EC-301 The Modernist Literature

Paper Name             : EC-301 The Modernist Literature

Name                        : Amita C. Jani

 Roll No.                    : 10

Semester                 : III

Topic                        : The West Land-T.S.Eliot

Date                         : 22/10/2011

Submitted to           : Dr.Dilip Barad

                                    Department of English,

                                    Bhavnagar University.

Introduction about poet and poem :

T.S. Eliot is one of the chief poets of modern age. His first volume of verse, Prufrock and other observations 1917 portrays often witty ironical satire and it shows boredom, emptiness and pessimism of its own day. In his poem poet tries to depict the depth if his contemporary life in a series of episode. By presenting vividly contrasted images in his verse, Eliot pride himself as gifted and original artist and then the poems of 1920 is in much the same mood but as often happens in Eliot’s case, the verse form is completely changed. The difficult monologue of this volume shows Eliot’s adaption of the blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists.

The Waste Land, first published seven years after The Love Song of S. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land is a more complex and difficult work than earlier poem. In the case of Profrock, the structural method could be justified in “dramatic” or “psychological” ground. We were following the movements of a single consciousness and we felt throughout the poem, the presence of a single voice.

The Waste Land departs even more boldly than Prufrock from conventional structure. The justification of these departures is not easy to formulate. It is generally said that The Waste Land presents the perceptions of a single consciousness is less dramatically rendered, less suggestive of an individual personality than that starling juxtaposition of The Waste Land, are therefore less clearly motivated so that shows that there is no essential unity to The Waste Land, is a question the reader will have to consider.

The Waste Land originally a much longer poem and the poem The Waste Land (1922) is made a tremendous impact on the post war journalism  and is considered one of the most important documents of its age. The poem is difficult to understand in detail but it’s general aim is clear. The poem caries out different images and because of these different images we find poem more complex and full of paradox. We find that nothing is clear in the poem and we are somehow loss in all this unclear images. Even there is no pattern in rhythm schema in the poem and this all different elements show the cultural difference and we find a erudition on the part of reader also. The poem is the representation of the moral characteristics of the age and culture. In this poem we find different elements like episode structure, cultural depertivity, and artistic trust. Revolt against tradition is the one of the effective point of the poem and in this was new form introduced by T.S. Eliot.

The poem is based on the legend of the fisher king in the Arthurian cycle; it presents modern London as an arid waste land. The poem is built round the symbol of drought and flood, representing death and rebirth and this fundamental idea is referred to throughout, other symbol in poem are, however, not capable of precise explanation. In this series of disconcertingly vivid impressions, the poem progresses by rather abrupt transitions through five movements. “The Burial of the Dead”, “The Game of Chess”, “The Fire Serman”, “Death by Water”, “What the Thunder Said..” throughout appears the figure of Tiresias, work unity. Its real unity, however, is one of the emotional atmospheres. The boredom of his earlier poetry gives way to a mood of terror in face of an outworn and disintegrating civilization.

A terror deeply felt even when hidden beneath the surface irony of some parts of the poem. The style shows a typical comprehension of clearly a visulized often metaphysical imagenary, a vocabulary essentially modern, and a subtly suggestive use of the rhythms of ordinary speech. One of its greatest difficulties lies in the numorous allusions out of the way writers, and the notes which Eliot himself provided are ofter inadequete. But inspite of its complexities and apparent ambiguities the poem is a powerfully moving presentation of sterllity and disruption.

Two parts of the poem :

1)      The Burial of the Dead :

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 a little life with dried tubers…

The poem opens with a series of paradoxes. April, the month that beginning of spring with its promise of rebirth and renewal, is not usually thought of as cruel, but in the “dead land” any reminder of life is cruel, just as the awareness of a joy we cannot share provoke pain. It is equally surprising to be told that winter, season of the cold, kept the inhabitants of The Waste Land warm. What is referred to is almost a state of hibernation, a kind of death in life. To the speaker, this state is preferable to an awareness of life or to life itself.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergerse

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 hour…

In the first of many sudden shifts of tone in this poem, the line loosens to a conversational cadence, and the language is of reminiscence, and the memory is presumably not that of the protagonist therefore expresses the memory of a memory. If the memory is a happy one, it leads nowhere. The last ward of above passage is winter and the death in life associations is relevant once again here.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this story rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say or guess, for you know on!

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound water only…

This passage is full of biblical references. The images of this passage emphasize the qualities of dryness and sterility, associated throughout with The Waste Land.

