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Critical Appreciation of The Wasteland

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1K views2 pages

Critical Appreciation of The Wasteland

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Ali Hamza
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Critical appreciation of “The Wasteland”

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is the most discussed poem of the 20th century. It was written post World
War I as an indictment of the spiritual and sexual sterility Western culture was experiencing. Images of
dryness and dessication run throughout, as does Eliot’s sense that Western paths to spirituality and love had lost
vitality and meaning.
Theme:
According to Day, "The Waste Land is a condemnation of the sterile futility of modern life." Its pattern is that
of death and resurrection, but it asserts that the modern period is more willing to settle for death than to seek
renewed vitality.
Underlying myth: Eliot took his central myth as well as the title of the poem from Jessie L. Weston’s From
Ritual to Romance (1920) and from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Weston sees the legend of the Holy
Grail as resting on ancient myths of the vegetation and fertility cycle. The fundamental story, as presented in
such myths as that of the Grail Knight Percival (Parsifal), concerns a Fisher King who through illness or wound
is rendered sexually impotent. The land, therefore, is blighted, an arid land sorely in need of water. The curse
may be removed, and both the king and the land restored to fertility, by a quester who endures hardships to seek
and bring back a cup and spear (or sword).
Technique: Day calls the poem a "ritual drama," employing a montage succession of images ranging through
Western art, literature, and life to illuminate the theme. This sequencing is "more effective than a logical
transition from one example of the theme to another."
Who is the protagonist?:
With fragmentary passages, literary quotations and allusions, there is an apparent lack of logical relationship
along them. The reason is that the whole poem is a stream of consciousness in verse of one personage, Tiresias.
He is the protagonist. Almost immortal, blind, bisexual he is the hidden poet, the very learned. Through
memories, meditations, literary quotations, allusions and implicit contrasts his is the view of materialistic world.
Structure of the poem: The Five sections
Part I. The Burial of the Dead: In April the vegetation God of Christianity, Jesus the Christ, is crucified, and
the postwar cafes of central Europe murmur with hopelessness, preferring the hibernation of winter to a
renewed life in the spring. Angry denunciations of the prophet are followed by taunting pictures of modern
sterility and of the oracle debased into a fortune-teller. A pedestrian on the London street is accosted with a
question about whether the buried corpse of the Vegetation God in his back yard will arise to renew the land
and the spirit.
Part II. A Game of Chess: The futility of upper class life is demonstrated by a frustrated lady, a spiritual desert
in the midst of sumptuous magnificence. The ancient and Renaissance past have become devalued and
vulgarized. Futility in the lower classes is represented by a cockney girl who sits in a London pub near closing
time, relating a sordid tale of sexual desire, abortion, and life denial. The title of this section comes from
Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton, where a game of chess is a cover for a seduction.
Part III. The Fire Sermon: Futility in the middle classes is represented by a series of fornications and perverse
materialisms. From this inferno of unholy love come warnings from St. Augustine, Zechariah, and Buddha
(whose Fire Sermon gives the section its title), calling for transcendence of the spirit over the flesh, and
heavenly love instead of carnal lust.
Part IV. Death by Water: Throughout the poem, water is a symbol of life and regeneration, but to many
modern people, the womb of life has proved a tomb.

Part V. What the Thunder Said: The betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus are the keynote for the depths of
despondency and hallucination in the parched land. The quester, his mind almost broken from pain, comes to
the Chapel Perilous, and the rains finally begin. From out of the thunder, God announces three disciplines: Datta
(give), Dayadhvam (sympathize), Damyata (control). Although the path to a new life is offered, the closing
lines recognize that the modern world is still in the waste land.

“The wasteland” as an Epic


The Waste Land is also characteristic of modernist poetry in that it contains both lyric and epic elements.
Modernism continued the tendency, begun in romanticism, to prize lyric highly, but many modernist poets also
sought to write in the traditionally highest form, epic. Eliot defined the lyric as “the voice of the poet talking to
himself, or to nobody,” and if we accept his description of The Waste Land as a “piece of rhythmical
grumbling,” it may seem to belong to the lyric tradition. Pound defined an epic as a “poem including history.”
Although much shorter than Homer’s Iliador Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, or
Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Waste Landdoes contain history—both contemporary history and the history of the
world understood in mythological terms. One of the factors that helped to create “high modernism” was the
attempt of poets, after the war, to extend the techniques of the pre-war avant-gardes to address broad, historical
questions, the sorts of questions normally addressed by epic.
Symbolism in “The Wasteland”:

Water, Symbols of Birth, Death and Resurrection


Water, a predominant symbol of birth, death and resurrection, appears throughout the poem. As in the opening,
water signifies the giver of life, a symbol of fertility. Yet it also stands for death: “Fear death by water,” or
“Those are pearls that were his eyes,” a literary allusion to a character in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" who had
been drowned so long under water that his eyes have turned into “pearls.” The symbolic meaning of water as an
emblem of death climaxes in the section “Death by Water,” which deals with a deceased Phoenician.
Drought as Symbol of Death
Although the poem deals with war's physical and emotional effects, the speaker of the poem uses drought as a
symbol of death: "Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road / There is not even
silence in the mountains / But dry sterile thunder without rain " Throughout these and others, drought is the
symbol of death. To heighten the anxiety of waiting for rain, the speaker says that even the thunder, which
indicates the possibility of rain, is “sterile,” thus killing what hope of rain there is in this stricken landscape.
Symbols of Disconnect between Human and Natural Worlds
In the section “A Game of Chess,” the speaker of the poem derides the how modern world has lost touch with
nature. The organic life-giving nature has turned into inorganic lifeless objects: “The Chair, she sat in, like a
burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble, where the glass / Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines ”
Fruited vines belong to nature, and not to an artificial object like chair, for example. The characters in the poem
have isolated themselves into an artificial world “drowned in synthetic perfumes.” Such mismatch between
what is natural and what is artificial pokes fun at the sense of personal disconnect in “The Waste Land,” one of
the poem's recurring themes.

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