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The Waste Land:a Real world from Quotations
Abstract:
There are almost one hundred quotations in the Waste Land,which are from remote antiquityin the present age,from Western Eutope to India,while from Miss Jesse L.Weston to Shakespare.From all of these qotations,the poet showed us a fantastic and loathly picture of modern society.It is easier for readers to understand the set of poems well if you know the quotatons.
Key Words:
quotations,be associated with,rebirth,heal,desolate,death,sexual,echo
Outline
I.Thesis:
This disertation will expound the set of poems--The Waste Land through analyzingits quotations.
II. Body
1.The title and the Epigraph
2.Part --The Burial of the Dead
3.Part --A Game of Chess
4.Part --The Fire Sermon
5.Part --Death by Water
6.Part --What the Thunder Said
III.Conclusion:
Eliot said that the works of poets at his time must be hard to understand under the conditon of theirculture.Because their culture was all_inclusive,whose substance was complicated.The poetsmust be more and more extensive,while they must turn to enjoy more and more quoating(Liu Biao,27).Therefore,Eliot quoted all kinds of quotations in the Waste Land;mythology and legend,Easternand Western religion,the classical books of philosophy,and the ancient and the present literature works,From all of these quotations,the poet showed us a fantanstic and loathly picture of modern society.He expressed hus view and worriment about the modern society and the people's mental world,In the Waste Land,however, from some quotations,we can find the poet was still eager to find a way to heal the sad human beings.All in all,it is easier for readers to understand the set of poems well if you know the quotatons.
I.Introduction
W.C.Williams,an American poet ,said in his Autobiography:"Eliot brought us back into classroom.”(Liu Kaifang,49)There are almost one hundred quotations in The Waste Land,which are from remote antiquity to the present age,from Western Europe to India,while from Miss Jesse L.Weston to Shakespeare.By using all of these quotations,Thomas Stesns Eliot describes a bleak and desolate real world.Therefore,it's very important to understand these quotations.This disertation will expound the set of poems--The Waste Land through analyzing its quotations.
II. The Title and the Epigraph
A.the Title
Let's read Eliot's note about the title first:"not only the title ,but the plan and a great deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jesse L. Westons book on the Grail legend:From Ritual to Romance(Cambridge).Indeed,ao deeply am I indebted,Miss Weston'book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do,and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself)to any who think such elucidationof the poem worth the trouble.”(Eliot,1189)In fact,Eliot's title refers to theancient legend of the Fisher King,the ruler of the Waste Land,so_called in the Perceval versions,of the Grail legend because it was doomed to barrenness until the King,who has wounded in the sexual organs,exists in many versions,pagan and christian,and originated in pagan fertility rites celebrating the movement of Nature from barren winter to fertile lifeful spring and often involving human sacrifice to bring about this rebirth.Usually the King was killed,his flowing blood being taken as the power that rejuvenates the land.In the Fisher King legend,however,there is no human sacrifice:the King stands for the land,inhis barrenness,and his healing accordingly comes to symboize the land's healing.(Xu Wenbo,46)
From the title,we can imagineEliot will shw us a bleak and revolting picture of modern society.the psyche of the people here is like the sterile desert,who are vacuous and listless,while they lose the passion and the ability of love.Also the people's life is dreary and insipid.The Waste Land is the set of poems which is after the World War .The real world is full of conflicts,theredor,Eliot will describe death in the poem.The real world is like hell,like a nightmae,and like the Waste Land.
Furthermore,in the English Middle Ages the Fisher King legend became associated with the Arthurian legends,especially that of the quest for the Holy Grail(the vessel supposed to have been used by Jesus at the Last Supper).One of Arthur's knights,om a quest,endures temptations and agonies in the Waste Land,All of which culminate in the ordeal of the chapel Perolous;then,through the Grail,he becomes able to heal the Fisher King,and the land regains its fertility.The Grail is symbolicaly associated with the lance,the female and male symbols(Wang Guanglin,153)
From the legend,we can understand why Eliot chooses the title--the Waste Land ,the monologist in the poem plays the persona just like the knight who heals the Fisher King and the Waste Land at last.Also we can understand what Eliot wants to tell us in the poem:he will show us a modern waste land ,while he will seek a way to heal the world.
