SGiannangeli - T.S. Eliot, notes and analysis

The Burial of the Dead: We’re going to analyse an extract taken from a poem that belongs to a series of dramatic monologues, and as a result we will see here different voices. The title of the poem is “THE WASTE LAND” (1922), the term pushes us to think to a sterile and arid land, so that the reader wonders why this land is sterile and who’s the addressee of the poem. Some of the most important works of modernist literature were published in 1922.

“The Waste Land” is dedicated to Ezra Pound. He’s considered an imagist poet. The poet starts with a dedication and a quotation from Latin and Greek: the epigraph is taken from Satyricon (I century AD). “Del resto la Sibilla a Cuma l’ho vista anche io con i miei occhi penzolare dentro un’ampolla e quando i fanciulli le chiedevano: Sibilla, cosa vuoi?: she answered: I want to die”. Right from the start the intelligent reader understands that there is something wrong with the poem because the title, the quotation and the first section of the poem express the desire to die. Death seems to set the atmosphere and the main point of the introduction. There are five sections (the first one is the “Burial of the Dead”).

At the first line the poet defines April as a cruel month. April is usually the month which brings spring, it’s strange to define it “cruel”. The term cruel refers to somebody who makes you suffer. Eliot is turning the traditional vision of that month upside down. Etymologically, Spring gives the idea of something which is reborn. The line is taken from Chaucer, whose “Canterbury Tales” opens with the words “April is the sweetest month”. Through the quotation, Eliot is going back to Chaucer, the poets’ poet: he was the first one to use English a literary language. Eliot is going to the origin of the English poetry and he wants to make an implicit comparison to the style of the Middle Age (which is more positive than his time).

What makes April cruel? April usually brings the promise of a rebirth, but Eliot cannot call it “sweet”, because in the Modern Age nothing gives promises.

He then expresses his worries about the spiritual slough of the 20^th century: indeed, people had lost all their points of references: Darwin said men came from a progressive evolution, and that there is no God to whom people can rely to, Nietzsche said “God is Dead”. This created a vacuum, which brought to the loss of hope. Eliot starts from a natural image and now tells us why is April cruel: he breeds Lilacs (flowers used by archbishop during burials: title). Eliot is speaking about flowers, but flowers we generally see during funerals in Anglican religion: this reminds to the title of the poem, which suggests that the land is waste because it is dead.

April mixes memory and desire, because it pushes people to hope in the future because of their past, indeed, during the Modern Age a new concept of time was introduced by Bergson: he said past and future are contained in the present. The concept of time is simultaneous, Bergson adopts new paradigms.

The roots of this land are dull, so they don’t help for rebirth, Eliot is using the convention of poetry: he’s speaking of nature and spring but according to a modernist point of view, without the themes of religion and hope in the future and traditions (roots). During spring, we expect the rain to help the rebirth but here land is sterile.

After the first scene of spring there is a juxtaposition of a scene that is set in winter, which is defined as the season that keeps people warm. The poet uses language in a paradoxical way. The paradox is something that can’t be real: he speaks about keeping people warm because they remain in the closed and protective space inside their houses, the outside world is menacing. Instead, winter keeps people warm, because they can stay alone in front of the fire, moreover, it covers the Earth with snow (It is the only realistic hint of what really happens in winter) which is defined “forgetful” (personification): the snow protects the Earth in order to it to be warm and it leaves outside all of our memories. Plus, the poet underlines the words “little life”(which is an alliteration to underline the tragic condition of human beings in the period he’s writing: IWW), winter is feeding life, but it is little. The poet also adds that winter feeds people of dry tubers, they dryness is a symbol for the sense of sterility that doesn’t give any product: a waste land, doesn’t give harvest that may help people’s lives go on. The waste land is an extended metaphor for existence unless every single human being has found his personal sense after a request.

Then comes summer: Eliot is exploiting the typical convention of nature usually used in poetry in a completely new way: he transforms nature in something new that Freud would define as disturbing.

Eliot is using the pronoun “we” because it is an inclusive subject which includes the dramatis personae and the reader, so he thinks the reader feels the same as he feels.

“Summer surprise”: suddenly the reader discovers summer has arrived. However, it’s an unusual chronology because it doesn’t follow the real order of seasons. The readers have hardly understood that summer has come: the human being isn’t even able to recognise the season: everything is dead, everything is the same. When people live in a terrible routine that makes their life dull, they are not excited by anything.  Summer is described with the landscape of a lake near Munich. Here, the mad king Ludwig the second, who was a friend of Wagner, died because of a shipwreck (a classical thopos of literature). King Ludwig II becomes a symbol of fertility, because he dies in water (which is the objective correlative for fertility and regeneration).
This is the first reference which gives the name to a section of “The Waste Land”. The speaking voice realizes that summer has come thanks to a shower rain, so that he and someone else are compelled to stop under a colonnade and go on in a garden. After that, suddenly the weather changes, the sun comes and they go on in the sunlight into the public park in Munich, after that they have a coffee: they are people who move around in a city. There is a juxtaposition of scenes, without any logic: they are only linked by atmospheres and by vegetable myths.

