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FComelli - The Waste Land. Analysis
by FComelli - (2009-02-03)
Up to  Modernist Literary Output. From V. Woolf to T.S.Eliot to J. JoyceUp to task document list
In this short essay I'm going to discuss some topics, metaphors, quotations and the message that The Waste Land wants to tell us. The Waste Land written in 1922 is a dramatic monologue organised into five sections. It is made up of 434lines and it is written by T. S. Eliot the most representative poet of modernism. The Burial of the Dead is the first section of the monologue. Right from the title an intelligent reader can make some hypothesis about the principal topic of the poem. The topic is the death. As a matter of fact the Latin quotation confirmed this hypothesis. The quotation is taken from Petronious' Satyriocon. The semantic field of death may contain the following words: dead land, memory. In this words the idea of death is connected to the impossibility of rebirth, this idea is expressed better in the title "The Waste Land". This is a metaphorical title that, as I said before, rappresents the impossibility of regeneration. As a matter of fact in his first note to the poem Eliot attributes the title to Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance. The allusion is to the wounding of the Fisher King and the subsequent sterility of his lands. Another topic present in the poem is the impossibility of knowledge expressed int the third scene. In this scene even the Wisest Woman in Europe, Madame Sosostris, is unable to foresee the future. Moreover in the last scene the city of London is presented as a victim of the brown fog of writter down and of the routine. 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.
Moreover Eliot makes another allusion when he speaks about a mysterious red rock which is an allusion to Isaiah's reference to the coming Messiah, and when he exclaims in verse number 63
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.