Textuality » 5QLSC TextualityAFantini - The Waste Land - analysis
by 2019-05-13)
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In the present text, I am going to analyse an extract taken from the first 30 lines of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land named The Burial of the Dead, in order to understand how the writer’s stylistic choices and the words used make meaning and the message of the poem. From the title the intelligent reader can understand that "dead" are people without values. At the beginning of the poetry, Eliot said that "April is the cruelest month" because he reminded to Geoffrey Chaucer (an important poet in the Middle Ages), who wrote “The Canterbury Tales”. Indeed, Eliot takes a line from the Canterbury Tales and he chenged it because Chaucer said that "April is the sweetest month". Going forward with the reading, we find out "Mixing memory and desire" and this is a very important concept: according to Bergson’s point of view, with whom Eliot agreed, human beings are unable to live in the present, since they life is a continuous mix of memories of the past (“memories”) and expectations for the future (“desire”). We note that the first ones lines are set in spring, but then the winter comes, breaking the cycle of seasons, and snow covers everything. Then there is another season, summer, when he goes in Austria, near a lake (where Ludwig the King sank) with someone else or he was there with his consciousness, and there he made many German references like Hofgarten, or the garden in the centre of Munich. The lake introduces the death by water. Eliot uses the myth as a cohesion element, especially vegetation rituals because they refers to primitive cultures that believed in something.
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