THE WASTE LAND

"The Burial of the dead"

Ex. 1

a)In the first extract "The Burial of the dead"  there are references  about a realistic description of the town in terms of local and temporal setting. As a matter of fact Eliot adopts his allusive language to suggest reality. References to setting are :"London Bridge", " King William Street", "Saint Mary Woolnoth".

 In this part of The Waste Land reader can notice a destruction of chronological concept of time, as an example Eliot named "Mylae" and also a constant reference to time . On the consequence we can find a semantic filed around the word "time": " winter, kept the hours, stroke of nine, last year".

b)In lines 1-5 there is commuters' description. This description suggests a ghostly  atmosphere in which people move in a passive way. Clues about mood people is in life is conveyed in the beginning of the extract " Under the brown fog of a winter..."that is to say , people is inability to see, seems not to have an identity , and is like " a crown flowed". People is  like zombie coming from death as a matter of fact men  can't breathe they can only "exhaled". Moreover they are described as if they are guilty without courage to look into each other eyes.

Ex. 2

LINE 1                     "Unreal city"

SOURCE                 Baudelaire " The Seven Old Man"

FUNCTIONS             London acquires a spectral dimension: it is unreal, full of dreams and

                            Inhabited by ghosts moving in broad daylight

LINE 4                    "I had not thought death..."

SOURCE                 Dante's Inferno

FUNCTIONS             People is described like zombie coming from death

LINE 5                    "Sighs, short and infrequent"

SOURCE                 Dante's Inferno

FUNCTIONS             People suffered from spiritual sloth. They can't breathe they can only exhaled.

LINE 9                    "With a dead sound on the final stroke"

SOURCE                  Luke

FUNCTIONS             The context of Christ's death is brought  to bear on the context of the passage

Ex. 4

1)The last passage is a quotation from Baudelaire in order to convey the frustration of people. As a matter of fact there isn't regeneration.

2)Reader can't e escape this view of the modern man.

Ex. 5

We find juxtaposition of different period of time in line 11. Past and present have simultaneous existence. They convey a contrast between past fertility and present sterility.

THE WASTE LAND

" What The Thunder Said"

Ex. 2

In this extract there is a natural setting. It seems a desert setting, the more desolate land described in the poem, as a  matter of fact nature obstructs men " Here is no water only rock". This central concept is conveyed by the obsessive repetition of "rock " and "water".

In lines 16-29 there is a natural setting, but there is an hypothetical better place. So Eliot used  hypothetic  phrases "if" 

Both the landscape reveal a frustration and nature can't regenerate as a matter of fact "there is no water" in both extracts.

Ex. 3

In this extract water has a connotative meaning referring to fertility, life, salvation and regeneration. Moreover water recalls also the  baptism and so it means purification.

Ex. 5

The extract is wrote in free verse.

There are two stanzas, but they haven't the same number of lines.