T.S. ELIOT – THE WASTE LAND Short Summary

T.S. ELIOT –
 THE WASTE LAND Short Summary
The poem begins with a section entitled .......

"The Burial of the Dead." In it, the narrator -- perhaps a representation of Eliot himself -- describes the seasons. Spring brings "memory and desire," and so the narrator's memory drifts back to times in Munich, to childhood sled rides, and to a possible romance with a "hyacinth girl." The memories only go so far, however. The narrator is now surrounded by a desolate land full of "stony rubbish." He remembers a fortune-teller named Madame Sosostris who said he was "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" and that he should "fear death by water." Next he finds himself on London Bridge, surrounded by a crowd of people. He spots a friend of his from wartime, and calls out to him.

  • The next section, "A Game of Chess," transports the reader abruptly from the streets of London to a gilded drawing room, in which sits a rich, jewel-bedecked lady who complains about her nerves and wonders what to do. The poem drifts again, this time to a pub at closing time in which two Cockney women gossip. Within a few stanzas, we have moved from the upper crust of society to London's low- life. 
  • "The Fire Sermon" opens with an image of a river. The narrator sits on the banks and muses on the deplorable state of the world. As Tiresias, he sees a young "carbuncular" man hop into bed with a lonely female typist, only to aggressively make love to her and then leave without hesitation. The poem returns to the river, where maidens sing a song of lament, one of them crying over her loss of innocence to a similarly lustful man. "Death by Water," the fourth section of the poem, describes a dead Phoenician lying in the water -- perhaps the same drowned sailor of whom Madame Sosostris spoke. "What the Thunder Said" shifts locales from the sea to rocks and mountains. The narrator cries for rain, and it finally comes. The thunder that accompanies it ushers in the three-pronged dictum sprung from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata": to give, to sympathize, to control. With these commandments, benediction is possible, despite the collapse of civilization that is under way -- "London bridge is falling down falling down falling down." About The Waste Land "The Waste Land" caused a sensation when it was published in 1922. It is today the most widely translated and studied English-language poem of the twentieth century. This is perhaps surprising given the poem's length and its difficulty, but Eliot's vision of modern life as plagued by sordid impulses, widespread apathy, and pervasive soullessness packed a punch when readers first encountered it. Of course, "The Waste Land" is not quite the poem Eliot originally drafted. Eliot's close friend and colleague, Ezra Pound, significantly revised the poem, suggesting major cuts and compressions. Thanks to Pound's heavy editing, as well as suggestions (specifically about scenes relevant to their stormy, hostile marriage) from Haigh-Wood, "The Waste Land" defined Modernist poetry and became possibly the most influential poem of the century. Devoid of a single speaker's voice, the poem ceaselessly shifts its tone and form, instead grafting together numerous allusive voices from Eliot's substantial poetic repertoire; Dante shares the stage with nonsense sounds (a technique that also showcases Eliot's dry wit). Believing this style best represented the fragmentation of the modern world, Eliot focused on the sterility of modern culture and its lack of tradition and ritual. Despite this pessimistic viewpoint, many find its mythical, religious ending hopeful about humanity's chance for renewal. Pound's influence on the final version of "The Waste Land" is significant. At the time of the poem's composition, Eliot was ill, struggling to recover from his nervous breakdown and languishing through an unhappy marriage. Pound offered him support and friendship; his belief in and admiration for Eliot were enormous. In turn, however, he radically trimmed Eliot's long first draft (nineteen pages, by some accounts), bringing the poem closer to its current version. This is not to say Eliot would not have revised 


the poem on his own in similar ways; rather, the two men seemed to have genuinely collaborated on molding what was already a loose and at times free-flowing work. Pound, like Eliot a crucible of modernism, called for compression, ellipsis, reduction.
The poem grew yet more cryptic; references that were previously clear now became more obscure. Explanations were out the window. The result was a more difficult work -- but arguably a richer one.Eliot did not take all of Pound's notes, but he did follow his friend's advice enough to turn his sprawling work into a tight, elliptical, and fragmented piece.