There is shadow under this red rock,

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you,

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you,

I will show you fear in a handful of dust…

The red rock offers a kind of shelter, but there is more than a hint of menace in the invitation to come under its shadow, particularly as the shadow becomes and image associated with dead and fear. The protagonist offers to show us is fear. The image of the “handful of dust” reinforces the general air of sterility in the passage. It also reminds us of the dust we are and which we shall return. Unless we find reason to think otherwise as the poem develops, we may suspect that she sterility implied here includes not only sterility in the land, but emotional and sexual sterility as well.

You gave me hyacinths first year ago; they called me the hyacinths girl,

Yet when we came, late, from the hyacinths garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not,

Speak and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence…

The principal action in these lines seems to involve a past sexual-romantic encounter in which the protagonist was unable to act. The passage begins and ends with lines from Richard Wagner’s opera. In the conclusion of the opera, Tristan, the hero, is mortally wounded and dies before Isolde, who has the power to heal him, can arrive. The first quotation comes from a sailor’s song and expresses a lover’s eager explanation for his beloved, born over the sea to him by a fresh wind. The second quotation us sung in the opera by a shepherd, who tells the dying Tristan that the sea is waste and void. The promise of love and the frustration of that promise, with an added suggestion that love is healing power. These lines, as a whole, may be regarded as fulfillment of the promise or threat.  

Madame Sosostris famous clairvoyant had a bad fold nevertheless is known to be the wisest woman in Europe with a wicked pack of cards. Here said she

Madame Sosostris is something of a comic figure. A fortune teller with a bad cold must provoke some laughter. But there is an irony here, for The Waste Land seems to suffer most from the absence of water, and a quotation from a song from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” introduces a suggestion of death by water as a transformation into something rich and strange.

The Hanged Man, whom Madame Sosostris does not see perhaps because of the limits of her and the protagonist’s perception, is traditionally associated with The Hanged God. The God sacrifices himself only to be ultimately reborn from the anthropologist’s point of view, Christ is one version of the Hanged God, but the Hanged God can be found in many non-Christian religions as well. Eliot says that he associates the man with Fisher King. In the vegetation myths the Fisher King is sexually maimed and restored by magic. This process is associated with the re-fertilization of the land in spring.

The rebirth or resurrection of the Hanged God are therefore associated, both are associated with vegetation rites intended to restore fertility to a stricken land. That Madame Sosostris does not find the hanged man suggests that there is no sign of redemption for The Waste Land. In first part of the poem, last passage is about unreal city, and the “unreal city” is London, actually a very real city, but unreal as everything in the Waste Land is unreal. The suggestion throughout is of people caught on the wheel of life, unable to break away to eternity. These associations are Buddhists. Apart from their immediate functions, the allusions to Dante, Baudelaire and the history of the panic war help to define the consciousness of the protagonist. His awareness extends to many areas of the experience if western man – enough to make us wonder if he represents western man in his modern manifestation including a modern awareness of Eastern thought.

2)      A Game of Chess :

The second major function of the waste land id constructed as an apparent contrast that turn out to be a comparison. The difference indicated of wealth, class and education are superficial in relation to the underlying similarities.  The section opens by placing a woman in a room characterized by what we might call a splendid clutter. This passage contains a number of allusions relevant to a full understanding. The opening is reminiscent of Enobarbus description of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s anatomy and Cleopatra. This suggests an implicit comparison between Cleopatra grand symbol of the woman who gives all for love and Elliot’s woman recall the legend of the ravished Philomel transformed into a nightingale. Rape, the ultimate act of lust without love, also figures prominently in Thomas Middleton’s play - Woman Beware Woman. In the play, a young woman is raped while her mother unaware plays a game of chess downstairs. The allusions to Philomel and to Women Beware Women, then, combine to emphasize the theme of rape, which is related to the more general theme of lust without love, the principal theme of the entire section.

The splendid clutter of the room released both sensual and cultural overtones. But the disorder of the details of the details suggests failure to relate the life of the sense and modern man’s or woman’s cultural inheritance to a unifying center. The closing lines of the passage present, not an image even of sensuous fulfillment but a woman nervously brushing her hair, bursting into tense speech and lapsing into a truly savage silence.

Elliot has been accused of an undemocratic snobbery for his portray of the lower class woman in latter part of this section.

Conclusion :

The Waste Land is a landmark of poetic complexity. It attempts to represent a history of human hope and desire through those ideas that Elliot considers the metaphysical basis or reality. By metaphysical is meant those fundamental truths or values that are the well-spring and source of all human affairs, aspirations and futilities. The axiom or truth or metaphysical basis of reality is that the contracting despair of mankind is the result of the purely emotional and spiritual character of man from its intellectual cloak.