The objective correlative: Eliot does something innovative that will be exploited in other literatures (for example by the Italian poet Eugenio Montale). He uses the objective correlative: it creates a relation and puts something into relation with something else, such as “forgetful snow”, “dead land”, “dry tubers”. It allows the reader to create a relation between the objects he’s referring to and the idea of sterility. Indeed, all the first part of this text works on the oppositions between sterility and fertility and sterility is the icon of the modern world. All the semantic choices refer to a language which is waste and sterile. People desire the land to be fertile (only when the land may give them a god harvests, they can eat and live). He defines it as the only way to express an emotion, so that the reader can feel the same emotion.

Human beings (that are all conditioned by such a spiritual and physical sterility) seem to be living a life in death. People in this period, because of the world’s loss of the points of reference that had nourished the western culture, are living a life which is a “life in death” (they feel unrooted, alone, without points of reference). The outside world (spiritual sloth of the world) is perceives as threatening and menacing.

Objective correlative is a linguistic device where Eliot uses objects that create relationships to say something else (dead land, forgetful snow, little life, rock) are object that convey the idea of sterility, as a result people look for fertility. Indeed, the poet wants to look for a possibility for men to regenerate, he looks for a salvation for the “Waste Land”. The metaphor of sterility is an extended metaphor which keeps together the whole poem.

All such language choices contribute to create the atmosphere of the “waste land” that is a symbol of men’s little and poor life. Men have no desires they don’t know what to do with their life. All traditional values seem to be cancelled.

The Mythical Method: Instead of the narrative method (chronological order, cause and effect logic), Eliot uses the mythical method. According to Eliot, modern art may not use the narrative method because modern reality does no longer follow a cause-effect logic.

The expression “Mythical Method” was introduced for the first time by T.S. Eliot when writing about J. Joyce’s “Ulysses”. In his work, Joyce juxtaposed periods that does not seem to follow a chronological order, he creates a parallelism between antiquity and modernity. T.S. decided to define the mythical method because, at that time, people did not understand Joyce’s work. The mythical method is the structural element of the Ulysses.  Indeed, Joyce manipulates a continue parallelism between modernity and antiquity making reference to the Odyssey by using its structure. T.S. Eliot used the mythical method, too: he used a kind of poetry that was considered innovative: it was created with the specific unusual structure made of juxtaposition of scenes which had no apparent connection with each other, that apparently have no chronological coherence, but they share the same principle of symbolical coherence and cohesion.

The reader can make sense of what he’s reading by the use of MYTH, something that Eliot had inherited from the dramatic monologue of the Victorian age (Browning had taken an historical event and had made the Duke’s voice speak).

It is a simple way to control, shape and structure the idea of futility and anarchy which characterise the Modern Age (loss of certainties).

In order to talk about the necessity of a cultural regeneration that didn’t take place Eliot uses the image of a sterile land. The cultural regeneration can only take place thanks to a life which is given a sense and value.  This is why Eliot feels nostalgic about the ancient world (indeed, he goes back to the roots of English culture by quoting Chaucer).

Through his poetry, Eliot looks for a possibility for men to emotionally, intellectually and spiritually regenerate and to get back a real life. He looks for a myth that can keep the scenes tied to each other, such as vegetation rites: he takes some texts and re-codifies them in order to create a frame that can link the scenes and images that suggest concepts and feelings.

So, by talking about man, Eliot finds out anthropologic studies which take him back to primitive cultures: he finds out that primitive people used vegetation rites that had the aim to bring fertility (indeed, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates made lands fertile through loam). The vegetation rites also included some legends to which illiterate people attributed a symbolical meaning. In every section the poet makes references to Western and European culture.

An example is the myth of “The Fisher King”, a figure that is present in a lot of rites regarding fertility: the king lives in a land that suffers from a curse that has made it sterile. Consequently, the king is impotent (he can’t generate life) because of a wound in his scrotum. Another illness that has made him sterile is his old age: he will be able to win the curse only when a stranger will come and he will be able to answer to a ritual question. This kind of myth are metaphors that allow to understand that if man is not able to regenerate his life, he will always be sterile and live a “death in life”. Eliot rescues the myth of The Fisher King from Jessie Weston’s “From Ritual to Romance”.

Another legend that has had a big influence is the legend of the “Grail” (the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood from Christ’s wound). The legend tells that in a waste land there were some people that decided to face a hard pilgrimage in order to reach a Chapel where the Grail is preserved. They make a lot of efforts in order to climb up the land with no water. So, the symbol of fertility, which is water, is constantly present as a necessity for those pilgrims (objective correlative: the reader is able to feel the same emotion of the pilgrims, which is a need for a regeneration).

The Irish symbolist poet Yeats used the mythical method, too (Sailing to Byzantium): he had understood that the method was necessary.

