TS Eliot peppers "The Wasteland," his apocalyptic poem, with images of modern dryness and inarticulation that contrast with fertile allusions to earlier times. Eliot's language details a fragile age, full of physical and sexual warfare, spiritually broken, culturally decaying, dry and dusty. His references to the Fisher King and mythical vegetation rituals imply that the 20th century world needs a Questar to water the land. “The Wasteland” refuses to provide a simple solution; the properties of the language serve to create a narrative and conclusion as ambiguous, confusing and fragmented as the Eliot era itself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Eliot wastes no time outlining the first irony of the poem. In the first lines of “The Burial of the Dead,” the speaker comments on the crucifixion of Jesus and Chaucer while using brutal sounds to tell of his spiritual coldness in a hot environment. In the “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer poetically writes “When that April with its showres soote/ The drought of March hath penetrated the roots, / And bathed every vein in swich licour, / Of which vertu engrendred is the flower" (Norton Anthology to English Literature, sixth edition, vol. 1, p.81). For those who speak of "The Wasteland," "April is the cruelest month, breeding/ lilacs from the dead earth, mixing/ memory and desire, mixing/ dull roots with spring rain" (Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition, p .1236, lines 1-4). The hard "c"s and soft "ds" indicate the speaker's disenchantment with a world full of paradoxes and dichotomies. The "mixing" of "Memory and Desire" does nothing but hurt him, as do all the verbs, which Eliot places at the end of lines to intensify their importance and action in an otherwise dead land. The speaker continues his rants against the world and displays a personality at odds with normal conceptions of happiness. “Winter kept us warm,” he says, as delayed alliteration pairs an unlikely pair (5). The speaker goes back in time, and perhaps changes her identity, remembering her childhood. Nostalgia is an essential component of "The Wasteland"; here, she recounts a young girl's escape techniques of reading in the mountains and flying "south for the winter" like a bird, while later Eliot imposes literary and historical meaning on the poem's allusions (18). At the center of these allusions are images of the death of spirituality. In the second stanza, Eliot enters a new motif, that of stones and broken idols. He wonders what has happened to his landscape: "What are the roots that cling, what branches grow / From this stony rubbish? Son of man, / You cannot tell, nor guess, for only you know / A bunch of broken images" (19-23). The roots, previously opaque, now cling to a sexually perverse image and arise from a "rubbish rock" which will be repeated later as a figure of aridity. The "Son of Man", referred to by Eliot as Ezekiel, lives in a pagan age of "broken images" and corresponds to modern man in "only knowing" such a corrupt time. Eliot develops the metaphor of the stone as an object "without the sound of water. Only/There is shadow under this red rock" (24-5). Once again he places “only” at the end of a line to draw the reader's attention to it, forcing the audience to consider its relationship to the character of the poem. Indeed, the speaker then addresses: "(Enter the shadow of this red rock), / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow in the morning walking behind you / Or theyour shadow in the evening rising to meet you" (26-9). In "The Hollow Men," another meditation on broken spirituality, several stanzas use the word "between" to reflect the paralyzed state of his travelers between life and death: "Between conception/ And creation/ Between emotion/ And response/ Shadow falls" ("The Hollow Men", V.). Using this as a point of reference, the next line of " The Wasteland" explicitly suggests the inevitability of death: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" (30). That impending death is ironically compared to Wagner's romantic opera, "Tristan und Isolde," and further alienates the speaker from any emotional attachment. Wagner's sailor's song shows the mastery of long-distance love "The wind blows fresh/ homeward" and even if the "hyacinth maiden", an object of love in the form of a vegetable ritual, has " my arms full and my hair wet", the speaker confesses "I could not/Speak, and my eyes grew weak, I was neither/Alive nor dead, and I knew nothing" (note 8, 38-40). The girl's fertility and wetness fail the nihilistic speaker who straddles life and death, struggling to see and communicate. The theme of sight and communication continues in the next stanza with Madame Sosostris, a "famous clairvoyant" (43). "Sosostris" itself is a word of speech; the two occurrences of "os" in his name suggest the Latin word for "mouth". He commands his audience to regain their sight: "(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!'") (48). One of her cards is a "one-eyed merchant" who "carries [something] on her back that" she is "forbidden to see" (53-4). This lack of depth perception, both the one-eyed man's and her own, leads her to issue the ironic command "Fear death by water" (55). Yet is it ironic that one should fear a death that seemingly drenches the desiccated landscape, or has even the Grail the speaker seeks, water, failed him? Sosostris concludes with the vision of "crowds of people walking in a circle" (56). This ritual, devoid of any movement or meaning and similar to the children's recitation and encircling of the prickly pear in "The Hollow Men", favors the latter, so much so that even a Fisher King or some other Questar is unable to help the earth. Eliot changes to less abstract terms as he describes London, the "Unreal City / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn" as a land of the marching dead. Again using irony to magnify the barrenness of the land, Eliot describes the crowds "flowing over London Bridge, so many/ I had not thought that death had undone so many./ Sighs, short and rare, were exhaled" ( 62-4). These breathless lives of exhalations become only the object of the speaker's sarcastic wrath: "'Stetson!