20th May 2015

• Water and rock 

It is an extract from section 5: “What the thunder said”. According to the poet, these lines are the best of the whole poem.

The title is a reference to the Indian legend of the thunder: after the thunder it rains. The legend belongs to Upanishad (which is kinda an Indian Bible). Eliot said that in the first part of the fifth section (he is referring to lines 322 – 394) he employed three themes:

1)      Journey to Emmaus (Pentecost: Jesus’ spirit revealed itself but wasn’t recognized)

2)      Approach to the Chapel Perilious (when it is generally said that you could find the Sacred Graal)

3)      Eastern Europe decay

Actually / To tell the truth the legend of the thunder may also be a reference to the vegetation rites.

The scene refers to some people walking upwards to reach the Chapel Perilious. The weather is terribly arid and sterile, very hot and the people have got sweaty faces.

The atmosphere is still a difficult one. The scene is totally built up with an insistent use of the objective correlative, namely water and rock. The people are very hot and sweaty. They’re going uphill and there is a frost silence: they’re so tired they don’t even have enough energy left to speak. There is an atmosphere of agony, where you can hear shouting and crying. They seem to be imprisoned and trapped. You can hear the echo of thunderous spring in the distant mountains.

There is a reference to Jesus’ death: “he who was living is now dead”.

There is the same atmosphere of dying. The landscape is a rocky one, where there is not even the memory of water. Water is a metonymy for baptism, a ritual by means of which men are purified from their sins: the desire for water should be interpreted as one’s desire for purification.

There is the rendering of the fatigue because the road is going above and it’s not straight forward. But at the top they find only rock and no water. “If there were water” is an hypotheses, a possibility: they imagine, because imagination can give them relief, too.

“There is only dry and sterile thunder” conveys people’s frustration.

“Mudcrack” --> mud

The idea of death is impending (= sospesa) and there is this desperate search for water, where the repetition of “rock” creates a sense of harshness: there is no help but the denial of water.

L’unità tematica è resa a livello: ideologico, antropologico, narrativo.

• Piano ideologico: l’opera è stata letta come il resoconto di una civiltà in crisi, ma Eliot dissente (la sua poesia non si riferisce a una “generazione”)
• Piano antropologico: l’unità è data dai riferimenti alla leggenda del Graal e ai riti della fertilità.
• Piano narrativo: alcune parti della storia sono volontariamente omesse.
• Piano formale: ricerca di un’unità analogica.