"The Waste Land" - The Burial of the Dead (part 2 of 2)

we begin where we left off last time about halfway through the first section the burial of dead we ended with the rather haunting beckoning of the speaker that he will show the reader something different from either our shadow at morning striding behind us the image of our past and our memories that are shrouded in shadow or your shadow at evening rising to meet you the image of the future the desire for something better to come that is not necessarily hopeful or even possible he says I will show you fear and a handful of dust this present that we live in that is barren empty reducing us simply to the dust with which we were made and now we have another one of Eliot's intrusions this interrupting voice from another language this is in German it's an excerpt from an opera by Faulkner entitled Tristan and is sold and it's an opera that the context of the Opera will help us understand its inclusion here at this point in the burial of the dead the Tristan and Isolda essentially recounts a love story that at this point in the Opera in which this is quoted Tristan is in England and Isolda is across the Irish Sea in Ireland and Tristan is lamenting the absence of his lover and wishing to see her return home he's looking out across the Irish Sea toward where his lover is and hoping that she'll come home and this excerpt here roughly translates to say fresh blows the wind to the homeland my Irish sweetheart where are you answers question of where his lover is where is the other half that completes me she is she's gone she's lost and it's this kind of mourning this lament this desire for something that may or may not return to us that epitomizes what we've seen in the very look at that so far that the blending of a memory that can never recapture and desire that we might not ever be able to lay claim to that middle ground where we see the handful of dust in our presence this fear between a memory we can't revisit and a desire we may not be able to have Tristan is caught in that moment he is remembering the memory of his time with this old and desirous of the time to be renewed for an encounter to be made and yet he ends with the question where are you my Irish sweetheart where are you and then we move on to a new voice and this again seems to be a blending of a memory that was pleasant and lovely with the desire to have it again that is unmet and unresolved we have the image of the hyacinth girl and she seems to be speaking we have the the gentlemen were responding to her up at this - here but she seems to say you gave me hyacinths which is a lovely flower with a purple hue you gave me Hyatt since first a year ago they called me the hyacinth girl we need to stop there this image seems to be a loving one between a lover and his beloved that he gave her hyacinths and adorned her in beautiful flowers enough so that she was called the hyacinth girl but that was her identity almost that she was this loved beautiful a stable figure in this relationship that she was loved and cared for and adorned with praises and beauty yet we see the response yet when we came back late from the hyacinth garden and noticed they are leaving the garden together there's something identic in that sense that what was once a loving paradise of a relationship between the two he says yet when we came back late from the garden your arms full your hair wet I could not speak and my eyes failed I was neither living nor dead and I knew nothing and we see that he has been diminished and reduced into essentially nothing that at that time she was the hyacinth girl she wore the flowers they had a relationship yet when we came back from the garden your arms full of hyacinths your hair wet from the ponds I could not speak he could not declare any kind of love my eyes failed I could not see to see to quote Emily Dickinson I could not see you for what you once were I was nothing I was neither living nor dead and this is the image of the undead the the great area between life and death that Eliot seems to believe we exist in that later on in the burial of the dead he'll depict a crowd of the undead a crowd of walking Undead crossing the London Bridge that they are neither living nor dead they were just the Hollow Men as he'll say in a in a separate poem neither living nor dead essentially nothing forced with this burden of consciousness forced to live we cannot do anything else but we have a life with no meaning we are dead we see nothing we speak nothing we know nothing he said I was looking into the heart of light the silence hear the heart of life beckoning back to the beauty and light that she bears in her being he was looking at her and looking into the heart of light in the silence but to ultimately no end and we have again a quote from vogner here to end this section desolate and empty the sea and it's important that we characterize the sea as desolate and empty that this is the very same see that Tristan is looking appearing across looking for is sold looking for his lost love here though the sea he is looking across for that ship that bears his love is desolate and empty that what if there is no ship bearing his beloved bringing her back home at the edge of the horizon what if the sea the distance is love is desolate and empty what if the distance between our present and our past in our future is infinite as the horizon and as Elliott promised we have another voice these competing voices toppling on top of each other much like the Tower of Babel we have a separate voice now a separate encounter we jump cut to it with no real transition Madame Sesostris famous clairvoyant Madame's a sorceress being a fortune-teller a secular version of the seer that we had at the beginning of the epigraph with the Sibyl the prophetess who wished for eternal life but neglected to wish for eternal