The Wasteland - T.S.Eliot

The waste land is one of the most popular poems of the 20^th century. It is written by T.S. Eliot.These things make the poem itself a virtual “waste land”. We can see a wide range of socio-cultural, religious and secular experiences common to both an individual life and the collective life of western society. It is a truly remarkable poem that broke new ground in English poetry. There are so many themes in this poem so I would like to discuss them one by one. The themes are like death, rebirth, the seasons, love, lust, water, history etc.

The life in modern waste land is a life-in-death, a living death. According to Eliot’s philosophy, Human being must act do either evil as good and it is better to do evil than do nothing. Modern man has lost his sense of good and evil, and this keeps him from being alive. In the modern land the people are dead. They merely exist like dead things.  

There are some references regarding the theme love in this poem. The first part of the poem “the burial of the dead”, in this part we can see some reference to Tristan und Isolde. The second part of the poem is “The Game of chess”. In this part there is a reference to Cleopatra and to the story of Tereus and Philomena suggest that love in the poem “the waste land”. It is often destructive. 

 

And the last section of The Wasteland, ‘What the Thunder Said?’, can be viewed as  a series of culmination reflection and experience. This part is full of the reminders of physical and spiritual dying. It is a complex pattern of the forms of dying. The death of Jesus, the living death of those who have failed to recognize its meaning, spiritual meaning of life as a preparation for dying…Here the god has now died, and the source of spirituality is cut now.

“He who was living is now dead,

We who were living are now dying.”

There are many themes. They are very helpful to understand the whole poem very easily. There are some important aspects remain in themes so themes can be important to study any other texts.