INTRODUCTION TO MODERNIST POETRY,

T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND (LA TERRA DESOLATA)

 

What is innovative in Eliot?

Now we will understand it considering an extract taken from a poem of him, consisting in a series of dramatic monologues; as a result from the exploitation of this narrative technique, we will ear different voices.

“The waste land”, published in 1922, which has been the “annus mirabilis” in literature: some of the most significative literature products were published in this date. Right from the title, we imagine a non-productive, arid land. What has made it became sterile? What season is the land living? What kind of people live there if they do? Who the poem has been written to?

It is dedicated to an American poet called Ezra Pound, who is considered by E. “the best artisan, “il miglior fabbro” (a quotation from Dante’s Purgatory), because of the fact he had helped Eliot in cutting away parts that his poem needn’t. He was a poet famous for the relevance he gave to imagery in writing poetry. Two other great poets Eliot appreciates a lot are Shakespeare and Dante, the greatest Medieval poet.

The poem starts with a dedication and a quotation in Latin and Greek, which stands for “I saw with my own eyes the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said “Sybil, what do you want?”, she replied “I want to die””, otherwise “del resto la sibilla a Cuma, l’ho vista anch’io, con i miei occhi, penzolare dentro un’ampolla, e quando I fanciulli le chiedevano: “Sibilla, cosa vuoi?”, lei rispondeva “Voglio morire!”” (from Satyricon, by Petronius Arbiter)

Right from the start, the i.r. understands that there is something wrong in his poem: the title says waste, the quotation deals with the desire to die, the first section is entitled “The Burial of the Dead”, so “la sepoltura dei morti”, …

In “The Waste Land” scenes are juxtaposed as if they were fragments: we can’t find connections between them. Just the atmosphere, the myth (in particular, the Primitive culture vegetation rites) knits them.

The Waste Land is a poem that consists of a mixture of dramatic monologues, thus the reader can listen to different voices and practically be pushed into the facts told because of the usage of the dramatis personae.

It is constituted by the juxtaposition of themes and is concerned with spring, juxtaposed with winter and summer.

In this poem there are 6 sections, and the first of them is “The Burial of the Dead”, of which the title refers to the Anglican’s church ceremony rituals.

 

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD (section 1)

“April”: the poem starts with a particular month, in Spring time. “April is the cruelest month” is something totally unusual to say, indeed in this period temperatures start to rise and flowers blossom. However, according to Eliot, it makes you suffer: he considers April the cruelest month because he’s turning tradition and the traditional vision of the month upside down. Eliot had read the Caterbury Tales by Chaucer: in his prologue Chaucer had said that April was the sweetest month. Eliot goes back to him because Chaucer is considered the poet’s poet: he was the first one to use English in literature in the European tradition. Since C. was a poet from the Medieval period, E. wants to create a parallelism with that era, because he considers that era better than his. The core meaning of April is that it brings the promise of a rebirth, that is why E. can’t call it sweet: in Europe in his period is happening the IWW, but, above the devastation of the land, he’s worried of the spiritual sloth (accidia). People in his period were suffering from sloth because they had lost their values: Darwin had said people came from a progressive law and not from God, who was considered dead by Nietzsche. They had lost all their hope: the sense of their lives couldn’t have a rebirth, so spring in April. Religious code was the most important in Medieval time: in Eliot’s era there is no promise, no hope: man is isolated, he doesn’t know what to grasp to, … God has disappeared.

April is the cruelest month because it births lilacs (lillà), flowers with the colour of the priest’s tunic he dresses on a funeral.

The land is dead, lifeless and April mixes memory and desires: E. refers to Bergson’s theory of time, using the new conventions of time. Spring rain usually feeds the land, whereas here it doesn’t help the outcome of a good harvest: the land is sterile, dead.