B.the Epigraph
"And as for the Sihyl,Isaw her with my ow eyes at Cumae,suspended in a bottle,and when boys asked her,‘Sibyl,what is your whish?’,she would reply,‘I want to die.’(Petronius,Satyricon).
The Sibyl, a prophetess,had been given long life by Apollo,but she had failed to sak for eternal youth and health.(Xu Wenbo,45)Eliot uses Latin and Greek letters in order to make the poem cosmic unbiversality.From this quotation,the readers will commiserate the Sybil's deplorable circumstance which she can't comeinto the death,while she can't stop the consenescence,thereby,the readers will know it may not be good for people to be immortal.What is more,the readers will understand:no death,no reincarnation.
III.Part I--The Burial of the Dead
"April is the cruellest month,breeding
Liacs out of the dead land ,mixing
Memory and desire,stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
These 4 lines echo Geoffrey Chaucer's "General Prologue”of the Canterbury.In Chaucer's eye,April is "sweet showers”and "west wind”,while in Eliot's eye,April is “dead land” and “dull roots”.Waster is in April，however，for Sibyl，“April is the cruellest month”.She can't die,so she can't rebirth.
From line 35 to line 42,the monologistdepicts a story about himself and hyacinth girl.The girl said :"You gave me hyacinth,first a year ago.”But the monologist said:
"-- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence. ”
The flower of love which would be very beautiful didn't bloom at all.The monologist betrayed the love between himself and hyacinth girl."Desolate and empty the sea”,this quotation is rom Wagner'sTristan and Isolde,the words of the shepherd telling Tristan there is no sign of the Isolde coming to heal his mortal wound.(Pan Yuli,46)Such this kind of extreme despair ends the love story of the hyacinth girl,it's obciously that Eliot makes exegesis to the modern love just like this.
Now,Let's read another Eliot's note:"I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards,from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the ‘crowds of people,’and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself. ”（Eliot,1189)
The Tarot cards were used originally as a part of fertility rites to "predict the rise and fall of the waters which brought fertility to the land" (Weston, From Ritual to Romance). The cards have four suits: cup (hearts), lance (diamonds), sword (spades), and dish (clubs). Among the cards are the Fool, the High Priestess, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hanged Man, and Death, but evidently no blank card, no drowned sailor. Certain other figures Eliot mentions here cannot be identified in the pack. The man with three staves may be the Pope, who carries a triple cross. The one-eyed merchant and his pack are likely the Fool, who on the Tarot card carries, on a wand over his back, a wallet or pack, the lock of which is in the form of a single eye. The Tarot symbolism suggests that the wallet contains the sum of past human experience, and that the eye which is the key to it is the all-seeing eye (compare the eye of Horus in Egyptian myth), the visionary power, by which man can gain access to a universal memory.In this part ,we can easily find death from the augury of “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante”.That is the thesis of the Part I--There is full of death in the modern society.
Here Eliot echoes Dante's Inferno.Date is led into the underworld,a dark plain just before they reach the great river over which Charon ferries the damned. There Dante sees a vast number, uttering cries in great pain: these are souls never sufficiently alive to be good or evil, but who cared only meanly for themselves: "And I looked and saw a flag that, whirling about, ran so quickly that it seemed to scorn to pause; and behind it came so long a line of people that I should never have believed death had undone so many.”（Zhang Jian，143）We can feel that：the hite_collar wor kers who go to work in a hurry become spooks in the hell；while the Thames which they go through also becomes thegreat river in the hell.Eliot shows us how horrible scene of modern cities.
When the monologist talked to Stetson,,"That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? ”The readers feel horrent.this quotatiao is fromSir James Frazer's Golden Bough.Glden bough tells many ceremonies anda mythes which record how the primeval tribes conjure good crop, of which some primeval tribes bury a statury of simulant dead deity or a living person instead of the deity with the seeds in the earth,In the people's mind there;the deity which is buried will come back to life in the next spring,meanwhile,the plantwill grow(Li Xin,140),Even the harrest must exchange with death,what a world!
"You! by pocrite reader!--my likeness,--my brother!”is from Baudelaire's Beface of Flears du mal.The monologist calls the reades"brother”direitly.(Pan YuLi,46)He seems to say,"we are all by pocrites,we are likeness.”That is a kind of exclamation which makes everyone who is living chaos awake.
