TS Eliot peppers "The Wasteland", his apocalyptic poem, with images of modern aridity and inarticularity which contrast with fertile allusions past. Eliot's language details a fragile time, rife with physical and sexual wars, spiritually broken, culturally in decline, dry and dusty. His references to the Fisher King and the mythical rituals of vegetation imply that the 20th century world needs a Quester to irrigate the earth. “The Wasteland” refuses to offer a simple solution; the properties of language serve to create an ambiguous narrative and conclusion, as confusing and fragmented as Eliot's time itself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay. Eliot wastes no time drawing out the first irony in the poem. In the opening lines of “The Burial of the Dead,” the speaker comments on the crucifixion of Jesus and Chaucer while using brutal sounds to recount his spiritual coldness in a warm environment. In "The General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer poetically writes "When this month of April with its soot shows/The drought of March pierced to the root,/And bathed every vein in swich liquor, / Whose virtue begets the flower” (Norton Anthology to English Literature, sixth edition, vol. 1, p.81). For the speaker of “The Wasteland,” “April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilac rising from the dead earth, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain” (Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition, p.1236, lines 1 to 4). The hard “c”s and muffled “d”s demonstrate the speaker’s disenchantment with a world full of paradoxes and dichotomies. The "mixture" of "Memory and desire" only harms it, like all verbs, which Eliot places at the end of their lines to intensify their importance and action in an otherwise dead country. The speaker continues his diatribes against the world and shows a personality at odds with normal conceptions of happiness. “Winter kept us warm,” he says, as the delayed alliteration forms an unlikely pairing (5). The speaker goes back in time, and possibly changes her identity, by remembering her childhood. Nostalgia is an essential component of “The Wasteland”; here he recounts a young girl's escape techniques of reading in the mountains and flying "south for the winter" like a bird, while later Eliot imposes literary and historical significance on the allusions of the poem (18). At the center of these allusions are images of the death of spirituality. In the second stanza, Eliot takes up a new motif, that of stones and broken idols. He wonders what has become of his landscape: "What are the roots that cling, what branches grow/ From this stony rubble? Son of man,/ You cannot say, nor guess, because you only know / A heap of broken images” (19-23). The roots, once dull, now cling in a sexually perverse image and originate from a "stony detritus" which will later be repeated as a figure of drought. The “Son of Man,” noted by Eliot as Ezekiel, lives in a pagan age of “broken images” and resembles modern man in “only knowing” such a corrupt age. Eliot develops the metaphor of the stone as an object "without the sound of water." Only/ There is shadow under this red rock” (24-5). He again places "only" at the end of a line to draw the reader's attention to it, forcing his audience to consider their relationship to the character in the poem. In fact, the speakerthen addresses: "(Enter under the shadow of this red rock),/And I will show you something different whether/Your morning shadow walking behind you/Or your evening shadow rising to meet you" (26 -9). In “The Hollow Men,” another meditation on broken spirituality, several stanzas use the word “between” to reflect the paralyzed state of its travelers between life and death: “Between conception/And creation/Between the emotion/ And the response/ Falls the Shadow” (“The Hollow Men,” V.). Using this as a point of reference, the following line from “The Wasteland” explicitly suggests the inevitability of death: “ I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (30). This imminent death is ironically compared to Wagner's romantic opera, "Tristan and Isolde", and further distances the speaker from any emotional attachment. Wagner's sea shanty shows the domination of love over distance "The wind blows fresh/towards the house" and even if the "hyacinth girl", object of love in the form of a plant ritual, has "full arms and wet hair", the speaker admits: "I don't could not / Speak, and my eyes gave way, I was neither / Alive nor dead, and I knew nothing” (footnote 8, 38-40 The Fertility and Wetness of the Maiden). fail on the nihilistic speaker who finds himself straddling life and death, who has difficulty seeing and communicating. The theme of sight and communication continues in the next stanza with Madame Sosostris, a “famous clairvoyant. » (43). “Sosostris” itself is a word; the two occurrences of “bone” in its name suggest the Latin word for “mouth”. She commands her audience to regain their sight: “(Her eyes were pearls. Look!”) (48). One of his cards is a “one-eyed merchant” who “carries [something] on his back that he is “forbidden to see” (53-4). This lack of depth perception, in both the one-eyed man and her, leads him to issue the ironic command “Fear death by water” (55). Yet is it ironic that