“Winter kept us warm” is another paradigm destruction: in winter people sit down in their houses and leave all the community outside, because outside is cold. According to Eliot, winter keeps us warm covering all the world with a snow that forgets (metaphorical use of the language: personification), that feeds a little life, a poor life, with dried tubers. Winter is told to be something warm because during it people remained into their houses and there they felt protected. The outside world is seen as menacing, threatening, as something that creates danger. Winter covers earth with a snow (the only true thing told about the season), which is forgetful, so a snow that lets out all our memories, of whom some may not be positive. Also, winter feeds our lives, which are said to be little: this underlines the precarious condition of life of people of his era: people suffered spiritually, so they don’t seem to find any realistic point of reference (Darwin, Nietzsche). In winter earth is only giving us dry tubers, so “dry” (secchi) doesn’t mean that tubers are good, but they feed people. This expression conveys a sense of sterility: land doesn’t give any product that may make people’s life going on.

Even in the scene of winter he reverses our general conception of it.

He uses language in a paradoxical way.

E. makes you think, wonder: “What can I do since life is this; what is my role; what’s the matter with this?” He generates an extended metaphor for everybody’s existence, making people search for personal sense after a quest. E. is using the conventional way of speaking in a new way: he transforms the existing tradition in something that Freud would have called “perturbing”, “perturbante”, exploiting the dramatis personae.

Then comes Summer. “Summer surprised us”: here we have an alliteration of the consonant “s”, which asks to stay in silence. Summer generates surprise because human beings are even unable to recognize seasons, because they have a bland (insulsa) life, where everything’s arid. The setting is the Starnbergersee, a lake near Munich, in Germany, where the mad king Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was a friend of Wagner, was found dead inside water and was told to be dead with a shipwreck, after a sinking. This is the first reference to what will give the name to the section of the first part of the Waste Land, which is The Burial of the Dead. His death gives the idea of a regeneration, because water is connected to the latter.

The speaking voice hasn’t realized that summer has arrived until it arrives a shower of rain. Due to this event, he and the other person who is with him have to stop and take shelter under a porch (portico). Afterwards, the two characters “went on in sunlight”: suddenly after the rain, comes the sun and they go into a common park in Munich, the Hofgarten. Later on that they have coffee and talk for an hour.

Why did Eliot choose such places? Eliot used a kind of poetry considered innovative, created with a specific structure, with the juxtaposition of scenes that have no apparent correlation, coherence, but together they can make sense for themes, due to the use of myth, correlated with a technique that he had learned from the dramatic monologue of the Victorian age.

Eliot is using the “objective correlative”, something that creates a relation. Eliot uses objects that allow the intelligent reader to make a correlation between them and sterility. Indeed, his text is based on the opposition sterility-fertility. The first passage is the icon of the modern world, so everything refer to sterility: people seem to live a life-in-death, because all that had nourished them until that period now had become dead: the world is imbued with spiritual sloth. People desire the land to be productive, because only in this way they can nourish themselves and survive.

The objective correlative is a technique through which poets use specific objects in order to create a relation between them to say something else. In this case, they convey the idea of sterility and, as a result, people look for fertility, something productive. All such language choices contribute to convey the idea of a waste land, symbol of man life: men don’t have desires since their values have been erased.

Eliot talks first about spring and then about winter, and then about summer: seasons are not set in their general order.

Eliot wrote some verses exploiting the season cycle and, in reverse, Chaucer’s verses.

Having become aware that his world is already lacking of spiritual values that give sense to men lives, he wants to understand if there is a possibility of savage for the human kind. Consequently, he studies anthropology and primitive cultures, and he’s able to understand that if people needed something in primitive times, they used vegetation rites to obtain that thing/those things.

When Tigri, Eufrate of Nilo went over their river banks, they left on the land a substance called “limo”, which fertilized the land. Consequently, water has always been connected to fertility, and in the land described in this poem there isn’t: everything is arid.

In vegetation rites there were also stories that were told for ignorant people, that didn’t know the alphabet. These stories had a symbolical meaning and one of them is the legend of the drowned fisherman king, which is revisit by Eliot.

In any section of his poem Eliot uses references to the western culture.

