ANALYSIS 3rd and 4th PART

Short introduction to The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

The poem is anticipated by Latin and Greek epigraph from The Satyricon of Petronius."I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die." After the epigraph, a dedication is inserted: "For Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro". Ezra Pound helped him edit and publish The Waste Land; Eliot is quoting a line of Dante's Purgatorio, from The Divine Comedy, and he makes also reference to the friend's title of his work The Spirit of Romance where he translated the phrase as "the better craftsman."

The Waste Land is organized into five parts:

1. The Burial of the Dead

2. A Game of Chess

3. The Fire Sermon

4. Death by Water

5. What the Thunder Said

The poem presents several pages of notes, aiming at explaining metaphors, references, and allusions. Some of these notes are helpful to interpret the poem, but some make it even more difficult to understand.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

TITLE: the first section of The Waste Land takes the title from the Anglican service consisting of burying dead people.

STRUCTURE: It consists of four parts, each presenting the perspective of a different speaking voice.

3rd PART

The third section deals with transformation. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris is the main figure appearing in the episode: she is known across Europe for her skills with Tarot cards. The speaking voice remembers meeting her when she had “a bad cold.” Throughout the section she transforms a series of vague symbols into predictions of death and change. She displayed the card of the drowned Phoenician Sailor: “Here, said she, is your card.” Next comes “Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,” and then “the man with three staves,” “the Wheel,” and “the one-eyed merchant.” The drowned sailor makes reference to WATER, in contrast with The Lady of the Rocks, embodying the element of ROCK. The contrasting symbolism is re-proposed during the whole poem, as correlative object. But in this case, WATER, that is symbol of life, becomes an image of death: indeed, men should fear “death by water”. The phrase is linked to the initial scene of the lake Starnbergersee.

4th PART:

The final episode of the first section seems to convey the image of the true wasteland of the poem, the modern city. Eliot refers to Baudelaire’s Paris (“Unreal City”) and Dante’s hell (“the flowing crowd of the dead”). The city is desolate, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson is a ghost appearing in front of the speaking voice: he asks him about a man buried in his garden: again, with the garden, the poet proposes the theme of regeneration and fertility. Eliot paints a portrait of London as a haunted city. With the sight of Stetson, we return to history. The Punic War replaces the World War I; the choice seems to make the reader recognize that all wars are the same, just as all men are the same like the final line suggests: “You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!”: Eliot is addressing to us, the readers; we all are involved in his reflection.