Symbols In The Waste Land Essay Research
Symbols In The Waste Land Essay, Research Paper
Symbols in T. S. Eliot & # 8217 ; s & # 8220 ; The Waste Land & # 8221 ;
When the verse form was foremost printed in book signifier two months after its initial publication in the & # 8220 ; Criterion & # 8221 ; of October, 1922, the pressman needed extra transcript to make full a signature ; since Eliot had no other verse forms ready at that clip, he submitted the explanatory notes on & # 8220 ; The Waste Land & # 8221 ; which now fill about five pages in the & # 8220 ; Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 & # 8243 ; . The notes have been the focal point of much critical attempt and remark, and Eliot has since remarked that he regrets holding appended them.
One valuable map of the notes, however, has been to bespeak some of the plants that most significantly influenced the authorship of the verse form among others ( as we mentioned ) Frazer & # 8217 ; s & # 8220 ; The Golden Bough & # 8221 ; and Weston & # 8217 ; s & # 8220 ; From Ritual to Romance, & # 8221 ; books relevant to much of the basic symbolism used.
In the vegetive rites discussed in both, the figure of the Year-god was thrown into the Waterss of the Nile ( or some other organic structure of H2O ) and later & # 8220 ; fished out & # 8221 ; ( resurrected ) , typifying the metempsychosis of the life rule in the spring. This ritual besides came to be associated with the spiritual induction forms to which crude people seem to give much more unfastened acknowledgment than make modern civilized societies. The Grail fables, harmonizing to Miss Weston, are derived from those vegetive rites, and it is the Fisher King on whom the wellness and birthrate of the land and people are dependent in these fables. The Fisher King is ill, holding been maimed ( normally a sexual lesion ) ; and, because he is ill, his lands are waste and waste, merely as in & # 8220 ; Oedipus Rex & # 8221 ; ( as Tiresias knew ) the pestilence upon
Thebes was due to the offenses of Oedipus against the generative rhythms. Merely when the Fisher King is healed through the appearance of a pure sap who asks the proper inquiries can the land once more become fertile.
The relevancy of this to the Christian-scheme is discussed by Miss Weston ; it is summarized as follows by C. S. Fraser: & # 8220 ; The Christian reading of this traditional myth is the highest 1: the sacrificed male monarch is Christ, as God Incarnate, and the waste land which has to be reclaimed to birthrate is the human bosom, full of selfishness and lecherousness, choked with the tares of sin. & # 8221 ;
The inevitableness of the & # 8220 ; fish & # 8221 ; and & # 8220 ; fisher & # 8221 ; spiritual symbolism is seen by reflecting on the high grade to which the early peoples were dependent on rivers and seas, the fruitfulness and verve of fishes, and the cryptic & # 8220 ; grace & # 8221 ; which brings the fish to the fisherman. Thus Buddha, for one illustration, was represented as sitting on the bank of the ocean of Samsara, projecting for the fish of Truth to pull it to the visible radiation of redemption ; and Christ, for another, offered to do his adherents & # 8220 ; fishers of men. & # 8221 ;
Another of import set of symbols related to the Grail fables and to the vegetive rites is seen in the Tarot cards, which are used in Section I of & # 8220 ; The Waste Land & # 8221 ; by Madame Sosostris, the fortune-teller, to read the luck of the talker. These cards, of unsure beginning, have been used for centuries for fortune-telling in general, and more specifically for foretelling the rise and autumn of the Waterss which brought birthrate to the land. Of the Madame Sosostris subdivision of & # 8221 ; The Waste Land, & # 8221 ; F. R. Leavis has said, & # 8220 ; & # 8230 ; it at one time intimates the range of the verse form, the manner of its contemplation of life. It informs us as to the nature of the characters: we know that they are such as could non hold dealingss with one another in any narrative strategy, and could non be brought together on any phase, no affair what liberties were taken with the Unities & # 8230 ; . & # 8221 ;
Eliot has slightly altered the Tarot deck to suit his ain intents, and the ways in which he has done so are declarative of the man-made & # 8220 ; mythic method & # 8221 ; underlying the whole verse form. His usage of the Tarot battalion was really likely influenced by his close friend Charles Williams, whose fresh & # 8220 ; The Greater Trumps & # 8221 ; is built around Tarot symbols. In his debut to that novel, William Lindsay Gresham writes of & # 8220 ; the wise old adult male, and two dominant symbols H2O, meaning the unconscious itself, and the mandala-wheel of integrating, divided into quarter-circles by the cross, the mighty mark of four. & # 8221 ; Each of these is rather relevant to Eliot & # 8217 ; s Hagiographas, including & # 8220 ; The Waste Land, & # 8221 ; as are a figure of Mr. Gresham & # 8217 ; s remarks on the greatertrumps, particularly those on the Lovers, Fortitude, the Hanged Man, Death, the Devil, and the Moon.
Many critics have written of the antitheses, the antinomies, and the contrasts in & # 8220 ; The Waste Land. & # 8221 ; These exist in copiousness and are non merely accidents of inclusion ; they comprise a basic and indispensable facet of the verse form & # 8217 ; s technique, patterned advance, and intending. Many such mutual oppositions could be identified in the verse form: universal-personal, male-female, conscious-unconscious, hope-fear, and others. But the technique of contradiction goes deeper than this in the verse form & # 8217 ; s construction. Many of its symbols are involved in what I should wish to name & # 8220 ; parallelodoxes. & # 8221 ; Many of its symbols, that is, at the same time develop in antithetical waies.