Rites and myths makes us understand that one of the legends that have got a lot of influence on this world in Medieval times is the one of the Sacred Grail, which is the chalice that contained Jesus Christ’s blood, flowed from a wound on his hip (fianco), caused by a soldier. This legend deals with human beings that, as pilgrims, decide to climb a completely arid territory, signed by creeps, in ascent, to reach a chapel (a part of any church), where there is the Grail. They pass through this land with a lot of pain and without water, that they desire above all, asking for it, but it is a symbol of fertility (indeed, for example, to purify a children during baptism, water passes above his head), that consequently can’t be reached.

The objective correlatives of this poem are sterility and fertility, symbolized by rock and water.

Once and again, the objective correlative is a literary form that consists in, throughout the poem, making reference to different objects and situations, putting them in relation, to make the reader feel an emotion: it is considered by Eliot “the only way of expressing an emotion”.

With the description of “Unreal City”,Eliot is justapposing a further scene: now it seems there is a shift: it is 9 am, moment when commuters (i pendolari) are going to work. The setting is London and precisely the district of Westminster, where all the main businesses go on day by day. The commuters are disgorged (vomitati) by the tube, the underground, and, while they are going out, they see that the city looks unreal, which means that something that hasn’t got real features. How does Eliot convey the idea of this city? It looks unreal from a denotative point of view because the scene is set at dawn (alba) and it is foggy: the weather conditions make the place unreal, because fog doesn’t permit to see things properly. Fog, besides being a natural element, prevents people to see properly, so fog may also mean a situation of confusion, so the setting may have a metaphorical meaning. Moreover, the crowd makes anybody similar: exactly how in Coketown, people is difficult to distinguish as individuals. They look like a spot with undistinguished identities: they are so many that the poet uses the term “flow”, usually used for rivers, instead of “walk” (they are walking). He exploits a quotation of Dante (who lived in a period when culture still had some values, mostly religious ones) to show how people who goes to work are a generation without values, so they are damned like the souls Acheronte takes to Hell (the only difference between the two groups of people, human being completely lacking of values, are their destinations: work and Hell). The poet thinks that people who go to work are living a “life of death”: thus he calls them dead people. He uses a verb like “exhaling” because life seems an existence in point of dead.

People presented by Eliot are walking down King William Street, watching their shoes, and they pass a street near the London Bridge, where there is a Church, where bells are tolling (it’s 9 am), but they are finishing to toll.

9 am was the time when the clerks, going to work into the city, started their timetable, and at 9 am Jesus Christ died.

The writer Lawrence will call anyone who’s going to work “the ignoble procession”, because anyone in this situation has a bad mood.

The poet seems to recognize someone among the crowd and goes to him, saying they were together during the battle of Mylae (battaglia di Milazzo), which is impossible, because that battle was from 260 b.C. It was a battle between Romans and Chartaginans, fought during the first Punic War. This is a paradoxical reference, since we are in 1920. Through it, Eliot wants to say that man doesn’t change: he’s always the same. In the poem temporal levels completely out of sync converge in an unique interaction perspective (because, as Robyn said, any text is made considering other texts, so any text is written by more writers), marked by the basic scheme of the transfer of the fertility rites in the legend of the Grail and in  the Contemporary Age. This is a revitalization typical of the mythical method, that shows that there is a continuity in human existence, that goes beyond chronological references.

In the last part of the extract Eliot makes references, with a process of transcodification, to “The white Devil”, a tragedy written by Webster during 17th century. It is a funeral canto where Ophelia cries on the body of her dead son and says this verse: “But keep the wolf far, who is enemy of man, who would dig the corpse out”.

He also quotates Baudelaire with his French words because he wants to express that he’s a poet describing people with a lot of unexpressed desires (es: Alfonso Nitti, Italo Svevo).

 

Eliot’s literature is cosmopolite, reason why he uses also German and French.

 

The fundamental question Eliot imposes with his poem is: can we rise?