Variuos Themes in The Waste Land.

Paper no:E-C- 301-The Modernist Literature.

Topic: Variuos Themes in The Waste Land.

Name: Gohil Hetalba

Roll No :5

Class:M.A,Sem-1

Submitted To:

Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English

Bhavnagar University

Bhavnagar

About Poet

             Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in st.Louis.He was the son of a prominent industrialist who came from well-connected Boston family. Though, Eliot had alead written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the war ‘which kept him in England, led him to decide to pursue poetry full time.

            Eliot finished the work that was to secure him fame, The Waste Land. This poem heavily edited by pound and perhaps also by Eliot’s wife ‘Vivien addressed the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modern culture, making use of these fragments to create a new kind of poetry. He was so monumental that younger poets often went out of their way to avoid his looming shadow, painstakingly avoiding all similarities of style.

Life in Death and Death in life

     In this poem, the poet want to say that, men have lost knowledge of good and evil in the modern era. It keeps them from being alive and is the justification for viewing the modern waste land as a kingdom in which the inhabitants do not even exist.

     Cleanthes brooks in “The Wasteland: critique of the Myth “Said that the device life n death and death in life is favorite of Eliot ‘s and the poem “The Waste Land” is built on a major contrast .The contrast is between two kinds of life and two kinds of death. Life devoid of meaning is death and sacrifice, even the sacrificial death, may be life-giving also an awakening to life .The poem occupies itself to a great extent with this paradox and with a number of variations upon it.

     Eliot in his essay “Baudelaire “says that “I think Baudelaire has perceived that what distinguish the relations has man woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of God and Evil like moral Good and Evil and which are not natural Good and bad or puritan right Wrong. So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good and so far as we do evil and good we are human and in paradoxical way that to do evil that is to do nothing.

The theme is stated in the quotation which is the preface of the poem.

“Nam sibylllam queen kumis ego ipse oculist me

Did in ampoule pendere, etfor cum illi pueri dicerent

Sibylla ti theis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo”

     This epigraph comes from the satyricon satire of Petronius. In English ,it reads’ saw with my own eyes the sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar and when the boys said to her ,sibly’what do you want? She replied that I want to die”

    Her statement has several interpretation .for one meaning is that who are inhabit the waste land saying .But she may be saying what in “Tha journey of the Magi says “-----this birth was hard and bitter agony for us ,like death, our death----I should be glad of another death.

     This is life in death and death in life suggest that a life of complete inactive, listlessness and apathy. That is why winter is welcoming them and Aprils the cruelest month because it stirring reminding them wake up, them dislikes to be roused from death in life.

Like in the very beginning of part-1, the lines like this...

“April is the cruelest month, breading

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’’

     Cleanth Brooks want to say that after World War 1, the majority of people felt that despair, desolationand despondency were the only honest response to their chaotic post –war universe.

The Changing Nature of Gender Roles

      Over the course of Eliot’s life, gender roles and sexuality became increasingly flexible, and Eliot reflected those changes in his work.

 In the poem,   The Waste Land, The poet portrays rape, prostitution, a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of nonreproductive sexuality. Nevertheless, the poem’s central character, Tiresias, is a hermaphrodite—and his powers of prophesy and transformations are, in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia. With Tiresias, Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by the two genders coming together in one body.

 Death

   Two of the poem’s sections -- “The Burial of the Dead” and “Death by Water” --refer specifically to this theme. What complicates matters is that death can mean life; in other words, by dying, a being can pave the way for new lives. Eliot asks his friend Stetson: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” Similarly, Christ, by “dying,” redeemed humanity and thereby gave new life. The ambiguous passage between life and death finds an echo in the frequent allusions to Dante, particularly in the Limbo-like vision of the men flowing across London Bridge and through the modern city.

Rebirth

    The Christ images in the poem, along with the many other religious metaphors, posit rebirth and resurrection as central themes. The Waste Land lies fallow and the Fisher King is impotent; what is needed is a new beginning. Water, for one, can bring about that rebirth, but it can also destroy. What the poet must finally turn to is Heaven, in the climactic exchange with the skies: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” Eliot’s vision is essentially of a world that is neither dying nor living; to break the spell, a profound change, perhaps an ineffable one, is required. Hence the prevalence of Grail imagery in the poem; that holy chalice can restore life and wipe the slate clean; likewise, Eliot refers frequently to baptisms and to rivers – both “life-givers,” in either spiritual or physical ways.

    The Seasons

        "The Waste Land" opens with an invocation of April, “the cruelest month.” That spring be depicted as cruel is a curious choice on Eliot’s part, but as a paradox it informs the rest of the poem to a great degree. What brings life brings also death; the seasons fluctuate, spinning from one state to another, but, like history, they maintain some sort of stasis; not everything changes. In the end, Eliot’s “waste land” is almost seasonless: devoid of rain, of propagation, of real change. The world hangs in a perpetual limbo, waiting the dawn of a new season.

    Lust

     Perhaps the most famous episode in "The Waste Land" involves a female typist’s liaison with a “carbuncular” man. Eliot depicts the scene as something akin to a rape. This chance sexual encounter carries with it mythological baggage – the violated Philomela, the blind Tiresias who lived for a time as a woman. Sexuality runs through "The Waste Land," taking center stage as a cause of calamity in “The Fire Sermon.” Nonetheless, Eliot defends “a moment’s surrender” as a part of existence in “What the Thunder Said.” Lust may be a sin, and sex may be too easy and too rampant in Eliot’s London, but action is still preferable to inaction. What is needed is sex that produces life, that rejuvenates, that restores – sex, in other words, that is not “sterile.”

 Love

    The references to Tristan and Isolde in “The Burial of the Dead,” to Cleopatra in “A Game of Chess,” and to the story of Tereus and Philomela suggest that love, in "The Waste Land," is often destructive. Tristan and Cleopatra die, while Tereus rapes Philomela, and even the love for the hyacinth girl leads the poet to see and know “nothing."