"Nunca" es la palabra que Dios escucha cuando necesita reír con ganas...

A HEAP OF LONDONER IMAGES:


MODERN SOCIETY IN THE WASTE LAND

Thomas Stern Eliot’s (1888-1965) major work is his poem “The Waste Land”, in which he concentrates his poetic style as well as his moral ideas. In this poem, we see his strong influences from culture, politics and religion; all these aspects are presented by an aesthetical use of the language.
Much has been discussed if the author wrote this magnificent poem as a protest against modern society in which he seeks for a remedy, or if he just wrote the poem in a pessimistic way. According to what Eliot himself declared some years before the publishing of “The Waste Land” (1922) in a volume of criticism named “The Sacred Wood” (1920), specifically in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in which he says that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality”[1], I am inclined to think that certainly the author was not in pursuit of a remedy but that he wrote it as a mere act of escape, an act of selfishness we could say. However, this does not make of it a less valuable work; not at all. Mainly because I do not think that the value of the poem lays in that characteristic.

"The Waste Land" is said to be the best poem of the twentieth century as well as the most complex because of the use of different languages and the constant use of sonorous and semantic resources. The reason why Eliot wrote such a difficult poem may has its basis on what he declared in an essay published in the previous year of the publishing of “The Waste Land”; the essay entitled “The Metaphysical Poets”:

“poets in our civilisations, as it exist at present, must be difficult.
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,
and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”[2]

These aspects that make of it a difficult poem are presented even before the poem begins properly, because the author made use of an epigraph written in Latin and Greek:

“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
In ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent eibulla
ti qeleiz ; respondebat illa: apoqanein qelw.”[3]

And go on through the entire poem in different languages: German, Italian (in a dedication to Ezra Pound)[4] and French.
The basic idea of the poem is the self-destruction that, according with Eliot, the modern society in London suffers as the result of its acts; certainly he focuses on London, but that idea could be applied to every society. This vision is shown from the very beginning with the epigraph I mentioned before, in which he perceives himself as a man that is able to see all this destruction of the modern world (we should remember that the poem was written in the post- Great War years[5]), and knowing that there is not much to do, becomes immersed in a state of pessimism.
The first part, "The Burial of the Death", starts with a paradox created by the author. Although we usually considered April as the month of life because is in that month when spring arrives “bringing life” again after a cold and sad winter, Eliot tell us that this month is the entire contrary: a month of death, of destruction and desolation:

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”[6]

And indeed, he gives us a landscape of destruction, of desolation; a waste land in which life barely exists, and certainly, in which there is no place for health, peace or joy, only for death and fear. It is a place which the author invites to stare at:

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”[7]

This is the Eliot’s idea of London, a place of fear; fear for a human condition: mortality. We should remember that almost three quarters of English men died during the World War I; and the war itself had not been forget, in the complete city there were monuments dedicated to the soldiers that died; for example, in Westminster Abbey there was a tomb of a soldier; there was a decreased of births, etc. In general, those years were an era of death. Those effects of the World War I are also shown in the following stanza: “…There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!/ ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!”[8]. Mylae was the named of the battle between Roma and Cartage; in that case, Mylae could be a symbol of the World War I, the war of which Eliot was a witness.
At the end of the Burial of the Death, Eliot compares his Londoner readers as his partners in this desolated city from they cannot escape and of an uncertain future by these verses: “ ‘You! Hypocrite lecturer!- mon semblable, - mon frère!’”[9]
Londoner society as is perceived by the author has not only fear of human condition of mortality, but also it has a lack of proper love. To the eyes of Eliot, modern society cares more about lust and the self, than about the others. This behaviour is attacked by Eliot because it goes against the laws of Christianity and, as we know, Eliot was a deep believer of God. In fact, he defined his point of view as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion”[10]. This idea of lack of love is shown almost at the end of "A Game of Chess", in a talk between a rich woman and a unknown listener:

“If Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be aschames, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one)
I can’t help it, she saidm pulling a long fave,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.”[11]

This lust for sex, goes against the nature of this act which, according to Christianity, is only allowed if it is made with the final aim of procreation. But the importance of this stanza not only lays on that fact, but also because this has repercussions on decrease of birth rate in London:

“You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t eat children?”[12]

All though there are many voices in the poem, it cannot be said that those voices exist as characters. The only one that could be consider as a real one is Tiresias, that personage that Eliot took from Greek mythology and that was said to had been woman and man. In it, we can see a reflection of the author; he probably uses this character as a representation of himself in the poem, because Tiresias is the man that can see the future (the present, in the case of Eliot), but that can do nothing, he only can be a spectator of his magnificent Greece as well as Eliot is of his London:

“I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest…”[13]

In the very last part of "The Waste Land", "What the Thunder Said", Eliot reinforces what he said in the first part of the poem. He describes again a landscape of desolation; or in London case, a landscape of war: desert, without life, sterile. But this time, he goes further, and confesses that he would like that this city were full of life, a better city for Londoners :

“Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountain
Which are mountains of rock without water...
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only…”[14]

However, he knows that it is not possible, that it is not the reality of his society and he comes back to his former pessimism, for him, there is no real hope in contemporary society, people are just killing themselves and they do not dare to realise of that.; that is why he dares to compare London with some famous cities that were destroyed: Athens, Alexandria, Jerusalem, etc.:

“He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patiente…
Here one can neither stand nor lie or sit
There is not even silence in the mountains…
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violent air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal.”[15]

T. S. Eliot, despite his eccentric moral ideas, did make of this poem an excellent portrait of the Londoner society at his times. As a poet, he was able to realise what was happening in the city after the war years, and mainly, about the nature of the human beings. For this purpose, he made and excellent description of the human psyche (he, as a poet of the first years of the twentieth century as one of the first men in using what the new psychology established). And more than that, he achieved to do this in a beautiful poetic form; using his knowledge about classic literature (he was deep influenced by Dante and his Comedy), different languages and, of course, playing with a constant use of semantic and sonorous resources.






[1] World Poets. Volume I. new York: Scribner, 2000. p. 348
[2] World Poets. Volume I. New York: Scribner, 2000. . p. 349
[3] “For once I saw with my own eyes the Sybil at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys asked her, `Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered, ‘I want to die.’ ”
[4] Another auto-exiled poet. Contemporary and friend of T. S. Eliot.
[5] At that time, World War I was known as Great War, obviously, because World War II had not have place yet.
[6] The Oxford Anthology of English Literature Vol. II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. p. 1984
[7] Ibid., p. 1984
[8] Ibid., p. 1985
[9] Ibid., p. 1986
[10] World Poets. Volume I. new York: Scribner, 2000. p. 345
[11] The Oxoford Anthology of English Literature Vol II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. p., 1989
[12] Ibid., p. 1989
[13] Ibid., p.
[14] Ibid., p., 1995
[15] Ibid., p. 1996

BIBLIOGRAPHY ·

The Oxford Anthology of English Literature Vol. II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.·

World Poets. Vol. I. New York: Scribner, 2000·

Critics on T. S. Eliot. Ed. Sheila Sullivan. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1973.

Here's my "essay" on Eliot's poem...Any comment?

(I'm pretty upset because it got an eight!)