we should fear a death that seems to flood the parched landscape, or has even the Holy Grail the speaker seeks, water, failed him? Sosostris ends with a vision of “crowds of people walking in circles” (56). This ritual, devoid of any movement or meaning and similar to the children's recitation and circling of the prickly pear in "The Hollow Men", favors the latter, so that even a Fisher King or another Quester is unable to help the earth. Eliot shifts to less abstract terms when he describes London, the “Unreal City/Beneath the brown mist of a winter dawn” as a land of the living dead. Once again using irony to magnify the sterility of the earth, Eliot describes the crowds that “thronged London Bridge, so numerous/ I had not thought that death had destroyed so many./ Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled” (62-4). . These panting lives of exhalations only become the object of the speaker's sarcastic anger: "'Stetson!/ You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!/ This corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it started to germinate? it is flowering this year/ Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? (69-73). “Stetson,” by association of his name and the capitalist battle of Mylae, connects modern commercialism with the death of rituals, in this case that of a corpse instead of vegetation. Jesse Weston, in "The Golden Bough", states that broken lands requiring a quest fall into two categories: those where infertility is a prerequisite for the quest, and those where it is caused by the incapacity of a hero to answer the call. So far, Eliot has refrained from pointing to man as the root of the wasteland problem, butin his description of bland London, he seems to blame man's own value system for the death of the landscape. of communication. In “A Game of Chess,” a queen-like woman sits in furniture that matches her magnificent but empty existence: “The chair she sat on, like a burnished throne,/gleamed on the marble, there where the glass/doubled the flames/Reflecting the light on the table while/The shine of her jewels rose to meet her” (77-8, 82-4). The rich, seductive prose that lavishes words like “burnished,” “bright,” and “glistening” over the woman’s possessions implies that its value is as false as her “strange synthetic perfumes,/Ointment, powder, or troubled, confused liquid / And drowned out the sensation of smells; agitated by the air” (87-89). The endings "ed" or "id", as in "powdered", "troubled" and "drowned", evoke a passivity, as if the world were inflicting turmoil and confusion on the woman. In this environment, the “smells” now resemble the landscape of the first stanza because they too are stirred from outside (just like the smoke from the candles, “Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling”) (93). A conversation between the wife and her husband unfolds: "'My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me./Talk to me. Why don't you ever talk. Talk./What are you thinking about? what are you thinking? What?/I never know what you're thinking'" (111-4). The flat, short sentences that hold even the slightest emotion in their questions and statements openly move the poem towards the theme of gender inarticulacy. A nihilistic component emerges from their abysmal comments: “'You don't know anything? Don't you see anything? Do you remember/Nothing?' » (121-2) The separation of "Nothing" is no accident, and allows Eliot to put an end to his aristocratic duelists and explore an example of desperate communication in the working class. Eliot uses colloquial slang to recount a one-sided conversation in a pub. This lively scene seems at first glance to be a reminder of how humans can communicate, and Eliot leads the reader to this suspicion by using the word "said" twice in the first two lines: "When Lil's husband was demobilized, I said/I didn't say. I don’t mince my words, I told him myself” (139-40). She is interrupted intermittently by the bartender, whose call to "HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT'S TIME" carries ominous implications of death and comes at quicker intervals. The woman speaks of an abortion, and the infertility of humanity which dominates her need to avoid loneliness is summed up in her question "Why get married if you don't want children?" (164) This solitude returns Eliot to the dark landscape of “The Fire Sermon.” Personification facilitates comparisons between human and environmental death: "the last fingers of the leaf / clutch and sink into the damp bank" (173-4). The Fisher King makes his appearance here, but in the midst of a corrupt ritual: "A rat crept gently through the vegetation/Trailing its slimy belly along the bank/While I fished in the dull canal" (187-9). The snake-like rat recalls the Edenic fall of man, another example of man bringing this “dull” scourge upon himself. Other accusations are made against man due to his robotic nature: “the human engine waits/like a taxi waiting thrilling” (216-7). Tiresias, explained by Eliot as the union of the two sexes, is called back again to witness the sexually grotesque encounter between a man and a woman. Man's ties to a conqueror or colonizer are demonstrated when he "attacks him immediately;/Exploring hands meet no defense" (239-40). Following this., 1996.