THE WASTE LAND – The Unreal City
T.S. Eliot
ANALYSIS
Considering the title I suppose the poem will deal with a city which has fantastic and ideal features, therefore a city that doesn’t really exist.
The scene is set at 9 a.m. of morning when commuters are going to work. The setting is London, the district of Westmintser, which was a financial district. Commuters disgorged from the tube, and while they’re going out they see that the city looks unreal. The city looks unreal from a denotative point of view because the scene is set at dawn, it is foggy and you can’t see properly, but fog besides being a natural element may also mean the situation of existential confusion: people can’t see reality properly. Commuters create a crowd, they look like a spot, and they are so many that the poet use the verb “fload” moreover they’re described as they seem the same: it’s an aspect that coveys human beings’ sense of alienation from life. Eliot is quoting Dante when the Italian poet writes about the people who is going to hell, but Eliot description refers to a crowd of alive people, so he underlines the theme of life in death. For this reason he uses the passive form: “were exhaled”. Moreover men don’t look the others in the face, but looks their own feet: it is a typical behaviour of the sense of guilt, so everyone is a sinner because lives without values and, as sinner from the “Inferno” who cross the Acheronte, here sinners are crossing the city in the tube. Therefore Eliot often makes references to religious and medieval literature, because he thinks the lack of a religion which had set certain values brought men to be lost in their own lives. The crowd, got off the tube, walks to Saint Mary Woolnoth, where it’s 9 o’clock. The bell sounds the last stroke of the hour, but it seems it sounds to dead. Number 9 is a symbol: it represents perfection (3x3: number of trinity) and has, again, a religious meaning because it’s the hour when Jesus died. Afterwards, the poet recognizes someone walking in the crowd and cried to him that they are together in Mylae battle (260 B.C.., war between Rome and Carthage), such paradoxical reference to Ancient Rome means that humans are always the same and it’s an evidence of the new conception of time adopted by Eliot. Indeed time, in this poem as in many others, doesn’t follow a chronological scheme but past, future and present are mixed together in an only perspective. In order to link together the different time-lines Eliot uses myth, in particular Graal legend which is brought in the contemporary world. Such a choice demonstrates that there is a continuity in the human existence which goes beyond chronological references. The dramatis personae asks if that corpse, buried in the land, is reborn as a tree: it’s the theme of reborn, is it possible to regenerate? Therefore the corpse represents the modern and western man, who is a dead in life, whereas the tree is the possibility of men to create new values, and so a new life, from the traditional ones. Such lines allow the reader to understand previous references to Christ (for example number 3), because Christ died and reborn as Eliot hopes human beings will do. Afterwards the word “Dog” is written with the capital letter and it’s a quotation from “White Devile” (‘600), where the character of Cornelia cries on the body of the son. He uses a very similar line, but changes the wolf with a dog because in the new era everything is depreciated. Finally the last line in French included the reader with the poet: Eliot is a antihero because his actions are different from his intentions, so this behaviour makes him an “hypocrite” and links him to all human beings, indeed he defines them brothers.