The Waste Land  :  Major Themes

Life in Death and Death in Life:

Cleanth Brooks in The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth (1939):

“Of hardly less importance to reader, however, is a knowledge of Eliot’s basic method. The Waste Land is built on a major contrast – a device which is a favorite of Eliot’s and is to be found in many of his poems, particularly his later poems. The contrast is between two kinds of life and two kinds of death. Life devoid of meaning is death; sacrifice, even the sacrificial death, may be life-giving, an awakening to life. The poem occupies itself to a great extent with this paradox, and with a number of variations upon it.

Eliot has stated the matter quite explicitly in one of his essays. In his ‘Baudelaire’ he says: ‘I think, that Baudelaire has perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of God and Evil (of moral Good and Evil which are not natural Good and Bad or puritan Right and Wrong). Having an imperfect, vague romantic conception of Good, he was at least able to understand that the sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural, ‘life-giving’, cherry automatism of the modern world … so far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.’

 The last statement is highly important for an understanding of The Waste Land. The fact that men have lost knowledge of good and evil, keeps them form being alive, and is the justification for viewing the modern waste land as a realm in which the inhabitants do not even exist.

This theme is stated in the quotation which prefaces the poem.

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis

vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:

Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo."

(This Epigraph comes form the Satyricon, a satire of Petronius. In English, it reads: "I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar / cage, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die."

Her statement has several possible interpretations. For one thing, she is saying what the people who inhabit the waste land are syaing. But she may also be saying what the speaker of ‘The Journey of the Magi’ says: ‘… this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our Death

… I should be glad of another death’.

This is life-in-death, a life of complete inactivity, listlessness and apathy. That is why winter is welcome to them and April is the cruelest of months, for it reminds them of the stirring of life and, they dislike to be roused from their death-in-life.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

The Waste Land is primarily regarded as a poem that epitomizes the chaotic life of both individuals and society in the twentieth century. Thematically, it reflects the disillusionment and despair of the post World War I generation. The World that Eliot portrays in his poem is one in which faith in divinely ordered events and a rationally organized universe has been totally lost. There is sterility and waste every where that has replaced traditional order and fertility. Thus, the central subject of The Waste Land is really a religious one.

The poem is not just a reflection of individual hopelessness and despair, but a panoramic view of the total spiritual exhaustion that has overtaken the modern world. The sterile, modern-day human society waits in dire distress for a revival or regeneration that may never come. Both the vegetation myths and the Grail Romances that are frequently referred to in the poem serves to underscore Eliot’s main theme - the quest for spiritual salvation or moral regeneration. The poem in its central theme recalls Coleridge’s concerns in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner i.e. the need for redemption through prayer, penance and self-abnegation after a life of sin.

The poem thus presents ‘a vision of dissolution and spiritual draught’. This spiritual and emotional sterility of the denizens of the waste land arises from the degeneration, vulgarization, and commercialization of sex. Eliot’s study of the fertility myth (in Frazer’s The Golden Bough) of different people had convinced him that sex-act is the source of life and vitality, when it is exercised for the sake of procreation and when it is an expression of love. But when it is served from its primary function, as is exercised for the sake of momentary pleasure or monetary benefit, it becomes a source of degeneration and corruption. It represent the importance of flesh over the spirit, and this results in spiritual decay and death. It was Eve and Adam’s sexual desires or obedience to the flesh that led to the original sin of disobedience of God and the Fall of Man, and it is this very obedience of flesh that accounts for the spiritual and emotional barrenness of the modern waste land.

Allied / Minor Themes

Closely allied to the central spiritual or religious theme of The Waste Land is Eliot’s concern with the socio-cultural scenario of post-war Europe. The 20s generation attempted to destroy the last vestiges of pre-war western civilization through their iconoclastic attacks on the prudery and Puritanism of Victorian times, their uninhibited displays of vulgarity, cheap sensationalism and their desire to shock by extreme forms of eccentric behavior.

Western society had exhausted its spiritual and cultural legacy. So people now sought replacements in magic, science, other cults and a life of quick sensations through indulgence in drug taking, sex and cheap thrills.  As Cleanth Brooks writes in The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth: “They form the second of the two classes of people who inhabit the modern waste land: those who are secularized and those who have no knowledge of the faith. Without faith their life is in reality a death”. This generation believed in what Eliot once wrote^[1]: “So far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.”   The majority felt that despair, desolation, and despondency were the only honest response to their chaotic post - war universe.

