The Waste Land

The Waste Land

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Second Entry

After looking over my last entry, I have decided that it would be easier to tackle this monster by not going line-by-line and examining it that way. Most of what I will do in this post is look at particular sections and not the lines themselves, and by doing this I will hopefully get a better glimpse at the bigger meaning rather than probe smaller pieces of the picture. This is what we did in class, and this is (hopefully) how Eliot would have wanted the readers to take his poem, that is, if he really meant for anybody to understand it at all.


Reading through the next paragraph in the first section (or at least the first couple of lines), obvious allusions to the Bible are made in lines 19-30, and the footnotes confirm this, citing the books of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. What the footnotes do not indicate, however, is if this particular paragraph is an allusion to a more specific part of the Bible, say, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, something that I am gathering from my readings. The first clue to this starts at the most obvious reference to Jesus, the “Son of Man.” The next one (“And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,”) is a likely reference to the Cross and the Crucifixion, seeing that the “dead tree” is the Cross of stripped limbs with no branches for shade. The initial descriptions of a “stony rubbish” are also indicative of Jesus’ death, painting an accurate description of what many believe Golgotha (the site of the crucifixion) was like. We could even explore the landscape of what historians believe to be Golgotha and see that rubble and stone dominate the surface, certainly a site where “dry stone” exists. The last part of the paragraph is unclear to me (although the book’s footnotes indicate a quote from “The Death of St. Narcissus”) but could be loosely interpreted as Jesus’ resurrection. The only clear lines to show this would be about finding shade in the “red rock” since Jesus was inserted into a tomb cut into the side of a hill and sealed by a rolling rock.

Beginning with a German quote from the famous opera Tristan und Isolde, the next theme of the poem is about love, or so we can assume knowing the theme of the opera, running from lines 31-42. The speaker goes into a spiel about hyacinths, a flower named by the Greeks in reference to a story in which Apollo kills his lover, who is a young man. It is not made clear to the reader who the speaker is referring to, but if Eliot was a complete stickler for mythological analogies (and you bet he was!), then this could have been about a homosexual relationship. Even though the speaker would, hypothetically, take on a feminine role (e.g. “They called me the hyacinth girl.”), the assumption is plausible. Of course, with T.S. Eliot, any assumption is possible since nobody can understand his poetry. With the end of the paragraph being another German quote, the inference suggests that the speaker is still waiting to hear about this love, much like Tristan does with Isolde.

Speaking of Eliot’s unintelligible poetry, the next paragraph, the one about Madame Sosostris and Tarot, is unclear and almost placed haphazardly. If I knew anything about Tarot cards (which I can guarantee you that I do not), then I would take this space to try to decipher the meaning of the particular cards, like the drowned Phoenician Sailor and Belladonna; but, alas, I cannot. The only thing I can get out of this passage is that Eliot does have a bit of humor and pokes some fun at “dear Mrs. Equitone”. One certainly MUST be careful these days...

The last paragraph of Section I is a portrait of the London Bridge on a typical work day. Eliot describes the crowd as a sort of colorless mob, people that are both to blame and yet not to blame, something that is described with his quote from Dante’s Inferno. The passage goes on to describe the scene more, using King William Street and Saint Mary Woolnoth, and also engages in a bit of dialogue with a man who was apparently alive in 206 B.C. This is hazy, but I will say that “You! — hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frere!” is a very cool quote.


More fun to come later.

First Post

As a staple of modern poetry, The Waste Land is widely considered “one of the most important poems of the 20th Century”, or at least to Alan Bennett of The Guardian and not the half-dozen poetry majors around campus whose impromptu reviews of the piece were virulent at the mildest. Yes, T.S. Eliot seems to have carved his face into the tablets of Modern Poetry with a poem that evokes only the strongest emotions in readers; a dichotomous split of love and hate that is found all too often in the classics (e.g. Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, “Stairway to Heaven”, etc.). This being said, how can such an important poem be hated by so many? The answer is the individualized reader response, something that I, myself, will examine in my own reading of the book and report back to you in this blog. Together we will show Eliot who is boss; together we will conquer The Waste Land! Haha!

So, do you remember that geek in high school with the bad acne, Haletosis, and horn-rimmed glasses that everybody hated because he could speak Russian fluently and took every opportunity to do it? Well, T.S. Eliot seems to be that kid. Except that instead of Russian it’s Greek, Latin, Italian, and German. And without the bad breath. Some scholars today scorn Eliot’s particular style as elitist and exclusive to the academic world, something that should not have any place in a craft devoted to the common people. This view is validated, and the reader picks up on this before the poem even starts. On the dedication page, an incomprehensible epigram written in Latin and Greek is shown at the top of the page with an Italian phrase posted below the only readable sentence on the page: “For Ezra Pound”. Normal circumstances would require the reader to grab a computer or an Italian to decipher such madness, but since the book has included the translations in the subtext, we are fortunate enough to have access to all of the information we so desperately need without having to lift our grubby little fingers off of the book. Assuming most readers qualify for “normal circumstances”, seeing this early display of linguistics could confuse or even push away readers who do not understand the text, regardless of the good visual property of having two languages printed close to each other. This, at first, threw me off guard, but seeing that these sentences actually had some significance revived my hopes that Eliot was not such an exclusive guy. I will give him the benefit of a doubt for this since Sibyl was an interesting character and since Italian “sounds totally badass” (according to my roommate, Ryan).
Reading the first couple of lines, I have easily picked up on the irony of April being cruel and Winter being warm, something that was quite pleasing after the intellectual shalacking Eliot dished in the dedication. I have also noticed the brevity of these first seven lines and the repetition of verbs in the present participle (“mixing”, “stirring”, “covering”, “feeding”). Particular emphasis is being put on these words to accentuate images of memory and roots, or so we can only infer. In the middle of this, the author actually introduces himself using a first person pronoun, but in the plural sense (“Winter kept us warm...”). Who is “us”? Moving through the next couple of lines about “Starnbergersee” and “Hofgarten”, we then come to a simple line written in German that starts the unquoted dialogue between a presumably Lithuanian woman (who is actually a “true German”). This transition is interesting since it introduces a new character to the text, even if you have to read the paragraph three times to realize that the speaker did not stay at the archduke’s as a child and did not have a cousin that uttered, “Marie, Maire, hold on tight.”


Seeing the length of this, I will stop here and let all of this sink in. The next post will cover the rest of the first section of The Waste Land.

Preliminary Report

Hello, everybody (but mostly Professor Hollingsworth)!

First, I want to apologize for formatting this blog so late in the game. We started reading The Waste Land at least a week and a half ago, and as you can see, I've just now made this blog. If it is any consolation, all of my postings are first written on my MacBook, edited for spelling and such, and then saved for this very blog. The bad part about this is that the first couple of postings will come very quickly within a short amount of time and then, after that, the postings will be sporadic and possibly variant in lengths, which should not be too much of a problem. Hopefully you will find it in your heart to forgive me. Or not...

Second, just sound off in the comment section if you have anything to say, or don't and just yell at your computer screen. Works for me either way.

Hope you enjoy the blog!

-Taylor