The Waste Land

By -
"The Waste Land," by T. S. Eliot

For Modern March I promised myself that I would read T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land."  I actually read it way back at the beginning of the month, but like a good classical student I read it 3 times, which took a while. I used this annotated copy, which was very helpful.  First I read it straight through without much preparation, then I read it with all the notes, and then I read it through again, keeping the notes in mind.  It was hard work!  I'm not really a poetry person, and I'm especially not a modernist poetry person.

The poem is thickly allusive, so that every line refers to something else.  Lots of mythology, literature, songs, all sorts of things.  There is a lot about birds, and water.

Many different voices say things, and they mostly seem to be women.  Women keep showing up in similar circumstances; they are tired and used by men who have no interest in their welfare.  (Even Eliot's wife makes a small appearance, but I don't know that I should try to link those two elements.)

There are references to people walking through London, and I found out that you can actually map out a bit of a route, across London Bridge and around several streets.  London and the Thames are a major part of the poem.  Since it's also supposed to be about the Fisher King, a wounded king whose land was wasted until he was healed (and who was assimilated into the Arthurian legends), I would think that those elements go together a bit--London/Thames/Logres and so on.

I cannot pretend to have even begun to understand "The Waste Land," but it was good for me to work on it.  I do want to read "The Hollow Men" this month too, and eventually "The Four Quartets," but that last one is something of a future ambition.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 26, 2013 at 5:34 PM

    I read The Waste Land years ago, as part of one of my ambitious reading pushes. Like you, I'm not much of a poetry reader. I find though, that once I start, I end up enjoying it more than I expected. Maybe I'll reread The Wasteland for April - it is poetry month after all :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. JennyApril 9, 2013 at 9:24 AM

    I love The Waste Land!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more