youth and so we have an eternity of life but also an eternity of age we have the image of the seer and the prophetess who cannot see so well as to wish for the right thing and thus is caught in a perpetual aging of Perpetual punishment a curse of eternity with no youth Madame so sorceress famous clairvoyant had a bad cold so again we have this image of the seer or the fortune-teller that is flawed or broken perhaps not so supernatural as we once thought the supernatural figure that we can trust the prophet that the son of man who once could foretell the future that operated as the very mouthpiece of God yet the son of man that cannot say or guess but knows only a heap of broken images now we have the fortune teller that has a bad cold the fortune teller that cannot foresee anything of real substance cannot even take care of herself she had a bad cold nevertheless she is known to be the wisest woman in Europe doesn't say much for the state of affairs in Europe at the time this modern world we live in is flawed and broken the most trusted voice the wisest woman in Europe is a famous clairvoyant that has a bad cold that she is not so all-knowing not so Supernatural with a wicked pack of cards this is known as the Terra the cards that a fortune-teller uses to flip over to for to foresee somebodies future to declare someone's fate to be a certain way so she brings out her wicked pack of cards to tell the tale the the fortunes of all of us here here said she is your card notice that second person that we are being told our fortune here that she is speaking directly to the reader it's a device Eliot will use again at the last line of the burial of the dead here said she is your card that she is predicting our future for us the Drowned Phoenician sailor this is death by water which interestingly is the title of section 4 of the wasteland Eliot uses that that's what we are to fear death by water the Drowned Phoenician sailor that is your card those are pearls upper his eyes this is a quick allusion to a play by Shakespeare called The Tempest in which a sailor is presumed to have drowned it turns out he didn't but it's presumed that he drowns and legend has it that when a sailor drowns and is lost to the bottom of the ocean he is transformed into something mystical and something beautiful and so this line that those are pearls over his eyes is an indication that he has begun to transform away from a deceased human drowned to the bottom of the sea turning into something a bit more angelic or supernatural his eyes are turning to pearls and it's this hint at a resurrection that we saw earlier ironically doesn't actually take place that there is no real prospect of rebirth in Elliott's wasteland so we view this indication of eyes becoming pearls with a sense of irony that that is not our fate as drowned sailors what once suffice and what once brought us comfort no longer can so that's our first car the second car here is belladonna the beautiful lady the lady of the rocks and this is a religious formulation usually applied to Mary that she is Our Lady of Mercy or Our Lady of Grace yet here we see the twist that it is a lady of the rocks which is Eliot's image of the wasteland remember earlier what are the roots that clutch what branches grow out of this stony rubbish that is the fundamental image of the wasteland that there is nothing fertile about it nothing can grow in this modern world we live in April is the coolest month for bringing the prospect of growth in April showers to land that is dull dull roots mix with memory and desire ultimately producing nothing so belladonna is the lady of the rocks the Lady of the wasteland which is to say no real salvation figure at all the Lady of situations next card here is the man with three stays and here the wheel now this is an image we need to speak to because Eliot and many modernists and other literary figures even in history perceives the wheel to be the fundamental design of nature and there are a few different ways they noticed that truth reaching all the way on a macro in a micro level then the first instance we have the Wheel of Time seasons change we go from spring to summer to fall to winter and then back to spring it seems an endless cycle the cycle of day to night we wake in the morning we go to work pass into the afternoon we approach evening we go to sleep and then we live it all over again but time itself seems fundamentally cyclical which for Elliot in his pessimistic view of the wasteland seems to view it as a monotony a routine that were caught in that doesn't present any real way of escape but also you'll notice the planets orbit around the Sun that is a cyclical design that they cycle around giving us something to model our lives around that we map our months and our years around the cycles of the planets that even down to our blood the circulation of the blood in our bodies is a cyclical motion the revolutions of protons and neutrons around the atom are most basic building block all of it from top to bottom seems to be an endless wheel and so when we see the wheel as part of our fate it seems to coincide with the way nature fundamentally is but it also presents a foreboding view of what our fate will look like it will look a lot like what it looks like now then what if our lives and our fates our futures look more like a gerbil on a treadmill than a steep and steady incline we go further up and further in to quote CS Lewis what if that's not the case what if we simply revolve in our days in our months in our years just cycle around and we are just simply caught in the machinery of the modern world how can there be a prospect of hope or growth if that is the summation of our existence the wheel endlessly revolving and here's the one-eyed merchant a card that would later become the jack and this card she says which is blank is something