T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Deader than a Doornail
Our class split up T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" towards the beginning of the semester to analyze the pome in individual sections. I focussed on Part I, which is titled, “The Burial of the Dead.” In this section, Eliot makes several allusions to death and life. He opens the section with a comparison between spring and winter. He refers to April as the “cruelest month” because of the dead, empty land. He expresses a preference for winter’s beautiful snow that keeps things warm and preserved. The next signs of “death” that he mentions are dry rocks without any waterfall and a dead tree. These signs of death are contrasted with blooming hyacinths. Finally at the end of the section, Eliot closes with a conversation between two Londoners concerning a recently buried acquaintance following “dead” chimes from a clock tower. One inquires after the dead body, “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” Here, death is casually talked about in passing, but the conversation still reflects a contrast between life and death as it did between winter/summer and spring in the first stanza. This opening section of this dreary, harsh poem prepares the reader for what is to come. The title provides a hint, but upon reading this opening section, the land feels very much wasted and desolate. What little exists within the stanzas is dead or dying.
T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
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Becca, this first section of the poem does have a lot of dreary images in it, but many of them are also linked to rebirth. It begins with April, the "cruelest month," bringing back life to "dried tubers." The memory of sledding, and Marie, who called herself the "hyacinth" girl, bring a sense of freshness to the poem, in spite of its dreariness. The many water images, which can also symbolize baptism as well as drowning, cleansing as well as dreariness, offer hope. Many of the images in this section--spring, bulbs--hint that the poem is also a quest in search of life, and symbolically, of rebirth. Although the section ends with the burial of a corpse in a garden, it is treated almost like a bulb that will flower again--or, perhaps, be resurrected. Check out the site I posted on my blog, which includes hyperlinks to symbolism in the poem. Eliot had not yet made his commitment to Anglican Christianity when this poem was published, but there is much evidence of a spiritual quest in its imagery.
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