Friday 10 October 2014

Show Eliot’s use of symbolism in ‘The Waste Land’.

Topic: Show Eliot’s use of symbolism in ‘The Waste Land’.

Name: Patel Kinjal

Paper Name: The Modernist Literature

Paper No: 9

Roll No: 16

STD: M.A 2

SEM: 3

Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Introduction:

T.S.Eliot (1888- 1956) was an essayist, poet, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic. He belonged to an old Yankee family. He was born in St.Louis, Missoure. Later on in 1914 at the age of 25 he left USA and since 1927 he was a British citizen. He was a modernist writer. He brought Greek Chorus in modern poetry that start with striking title-----

“Nam sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis Meis

Vidi in ampulla pendere, ET cum illi pueri dicerent:

Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat ill: apothanein thelo.”

His works:

Some of his well-known poems are:

ü The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock 1915 ( this poem is seen as his masterpiece in modern literature)

ü The Waste Land 1922

ü The Hollow Men 1925

ü Ash Wednesday 1930

ü Four quartets 1945

He also wrote plays:

Sweeney Agonistes

ü Murder in the Cathedral

ü The Rock

ü The Family Reunion

ü The confidential Clerk

ü The Elder statesman

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and Order of Merit 1948

The Waste Land:

This poem is widely regarded as “one of the most important poems of the 20^th century” and central texts in Modernist poetry. It was published in 1922. It contains 434 lines. It was first seen in the UK in the October issue of The Criterion. In the U.S. it was issued in ‘The Dial’. It contains famous phrases like

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

The Wasteland follows the legend of the ‘Holy Grail’ and ‘The Fisher King’. Many literary and cultural allusions are found in the poem. Some of the allusions of Western canon Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads are delineated. Some critics regard the poem as obscure.

“The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time and conjuring of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literature.

Structure:

The poem structure is divided into five sections. The first section the burial of the dead introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, the game of chess employs vignette of several characters alternating narration that addresses those themes experimentally. The fire sermon, the third section offers a philosophic relation to the imagery of death and use of self denial in juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of hippo and eastern religions. After fourth section that includes a brief lyrical pattern the terminating fifth section, what the thunder said concludes with an image of judgment.

Symbolism:

Symbolism is the use of symbols to signify ideas and qualities by giving them symbolic meanings that are different from their literal sense. Some time an action, an event or a word spoken by someone may have a symbolic value.

A symbol works two ways: it is something itself and it also suggests something deeper. Symbols associate two things, but their meaning is that both figurative and literal. Some symbols have widespread, commonly accepted values that should recognize. No symbols have absolute meanings and by their nature we cannot read them at face value. It is better to think what could the symbol mean or what they have meant.

Symbols in the Waste Land:

Water:

In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot`s characters wait for water to quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of stagnant water. Although water has regenerating possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drawing and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from the Waste Land. Traditionally water can be baptism, Christianity and the figure of Jesus Christ and Eliot draws these traditional meanings; water cleanses, water provide solace and water brings relief elsewhere in the Waste land and in “Little Giddings” the fourth part of four quartets. Prufrock hears the seductive calls of mermaids as he walks along the shore in “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”, but like Odysseus in Homer`s Odyssey (CA. 800 B.C.E.). He realizes that a malicious intent lies behind the sweet voices. The poem concludes- “we drown”.

Eliot thus cautions us to beware of simple solutions or cures, for what looks innocent might turn out to be very dangerous.

Water a predominant symbol of birth, death and resurrection appears through the poem as in the opening water signifies the giver of life. Yet it also stands for death. “Fear death by water”, or those are pearls that were his eyes. The symbolic meaning depends with a deceased Phoenician.

“a current under sea picked his bones in whispers.”

Eliot wrote

“as he rose and fell he passed the stages his age and youth entering the whirlpool”

Now let’s see water as symbol in what the thunder said- here water symbolize hope- the resurrection of the desolate Waste Land.

“Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves waited for rain,

While the black clouds gathered far distant, over Himavant.”

The fisher king:

The fisher king is one of the central characters in the poem; Eliot drew on from ‘Ritual to Romance’ a 1920 book about the legend of the Holy Grail written by Miss Jessie L. Westone for many of his symbols and images. The book is seen for the connection between ancient fertility rights and Christianity. It includes the evolution of the Fisher King into early representation of Jesus Christ as a fish. If we see it traditionally we find that the importance of death of the Fisher King brought unhappiness and famine. Eliot shows the Fisher King as symbolic of humanity robbed of its sexuality potency in the modern world and connected to the meaninglessness of urban existence.

Religion:

The Fisher King stands for Christ and other religious figures associated with divine resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of “what the thunder said” fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliot’s scene echoes the

Scene in the Bible in which Christ performs one of these miracles, Christ manages to feed his multitude of flowers by the Sea of Galilee with just a small amount of fish. St. Augustine and the Buddha represent East and West’s religious Music and Singing philosophy.

Eliot’s been interested in dividing high and low culture. He symbolized them using music. According to him high culture included are opera and drama were on decline. On the other hand popular culture was on rise.

In the poem, T.S.Eliot blended high culture with low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops. Eliot splices nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men”, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is as the little, implies a song, with various lines repeated as refrains. That poem ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowning- a scene that echoes Odysseus’ interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another way to Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions, elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics as a kind of Chorus, seconding and echoing the action of the poem much as the Chorus functions in Greek tragedies.