All this and much more of the socio-cultural malaise that affected Western Society in the 1920’s is very effectively projected by Eliot in his poem The Waste Land. In its epic sweep, it captures the near collapse of 2000 years of Western civilization. This forms the secondary theme of The Waste Land, if not indeed at least a subject closely allied to the central religious theme.

Other minor Themes are related to Eliot’s perspective on time as telescopic or continuous i.e. the past, present and future are inextricably linked in one "continuum." Hence the poem constantly shifts its perspectives from the present to the past and vice versa. The ancient myths, classical legends, allusions to old literary masterpieces, landmarks in World history are all frequently juxtaposed in the context of contemporary events and personalities, shedding a fresh and illuminating light on both the past and the present. An understanding of Eliot’s time concept is crucial to over understanding of the poem itself.

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmWasteland12.asp

Religious Poem: I.A.Richards and Cleanth Brooks agrees that this poem is essentially a religious poem – a Christian poem. The Christian material is at the centre, but the poet never deals with it directly. The theme of resurrection is made on the surface in terms of the fertility rites. The Christian meaning at the bases of the poem is that human nature is liable to the temptations of the flesh, giving way to these temptations means a denial of the spirit, disobedience to God, and consequently it results in suffering and degeneration. Further, with reference to the ancient myths, like the myth of King Fisher, Eliot shows that regeneration is possible through penance and suffering, and this is the very basis of Christianity.

Illustrations from the text: Sexual perversion:

• A Game of chess: suggests that sex has become a matter of intrigue, a matter of moves and counter-moves, a source of momentary pleasure, a sordid game of seduction, and exploitation of the innocent.
• The sex-relation is a meaningless routine, a mere mechanical relationship bringing them no satisfaction – the typist and the clerk… e-text
• Not only has sex been vulgarised and commercialised there also prevail abnormal sex-practices of various kinds. Thus, Mr.Eugenides is a homosexual and Hotel Metropole is a place known for homosexuality.
• All Europe is burning with lust and sexuality.
• Unreal city … London Bridge is falling down. A social document of neurosis, boredom, ennui, frustration, disillusionment despair and hopelessness of the modern ‘Hollow Man’ stuffed in mind with straw.

Universality of Theme:

F.O.Matthiessen reveals the resembling contrast between the past and present to give universality to this modern epic poem.

* Sexual sins, perversion of sex, have always let to degeneration and decay. Examples of Fisher King, Oedipus and Thebes, Philomela, Elizabeth and Leicester…

In all these respect, the present resembles the past. In past suffering and penance resulted in spiritual regeneration and return to good spiritual health.

Here also Eliot implies a path to regenerate the denizens of the waste land. Eg. What the thunder said: Datta – Give; Dayathawam – Sympathise; Damyata – self-control.

Eliot brings together the wisdom of the east and west and shows that spiritual regeneration can come, if only we heed the voice of the thunder

DA

Datta: Devote to noble cause

DA

Dayadhvam : Sympathise with the sorrows and suffering of others

DA

Damyata: Self-control over one’s passions and desires.

Helen Gardner also discovers universal meaning to the poem: ‘the modern dilemma is the historical dilemma.’ The poem demonstrates that, beneath both beauty and ugliness there lurks in all classes and in all ages boredom and terror; all wars are the same war, all love-making the same love-making, all home comings the same home-comings. In this way, universality is imparted to the modern and the topical.

Eg. Mylae – Punic war…

Finally, another allied Themes of Eliot’s The Waste Land is its notions of the purposes of art and the structure of the artistic personality as evident in its technique. Much of the poem brings us face to face with the modern artist’s dilemma of how to find an adequate poetic form and expression to convey his/her inner experience. It shows us that the modern poet is acutely aware of the conflicts and contradictions the complexities and fragmentation of his society so that he/she can no longer use traditional methods of writing poetry. Hence the artist today is forced to recreate his/her own esoteric myths and symbols, and draw upon his/her own vast and unique range of reading for references and allusions to adequately express his/her meaning or experience. This, of course, leads to the charge that Eliot’s poetry, especially in The Waste Land is often abstruse and suffers from extreme ambiguity. Thus, the disintegration of modern art and poetry itself into the realms of obscurity, and elitism becomes a crucial issue in Eliot’s poem.

To sum up, in the words of F.L.Lucas: “The gist of the poem is apparently a wild revolt from the abomination of desolation which is human life, combined with a belief in salvation by the usual catchwords of renunciation – this salvation being also the esoteric significance of the savage fertility-rituals found in the Golden Bough, a watering, as it were, of the desert of the suffering soul.”