Notes of the 11^th of April 2012

The Waste-Land - What the Thunder Said

The title of the final section of The Waste Land mentions the Hindu fable belonging to the holy book Upanishad. In this section three themes are juxtaposed following the style of the dramatic monologue: the journey of Jesus Christ, the approaching to the chapel containing the Holy Grail, the contemporary decadence of East Europe.

There’s an apparent chaos that gradually has been arranged according to a structured pattern of juxtaposed themes, symbols and quotations. The stressed and unstressed iambic pentameter gives the rhythm.   

The first lines (“After the torchlight red on sweaty faces/After the frosty silence in the gardens/After the agony in stony places/The shouting and the crying”) are linked to Jesus’s dead: Mr. Eliot gives the reader the image of pain and compares life to dead (“He who was living is now dead/We who were living are now dying”).

On the line 11 there are two famous objective correlative: the water, which reminds to the birth, the Baptism and the regeneration; the rock, which reminds to the difficulties. Those two words juxtaposed make a contrast.

On lines 14 and 17 the poet uses an “if clause” of the second type to express an hypothesis that can realize or not, it’s an imaginary situation.     

“Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth” recalls the Ballad of the ancient mariner by Coleridge.

Repetition of negatives means the reiteration of deprivation: if there isn’t water there isn’t regeneration, there’s the thunder but it doesn’t rain.

The mountain slope reminds the ascend of Jesus to the Golgota; the alliteration of the sound “s” strength the idea of the men’s strain during the climb. 

On line 30 there’s the isolated word “spring” that has a variety of meanings: it can indicate the season, the mechanical device, a spurt, and on line 34 the poet inserts a synesthesia.

The hermit thrush singing is an objective correlative, because it refers to the loss of water and makes the reader thirsty. This memory of the bird singing is associated to the moment when the disciples don’t recognizes Jesus during the journey to Emmaus. The people “wrapped in a brown mantle, hooded” is related to the theme of the incapacity of man to recognize, to identify something or someone.

On lines 51-52 Mr. Eliot speaks about the city that falls, “cracks and reforms” alluding to the culture’s crisis of his ages: it seems that those cities are becoming mushing and this is underlined by the sound of the word “cracks”.

Next section are characterized by complicate symbolic images, that have to be decoded by the reader. Inside this hole the grass is singing on the graves surrounded by nothing, neither by hope. The thunder, a holy symbol of Hindu religion, doesn’t speak.  

They find the chapel empty, denying the regeneration. The incense means purification. The cock on the tree refers to the sentence said by Jesus to his apostles “one of us will betray me before the cockcrow”. Also the divinity speaks in a symbolic way. The regeneration of man consists in: giving to other people, pitying people, pondering before speaking, being balanced. Here Mr. Eliot is portraying man of his age: opportunist, selfish, closed in sort of prison. Indeed he opposes Coriolanus (very selfish) to Jesus (who gave his life for humanity).