The Waste Land by Eliot

THE WASTE LAND

1.Number of Sections, name them and give a brief summary of the content.

The poem is composed of 5 sections: 1. The burial of the dead; 2. A game of Chess; 3. The fire Sermon; 4. Death by water; 5. What the thunder said.

The burial of the dead begins with the description of the seasons. Between these descriptions, Eliot focuses on the First of April, described as "the cruelest month". In the second Stanza is searching in vain for life in the waste land, an arid,sterile place with no life and water, domined by stones, dead trees and no relief from the beating sun. In the third stanza the poet introduces Madame Sosostris, a clairvoyant, and remember when she displayed to him her tarots cards in their first meeting. The fourth and final stanza is about an unreal city full of people flowing over London Bridge in a foggy atmosphere. Here the narrator sees a man called Setson, who fought with him in the war.

In the first lines of the Game of Chess appears a woman sitting on a elegant chair into a beautiful setting, full of rich furniture, then the author begins a delirant dialogue with this woman. Finally in the last stanza there is a dialogue between two women at closing time, they are talking about a certain Lil, whose husband Albert was recently released from the army. This last stanza ends with a quotation from Hamlet.

The fire sermon starts with the image of the river Thames. Here this river is descripted as empty, using a comparison between its condition and the modern life(the river is as empty as life). Suddenly a rat appears and the narrator, who is fishing, assumes the role of a fishing king, describing the wasteland stretching out before him. The poet ends this stanza describing this death setting with onomatopeias and with a quotation from Verlaine's Parsifal.

Unreal city start with a link from "The Burial of Dead", evoking Baudelaire once more. Here a merchant called Eugenides invites the narrator to. The next stanza talks about the role of Tiresias, an old man that sees a young man who pays to meet a female that, when he leaves her house, plays music with a gramophone. The music played by the gramophone seems to transport the narrator back to the city he describes below, precisely in a bar in lower Thames Street full of fishmen. This stanza ends with another vision of the Thames and with references to St. Augustine's Confession and Buddha's Fire Sermon

In Death by water there is a description of a man called Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died by drowing. Here the death of this character is presented as the abandonment of his worldly cares.

The first stanza of "What the thunder said" refers to the passion of Christ and here life and death are strictly related. The second stanza describes a land full of rocks, sand and where there is no water. In this desolate land there are two travelers walking upon a road, which seem to be accompanied by a third person whose presence can't be assured by them. Then follows an apocalyptic description of Europe and Asia(Jerusalem,Athens,Alexandria,Vienna,London), pictured as an unreal place full of ghosts.

2.Why is considered a modernist poem?

Eliot is modernist because in his poetry there are features like the continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, the examination of the mundane matter, the presence of formal and stylistic characteristics as juxstaposition, irony, comparison and satire, the use of the first person, the use of "stream of consciousness", formed by changes of speaker, location and time which leave the reader slightly confused similar to a rant. Another feature of his modernist approach is the fact that he is conscious of the objectivity of his surrounding and that he shifts from an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological one(the object he analyses "is" and not "means"). Furthermore he is modernist because of the themes of his poetry, presented as a not-linear, fragmented story characterized by a lack of consciousness of the writing. The main themes are the breaking down of social norms, rejection of standard social ideas and traditional thoughts and expectations, the rejection of the truth, the history, the social system and the sense of loneliness and failure caused by the chaos within the modern society.

3.What about is symbolism, give examples.

The symbolism of his poetry is related to the elements of the "waste land", the water, the city, the stairs and is used for expressing the themes of time, death-rebirth, levels of love(especially the attitude toward women). The technique adopted by Eliot for his symbolism is the object correlative, by which he exteriorize abstract feeling and emotions by using external situations and objects which are material and real. Finally, Eliot's symbolism has to be analyzed by four levels: the literal level (in the geographical description), the allegorical, the moral, and finally the anagogic one. In fact, to understand is poetry we must relate the geographic place to his vision of the world.

Examples of his symbolism: In "The Burial of the Dead" there is the opposition between the aridity of the waste land and the pursuit of water which symbolizes the