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2Themes of the Wasteland
Name:- Nirali
dungrani
Roll no:- 24
Enrolment
no:- 2069108420180012
Paper: - 9
Modernist literature
Topic: -
Themes of the Wasteland
Submitted to:
- Department of English MKB uni.
Introduction:-
About Author:-
Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965), was an essayist, publisher,
playwright, literary and social critic, and one of the twentieth century's major
poets.
Born in St.
Louis, Missouri,
in the United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25,
settling, working, and marrying there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American
passport.
Poem:-
The Waste Land is a long poem by T. S. Eliot widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line.
·
Part I opens with
the famous line, "April is the cruellest month." The speaker, Marie,
is a young woman who bears witness to the physical and emotional devastation
caused by the war.
·
Parts II and III
describe the inside of a wealthy woman's bedroom and the garbage-filled waters
of the Thames, respectively. Part IV eulogizes a drowned man named Phlebas.
·
In the fifth and
final part of the poem, the speaker "translates" the thunderclaps
cracking over an Indian jungle. The poem ends with the repetition of the
Sanskrit word for peace: "Shantih shantih shantih."
The poem's structure is
divided into five sections. The first section, "The Burial of the
Dead," introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The
second, "A Game of Chess," employs vignettes of several characters
alternating narrations that address those themes experientially. "The Fire
Sermon," the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in relation
to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition influenced
by Augustine of Hippo and eastern religions. After a fourth section, "Death by
Water," which includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth
section, "What the Thunder Said," concludes with an image of
judgment.
Themes:-
1)
The seasons
2)
Sex
3)
Memory and the past
4)
Water
5)
Rebirth
6)
Religion
7)
History
8)
Lust
9)
Isolation
The Seasons
The Waste Land opens with an
invocation of April, the cruellest 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 season less: devoid of rain, of propagation, of real change. The
world hangs in a perpetual limbo, waiting the dawn of a new season.
SEX
In "The Waste Land,"
the status of sex is pretty much a measuring stick for how morally demolished
society is. On several occasions, when it comes time for Eliot to show how
truly low we've all fallen, he points toward sex—and not just sex, but the
separation of sex from love. There's no getting around it; pop culture is
totally obsessed with sex, and it tries to throw sex in our faces as much as it
can. For Eliot, sex once had the potential to be a beautiful thing. But in
modern times, this beauty has been completely stripped of its significance,
mostly because the act of sex no longer has anything to do with love. Call
Eliot a little old-fashioned, but the guy's observations on sex pretty much
still hold true for much of pop culture today.
MEMORY
AND THE PAST
There's just no getting away
from the past in "The Waste Land," but Eliot's biggest criticism of
modern society is that it has gotten too far away from the past. Throughout
this poem, you encounter a lot of personal memories; but for Eliot, these
aren't nearly as important as the "cultural memory" he's trying to
preserve in this poem.
Water
"The Waste Land" lacks water water
promises rebirth. At the same time, however, water can bring about death. Eliot
sees the card of the drowned Phoenician sailor and later titles the fourth
section of his poem after Madame Sosostris‟ mandate that he fear “death by
water.” When the rain finally arrives at the close of the poem, it does suggest
the cleansing of sins, the washing away of misdeeds, and the start of a new
future; however, with it comes thunder, and therefore perhaps lightning. The
latter may portend fire; thus, “The Fire Sermon” and “What the Thunder Said”
are not so far removed in imagery, linked by the potentially harmful forces of
nature.
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.
RELIGION
For
Eliot, one of the single greatest causes of Western civilization becoming
"The Waste Land" is the fact that religion doesn't really have the
influence it once did. In the old days, people didn't have to worry so much
about questions like "Why am I here?" or "What's the meaning of
life," because religion already had answers for these questions. In the
modern world though, Eliot has seen a decline in the power of religion, and one
of the side effects of this decline is that more and more people are feeling
like they're in a funk or suffering from a full-blown spiritual crisis.
History
History, Eliot suggests, is a repeating
cycle. When he calls to Stetson, the Punic War stands in for World War I; this
substitution is crucial because it is shocking. At the time Eliot wrote
"The Waste Land," the First World War was definitively a first - the
"Great War" for those who had witnessed it. There had been none to
compare with it in history. The predominant sensibility was one of profound change;
the world had been turned upside down and now, with the rapid progress of
technology, the movements of societies, and the radical upheavals in the arts,
sciences, and philosophy, the history of mankind had reached a turning point.
Lust
Perhaps the most famous episode in "The
Waste Land" involves a female typist’s liaison with a carbuncula 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, and that is not sterile.
Isolation
Question: Hey Eliot, what's so wrong
with the modern world?
Eliot's answer: Everyone is way
too selfish.
Question: So what?
Eliot's answer: Well, haven't you
ever wondered why you're so lonely? That's why.
In "The Waste Land," the
great despair of modern existence doesn't just come from a sense of
meaninglessness, but from a very deep loneliness. This loneliness, in turn, is
something Eliot thinks we create for ourselves by constantly pursuing our own
selfish interests. It's pretty simple: you can't spend your whole life trying
to beat the people around you, then turn around and complain about being
lonely. Modern existence, with its emphasis on individualism, is a breeding
ground for isolation and loneliness, and the major problem with modern people
is that they don't seem to realize that they're responsible for the isolation
that's always eating at their souls.
APPEARANCES
Simply
put, there are some pretty unattractive characters walking around "The
Waste Land." The worst of all might be the two-thousand-year-old Tiresias,
with his wrinkled dugs but the pimply-faced young man carbuncular might give
the prophet a run for his money in the Ugliest Eliot Character pageant. Eliot
might talk a lot about sympathy and compassion, but he's more than willing to
draw a direct relationship between moral and physical ugliness when it comes to
stuff he doesn't like. Eliot focuses on people's appearances constantly
throughout this poem, and always does so to convey his larger ideas about
spiritual beauty and ugliness.
Conclusion:-
There are many themes. They are
very helpful to understand the whole poem very easily. There are some important
aspects remain in themes so themes can be important to study any other
texts.
Works Cited
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. the waste
land . 13 march 2002. 20 september 2018
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land>.
PREMIUM, SHMOOP. www.shmoop.com.
<https://www.shmoop.com/the-waste-land/memory-past-theme.html>.
T.S. ELIOT – THE
WASTE LAND.
<file:///C:/Users/hp/Downloads/33._T.S._Eliot___The_Waste_Land%20(2).pdf>.
The Waste Land
Summary. <https://www.enotes.com/topics/waste-land>.
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