he carries on his back so the jack carries the blank card on his back as a burden this hint said the burden of consciousness that human beings are required to bear then we have no choice in the matter of our consciousness or our existence we are subjected to this world by birth and we have no real choice and so for that next car that she presents to be blank seems to present a meaninglessness to at all a sense of Oblivion that there is no real solution or no real resolution to all of these conflicts and fears that we face the card is ultimately blank yet we must carry it on our back and Madame's a sorceress is forbidden to see it even the wisest woman in Europe is not able to tell the meaning or the substance of this blank card we bear this burden of consciousness the great question as to why we are here why are we caught in this wheel why are we existing in this wasteland Madame's and saucers cannot tell us and neither can any other form of truth that once satisfied we are forbidden to see she says I do not find the Hanged Man which that card in the Tarot pack embodies the sense of a messiah a scapegoat figure one who would take on the punishments for the sins of another she says I do not find this Christ figure this Messiah figure and she reiterates what she started with fear death by water again giving us a taste of what we'll see at section four of the wasteland where we are actually presented with an episode of death by water with the Drowned Phoenician sailor but Pripet perhaps most interesting is this last piece that she gives the reader she says I do see earlier she said I do not see the hanged man I see crowds of people walking around in a ring and this is interesting because it's a straight allusion to Dante's Inferno in which Dante comes to the lip of the pit of hell and peers downward and all he is able to see are the many layers of hell spiraling downward into the center of the earth these layers these walkways carved into the edge of the earth that simply spiraled down creating different layers or different casts of hell and his remarking here that what he sees are crowds of people walking around in a ring which brings that hell image straight to the forefront of our fortune if this is the last image that madam so sorceress sees we have nothing but to deepen ourselves into a great pit of despair to see our existence simply walking around in a ring enduring this wheel image cycling through our powers and our weeks and our months ultimately to no end we live we go to work we drink our coffee we go to bed we get married we grow old and ultimately we die but if that's the end if death is our final event what hope do we have and that is the real question that Elliot brings to the forefront if this wasteland is the culmination of our life why should we look to things to satisfy us or present any real kind of hope or purpose to our existence are we not simply walking around in a ring are we not crowds of people spiraling ever downward much like the Civil who is aging and aging and aging as she lives forever that there is no real end there's no real purpose to it there's no meaning behind it thank you she says you see dear mrs. equit own tell her I bring the horoscope myself one must be so careful these days these days hinting at the modern world we live in we must be skeptical distrust everything surely we must write if everything we once knew from literature from religion from philosophy from music and art if all of it in this modern world has has been diminished and reduced to this wasteland we live in where we are simply idly idly circling around - no meaning into no end how can we have any real authority on anything who can be trusted what can we trust it these days are fraught with betrayal skepticism cynicism meaninglessness in this last section Elliot presents probably one of his most famous images in the wasteland but he begins it with a reference to Baudelaires poetry Charles Baudelaire is a French poet the 19th century French poet famous for his collection of poetry called the flowers of evil but in that collection he describes Paris that the city he loved so much as an unreal city the city that is not quite real that is surreal and um ghostly even and now Elliott is applying that phrase to describe London as we'll see London is the unreal city this ghostly ethereal undead City this modern world being filled with ghosts of what of who we once were unreal city under the brown fog of a winter dawn notice we are underneath a fog we are trapped within this framework that we are under the fog that isolates us blinds us confuses us here's a great shroud over the wasteland that prohibits us from seeing remember the man responding to the hyacinth girl I could not speak I could not see my eyes failed and now we are shrouded in fog unable to see ahead of us everything is wrapped in shadow a crowd notice repetition here the same crowd that Dante saw in hell that Madame Sesostris foretold now Elliot sees a crowd flowing over London Bridge and he'll repeat this word flowing later it seems like crowds of people are poring over London Bridge much like the Thames that flowed beneath it a crowd he says flowed over London Bridge so many I had not thought death had undone so many here's another quote from Dante again as he is winding his way through the inferno at the beginning of Dante's great Divine Comedy one of his great astonishing remarks is that he is simply amazed at how many people populate this hell and yet here Elliot uses the same phrase to describe the kind of astonishment we see it how many people have been undone by this living death that the modern world provides they are not physically dead that they are shuffling across London Bridge cycling through their hours in their day's pointlessly purposelessly so it presents a living death not me that is perhaps more frightening than