Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
In this short essay I'm going to discuss some topics, metaphors, quotations and the message of The Waste Land. Right from the title the intelligent reader can understand the topic of the poem, that is the death. As a matter of fact the Latin quotation confirmed this hypothesis. The quotation is taken from Petronious' Satyriocon and it talks about a Sybilla that wants to die because she had asked the immortality to Apollo. The poem has a methaporical title, as a matter of fact it reminds to the impossibility of regeneration.
Another topic present in the poem is the impossibility of knowledge expressed in the third scene. In this scene even the Wisest Woman in Europe, Madame Sosostris, is unable to foresee the future.
Moreover the title The Burial of Dead is an allusion to The Book of Common Prayer, the prayer book of the Anglican Church.
The second section of "The Burial of the Dead" shifts from the voice of Marie to the voice of the narrator that gives us some memories about a man and a woman who live in Austria in summer.
The first twelve lines of this section include three Old Testament allusions, and the narrator finds himself in a summer drought that has transformed the land into a desert. Moreover in these first lines Eliot creates an unusual, a strange and an atypical scene, as a matter of fact he creates a paradox in which a dead land generate life.
I had not thought death had undone so many. This is an allusion to Dante's Inferno and the people died without living and they may not enter either Hell or Heaven since when they made no choice in life to be virtuous or to sin.
In this poem time is fused into present. As a matter of fact, for example, Eliot in the month April (present) some memories of winter (past) and the desire of summer (future). So he creates a simultaneous concept of time. Moreover in my opinion Eliot uses the month April because it is the month of birth and regeneration that is the major theme of this poem, in according to death.
The reader is confused by the allusive technique used by Eliot, in adopting quotation. As a matter of fact this technique creates an intricate web that the reader must understand.
The style of the dramatic monologue used by T.S.Eliot is free verse. The metaphors of sterility is interpreted as T.S.Eliot connote on the futility of Civilization after the first World War.
In conclusion in my opinion the message sent is about the impossibility to reorder civilization after the first World War.