Comprehension

- The references to the first theme (the journey of Christ’s disciples to Emmaus) is present in this line “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”. The second theme (the approach to the Chapel Perilous in the Holy Grail legend) is “There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.”. The third theme (the present decay of Eastern Europe) is present in “What is that sound high in the air Who are those hooded hordes swarming”

- The images associated with the sterility are: frosty silence in the gardens, stony places, no water but only rock, sandy road, rock without water, sweat is dry, doors of mudcracked, murmur of maternal lamentation, cracked heart, decayed hole, empty chapel, dry bones, empty rooms, arid plain, ruins.

Interpretation

- Thunder’s advice is that the modern man is sterile because he looks for a solution but he doesn’t reach and for this reason the regeneration can’t take place. The modern man is also selfish and he doesn’t share something with others, another consequence of this condition.

- I think that “these fragments” are the researches of the solution to the regeneration.

- The message in the final lines is that man must find the solution of his sterility in the depth, also the three word Datta (to give alms), Dayadhvam (to have compassion), Damyata (to practice selfcontrol) are hopes for a more compassionate man.

I think the last words are in Sanskrit because the poet would suggest that the solution goes beyond the European culture.

- The other examples are about death: “..Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In your empty rooms”, despair “..Murmur of maternal lamentation…cracked earth”, sterility “..Here is no water but only rock”, rebirth/hope “I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me”.

- Eliot’s experimental poetry is very interesting because it expresses concepts with symbolic meanings. This poetry isn’t always easy to understand because it resumes past culture to express a problem of his time.

- The obscurity in Eliot’s poetry is caused by the abbreviation that the sequence of the images coincides into a one impression that loses some symbols.

- Virginia Woolf underlines the intensity and the hidden meanings, the presence of the ancestors in Eliot’s works.

- The modernists Eliot, Woolf and Joyce are similar in the fact that narrator is located in the action of the fiction, the shift of point of view and perspective, the search of a meaning because the key-word of Modernism is quest, the time becomes psychological time, they show their society and they use a free indirect style.

- I find most significant this lines “Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumors”

- The examples of alliteration, repletion and onomatopoeia are from verse 1 to 3 “After…After…After”, from line 26 to 31 “And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock”, from line 57 to 62 and the line 37 “..Drip drop drip drop…”.