century playwright Thomas Middleton, in one of which the moves in a game of chess denote stages in a seduction. This section focuses on two opposing scenes, one of high society and one of the lower classes. The first half of the section portrays a wealthy, highly groomed woman surrounded by 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. Between the bartender’s repeated calls of “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” (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” reminiscent of Ophelia’s farewell speech in Hamlet.
Significance Of The Title :
The title of T. S. Eliot’s poem suggests physical and spiritual qualities related to the overall concept of a wasteland as well as to each individual term. In general, it suggests images of a place or people that have been abandoned or cast aside, or are barren. The denotation or literal meanings include a trash heap or dump, or an agricultural field that fails to produce crops. A related meaning would be a place of where senseless deaths occur, like a battlefield. Similarly, the winter period when nothing grows is also implied. The connotations as related to human qualities include infertility and spiritual or psychological states that prevent people from producing—whether knowledge, art, or children.
Eliot wrote the poem in the aftermath of World War I, when images of battlefields and fallen soldiers were fresh in people’s minds. The literal difficulties for European nations to bring land back into production were considerable. The poet also suggests the waste of human energy that goes into destruction rather than creativity. These wastes include the development and wide-scale use of weapons. The challenges of recovery from war on those who survived, whether or not they saw combat, are also implied. Eliot suggests that countries that devote themselves to war are wasting their own people and impeding their future.