The impersonality of the artist: the idea of the impersonality of poetry is expressed by Eliot in his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”. In his opinion, the poet (differently from Romanticism) may not express his own personality and feelings in his works, instead, he should sacrifice and extinguish his identity (it must be the text that builds up the poem), “The feeling or emotion or vision resulting from the poem is something different from feeling, emotion, and vision in the mind of the poet”. “According to his view the past is never dead, it lives in the present” and the poet must always consider the tradition: in order to evaluate or write an innovative text it must be put into relation with previous texts otherwise it won’t be universally valid and innovative. The text must conserve the tradition and modify its structure.

Unreal City: First of all, the setting is juxtaposed to the ones we have already analysed. Once and again the poet is juxtaposing a different scene, that is set at nine o’clock in the morning when the people (commuters) are going to work. The setting is London and precisely is the district of Westminster (which is a financial district). People are going to work, they are disgorged out of the tube and while they’re going out, they see that the city looks unreal (which means something that has not got realistic features).

Now we try to make sense of how Eliot conveys the idea of this unreal city: first of all, from a denotative point of view, the scene is set at down and it is foggy, the weather conditions make the city unreal because it is surrounded by fog so that people can’t see properly. Eliot decided to present the city like this because the fog, besides being a natural element, also represents the situation of confusion. The setting may also have a metaphorical meaning. Both on a concrete and metaphorical level the poet speaks about natural elements.

The crowd makes everybody look similar: the sense of alienation is present here (just like Coketown). The semantic choice of the word “crowd” means that people look like a spot, they are undistinguished identities. He uses the verb “flow” which conveys the idea of a mass of people. In describing the crowd, the poet makes a quotation from Dante, who said “sì lunga tratta di gente, ch'i' non averei creduto che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta”. Dante’s Canto III describes people who are going to hell, so, Eliot transcodes Dante’s verse in order to create a continuity between Medieval Age and Contemporary Age.

Eliot thinks that all people are “sinner”, in his opinion, everyone has faults (they do not forgive, they are not compassionate, they are not generous).

In order to describe de flow of people, he uses an element of intertextuality, using Dante’s verse through the English language code. He makes reference to an age in which the most important code was the religious one.

The poet thinks that the people are living a life in death, they are spiritually dead so he chooses a verb such as “exhaled” coherent with the fact that people are living in death. Also, they do not look people straight in the eyes, because they are sinners, they are similar to the condemned people that Dante places in the Acheronte river. He takes the idea of exhaling men from the IV Canto of the “Inferno” by Dante through another quotation: “Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, non avea pianto mai che di sospiri, che l’aura etterna facevan tremare”.

The poet chooses the Inferno in order to represent the spiritually, emotionally and intellectual death and misery. These verses make reference to a culture in which people had ethic and religious values, so that the loss of those values in the Modern world is underlined.

Going on, the poet describes people walking until a street near the London Bridge, towards the Church of Saint Mary Woolnoth. While they were walking, they hear the sound of the tolling bells, which is described as a dead sound. They arrive when the bell is tolling the last stroke, indeed, at nine o’clock clerks started to work. But the bells tolling at nine o’clock also have a symbolic relevance: nine is a perfect number, it is a multiple of three (which symbolises Trinity), also, Jesus Christ died at nine o’clock.

Lawrence wrote the “The Ignoble Procession”, in which he describes a procession of people headed to work, too.

The poet seems then to recognize someone among the people walking in the crowd, he stops him, and tries to get his attention and tells him that they were together in the “Battaglia di Milazzo”: that was fought in 260 a.C. It was a conflict between Romans and Carthaginian (during the first Punic War). It seems to be a paradoxical reference, but Eliot wanted to underline that man has never changed: once again, in the poem different temporal levels are juxtaposed and they converge and communicate in a single perspective linked by the basic scheme of fertility rites and myths.

This is typical of the “mythical method” introduced by Eliot: he wants to show that there is a continuity in the human existence that goes beyond chronological references.

Going back to the text, the speaking voice calls his friend “Stetson”, that was the brand of a hat that Ezra Pound used to wear. The speaking voice then refers to the interlocutor a question: the theme of his question is the regeneration from a life in death (reference to Jesus Christ’s path).

The imagine of the “dig” reminds to the roots of culture. Then, the dramatis personae refers to the reader. The imagine of the dig and the dog have a specific meaning: the dog is a trans-codification of “The White Devil” that is a work of Webster (‘600), it is a funeral poem, in which the character of Cornelia, while crying on the corpse oh his son, suggests to keep the wolf away, because it’s a man’s enemy and he is going to dig out the corpse with its nails. In Eliot’s poem, the wolf becomes a dog: everything during the Modern Age has depreciated.

Lastly, Eliot quotes Baudelaire: “mon frere”, so that he includes the reader, because he knows that they are equal (they are both antiheroes) since they are persons full of desires that they can’t satisfy (indeed, the poem ends with a message that invites people to be generous).