I.A.Richards and Cleanth Brooks believe the poem to be religious. The Christian myth of King Fisher shows that regeneration is possible through penance and suffering. The poem ends with Shantih, Shantih, and Shantih. Vedic recitation ends with Universal theme of nonviolence and peace.

The symbolism surrounding the Grail myth is still extant but it is empty, devoid of people. No one comes to the ruined Chapel, yet it exists, regardless of who visits it. This is a horribly sad situation. The symbols that have previously held profound meaning still exist, yet they are unused and unusable. A flash of light-a quick glimpse of truth and vitality, perhaps-releases the rain and lets the poem end.

The Upanishads give Eliot a chance to test the potential of the modern world. “What have we given”, Eliot finds that the only time people give is in sexual act and that this gift is ultimately, evanescent and destructive that associates it with spider webs and solicitors reading wills.

He recalls individuals so caught up in his or her own fait – each thinking only of the key to his or her own person has to be obvious to anything but “eternal rumors” of others. The third idea expressed in the thunder speech that of control – holds the most potential, although it implies a series of domineering relationships and surrenders of the self that ultimately are never realized.

Animals:

Rat could be said to provide a model for Eliot`s poetic process. Like the rat Eliot uses the bits and pieces to sustain poetic life. Somehow this is preferable to the more coherent but vulgar existence of the contemporary world-

“here represented by the sound of horns and motors in the distance intimating a sexual liaison”.

Drought as a symbol of death:

The war`s physical and emotional effects are visualized in the poem. The speaker of the poem uses drought as 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 the poem drought has been the symbol of death. To heighten the anxiety of waiting for rain the speaker said that even the thunder, which indicates the possibility of the rain, is “sterile”, thus killing what hope of rain there is in this stricken landscape.

Symbol of disconnection between human and natural world:

In a game of chess the speaker of the poem derides modern world that has lost touch with nature.

“the chair, she set in like a burnished throne

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by vines standard wrought with fruited vines”

Fruited vines belong to nature where as chair belongs to artificial world. The poet thus makes fun of the sense of personal disconnection in “The Waste Land”.

Character:

The characters in the poem are not the only devices used to invoke symbolism. The tarot card characters Phoenician sailor, the hanged man, the repeated biblical references and other literary references all serve to touch upon symbolic value and also function as objective correlatives

“(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the lady of the rocks,

The lady of situations.”

The tarot reader Madam Sosostris conducts the most outrageous form of “reading” possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into predictions that come true in the further sections. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work of magic and transformation in English literature.

“There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!”

You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

`That corpse you planted last year in garden,

`Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

`Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

O keep the Dog far hence, That`s friend to men,

`Or with his nail he`ll dig it up again!

`You! Hypocrite lecture! –Mon semblable, -Mon frère!”

Stetston is a fallen war comrade. His failure to answer the speaker clears that the dead offer few answers.

“The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced: yet there the nightingale

Filled the entire desert with inviolable voice.”

The two women in the second section represent two sides of modern sexuality. One side is dry, barren the other side is rampant fecundity showing a lack of culture and rapid again, Cleopatra, Dido, Lomia and Philomela are referred here.

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the driven are piled (at night by her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and says.

Tiresias is one of the most important models for modern existence. He is held motionless by ennui and pragmatism. He would like to die but cannot.

“Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.”

Phlebas, the Phoenician died of drowning. In death he has forgotten his wordly cares as we have forgotten our own mortality. The only lesson that Phlebus offers is that, the physical reality of death and decay triumphs over- all.

City:

Eliot’s London references Baudelaire’s Paris (Unreal city), Dickens’s London (“the brown fog of a winter dawn) and Dante’s hell (“the flowing crowed of the dead are similar. The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past.

Cities are destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed mirroring the cyclical downfall of cultures. Jerusalem, Greece, Egypt and Austria among the major empires of the past two millennia all see their capitals fall.

River:

The poem refers to Ganges in Himalaya. River is called the mother of civilization. The river symbolizes the flow continuity of life. Rivers are considered serene also. It symbolizes destruction as well as construction.

Buddhist:

‘The Fire Sermon’ is the title taken from a sermon given by Buddha. Buddha encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolized by fire). Buddha preached nonviolence and wanted his followers to rise spiritually. He symbolizes universal Non violence and peace.

Season:

"I read much of the night and go south in the winter ".

Her woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence.

Summer refers to joy,

Winter refers to grimness and

death. It refers to barrenness.

Thunder:

Thunder strikes and does prophecy. There are many mythical tales about thunder in the Holy books of Mahabharata and Ramayana. It symbolizes the coming of good or evil time.

Landscape:

Various landscapes are shown by the poet like mountain, river, bank, unreal cities etc.

Conclusion:

The poetries of the modern poets like T.S.Eliot and Robert Frost are symbolically. They give us many allusions through allusions rather than sticking to one. The Waste Land is symbolically very rich poem. We rarely find such a variety of symbols except in T.S.Eliot’s Wasteland. Living beings, animal or insect have been the important symbol. Land fertile and Barren both are depicted symbolically with deep meaning. River, water, Natural objects, drought, music, religion, song, king, queen and common people have been used with symbolic reference.

“Quando fiam uti chelidon---O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’ Aquitainte a la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih Shantih Shanti