paper 301-Modernist Literature

UNITY OF THE POEM??

 

Assignment: Paper E-C-301,

Topic: Unity of the poem ‘The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot

Student's Name - Pooja N. Trivedi, 

Roll No - 18 

M. A. Part II, Semester - III,

Submitted To - Dr. Dilip Barad, 

                        Department of English,

                        Bhavnagar University,

                        Bhavnagar.

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,”
…

“Unreal City,                                                           
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”

…

“HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”

…

“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” 

…

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                           Shantih    shantih    shantih

                    

What idea is conveyed, if these lines are put together? Do they carry any message? Whether they are interconnected with one another? Do they have any coordination to be the parts of a single poem? These are the questions that crop up in our mind at a glance or having bird’s eye view at T.S.Eliot’s master piece poem ‘The Waste Land’. And these questions always remain while reading any modern poem.

Usually, Modernist poetry is tricky to evaluate and comprehend. A basic reason reader considers a bit confused while reading a modernist poem is that the speaker of the modern poem himself is doubtful about his or her own ontological courses. For example ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S.Eliot,

“Time for you and time for me,

Time for yet a hundred indecisions

And for hundred visions and revisions

Before the taking of a toast and tea”

…

“Oh, do not ask ‘What is it?’

Let us go and make our visit.”

In fact, modern poetry is such that we have to go and visit it ourselves to understand, as said in these two lines. And the reader has to follow another marked feature of modern poem that is repetitive use of line. A reader has to read it repeatedly to comprehend certain aspects of it. Rather…The speaker of modernist poems characteristically wrestles with the crucial interrogation of “self,” often feeling fragmented and alienated from the world around him. In other words, a consistent uniform speaker with a clear sense is hard to find in modernist poetry, often leaving readers confused and “lost.” Such ontological feelings of fragmentation and alienation, which often led to a more pessimistic and hopeless outlook on life as displayed in representative modernist poems. Hence there are the chances of misunderstanding or devaluation of unusual features of modern poms.

Modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference momentarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity. T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land.’ is an adequate instance of such modern poetry. Initially the poem seems like a collage… where several things are gathered and scattered together without evaluation and consideration… ‘The Waste Land’ is generally described as a collection of fragments. The five sections into which it is divided do not claim to be complete in themselves. Further, each of these contains passages which abut upon each other without transitions and within these appear even smaller units, sometimes single words or phrases that are incomplete on form and apparently unrelated to their contexts.

It has been almost consistently misinterpreted since its first publication. It was considered a series of slightly related separate poems. New Statesman called it, “ several seprate poems entitled ‘The Waste Land’”. Alec Brown in The Scrutinizes called it,

 “a set of shorter poems tacked together”

Louis Untermeyer in American Poetry criticized it as

 “a set of seprate poems… a piece of literary carpentary, scholarly joiner’s work… a pompous parade of erudition.”

 Even a critic as acute as Edmund Wilson has seen the poem as essentially a statement of despair and disillusionment, and his account sums up the stock interpretation of the poem. Indeed, the phrase, "the poetry of drought". It has been criticized by a number of other critics as fragmentary, and formless. It has been also called “a series of poems rather than a single poem”. It is a group of poems loosely strung together. Some critics understand that there is no story or movement in the poem. For instance, The entire poem is worked in ‘the pattern of a collage’, an art form popular in the 1920’s quote Eliot’s own phrase in Part I, the poem presents "a heap of broken images."(l. 22)

 However,  Cleanth Brooks and other critics have shown every part of it is connected with others, not in a conventional way but by means of a complicated system of echoes, contrasts, parallels and illusions,on a careful study of the poem it has been found that there is a thin thread which flows throughout the poem and gives it a variety of unity. The poet is careful to ensure that these "broken images" affix to the sum of the barren and depressing waste land scenario, which is the dominant symbol of the poem.

Primarily no coherence is there in the poem. The lines from Wagner’s Tristan in the first section for example,

“  Frisch weht der Wind
        Der Heimat zu
        Mein Irisch Kind,
        Wo weilest du?”

They are formless scraps that retain little of the quality of the work from which they are drawn but they do support the themes of loss and love in the poem as a whole. The dominant figures of grail Knight, the Fisher King and Tiresias all taken from well developed tradition of their own, appear only sporadically. 

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.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,  
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

The diagram shows the difficulty. Lines 1-6 are linked by the use of present participles, lines 5-18 by personal pronouns, lines 8-12 by the use of German, lines 10-16 by the reiteration of the conjunction "and." The outcome is the absence of any such element which binds it to a succeeding or previous line, in this way suggesting a continuous speaker. The poem's opening lines do not hang together, neither do they fall cleanly apart. Here, as elsewhere, the poem plays between bridges and chasms, repetitions and aggressive novelties, echoes and new voices.

Eliot has used innumerable devices to impart unity to his work. He has applied mythical method to give form to what is actually formless and convey the spiritual degeneracy of the contemporary city. A myth is used as a norm to measure the anarchy and confusion, and degeneracy of the present, and attention is thus focused on the moral confusion in post-war European society. This is a very restrained, structural device woven inextricably into the framework of the poem to give it an exceptional unity. Here, Eliot was obliged to the works of two famous anthropologists of his time: Ms. Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1915). Both of these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern thought and religion

The legend's imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative (like religion or mythology) in the modern world.