/ You who were with me on the ships in Mylae!/ That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year/ Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?” (69-73). “Stetson,” associating its name and the capitalist-driven battle of Mylae, links modern commercialism to death rituals, in this case that of a corpse instead of vegetation. Jesse Weston, in "The Golden Bough", states that broken lands in need of a Mission fall into two categories: those where the infertility predates the Mission and those where it is caused by a Hero's failure to respond to the call. Up to this point, Eliot has refrained from pointing to man as the root of the wasteland problem, but in his description of vapid London, he seems to blame man's declining value system for its dying landscape. Along with man's imperfect values ​​comes an imperfect sense of communication. In "A Game of Chess", a womanQueen-like she sits in furniture that suits her magnificent but empty existence: "The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Shined on the marble, where the glass / Doubled the flames / Reflecting the light on the table while/ It glitter of her jewels rose to meet her" (77-8, 82-4). The rich, seductive prose that lavishes words like “burnished,” “bright,” and “glitter” on the woman's possessions implies that her value is as false as her “strange synthetic perfumes,/ Ointment, powdered, or stirred, confused liquid / And stifled the sense of odors moved by the air" (87-89). The endings “ed” or “id,” as in “dust,” “troubled,” and “drowned,” connote a passivity, as if the world is inflicting what is.trouble and confusion upon the woman. In this medium, the "smells" now resemble the landscape of the first stanza as they too are stirred from without (like the smoke from the candles, "Stir the pattern on the coffered ceiling") (93). A conversation between the woman and her husband is staged: "'My nerves are shot tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me./ Talk to me. Why don't you ever talk. Talk./ What are you thinking? What are you thinking? What ?/ I never know what you're thinking.'" (111-4). The flat, short sentences that hold even the slightest emotion in the questions and statements move the poem overtly onto the theme of inarticulation between the sexes. A nihilistic component emerges from their abysmal comments: "'Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember/Nothing?'" (121-2) The separation of "Nothing" is not accidental, and allows Eliot to end with his aristocratic duelists and explores an example of desperate working-class communication. Eliot uses colloquial slang to recount a one-sided conversation in a pub. This lively scene at first seems like a reminder of how humans can communicate, and Eliot leads the reader to this suspicion by using the word “said” twice in the first two lines: “When Lil's husband was demobbed, I said / didn't do it" don't mince words, I told her myself" (139-40). She is intermittently interrupted by the bartender, whose call to "Hurry up, please, it's time" carries with it death-threatening implications and comes at quicker intervals. The woman tells of an abortion, and the infertility of humanity that dominates her need to avoid loneliness is summed up in her question "What do you get married for if you don't want children?" (164) That loneliness brings Eliot back to the bleak landscape of “The Fire Sermon.” Personification aids comparisons between human and environmental death: “the last fingers of the leaf/ Sinking and sinking into the wet bank” (173-4). The Fisher King makes his appearance here, but in the midst of a corrupt ritual: "A mouse crept softly through the vegetation/ Dragging his slimy belly onto the bank/ As I fished in the dark canal" (187-9). The snake-like rat recalls the Edenic fall of man, another example of how man has brought this "tedious" plague upon himself. Further accusations are made against man for his robotic nature: "the human engine waits/ Like a taxi quivering waiting" (216-7). Tiresias, explained by Eliot as the union of both sexes, is again remembered for witnessing the sexually grotesque encounter between a man and a woman. Man's ties to a conqueror or colonizer emerge when he "immediately assaults her;/ Probing hands meet no defense" (239-40). Following this encounter, "The Wasteland" becomes much less poetic; his lines become shorter and make no effort at lyricism: "The river sweats / Oil and tar / The barges drift / With the changing tide" (266-9). The climax of the poem invokes a series of images of water. In "Death by Water," Madame Osostris's admonition, Eliot laments the passing of Phleba the Phoenician, when "A current beneath the sea/ Gathered his., 1996.