The Waste Land notes and analysis

The Waste Land is a poem written by T. S. Eliot. This poem consists of 5 sections. The first is The Burial of the dead. It refers to a ritual that entered religion from primitive rights; it also refers to the concrete burial of the people in a metaphorical way: people look for protection against any possibility of leaving. It opens with the quotation from Petronius Satiricon in the Greek language, where the reader can come across Sibilla Cumana's words. In the quotation the Sibilla is asked by some young people what she wants and she answers "I want to die".

From the narrative level the poem has to move to the mythical level. Eliot's poetry is the result of the just-apposition of a series of scenes. They are kept together by the atmosphere and the myth and the ritual add unity to the poem. 

In the first line Eliot is terming all the traditional concept of nature using intertextuality. He has taken the first line from the Canterbury Tales, in which Chaucer said that "April is the sweetest month". Eliot quotes Chaucer because he is the first poet who used English as a poetical language. Eliot says that April is cruel because it promises a regeneration that doesn't come, so April frustrates our expectations.

From line 1 to line 7 there is the first scene where Eliot describes April, saying that it doesn't help people to face life, because April is a cruel month.

From line 5 to line 18 the poet just- apposes another scene: children are caught by rain during the summer while they were at the Lake. It has the name of the king Ludwig II, who was drowned into the lake: so the lake becomes the symbolic image of what goes under the name "death by water". The idea of "death by water" is also connected to a quotation from "Tristan and Isolde" which the reader can come across in line 31-34 and 42 where the text hints at the figure of the Fisher King of the GraalLegend.                                                                                                                                        

Line 8 displaces the verb "surprised us", in order to introduce a new scene and a new season: summer. In the second scene is getting summer and it is the memory of two young people who are caught by the rain and they went under a colonnade in Munich. When the sun came out again they went to the public park, they had some coffee and they talked.

Then comes the Germanic line (12) which means "I'm not absolutely Russian, I'm from Lithuania, really German".

Going on there is a memory of childhood when the speaking voice together with her cousin was staying at the Archduke's home; the speaking voice remembers a scene when she went on a sled and she was frightened.

The scenes are kept together by a general atmosphere that seems to be the same.

From line 19 to line 24 the reader finds the scene of sterility. Here we have the idea of nature again. The lines also recall the Bible. There T. S. Eliot finds a very fertile container of symbols and images.

In the third scene the reader can come across a dry land. Even the roots seem to find no fixed point, they try to grasp at the land. Follows an intertextual quotation from the Bible from Ezekiel. Thanks to the quotation of Ezekiel, Eliot links together past and present. The sterile and an arid land, the reader perceives, is not simply to be understood on the naturalistic level ( sun, dead trees, cricket are all words belonging to the semantic field of nature). There is an idea of desolate land and a dead landscape. Inside the land there is somebody speaking to a "son of man" (line 20) but he knows that the man cannot answer the question. He lives in a word where everything seems to have lost unity, seems to be fragmented. Around this desolation the son of man can only see the sun which creates an arid sterile land which brings forth to dead trees. The land is dead, it cannot sprout. The cricket (line 23) is a typical part of nature, and it gives the idea of fragmented land. The idea of fragmented land becomes a metaphor, a symbol for an almost impossible generation.

At line 24, 25 the reader can notice two objective correlatives: water and rock.

At line 25 there is a metaphorical use of the language. The lack of life is an epiphany.

Al line 26 people are unable to face life. At line 27 and 28 Eliot sees the circle of a day as the metaphor of life.