Thinking Activity : The Wasteland
Friedrich Nietzsche is progressive and forward looking where as T. S. Eliot seems like regressive because both have totally different sights and beliefs. Friedrich has the idea of 'Superman' who believes in faith and Self only. Superman has quality that he only believes in this life rather than after the death of life. Means, he has no belief in any mysticism. Super human is the creator of own life and values. He has his own motifs and will power. He thinks that the self is more important than anything else and there is nothing beyond the self.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
The poem – The Waste Land provides the modern reader with both a glimpse of the collective psyche.
Somehow Freud's point of view is parallel and both are totally against to T. S . Eliot. Fragmented parts are there in each poem which must be connected. The fragments the broken images are the remains of something that is once, presumably, solid but is now ruins.
The Waste land presents the remains of the culture and the world it describes are only the remains of a culture and of a world not a whole as it is. And The Hollow Men also support this argument and line suggests that.......
"This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised....."
The waste Land is also referred as 'dead land'. Mentioning only Indian thoughts which are used by Eliot in his poem, he reflects his reliance in Indic philosophy to come out from the agony. He uses 'Upanishads philosophy' which shows the path of living life. He uses that time where in poems , there is no calmness and no hope for bright future. He describes the way of living life through 'Sanatan Dharama'. There is the concept of ' Life in Death & Death in Life '. In poems, Inner turmoil of human begins visibly described. It is struggle not against any material things or outer enemies but struggle from the self. Being is not there. Existential anxiety are there . How to survive in this thorny state of affairs? Spiritual lack is also there and how to get the peace of heart. Human despair, spiritual draught exist there but the kingdom has no bright future.
"A dead sound on the final stroke of nine."
Above line is direct connected with death God- Christ. Eliot is regressive as compared to Nietzsche’s views because Eliot goes back into past. Eliot uses the mythos and historical settings to convey his messages at different level. Because Our behaviours and culture is constructed by myths. with the references of myths, poet is able to explain some moral lessons. Present and past is always connected because roots are always in past. His vision of the future is connected to past.
"How can rootlessness be repaired?"
From there the quest of T. S. Eliot to find out the way - how to be out from this Waste Land of the world of the early 20th century.
Born in St.Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there.He became a British citizen in 1927 at the age of 39, subsequently renouncing his American citizenship.
Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" in 1915, which was received as a modernist masterpiece. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including "The Waste Land" (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".
ABOUT POEM
Death
Two of the poem’s sections -- “The Burial of the Dead” and “Death by Water” --refer specifically to this theme. What complicates matters is that death can mean life; in other words, by dying, a being can pave the way for new lives. Eliot asks his friend Stetson: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” Similarly, Christ, by “dying,” redeemed humanity and thereby gave new life. The ambiguous passage between life and death finds an echo in the frequent allusions to Dante, particularly in the Limbo-like vision of the men flowing across London Bridge and through the modern city.
Rebirth
The Christ images in the poem, along with the many other religious metaphors, posit rebirth and resurrection as central themes. The Waste Land lies fallow and the Fisher King is impotent; what is needed is a new beginning. Water, for one, can bring about that rebirth, but it can also destroy. What the poet must finally turn to is Heaven, in the climactic exchange with the skies: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” Eliot’s vision is essentially of a world that is neither dying nor living; to break the spell, a profound change, perhaps an ineffable one, is required. Hence the prevalence of Grail imagery in the poem; that holy chalice can restore life and wipe the slate clean; likewise, Eliot refers frequently to baptisms and to rivers – both “life-givers,” in either spiritual or physical ways.
The Seasons
"The Waste Land" opens with an invocation of April, “the cruellest month.” That spring be depicted as cruel is a curious choice on Eliot’s part, but as a paradox it informs the rest of the poem to a great degree. What brings life brings also death; the seasons fluctuate, spinning from one state to another, but, like history, they maintain some sort of stasis; not everything changes. In the end, Eliot’s “waste land” is almost seasonless: devoid of rain, of propagation, of real change. The world hangs in a perpetual limbo, awaiting the dawn of a new season.
Lust
Perhaps the most famous episode in "The Waste Land" involves a female typist’s liaison with a “carbuncular” man. Eliot depicts the scene as something akin to a rape. This chance sexual encounter carries with it mythological baggage – the violated Philomela, the blind Tiresias who lived for a time as a woman. Sexuality runs through "The Waste Land," taking center stage as a cause of calamity in “The Fire Sermon.” Nonetheless, Eliot defends “a moment’s surrender” as a part of existence in “What the Thunder Said.” Lust may be a sin, and sex may be too easy and too rampant in Eliot’s London, but action is still preferable to inaction. What is needed is sex that produces life, that rejuvenates, that restores – sex, in other words, that is not “sterile.”
Love
The references to Tristan und Isolde in “The Burial of the Dead,” to Cleopatra in “A Game of Chess,” and to the story of Tereus and Philomela suggest that love, in "The Waste Land," is often destructive. Tristan and Cleopatra die, while Tereus rapes Philomela, and even the love for the hyacinth girl leads the poet to see and know “nothing."
Water
"The Waste Land" lacks water; water promises rebirth. At the same time, however, water can bring about death. Eliot sees the card of the drowned Phoenician sailor and later titles the fourth section of his poem after Madame Sosostris’ mandate that he fear “death by water.” When the rain finally arrives at the close of the poem, it does suggest the cleansing of sins, the washing away of misdeeds, and the start of a new future; however, with it comes thunder, and therefore perhaps lightning. The latter may portend fire; thus, “The Fire Sermon” and “What the Thunder Said” are not so far removed in imagery, linked by the potentially harmful forces of nature.
History
History, Eliot suggests, is a repeating cycle. When he calls to Stetson, the Punic War stands in for World War I; this substitution is crucial because it is shocking. At the time Eliot wrote "The Waste Land," the First World War was definitively a first - the "Great War" for those who had witnessed it. There had been none to compare with it in history. The predominant sensibility was one of profound change; the world had been turned upside down and now, with the rapid progress of technology, the movements of societies, and the radical upheavals in the arts, sciences, and philosophy, the history of mankind had reached a turning point.
Eliot revises this thesis, arguing that the more things change the more they stay the same. He links a sordid affair between a typist and a young man to Sophocles via the figure of Tiresias; he replaces a line from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” with “the sound of horns and motors”; he invokes Dante upon the modern-day London Bridge, bustling with commuter traffic; he notices the Ionian columns of a bar on Lower Thames Street teeming with fishermen. The ancient nestles against the medieval, rubs shoulders with the Renaissance, and crosses paths with the centuries to follow. History becomes a blur. Eliot’s poem is like a street in Rome or Athens; one layer of history upon another upon another.
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