 Once the poem was completed, Pound lobbied on its behalf, convincing others of its importance. He believed in Eliot's genius, and in the impact "The Waste Land" would have on the literature of its day. That impact ultimately stretched beyond poetry, to novels, painting, music, and all the other arts. John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer owes a significant debt to "The Waste Land," for example. Eliot's take on the modern world profoundly shaped future schools of thought and literature, and his 1922 poem remains a touchstone of the English-language canon.

Character List

The Narrator
The most difficult to describe of the poem's characters, he assumes many different shapes and guises. At times the Narrator seems to be Eliot himself; at other times he stands in for all humanity. In "The Fire
Sermon" he is at one point the Fisher King of the Grail legend, at another the blind prophet Tiresias. 

When he seems to reflect Eliot, the extent to which his ruminations are autobiographical is ambiguous. 

Madame Sosostris
A famous clairvoyant referred to in Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow and borrowed by Eliot for the
Tarot card episode. She suffers from a bad cold, but is nonetheless "known to be the wisest woman in
Europe, / With a wicked pack of cards."
Stetson
A friend of the Narrator's, who fought in the war with him. Which war? It is unclear. Perhaps the Punic
War or World War I, or both, or neither.
The Rich Lady
Never referred to by name, she sits in the resplendent drawing room of "A Game of Chess." She seems
to be surrounded by luxury, but unable to appreciate or enjoy it. She might allude to Eliot's wife
Vivienne. 

Philomela
A character from Ovid's Metamorphoses. She was raped by Tereus, then, after taking her vengeance
with her sister, morphed into a nightingale.

A Typist
Lonely, a creature of the modern world. She is visited by a "young man carbuncular," who sleeps with
her. She is left alone again, accompanied by just her mirror and a gramophone. 

Mr. Eugenides

A merchant from Smyrna (now Izmir, in Turkey). Probably the one-eyed merchant to whom Madame Sosostris refers. 

Phlebas
A Phoenician merchant who is described lying dead in the water in "Death by Water." Perhaps the same
drowned Phoenician sailor to whom Madame Sosostris refers.


Major Themes

Death
Two of the poem‟s sections -- “The Burial of the Dead” and “Death by Water” --refer specifically to this
theme. What complicates matters is that death can mean life; in other words, by dying, a being can pave
the way for new lives. Eliot asks his friend Stetson: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, /
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” Similarly, Christ, by “dying,” redeemed humanity and
thereby gave new life. The ambiguous passage between life and death finds an echo in the frequent
allusions to Dante, particularly in the Limbo-like vision of the men flowing across London Bridge and
through the modern city. 

Rebirth
The Christ images in the poem, along with the many other religious metaphors, posit rebirth and resurrection as central themes. The Waste Land lies fallow and the Fisher King is impotent; what is needed is a new beginning. Water, for one, can bring about that rebirth, but it can also destroy.
                  What the poet must finally turn to is Heaven, in the climactic exchange with the skies: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” Eliot‟s vision is essentially of a world that is neither dying nor living; to break the spell, a profound change, perhaps an ineffable one, is required. Hence the prevalence of Grail imagery in the poem; that holy chalice can restore life and wipe the slate clean; likewise, Eliot refers frequently to
baptisms and to rivers – both “life-givers,” in either spiritual or physical ways. 


The Seasons
"The Waste Land" opens with an invocation of April, “the cruellest month.” That spring be depicted as ruel is a curious choice on Eliot‟s part, but as a paradox it informs the rest of the poem to a great degree. What brings life brings also death; the seasons fluctuate, spinning from one state to another, but, like history, they maintain some sort of stasis; not everything changes. In the end, Eliot‟s “waste land” is
almost seasonless: devoid of rain, of propagation, of real change. The world hangs in a perpetual limbo,
awaiting the dawn of a new season. 

Lust
Perhaps the most famous episode in "The Waste Land" involves a female typist‟s liaison with a “carbuncular” man. Eliot depicts the scene as something akin to a rape. This chance sexual encounter
carries with it mythological baggage – the violated Philomela, the blind Tiresias who lived for a time as a woman. Sexuality runs through "The Waste Land," taking center stage as a cause of calamity in “The
Fire Sermon.” Nonetheless, Eliot defends “a moment‟s surrender” as a part of existence in “What the Thunder Said.” Lust may be a sin, and sex may be too easy and too rampant in Eliot‟s London, but action is still preferable to inaction. What is needed is sex that produces life, that rejuvenates, that restores – sex, in other words, that is not “sterile.” 

