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Name :- Bambha Kajal A
Sen :- 3
Roll
no :- 17
Year :- 2017-2019
Paper
no :- The Modernist literature
Enrollment
no :-
2069108420180002
Submitted to :-
Smt.S.B Gardi Department of
English,
MKBU
Topic: -
Write Critical appreciation of the Waste Land
v
Introduction :-
T.S. Eliot, the greatest modern
English poet, was an American by birth and an Englishman by adoption. Born at
St.Louis, Missouri, U.S.A, he became a naturalized British Subject in
1927. As such he had the blending of the
best of the American blood and the English intellect. He combined in himself
strange and opposing characteristics. He came to possess a many sided
personality. He was a classicist, an innovator, a critic social reformer or a
mystic all combined into one.
T.S.Eliot The Waste Land is an important achievement in the
history of English poetry and one of the most talked poems of the 20th
century by Thomas Stern Eliot. This poem is very long one including four
hundred forty lines which is divided into five parts. They are given below;
(1) The Burial of the Dead
(2) A Game of chess
(3) The fire sermon
(4) Death by water and
(5) What the Thunder said
It
was written during the autumn of 1921,
in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the poet was
just recovering after a serious breakdown in health, caused by domestic worries and over-work. Personal health-crisis, the mental
derangement of his wife, who untimely died
in a mental hospital and never, is shattering the influence of World War1. On account of this
gloomy image of World War 1 the poet
presented that the poem expresses the
disillusionment of a generation. The gloom and despair of the poet are mirrored
in the poem.
v The Title
Words: -
The title of the
poem The Waste Land has been inspired by Miss Dessie L. Weston’s book from
Ritual to Romance. It refers to a Waste Land described in one of the Grail Romances.
The Land was ruled by the Fisher king. He along with his knights ravished
certain maidens who were guardians of the Grail mysteries. Because of that
outrage, he became impotent and fell ill, and his land became Waste. Eliot has
represented in his poem the modern materialistic world as the wasteland, and
its rulers as the modern materialistic man – He has profaned the mysteries of
life and being, namely the Soul and God. Consequent upon his outrage, he has
become spiritually impotent and has fallen ill with misery and his land has
become Waste spiritually.
v Theme of this poem:-
1. Death
2. Rebirth
3. The Seasons
4. Lust
5. Love
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. 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.
(2) 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’. The gods interpret this as
'damyata' and Control the humans as Datta and give the demons as Dayadhvam and sympathize
‘Compassion’. The poem ends with the repeating of ‘Da’ ‘Da’ ‘Da’ as a reminder
to practice self -control, giving, and
compassion.
(3) The Seasons
The Waste
Land opens with an invocation of April, the cruelest month. T.S Eliot has
expressed what he felt about his land in The Waste Land and how people gradually
lost faith in God and spiritual decay is the main theme of the poem as because
of it only his land is waste land. Eliot’s The Waste land is almost season less
devoid of rain, of propagation, of real change. The world hangs in a perpetual
limbo, a waiting the dawn of a new
season.
(4) Lust
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. The
violated Philomela, the blind Tiresias who lived for a time as a woman.
Sexuality runs through the waste land taking centre stage as a cause of
calamity in the Fire Sermon. 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
(5) Love
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. The references to Tristan und 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
v
Motifs :-
Fragmentation:-
Eliot
used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of
modern existence and to juxtapose literary texts against one another. In
Eliot’s view, humanity psyche had been shattered by World War I and by the
collapse of the British Empire. The Waste Land echoes an academic work
and canonical literary text, and many lines also have long footnotes written by
Eliot as an attempt to explain his references and to encourage his readers to
educate themselves by delving deeper into his sources.
Mythic and Religious Ritual
Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual,
academic works, and key books in the literary tradition informs every aspect of
his poetry. He filled his poems with references to both in the obscure and the
as well as known, T.S Eliot described the mythical background in his poem. This
mythical technique can be elaborated as given below;
1.
The
Grail Legend
2.
The
King Fisher
3.
Myth
of Tiresias
4.
Myth
of Vegetation and fertility
v Symbols:-
(1) Water:-
In Eliot’s poetry water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot’s characters wait for water to quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of standing water. Fear death by water and those are pearls that were his eyes. The symbolic meaning depends with a deceased Phoenician.
.
(2) The Fisher King :-
Eliot saw the Fisher King as symbolic of humanity, robbed of its sexual potency in the modern world and connected to the meaninglessness of the urban existence. But this Fisher King also stands in the for Christ and other religious of the figures associated with divine resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of What the Thunder Said fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliot’s scene echoes the scene in the Bible in which Christ performs one of his miracles: Christ manages to feed his multitude of followers by the Sea of Galilee with just a small amount of fish.
(3) Landscape:-
Various landscapes are shown by the poet like mountain, river, bank, unreal cities etc.
(4) Buddhist:-
The Fire Sermon is the title taken from a sermon given by Buddha. Buddha encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolized by fire). Buddha preached nonviolence and wanted his followers to rise spiritually. He symbolizes universal Non violence and peace.
(5) Religion:-
Eliot’s been interested in dividing high and low culture. He symbolized them using music. According to him high culture included are opera and drama were on decline. On the other hand popular culture was on rise.
That poem ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowning- a scene that echoes Odysseus’ interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another way to Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions, elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics as a kind of Chorus, seconding and echoing the action of the poem much as the Chorus functions in Greek tragedies.
v Style and Writing
I.A.Richards and Cleanthes Brooks believe the poem to be religious. The Christian myth of King Fisher shows that regeneration is possible through penance and suffering. The poem ends with Shantih, Shantih, and Shantih. Vedic recitation ends with Universal theme of nonviolence and peace.
In clandestine style with
missing links, quotations from foreign literature, use of myths and symbols are
the key points in the poem. The tendency to suppress defining links may be
traced back to the French symbolist. The Waste Land symbol is based on the myth
of the Grail legend. This symbol has been developed by means of the vegetation
myth with the rites of fertility found in ancient Eastern cults. Further, the
poem is of striking speech rhythms for a sudden tightening, for a cumulative
insistence, or for an abrupt change of mood. In conversational passages the
speech rhythm gets down to colloquial level.
v Conclusion
:-
The
modern poets like T.S.Eliot and Robert Frost are symbolically. They give us
many allusions through allusions rather than sticking to one. The Waste Land is
symbolically very rich poem. We rarely find such a variety of symbols except in
T.S.Eliot Wasteland. Living beings, animal or insect have been the important
symbol. Land fertile and Barren both are depicted symbolically with deep
meaning. River, water, Natural objects, drought, music, religion, song, king,
queen and common people have been used with symbolic reference.
“Quando fiam uti chelidon -O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’ Aquitainte a 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 Shanti
The Waste Land does not
carry within itself all that is necessary for understanding. Its structural
basis lies in a special branch of learning, and it involves continual
references to other branches of knowledge with which few readers can be
acquainted. The piece is not a self contained study.
v Work cited :-
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