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T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: Summary & Analysis
Ts eliot the wasteland essay
T.s. Eliot use of symbolism
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An Annotation of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Part 4, Death By Water
Each of us has our own personal wasteland. The wasteland may manifest itself in many things; school, loss of love, loneliness, work, fear or doubt. In any case, a wasteland is a part of us that is clearly missing something and causes a distinct lack of completeness and a sense of uncertainty about our future. T.S. Eliot manages to capture the essence of that dry and forsaken feeling in his five-part poem entitled, The Wasteland. Using five different sections, Eliot ties weaves together an enchanting story that was influenced by the book by Jessie L. Weston entitled From Ritual to Romance. Her book tells the ancient myth of the Fisher King, who lived as the impotent King of the Wasteland. The myth introduces a figure called the "Deliverer" who is also known as the Phlebas the Phoenician Sailor, who must sacrifice his life to save that of the dying Fisher King in hopes of restoring the dry and fertile land once again. Although based off of an ancient myth, the poem is drenched with Biblical references and symbolic characters that offer connections to the life and death of Christ leading any reader to believe that Phlebas has every right to represent the person of Christ.
Section four of the poem contains a problem that must be solved before the end of the work. Section IV entitled Death by Water holds the death of the figure that represents the "Deliverer" of Christ. A mere ten lines in length so much depends upon the interpretation of that death. Two strong interpretations can be made from the lines, however they leave the reader with the very same question to ponder. The conclusion that the two interpretations share is the idea and existence of life afte...
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...ce of the wasteland. Humans running back and forth, never really accomplishing anything because they sense no greater purpose of meaning; they live in a dry, weary, compromised world…much like the life Eliot describes in part five where peoples faces "sneer and snarl (344)."
The entire poem the wasteland is a searching, a struggle for the truth, for salvation of the dry, arid, and deserted time Eliot is living in. Eliot recognizes that there needs to be some sort of a renewal, a salvation that is offered to all. He establishes the first part of that renewal in Part 4 with the death of Phlebas. Whether we look at Phlebas as Christ and his sacrifice for the world, or we see Phlebas as a mere mortal, we see that in order to bring peace, re-birth, and renewal, death must precede that new beginning.
Work Cited
"Consider." Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. 1995.
As the first poem in the book it sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. The questions posed about the nature of God become recurring themes in the following sections, especially One and Four. The symbolism includes the image of earthly possessions sprawled out like gangly dolls, a reference possibly meant to bring about a sense of nostalgia which this poem does quite well. The final lines cement the message that this is about loss and life, the idea that once something is lost, it can no longer belong to anyone anymore brings a sense...
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
In the first instance, death is portrayed as a “bear” (2) that reaches out seasonally. This is then followed by a man whom “ comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse / / to buy me…” This ever-changing persona that encapsulates death brings forth a curiosity about death and its presence in the living world. In the second stanza, “measles-pox” (6) is an illness used to portray death’s existence in a distinctive embodiment. This uncertainty creates the illusion of warmth and welcomenesss and is further demonstrated through the reproduction of death as an eminent figure. Further inspection allows the reader to understand death as a swift encounter. The quick imagery brought forth by words such as “snaps” and “shut” provoke a sense of startle in which the audience may dispel any idea of expectedness in death’s coming. This essential idea of apparent arrival transitions to a slower, foreseeable fate where one can imagine the enduring pain experienced “an iceberg between shoulder blades” (line 8). This shift characterizes the constant adaptation in appearance that death acquires. Moreover, the idea of warmth radiating from death’s presence reemerges with the introduction to a “cottage of darkness” (line 10), which to some may bring about a feeling of pleasantry and comfort. It is important to note that line 10 was the sole occurrence of a rhetorical question that the speaker
There are reasons that the Lord of the Rings trilogy has spanned nearly one hundred years, allowing children to connect with their grandparents through their love of the tale, and that stories like Harry Potter have defined a generation: the story of a journey is one that audiences love to hear. Reading and watching about journeys can make the reader/watcher experience that journey with the characters. Journeys, however, do not have to be fantastical or magical to be powerful to a person. T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, for example, were both modernist poets, but they were creators of journeys that seemed much simpler. This is not to say, however, that the journeys they wrote of were incredibly similar. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” both depict in first-person form physical journeys by the speakers, through a city and through the woods, respectively, but also the metaphorical journey taken through life. The speakers of each of these poems are in different stages of their life-journeys, which provides them each with a different perspective. The speakers also have very different attitude to their journeys, showing that the stage and setting of a journey can greatly affect how that journey is perceived by the journeyer.
Eliot, T.S. The wasteland. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991: 1447-1463.
