Assignment

P - 106 Assignment

⭐Eliot's Use of Symbolism in The Waste Land

Name: Nidhi Dave

Paper-The Twentieth-century Literature: 1900 to World War- II

Roll no-16

Enrollment no- 4069206420210005

Email ID - davenidhi05@gmail.com 

Batch-2021-23(MA Sem-2)

Submitted to- S. B. Gardi Department of English. Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University. 

⭐Eliot's Use of Symbolism in The Waste Land

          

👉Introduction: 

Symbolism is a literary device through which comparisons are established between certain things. When an abstract idea is concretized through a physical object, the comparison becomes meaningful and vivid. 

For example, the rose is a symbol of beauty. Generally, symbols represents conceptions or ideas through things which can be seen or felt through the fine senses of man. Symbolism is very handy method which enables the poet to use myths and images to bring out the resemblance between two different things.

🔅What is Symbolism:

Symbolism is a literary element used in literature to help readers understand a literary work.

Symbolism is a figure of speech that is used when an author wants to create a certain mood or emotion in a work of literature.

🔶Symbol in The Waste Land

• The Fisher King
• River
• Buddhism
• City
• Season
• Religion
• Human Characters
• Thunder
• Drought and dryness
• Landscape 
• Fire

📌The Fisher King

      

The fisher king is one of the central characters in the poem; Eliot drew on from ‘Ritual to Romance’ a 1920 book about the legend of the Holy Grail written by Miss Jessie L. Westone for many of his symbols and images. The book is seen for the connection between ancient fertility rights and Christianity. It includes the evolution of the Fisher King into early representation of Jesus Christ as a fish. If we see it traditionally we find that the importance of the death of the Fisher King brought unhappiness and famine. Eliot shows the Fisher King as symbolic of humanity robbed of its sexuality potency in the modern world and connected to the meaninglessness of urban existence. 

📌River:

      

The poem refers to Ganges in Himalaya. River is called the mother of civilization. The river symbolises the flow of life. Rivers are considered serene also. It symbolises destruction as well as construction.

📌Buddhism

     

The Fire Sermon’ is the title taken from a sermon given by Buddha. Buddha encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolized by fire). Buddha preached nonviolence and wanted his followers to rise spiritually. He symbolizes universal Non violence and peace.

📌Water

   

In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot`s characters wait for water to quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of stagnant water. Although water has the regenerating possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drawing and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from the Waste Land. Traditionally water can be baptism, Christianity and the figure of Jesus Christ and Eliot draws these traditional meanings; water cleanses, water provides solace and water brings relief elsewhere in the Waste land and in “Little Giddings' ' the fourth part of four quartets. Prufrock hears the seductive calls of mermaids as he walks along the shore in “The LoveSong of J.Alfred Prufrock '', but like Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey (CA. 800 B.C.E.). He realizes that a malicious intent lies behind the sweet voices. The poem concludes- “we drown''.

Eliot thus cautions us to beware of simple solutions or cures, for what looks innocent might turn out to be very dangerous.

Water, a predominant symbol of birth, death and resurrection appears through the poem as in the opening water signifies the giver of life. Yet it also stands for death. “Fear death by water”, or those are pearls that were his eyes. The symbolic meaning depends on a deceased Phoenician.

“a current under sea picked his bones in whispers.”

 Eliot wrote

“as he rose and fell he passed the stages his age and youth entering the whirlpool”

Now let’s see water as a symbol in what the thunder said- here water symbolizes hope- the resurrection of the desolate Waste Land.

“Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves waited for rain,

While the black clouds gathered far distant, over the Himavant.”

📌City

    

Eliot’s London references Baudelaire’s Paris (Unreal city), Dickens’s London (“the brown fog of a winter dawn'') and Dante’s hell (“the flowing crowd of the dead are similar. The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past.

Cities are destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed mirroring the cyclical downfall of cultures. Jerusalem, Greece, Egypt and Austria among the major empires of the past two millennia all see their capitals fall.

📌Season

"I read much of the night and go south in the winter ".

  

Her woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence. Summer refers to joy,Winter refers to grimness and death. It refers to barrenness.

📌Religion

    

The Fisher King stands for Christ and other religious figures associated with divine resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of “what the thunder said” fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliot’s scene echoes the

Scene in the Bible in which Christ performs one of these miracles, Christ manages to feed his multitude of flowers by the Sea of Galilee with just a small amount of fish. St. Augustine and the Buddha represent East and West religious Music and Singing philosophy.