Love
The references to Tristan und Isolde in “The Burial of the Dead,” to Cleopatra in “A Game of Chess,”
and to the story of Tereus and Philomela suggest that love, in "The Waste Land," is often destructive.

Tristan and Cleopatra die, while Tereus rapes Philomela, and even the love for the hyacinth girl leads
the poet to see and know “nothing." 

Water
"The Waste Land" lacks water; water promises rebirth. At the same time, however, water can bring
about death. Eliot sees the card of the drowned Phoenician sailor and later titles the fourth section of his poem after Madame Sosostris‟ mandate that he fear “death by water.” When the rain finally arrives at the close of the poem, it does suggest the cleansing of sins, the washing away of misdeeds, and the start
of a new future; however, with it comes thunder, and therefore perhaps lightning. The latter may portend fire; thus, “The Fire Sermon” and “What the Thunder Said” are not so far removed in imagery, linked by
the potentially harmful forces of nature. 

History
History, Eliot suggests, is a repeating cycle. When he calls to Stetson, the Punic War stands in for World
War I; this substitution is crucial because it is shocking. At the time Eliot wrote "The Waste Land," the
First World War was definitively a first - the "Great War" for those who had witnessed it. There had
been none to compare with it in history. The predominant sensibility was one of profound change; the
world had been turned upside down and now, with the rapid progress of technology, the movements of
societies, and the radical upheavals in the arts, sciences, and philosophy, the history of mankind had
reached a turning point.
Eliot revises this thesis, arguing that the more things change the more they stay the same. He links a
sordid affair between a typist and a young man to Sophocles via the figure of Tiresias; he replaces a line
from Marvell‟s “To His Coy Mistress” with “the sound of horns and motors”; he invokes Dante upon
the modern-day London Bridge, bustling with commuter traffic; he notices the Ionian columns of a bar
on Lower Thames Street teeming with fishermen. The ancient nestles against the medieval, rubs
shoulders with the Renaissance, and crosses paths with the centuries to follow. History becomes a blur.
Eliot‟s poem is like a street in Rome or Athens; one layer of history upon another upon another.
Summary and Analysis of Section I: "The Burial of the Dead"
"The Waste Land" begins with an excerpt from Petronius Arbiter‟s Satyricon, in Latin and Greek, which
translates as: “For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys
asked her, „Sibyl, what do you want?‟ she answered, „I want to die.‟” The quotation is followed by a
dedication to Ezra Pound, Eliot‟s colleague and friend, who played a major role in shaping the final
version of the poem.
The poem proper begins with a description of the seasons. April emerges as the “cruellest” month,
passing over a desolate land to which winter is far kinder. Eliot shifts from this vague invocation of time
and nature to what seem to be more specific memories: a rain shower by the Starnbergersee; a lake
outside Munich; coffee in that city‟s Hofgarten; sledding with a cousin in the days of childhood.
The second stanza returns to the tone of the opening lines, describing a land of “stony rubbish” – arid,
sterile, devoid of life, quite simply the “waste land” of the poem‟s title. Eliot quotes Ezekiel 2.1 and
Ecclesiastes 12.5, using biblical language to construct a sort of dialogue between the narrator –- the “son
of man” -– and a higher power. The former is desperately searching for some sign of life -– “roots that
clutch,” branches that grow -- but all he can find are dry stones, dead trees, and “a heap of broken
images.” We have here a forsaken plane that offers no relief from the beating sun, and no trace of water.
Suddenly Eliot switches to German, quoting directly from Wagner‟s Tristan und Isolde. The passage
translates as: “Fresh blows the wind / To the homeland / My Irish child / Where do you wait?” In
Wagner‟s opera, Isolde, on her way to Ireland, overhears a sailor singing this song, which brings with it
ruminations of love promised and of a future of possibilities. After this digression, Eliot offers the reader
a snatch of speech, this time from the mouth of the “hyacinth girl.” This girl, perhaps one of the

