paper9 The Modernist Literature

Topic : The Wast land Five parts of Poem.

Name : Solanki Binita M.

Roll No :04

Subject : The Modernist English Literature.

Paper No :09

Submitted to:  S.B.Gardi. Bhavnagar University.

                           (Department of English)

Introduction:

Thomas Steams Eliot was born in St.Louis, Missouri, on September 26,1882. His First book of poems, Prufrock and other observation, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde.

                         As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His poem in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-world war 1 generation with the convention both literary and social of the Victorian ear. T.S. Eliot received the Nobel prize for literature in 1948. He died in London on January 04,1965.

                        The Wast land it’s a epic poem. A poem made of collage of images. In ‘The Wast land’ Image and symbol take in city life. Eliot represent the city life people living style. Eliot use complex language and also use mythical technique in the ‘The Wast Land’. Poem divided in five parts. Five parts like this :

ü The Burial of the Dead.

ü A Game of Chess.

ü The Fire Serman.

ü Death by Water.

ü What the thunder said.

     

Each part in no equial length. Eliot not use the classical system of writing. In the poem no plot, no beginning, no medium, no end. Eliot present the condition of England /Europe people life and situation of the world. The poem related to three important myth.

Poem’s title The wast land refers to a myth from  ritual to romance, in which Weston describe a kingdom where the genitals of the king, known as the fisher king, have been wounded in some way. This injury, which affects the king’s fertility also mythically affects the kingdom itself.

The first part of the poem the poem is ‘The Burial of the Dead.’ The poem’s speaker talk about how spring is an awful time of year stirring up memories of a bygone days  and unfulfilled desires. The first part The Burial of the dead stars with this line like:

                            April is the cruelest month breeding

                            Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

                            Memory and desire, stirring

                            Dull roots with spring rain……..

    In this lines unknown speaker claims that April is the cruelest month, even though we might usually thinking of spring as a time of love. This section title from a line in the Anglican burial service. These recollection from Wagner’s operatic version of Tristan and Isolate an Arthurian take of adultery and loss.

                                        ‘Summer Surprised us, coming over the Starnbegerse’.

This line talk about how “Summer Surprised us” meaning that the poem’s speaker has a crowed they hung out with in the past, but we’re not clear who “us” is.

                                        Second part of the poem is ‘ A Game of Chess’.

This section takes its title from two plays by the early  17^th century playwright Thomas Middleton, in one of which the move in a game of chess denote stages in seduction.

                                        This part start with like this lines:

                            The  chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

                            Glowed in the marble, where the glass,

                            Held up by standardats wrought with fruited vines…….

This part opens with a description of a woman sitting inside a really expensive room. Eliot vividly paints a picture of someone sitting on the bank of the famous Thames river in Landon. Although Eliot is able to produce starting beautiful poetry from the rough speech of the women in bar he nevertheless present their conversation as reason for pessimism.

                            The third part of the poem is ‘The Fire Sermon.’

The title of this, the longest section of the poem .This part start with like this lines:

                                        ‘The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf.

                                        Clutch and sink into the wet bank, the wind.

                                        Crosses the branch land, unheard the nymphs are departed.’……

This section opens with a desolate riverside scene: Rats and garbage surround the speaker, who is fishing and ‘musing on the king my brother’s wreck.’  The Fire Sermon however, also includes bits of many musical pieces, including Spenser’s wedding song, a soldier’s ballad a nightingale’s chirps, a song from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wake filed, and a mandolin tune.

                            The fourth part of the poem is ‘Death by Water’

This part is shortest of section in the poem. This part describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician who has died, apparently by drowning. This part start like lines:

                            ‘Phelbas the Phoenician a fortnight dead,

                            Forget the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

                            And the profit and loss………’ 

                           

                This lines tells us that some guy named Phlebas the Phoenician is the one who’s been killed by water. He’s been dead for two weeks, or a fortnight.

                The fifth part of the poem is ‘What the Thunder Said.’

                                    The final section of the poem opening is taken from the crucifixion of Christ.This section start like this lines:

                                    ‘After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens ,

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying’……..

These lines in particular refer to the moment that has come after death of Christ, but before his rebirth on Easter Sunday. The scene then shifts to the Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where thunder rumbles. According to these fables, the thunder “gives “, “sympathizes” and “controls” through out’s “speech”. Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunder’s power.

            The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children’s song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to final chant of “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih”-the traditional ending to an Upanishad.

Conclusion:    

  In this poem Eliot use many themes. He write about people life. Eliot’s achievement in this highly sophisticated poem is the blending of the disparate element of varied traditional into a unity that may itself be both an object lesson in and for the necessity of artistic wholeness.