Eliot’s been interested in dividing high and low culture. He symbolized them using music. According to him, high culture including opera and drama were on decline. On the other hand, popular culture was on the rise.

In the poem, T.S.Eliot blended high culture with low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops. Eliot splices nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men”, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is as the little, implies a song, with various lines repeated as refrains. That poem ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowning- a scene that echoes Odysseus’ interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another way to Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions, elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics as a kind of Chorus, seconding and echoing the action of the poem much as the Chorus functions in Greek tragedies.

📌Drought and dryness

Dry symbols, whether it’s dust, red rock, cracked mouths, or dry bones, can be found throughout The Waste Land. The majority of dry symbols in the poem, however, can be found in the ‘heap of broken images’ section early on in ‘The Burial of the Dead’, and in the poem’s final part, ‘What the Thunder Said’, with its ‘empty cisterns’ (i.e., reservoirs) and ‘exhausted wells’.

This symbolism of drought and decay is linked to the Fisher King myth (see below), but it is also symptomatic of a wider cultural and spiritual emptiness: modern life, Eliot’s poem seems to suggest, has lost its way. 

📌Fire

   

Fire is especially important in the third part of The Waste Land, ‘The Fire Sermon’. In the Buddhist Fire Sermon, the 

Buddha states that everything is on fire: our lives are dominated by the ‘burning’ of passions, desires, and human suffering. We need to transcend this sensation and liberate ourselves from the base sensations associated with fire.

So ‘fire’ in this third section of the poem relates to the human passions and the suffering they cause: see the undoing of the Thames-daughters (women who are taken advantage of while sailing down the river), or the casual encounter between the typist and her boyfriend, the spotty young house agent’s clerk. The modern world is governed by these base passions and sensations, lacking any spiritual significance.

But Eliot is even cleverer, because his reference to, for instance, the church of Magnus Martyr brings in Christopher Wren (as his notes make clear), the architect who rebuilt so many of London’s churches when they were destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666. So even in this apparently unrelated nod to the interior of a London church, fire symbolism comes into the poem.

📌The Human Characters

The characters in the poem are not the only devices used to invoke symbolism. The tarot card characters Phoenician sailor, the hanged man, the repeated biblical references and other literary references all serve to touch upon symbolic value and also function as objective correlatives

“(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the lady of the rocks,

The lady of situations.”

The tarot reader Madame Sosostris conducts the most outrageous form of “reading” possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into predictions that come true in the further sections. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work of magic and transformation in English literature.

“There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!”

You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

`That corpse you planted last year in garden,

`Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

`Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

O keep the Dog far hence, That`s friend to men,

`Or with his nail he`ll dig it up again!

`You! Hypocrite lecture! –Mon semblable, -Mon frère!”

Stetston is a fallen war comrade. His failure to answer the speaker clears that the dead offer few answers.

“The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced: yet there the nightingale

Filled the entire desert with an inviolable voice.”

The two women in the second section represent two sides of modern sexuality. One side is dry, barren the other side is rampant fecundity showing a lack of culture and rapid again, Cleopatra, Dido, Lomia and Philomela are referred to here.

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

 Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the driven are piled (at night by her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and says.

Tiresias is one of the most important models for modern existence. He is held motionless by ennui and pragmatism. He would like to die but cannot.

“Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.”

Phlebas, the Phoenician died of drowning. In death he has forgotten his worldly cares as we have forgotten our own mortality. The only lesson that Phlebus offers is that, the physical reality of death and decay triumphs over- all.

📌Thunder

   

There are many mythical tales about thunder in the holy books of Mahabharata and Ramayana. It symbolizes the coming of good and evil times. 

📌Landscape

Various landscapes are shown by the poet like mountains, rivers, banks, unreal cities etc.

🔶Conclusion:

The poetries of the modern poets like T.S.Eliot and Robert Frost are symbolically. They give us many allusions through allusions rather than sticking to one. The Waste Land is symbolically a very rich poem. We rarely find such a variety of symbols except in T.S.Eliot’s Wasteland. Living beings, animals or insects have been important symbols. Land fertile and Barren both are depicted symbolically with deep meaning. River, water, Natural objects, drought, music, religion, song, king, queen and common people have been used with symbolic reference.

Words: 1,900

Reference:

https://www.englishliterature.info/2021/03/eliots-symbolism-in-the-waste-land.html 

https://interestingliterature-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/interestingliterature.com/2021/06/symbolism-of-the-wast-land