The symbol of H2O, for
case, is already present equivocally in line nine of the first subdivision: The shower of rain that comes over the Starnbergersee both heralds the summer and makes the talker tally for shelter. The absence of H2O and the thirst for it enter in line 24, “the dry rock [ gives ] no sound of water” ; in line 42, “Oed and sneer Department of State Meer” ( ”Wide and empty the sea” ) , H2O is both a negative and a positive symbol: it may transport Isolde and her healing humanistic disciplines to the deceasing Tristan, but as yet it is waste and waste. The fright of decease by H2O is foremost made explicit by Madame Sosostris.
Both sides of this equivocal symbol are inconspicuously present in the game of cheat: & # 8220 ; The hot H2O at ten./And if it rains, a closed auto at four & # 8221 ; ; and once more the negative side is seen through the allusion to Ophelia, who drowned herself: & # 8220 ; Good dark, ladies, good dark, sweet ladies, good dark, good night. & # 8221 ;
In Section III, & # 8220 ; The Fire Sermon, & # 8221 ; the river has both positive and negative intensions, proposing both pureness and pollution, both artlessness and immorality. Mrs. Porter & # 8217 ; s soda H2O is contrasted with the ceremonial H2O of the Grail chapel in Verlaine & # 8217 ; s & # 8220 ; Parsifal. & # 8221 ; This analogue but antithetical development is amplified in great item throughout the verse form. Death by H2O, which in Section I was to be feared, has become by Section IV ambiguous-suggesting both the disintegration of physical decease and the promise of Resurrection in the Year-god ceremonials, Christian baptism, the Easter pageant, and the other main symbolic forms used.
The symbol of Philomel provides another such & # 8220 ; parallelodox & # 8221 ; : in its first visual aspect, once more, we see both positive and negative intensions:
Above the antique mantle was displayed
As though a window gave upon the silvan scene
The alteration of Philomel, by the brutal male monarch
So impolitely forced ; yet there the Luscinia megarhynchos
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried and still the universe pursues,
& # 8220 ; Jug Jug & # 8221 ; to soil ears.
In context this transition suggests non merely the beauty of a distant and picturesque artefact but besides the barbarous misdemeanor suffered by Philomel ; her vocal, the & # 8220 ; inviolable voice & # 8221 ; ( twit twerp & # 8221 ; ) still sounds like & # 8220 ; jug lug & # 8221 ; to soil ears. She following appears in Section III, & # 8220 ; The Fire Sermon, & # 8221 ; after the contradictory mentions to Mrs. Porter and & # 8220 ; Ces voix vitamin D & # 8217 ; enfants, chantant dans la coupole & # 8221 ; ( & # 8221 ; those voices of kids, singing in the choir-loft & # 8221 ; ) : Twit twerp twit// Jug jug jug Lug jug jug/So impolitely forc & # 8217 ; d / Tereu. & # 8221 ; The sarcasm of the mention to Verlaine & # 8217 ; s Grail ceremonial in this context carries over into the vocal of the Luscinia megarhynchos, at first positive, so negative. The following line, & # 8220 ; So impolitely forc & # 8217 ; vitamin D, & # 8221 ; refers non merely to Philomel but besides to the usage of Grail imagination in the & # 8220 ; Sweeney and Mrs. Porter & # 8221 ; context. The shutting word of this four-line transition, & # 8220 ; Tereu, & # 8221 ; suggests Tereus & # 8217 ; s act of misdemeanor, the fact that it is to be rued, and the sound of the bird & # 8217 ; s vocalizing ; for & # 8220 ; twit twerp, & # 8221 ; & # 8220 ; jug jug, & # 8221 ; and & # 8220 ; Tereu & # 8221 ; were the three common representations of the nightingale & # 8217 ; s vocal in Elizabethan literature, where its moral significances were emphasized as they are here. Though Philomel does non look once more straight in & # 8220 ; The Waste Land, & # 8221 ; she is suggested in the other bird vocals used and referred to at two degrees of indirectness in the & # 8220 ; Quando fiam uti chelidon & # 8221 ; fragment ( & # 8221 ; When will I be like the sup? & # 8221 ; ) of the shutting transition for the reader who is familiar with its context in the anon. Latin work & # 8220 ; Pervigilium Veneris. & # 8221 ;
As in the instance of the H2O symbol, which by the terminal of the verse form suggested the whole rule which Jung calls the & # 8220 ; anima, & # 8221 ; the associations of the Philomel symbol have been expanded by the full development of the verse form: By the terminal she has come to propose in all their assortments both misdemeanor through lecherousness and purification through transmutation. Fire is likewise used and developed as the symbol of both the destroying lecherousness which must be transcended and the purging fires which purify.
Such & # 8220 ; parallelodoxes & # 8221 ; are inevitable accompaniments of the associatory method by which the verse form develops in the head of the talker. Its associational footing is non in thoughts or images, but in entire provinces of a complex and single consciousness that is ever cognizant of multiple deductions. This kind of patterned advance is inexplicit in the verse form & # 8217 ; s full construction, but it is easy to lose, since its acknowledgment arises in the reader & # 8217 ; s empathetic identification- & # 8221 ; You! hypocrite lecteur! Monday semblable, -mon Fr rhenium! & # 8221 ; The demand of this designation needfully limits the reader- ship of the verse form, but it besides allows grades of compaction and of elusive complexness likely impossible to accomplish by any other structural technique.
The verse form is basically dramatic, and its grasp depends on what Francis Fergusson calls & # 8220 ; the melodramatic sensibility. & # 8221 ; But both the phase and the dramatis personae of the poem exist in the head of the talker. It is true that frequently we need to acknowledge the personages through whom he speaks, but ever we need to acknowledge every bit good the tone and accent of his voice talking through them.
33a
