Poem: “The Waste Land” by T.S Eliot
Text 1
Origin: 20th century, T.S Eliot
Text Type: Poem
Intended audience: Those concerned with the Environment and those who enjoy T.S Eliot’s poetry.
The Waste Land, written by T. S Eliot, is broken up into 5 sections; The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, and What Thunder Said. The poem in a nutshell, is trying to illustrate the decline of Western Culture and the beauty that this culture once possessed.
The Burial of the Dead begins with memories of bygone days and unfulfilled desires — memories of a gloomy spring. The poem illustrates memories of childhood sled rides, and to a possible romance with a ‘hyacinth girl’. However, the memories only go so far, as the narrator later finds himself surrounded by a desolate land full of ‘stony rubbish’ and a land that no longer results in growth. Moreover, in the first section of his poem “The Waste Land”, Eliot uses vivid dark imagery to establish the depressing tone of his poem. The opening two stanzas of this section describe the ultimate “Waste Land” as Eliot sees it. The wasteland is cold, dry, and barren, covered in garbage. Even the river, normally a symbol of renewal, has been reduced to a “dull canal.” The poem begins by saying that “April is the cruelest month” (line 1) because it “breeds lilacs out of dead land” (line 2) and “stirs dull roots with spring rain” (line 3). Here, Elliot has taken images that are usually associated with beauty and life, such as the blossoming of flowers or spring rain, and instead associated them with darkness and death. In the next stanza, Eliot goes on to describe a dystopian environment where roots and branches cannot grow, the trees are dead and there is no water flowing in the streams.
These images portray death. There is no life in this environment and the reader can sense the dark tone of the speaker. In the next stanza the speaker is visiting a fortune teller. Keeping with the rest of the poem’s tone, the tarot cards the speaker draws, such as the “drowned Phoenician Sailor” or the “one-eyed merchant” are all negative cards, predicting trouble ahead. The last stanza speaks of a city that appears to be for those that have died. This is evident through the lines “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many”. Through Eliot’s dark images, mostly centered around death, he’s establishing a lack of a concern we humans have about our planet, as well as the unfortunate irony of our planet being destroyed by its human counterparts.