IV.PartII.--A Game of chess
The title is associated with Thomas Middleton's women Beware,in which a widow is distracted by the playing of a game of chess .from the duke's seduction of her daughter-in-law Biancain the next yoom(Pan YuLi,46) From this, we can imagine,the part will showus the failure and defection of matrimory.
From line 77 to line 82, Eliot describes Imogen's room in shakesoeare's cymbeline.In order to convince posthumass that he has seduced his wife Imogen,the cunning Iachimo visits her room while she is asleep and writes down the details of the bedroom's decoration,and certain distingguishing makes on Imogen's body.
Let's go on reading the poem.from line 83 to line 98,Eliot quotes another sad story about love .Aeneus,the lastson of Trojan Priam, and after many misadventures reaches Carthage,the punic capital of Queen Dido.Aeneus's mother,Venus, took him under her protection against Juno, Queen of Heaven, who supports the Greeks and has a temple in Carthage. So as to secure Aeneus from Juno's evil influence there, Venus puts Aeneus to sleep on the night in which he is supposed to attend a feast given by Dido and doubles for him her other son, Cupid, whom she tells to arouse Dido's desire for Aeneus' image. Dido receives the false Aeneus on her golden couch beneath rich tapestries and falls in love quickly. Just before Dido proposes a toast and asks the false Aeneus to tell his adventures, the original work describes the sensuously rich hall in lines that Eliot here adapts: "lighted lamps hang down from the fretted roof of gold,and flaming torches drive out the night”Aeneus and Dido become lovers, and when he leaves Carthage to fulfil his destiny she commits suicide. Their unmarried love -- Dido was widowed when her brother killed her husband -- proved disastrous for her country, which Rome went on to defeat and destroy. Carthage, the city of Juno, goddess of marriage, was doomed once Venus intervened.(Xu Wenbo,46)
From line 99 to 110,Eliot quotes Ovic's Metamorphoses,Philomela(daughter of Pandion, king of Athens) went by sea to visit her sister Procne, who had married Tereus, king of Trace. Tereus accompanied Philomela from Athens, and when they disembarked he took her to a hut in a dark wood and violently raped the virgin. When she threatened to accuse him, Tereus cut out her tongue with his sword and raped her again in her blood. Shut up afterwards for a year in that hut, Philomela cleverly wove into a tapestry the story of her sufferings and had it conveyed to her sister, who then found her prison and secretly brought her back to Tereus' palace, where they plotted revenge. Procne seized her own son (by Tereus), Itys, who looked like his father, and stabbed him in the chest and cut his throat. The two sisters then butchered the boy's body, cooked it by boiling in kettles and by roasting on skewers over a fire, and served the meat to Tereus, who made it a feast. Philomela then appeared before Tereus and flung the boy's bloody head at him. Before Tereus could murder the sisters, they all changed into birds: Tereus into a hoopoe bird, Procne into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale, who sings according to legend with her breast pressed against a thorn -- assuredly a sexual image -- a plaintive song of great beauty on love's mixed joy and sorrow.(Zhang Jjian,145).
From these three stories(I would rather like to call them sexual stories than love stories),Eliot shows us a chaotic,insensate,and disagreeable sexual relationshp in the modern society,It makes us have to meditate ourselves:what true love is;how to treat our sensation;which is more important,love or libido.
Eliot not only quotes a lot,but describes plenty of scenes of modern life.
" Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you dont give it him, there's others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you dont like it you can get on with it, I said,
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it wont be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same. ”
In the description,Eliot describe th agony and misgiving of common people in the modern city.There is no sacred and chaste love between man and woman.Lil' marriage is full of woe and misery.
The last line in part II "Good night,ladies,good night,sweet ladies,good night,good night”,quotes from Ophelia's first mad scene, where she appears, distracted by the news of Hamlet's murder of her father, Polonius, and also apparently by the prince's decision to repudiate his previously expressed love for her. Just before this poignant farewell, Ophelia sang a St. Valentine's day's poem about a young man who seduced a virgin (on a promise of marriage) and then refused to wed her because she yielded to him -- a song that may apply to Ophelia herself.Later she will be drowned.(Pan Yuli,47)Then what about Lil?Shall we regard it as a connote?
V. Part III. --The Fire Sermon
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