narrator's (or Eliot's) early loves, alludes to a time a year ago when the narrator presented her with
hyacinths. The narrator, for his part, describes in another personal account –- distinct in tone, that is,
from the more grandiloquent descriptions of the waste land, the seasons, and intimations of spirituality
that have preceded it –- coming back late from a hyacinth garden and feeling struck by a sense of
emptiness. Looking upon the beloved girl, he “knew nothing”; that is to say, faced with love, beauty,
and “the heart of light,” he saw only “silence.” At this point, Eliot returns to Wagner, with the line
“Oed‟ und leer das Meer”: “Desolate and empty is the sea.” Also plucked from Tristan und Isolde, the
line belongs to a watchman, who tells the dying Tristan that Isolde‟s ship is nowhere to be seen on the
horizon.
From here Eliot switches abruptly to a more prosaic mode, introducing Madame Sosostris, a “famous
clairvoyante” alluded to in Aldous Huxley‟s Crome Yellow. This fortune-teller is known across Europe
for her skills with Tarot cards. The narrator remembers meeting her when she had “a bad cold.” At that
meeting she displayed to him the card of the drowned Phoenician Sailor: “Here, said she, is your card.”
Next comes “Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,” and then “the man with three staves,” “the Wheel,”
and “the one-eyed merchant.” It should be noted that only the man with three staves and the wheel are
actual Tarot cards; Belladonna is often associated with da Vinci‟s "Madonna of the Rocks," and the one-
eyed merchant is, as far as we can tell, an invention of Eliot‟s.
Finally, Sosostris encounters a blank card representing something the one-eyed merchant is carrying on
his back – something she is apparently “forbidden to see.” She is likewise unable to find the Hanged
Man among the cards she displays; from this she concludes that the narrator should “fear death by
water.” Sosostris also sees a vision of a mass of people “walking round in a ring.” Her meeting with the
narrator concludes with a hasty bit of business: she asks him to tell Mrs. Equitone, if he sees her, that
Sosostris will bring the horoscope herself.
The final stanza of this first section of "The Waste Land" begins with the image of an “Unreal City”
echoing Baudelaire‟s “fourmillante cite,” in which a crowd of people –- perhaps the same crowd
Sosostris witnessed –- flows over London Bridge while a “brown fog” hangs like a wintry cloud over
the proceedings. Eliot twice quotes Dante in describing this phantasmagoric scene: “I had not thought
death had undone so many” (from Canto 3 of the Inferno); “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled”
(from Canto 4). The first quote refers to the area just inside the Gates of Hell; the second refers to
Limbo, the first circle of Hell.
It seems that the denizens of modern London remind Eliot of those without any blame or praise who are
relegated to the Gates of Hell, and those who where never baptized and who now dwell in Limbo, in
Dante‟s famous vision. Each member of the crowd keeps his eyes on his feet; the mass of men flow up a
hill and down King William Street, in the financial district of London, winding up beside the Church of
Saint Mary Woolnoth. The narrator sees a man he recognizes named Stetson. He cries out to him, and it
appears that the two men fought together in a war. Logic would suggest World War I, but the narrator
refers to Mylae, a battle that took place during the First Punic War. He then asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted last year in his garden has begun to sprout. Finally, Eliot quotes Webster and
Baudelaire, back to back, ending the address to Stetson in French: “hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable,
– mon frère!”
Analysis
Eliot‟s opening quotation sets the tone for the poem as a whole. Sibyl is a mythological figure who
asked Apollo “for as many years of life as there are grains in a handful of sand” (North, 3).
Unfortunately, she did not think to ask for everlasting youth. As a result, she is doomed to decay for
years and years, and preserves herself within a jar. Having asked for something akin to eternal life, she
finds that what she most wants is death. Death alone offers escape; death alone promises the end, and
therefore a new beginning.
Thus does Eliot begin his magisterial poem, labeling his first section “The Burial of the Dead,” a title
pulled from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. He has been careful to lay out his central theme

If u like the post please followed the blog

No comments:

For more update click on subscribe button