Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
GMargarit - The Waste Land
by - (2009-02-03)
Up to Modernist Literary Output. From V. Woolf to T.S.Eliot to J. Joyce
It is an anthology of states of mind based on hallucinations, fragmentary, impressions and opposition.
The Burial of the Dead focuses on the opposition between sterility and fertility, life and death.
The poem starts with a sense with a resistance to change, which we can see in lines, where he speaks, about "forgetful snow", "April is the cruellest month" and "dried tubers".
The concept of history is conveyed through quotations. T.S. Elliot wants to show that events are repeated in the history and that some situations of the past prepare future developments, so the poem is seen as living unity.
The present and the past exist in the same time in every mind and create a continuity of space and time.
Thanks to the mythical method he shows the contrast between present and past speaking about the present waste life in contrast with metaphor of men's search of spiritual salvation of the Oly Grail.
In the first stanza, Elliot describes April as a cruel month and opposes it to Winter. He recalls the opening of Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer describes April as the month of rebirth. The myth of fertility appears in the first stanza with the verbs "breeding", "stirring" and in the seven line he speaks about a "little life" which is juxtaposed to "dried tubers" which give us the image of sterility. The technical of juxtaposition is a precise choice to highlight particular concept.
The rhythm scheme is free, which emphasizes the confusion and fragmentary of ideas, as a matter of fact from line 8 to line 18, we find images of landscape, children and German sentences.
In the second stanza the author uses the technical of implication through the questions the reader should answer. The use of metaphor, through the technique of objective correlative refers to the main idea of old composition, evoking sensation of sterility and fertility and images of life and death: "a dead tree" isn't even able to produce shadow. In this stanza there is the repetition of the word "shadow" and the sound "sh", it recalls the sound of water which is the image of fertility, it is antithesis with drieness which represents sterility.
In third stanza we find the figure of Madame Sosostris, a famous clairyante who appears as a normal woman. She reads the cards projecting the mind in future but a future with the fear of death; (a scene which recalls the "walking around the ring" of people in the "Divina Commedia")
In the last stanza the speaking voice describes the contemporary life in the city in contrast with the Heroic past, using hints from work of art of literally masterpiece: "I had not thought death had undone so many", "sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled", "There I saw one I knew and stopped him, crying, Stetson" refers to Divina Commedia.
The image of London is unreal, full of "ghosts" and which are hopeless. The connection of present and past which live in the same time in the mind and it is clear in line 68 where the stroke of nine means the opening time of offices of the City but recalls the time when Christ died. The idea of dead merges in the line 71, where the (corps) recalls the Egyptian rite: they buried the god of fertility.
The poem is characterized by a frequent use of different personal pronomes, "We", "I", "you" and "he", shifting from passive actor, common people and an accompliance. The author involves the reader, to become a sort of character in the flow of thoughts of the writer.
The poem reveals the fragmentary of the present world, and gives the image of the life, lived between life and death, sterility and fertility, Spring and Winter, water and drieness. We have the sensation of negativity of a life embodying death within life.
The Burial of the Dead focuses on the opposition between sterility and fertility, life and death.
The poem starts with a sense with a resistance to change, which we can see in lines, where he speaks, about "forgetful snow", "April is the cruellest month" and "dried tubers".
The concept of history is conveyed through quotations. T.S. Elliot wants to show that events are repeated in the history and that some situations of the past prepare future developments, so the poem is seen as living unity.
The present and the past exist in the same time in every mind and create a continuity of space and time.
Thanks to the mythical method he shows the contrast between present and past speaking about the present waste life in contrast with metaphor of men's search of spiritual salvation of the Oly Grail.
In the first stanza, Elliot describes April as a cruel month and opposes it to Winter. He recalls the opening of Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer describes April as the month of rebirth. The myth of fertility appears in the first stanza with the verbs "breeding", "stirring" and in the seven line he speaks about a "little life" which is juxtaposed to "dried tubers" which give us the image of sterility. The technical of juxtaposition is a precise choice to highlight particular concept.
The rhythm scheme is free, which emphasizes the confusion and fragmentary of ideas, as a matter of fact from line 8 to line 18, we find images of landscape, children and German sentences.
In the second stanza the author uses the technical of implication through the questions the reader should answer. The use of metaphor, through the technique of objective correlative refers to the main idea of old composition, evoking sensation of sterility and fertility and images of life and death: "a dead tree" isn't even able to produce shadow. In this stanza there is the repetition of the word "shadow" and the sound "sh", it recalls the sound of water which is the image of fertility, it is antithesis with drieness which represents sterility.
In third stanza we find the figure of Madame Sosostris, a famous clairyante who appears as a normal woman. She reads the cards projecting the mind in future but a future with the fear of death; (a scene which recalls the "walking around the ring" of people in the "Divina Commedia")
In the last stanza the speaking voice describes the contemporary life in the city in contrast with the Heroic past, using hints from work of art of literally masterpiece: "I had not thought death had undone so many", "sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled", "There I saw one I knew and stopped him, crying, Stetson" refers to Divina Commedia.
The image of London is unreal, full of "ghosts" and which are hopeless. The connection of present and past which live in the same time in the mind and it is clear in line 68 where the stroke of nine means the opening time of offices of the City but recalls the time when Christ died. The idea of dead merges in the line 71, where the (corps) recalls the Egyptian rite: they buried the god of fertility.
The poem is characterized by a frequent use of different personal pronomes, "We", "I", "you" and "he", shifting from passive actor, common people and an accompliance. The author involves the reader, to become a sort of character in the flow of thoughts of the writer.
The poem reveals the fragmentary of the present world, and gives the image of the life, lived between life and death, sterility and fertility, Spring and Winter, water and drieness. We have the sensation of negativity of a life embodying death within life.