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Toso_The Waste Land Analysis
[author: Francesca Toso - postdate: 2008-01-04]

Text:The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
Task: Make an analysis of the text

OBJECTIVES
Cultural: Undestand the work

Linguistic: Improve writing competences

 

 

The Waste Land (1922) is a modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. The poem is written in a lyrical form and in this opera Eliot experiments more than in others the use of the objective correlative. It is consider a difficult poem to understand for the presence of a lot of intertextual quotations  and for the apparently unconnection of opposite signs. The first section, The Burial of the Dead, starts with a quotation from J. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales  "April is the cruellest month": Eliot consider

April is a cruel month because it does not give life again to the dead earth, it gives promises that won't come. With this semantic deviation, he starts the poem using methaphores about life and death:lillacs_that are breeding_recall the colour used from priests during funerals. Eliot makes a revolution of common thinking when he said "Winter Kept us worm": winter is not consider a pause, a rest to have life again in spring but it is a restoration while people feel closed and protected from cold. The section ends with the Unreal City, where fog represents confusion and all the workers seem to be going to dead. The last line is a quotation from Baudelaire. All the section focuses on the opposition between sterility and fertility. The last section, What the Thunder Said, hints  at eigeneration by the gospel of St Luke. This section is consider by Eliot "the only fewl good lines". The seekers are now approaching to the Chapel Perilious, the place where the Holy Grail was housed. They enter a nightmare world of horrors and dangers.The poem ends with a note of desolation, infact the thunder won't suffice the desire of water or rain to have a better life.