          Another unifying link in The Waste Land is Tiresias. Tiresias can serve the function of "uniting all the rest," without that obliging us to conclude that all speech and all consciousness are the speech and consciousness of Tiresias. the protagonist of the poem, the old, blind prophet of Kin Oedipus of Thebes, helps the reader to put the whole poem into proper viewpoint. Tiresias functions in the poem in just this way: not as a consistent harmonizing consciousness but as the struggled-for emergence of a more encompassing point of view.

Despite being blind, he "sees" and knows all. Through his comprehensive consciousness. He is the unifying symbol and the substance of the poem is made up of what he sees and hears. Tiresias blends together different scenes, events and personalities ancient and modern, mythical and real. In the middle of the poem his character is revealed and the whole poem seems to have ‘Stream of Consciousness’ of his mind…As in third part of the poem he introduces himself,

“I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female brests….

"My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised 'a new start'.
I made no comment. What should I resent?"
"On Margate Sands.                                                    
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing."

          In the same part (part iii) the words “I Tiresias…” are repeated thrice. This refers that in certain ways he has turned out to be the mouthpiece and channel for the message which Eliot strives to communicate to this spiritually degenerated society of the post war world. Tiresias perceptions cut across the boundaries of historical time, geographical location and gender biases. Eliot uses this blind prophet-narrator as a strategic device to hold the poem together structurally.

   

Besides, the concluding lines of the same part demonstrate how unity is imparted interposing distinct theories of diverse culture and religion.

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest                                                    

burning

It collocates in order to culminate. It offers us fragments of consciousness, "various presentations to various viewpoints," which overlap, interlock, "melting into" one another to form emergent wholes. The poems is not, as it is common to say, built upon the juxtaposition of fragments: it is built out of their interpenetration. Fragments of the Buddha and Augustine combine to make a new literary reality which is neither the Buddha nor Augustine but which includes them both.

Another marked quality of the unity is the theme. The idea of sexual perversion and spiritual sterility in this modern man is at the centre and by and large all the parts and all the references try to come to that core point and indicate the same thing with number of examples and incidences. The two women in “the game of chess” have no actual connection with each other. But the poem relates them within its own design as two contrasting illustration of the failure of love in modern society. 

Hence, Eliot's definition of what the Waste Land is continued in all the parts, however, vividly but each part of the poem centers on the indication of the same point of sexual perversion and spiritual sterility. The structure of that of spiral up and down. The poem proceeds with dipper and dipper meaning into modern malice. Throughout the poem we come back to the same point, but at different levels.

T.S.Eliot has used the technique of cinematograph which becomes a strong indication to substantiate the poem as a consistent one. Just as in cinema-film, so in the poem, there are a series of shots transcending time and place, meaninglessness but taken together forming a coherent whole. Besides, the progress of modern psychology has transformed the concept of time and place where the past, present and future are viewed as a continuing whole. Hence, Time and space have been conquered and contemporary problem has given a universal and permanent significance.

“‘The Waste Land’ is made up of a number of successive pictures which after a few readings fix themselves in the memory and convey a coherent whole of meaning.”

The poem concludes with a rapid series of allusive literary fragments: seven of the last eight lines are quotations.

DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms                                                    
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar                           
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

….

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                           Shantih    shantih    shantih

The bundle of quotations with which the poem ends has a very definite relation to the general theme of the poem and to several of the major symbols used in the poem. But in the midst of these quotations is a line to which we must attach great importance:

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."      

Moreover, the poetic solution is continuous with the philosophic solution: individual experiences, individual personalities are not impenetrable. They are distinct, but not wholly so. Like the points of view described in the dissertation, the fragments in The Waste Land merge with one another, pass into one another.

“a sense of the oneness of experience and of unity of all periods.”

In a nutshell, correlation in the poem has been imparted in various ways. Ironically, The Waste Land is also a parody of literary quotes and scholarly references. The poem is liberally scattered with secular and religious figures drawn from history, literature, the Bible, or the sacred Hindu scriptures and also related to the European literary and mythical tradition. The continuity of past and present is emphasized. Their sole purpose is to apply either the plan of the waste land scenario, or to bring in the theme of redemption through a spiritual quest. Thus, the poem is not fragmentary, but shows a coherent pattern – THE POET”S SEARCH FOR SPIRITUAL WISDOM. These rather disorganized and seemingly unlike references are skillfully blended into the surface of the poem to provide a not-so-easily- visible artistic unity. Yet, it is surely there and an acknowledgment to Eliot’s skill in creating his poem. Every apt reader must wonder at the way Eliot controls and masters such materials drawn from so many diverse sources. Thus, the structure of The Waste Land is very different from usual poetry. It is written with a kind of cinematic style of flashbacks. It also employs "stream of consciousness" mode. , The Waste Land owes much to the Symbolist and Imagist techniques of contemporary poets. A combination of these many aspects gives to the structure of The Waste Land its "unity in diversity."

As a last point it can be taken into consideration that Eliot had to write footnotes and introduction about this poem which Wilson termed as “complicated corresponds” and this gives a point to defenders and stronch believers of unity a point to argue against unity of the waste land. Nevertheless, rejects the need for any such integrating Absolute as a way of guaranteeing order. Points of view, though distinct, can be combined.

"I contend that if one recognizes two points of view which are quite irreconcilable and yet melt into each other, this theory is quite superfluous."

          The poem does not achieve a resolved coherence, but neither does it remain in a chaos of fragmentation. Rather it displays a series of more or less stable patterns, regions of coherence, and temporary principles of order the poem not as a stable unity but engaged in what Eliot calls the "painful task of unifying."