“This is the dead land this is the cactus land” describes a vacant, dead environment. Eliot uses the barren desert to show the lifelessness of the hollow men, despite the fact that they are alive. The lack of life in that environment perfectly describes the lives of the people with no dreams that Eliot is trying to describe. Truly, the men lack any spirit and life, which Eliot showed through the imagery and characteri...
Many political scientists symbolically consider the Balance-of-Power concept central to a firm understanding of classical realism. As T. V. Paul (2004) explains, the Balance of Power’s common form appears as a system of alliances in which the stronger nations deter their weaker counter-parts from acting belligerently (Paul, 2004). This symbiotic concept of balancing power, nevertheless, is not an inherent thought and specifically appeared in the modern era. Its entrance into the world of international politics represented a fundamental paradigm shift in which it became necessary to reevaluate our systematic understanding of the social and political world Wendt (2006). Questions centered on the underlying concepts that drove the system ever forward such as: by whom was the system made, how does such a system function, what brought about such political organizations, and how could a state theoretically enter into the system. Hume, an ancient and respected theorist, largely analyzed the relationship between states and the idea of the Balance-of-Power theory. Similar to Hume, International-Relations thinkers, such as Spykman, Wolfers, and Morgenthau, became paramount to the concept’s realization. For brevity’s sake, thinkers spent a vast amount of time pondering the theory’s many forms insofar as they produced a semi-coherent discourse upon which its modern form operates.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare is an extraordinary fantasy story that has many themes throughout the play. One of the many themes is that love is not always easy. Anybody who has been in love can understand to some degree, that love is almost never easy. Love is difficult, especially if the two lovers have been together for a long time. Love will last if both people are willing to never give up, to stand up and still try every time one of you or both off you fall. Shakespeare uses competition, comedy, and irony to show the audience that love is not always easy.
In conclusion, after exploring the theme of this poem and reading it for myself, Eliot has created this persona, in industrialised England or somewhere else. A man of low self-esteem, you embark on his journey as he struggles with a rational fear of being rejected by a woman.
Throughout the events which unfold in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare delivers several messages on love. Through this play, one of the significant ideas he suggests is that love is blind, often defying logic and overriding other emotions and priorities. Helena loves Demetrius unconditionally and pursues him despite knowing that he loathes her; conflict arises between Helena and Hermia, childhood best friends, over Demetrius and Lysander; and because she is in love, Queen Titania is able to see beauty and virtue in the ass-headed Nick Bottom.
In his poem "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern man is in a wasteland, and must be reborn.
In conclusion realist and liberalist theories provide contrasting views on goals and instruments of international affairs. Each theory offers reasons why state and people behave the way they do when confronted with questions such as power, anarchy, state interests and the cause of war. Realists have a pessimistic view about human nature and they see international relations as driven by a states self preservation and suggest that the primary objective of every state is to promote its national interest and that power is gained through war or the threat of military action. Liberalism on the other hand has an optimistic view about human nature and focuses on democracy and individual rights and that economic independence is achieved through cooperation among states and power is gained through lasting alliances and state interdependence.
There are several death related motifs present in the poem. For instance, the poem opens with a passage from Dante’s Inferno, foreshadowing the theme of death in the poem. The speaker says “I know the voices dying with a dying fall.” He also references Lazarus from the Bible, who was raised from the dead, further developing the death motif. The speaker also seems to be looking back on life, referring to past experiences and his aging, as if he believes his death is imminent. He seems to have an obsession with hiding his age. According to the Psychoanalytic Criticism Chapter, the greater our fear of something is, the greater our obsession becomes (24). The speaker's fear of death has lead him to wear clothes that are fashionable for young people, such as rolling his trousers, and goes to great lengths to cover his age in other ways, such as parting his hair behind to cover a bald spot. The last stanza of the poem has a rather depressing and sad ending, a result of fear of
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
The study of international relations takes a wide range of theoretical approaches. Some emerge from within the discipline itself others have been imported, in whole or in part, from disciplines such as economics or sociology. Indeed, few social scientific theories have not been applied to the study of relations amongst nations. Many theories of international relations are internally and externally contested, and few scholars believe only in one or another. In spite of this diversity, several major schools of thought are discernable, differentiated principally by the variables they emphasize on military power, material interests, or ideological beliefs. International Relations thinking have evolved in stages that are marked by specific debates between groups of scholars. The first major debate is between utopian liberalism and realism, the second debate is on method, between traditional approaches and behavioralism. The third debate is between neorealism/neoliberalism and neo-Marxism, and an emerging fourth debate is between established traditions and post-positivist alternatives (Jackson, 2007).