death at least death is finite death is definite with this living death we live in the modern age this is existence that is unexplainable without purpose without meaning is worse and so for Eliot London is now a sort of hell with crowds of people flowing over it going to their jobs working from 9:00 to 5:00 coming home eating dinner going to bed waking up to do it all over again he says this death has undone so many we have become unraveled by the wasteland we live in size short and infrequent were exhaled and each man fixed his eyes before his feet Wilfred Owen has a quote similar in his great poem dulce et decorum s to world war one poem he says men marched asleep and that image for Owen applied to World War one in a trench warfare that he saw firsthand is this despairing depressing reality that men are simply following the leader we lock arms with those ahead of us and we march asleep we trudge through the dirt and soil of this barren land that has been destroyed by bombs and explosions and death and decay is just nothing can be the same as once was there's no growth we marked asleep we march as Holloman pointlessly flowing over London Bridge each man fixed his eyes before his feet this has another interesting quality to it that human fellowship and communion and camaraderie has almost entirely vanished it's the irony here that they are not alone yet they are lonely that we need to pick up here they are not alone this is a crowd people jam-packed on London Bridge yet all of them have their eyes fixed on their own feet that they are fundamentally lonely and isolated from one another and detached from one another there is no meaningful intimacy in the wasteland anymore everything has been neutered of its joy and its purpose that it once had yet we are still crowded together we are still stuck together on this earth and perhaps we can't help but see a 21st century parallel here then one might notice the kind of online presence that we have where we would point to hundreds of friends on Facebook and Instagram these these communities that we feel so invested in and so much a part of that we belong to this vast network of friends and communities and families and yet an outside observer might notice that it's simply one person stuck at a desk looking at a computer screen that we feel like we are companions that we are friends that we are all connected on this great playing together but the deeper reality that underlies all of that is that we are detached we are fundamentally disconnected from one another cannibal wonder what Eliot would have thought of this internet age that we live in now 100 years later this crowd flows up the hill and down the street again the kind of monotony we see they go up and they come down that is what their existence has come to they go down King William streets to where st. Mary Wilma kept the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine st. Mary walnut being a church in London at the end of King William Street it's interesting that they are marching men marching asleep as Owen would say they are flowing over London Bridge undone by this kind of living death headed to this church that is tolling the hours but the sound that the Bell is making it a church is not a wedding celebration it's not the bells that herald the beginning of a mass I saw a church service but it is a dead sound and a final stroke of nine that this is more of a death knell it seems more like a funeral march again emphasizing how death has undone so many this image of crowds and crowds of people flowing over London Bridge only to end up at st. Mary walnuts for the dead sound of nine the final stroke of their life that they were marching to their own graves unaware unsung there I saw one I knew so the speaker declares that he recognizes someone and stopped him crying Stetson you who were with me in the chips at meal I which is an interesting juxtaposition hear me lie is actually a battle from the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage centuries before but it seems Elliot is mashing these timeframes together harkening back to the reminiscence of World War one that the recognition in this long march of people who have been undone by death the recognition of someone who fought alongside you at arm's meal I might very well be a veiled reference to a battle of the First World War you recognize as Stetson and says you who are with me in the ships at me lie that corpse you planted last year in your garden the garden image appearing again has it begun to sprout will it bloom this year and perhaps we have one of the sadder moments in the section where the prospect of resurrection is hinted at again but it's not a true resurrection it's not a pure resurrection the dead don't come back to life in the wasteland there is no rebirth after death but here there is a kind of rebirth that's hinted at he says the corpse you planted in your garden has it begun to sprout and the only way a corpse can begin to sprout as if the corpse decomposes in the ground and feeds the roots and the soil causing some vegetation to grow acting as a sort of compost which is a form of resurrection that the central molecules of the corpse reconvene into nutrients that supply life for a plant but it's not the kind of resurrection that religion and philosophy and spiritual considerations of times but by have once promised us it's a corrupted version of it it's a putrid disgusting version this image of a corpse becoming life by fertilizing plants it's no real great blossom but also there's no answer to the question either the corpse may or may not begin to sprout it may or may not bloom we get no resolve to that question as the sudden frost disturbed its bed has the cold unearthed the corpse Oh keep the dog far heads that's friend to man or with his nails he'll dig it up again here we have another kind of resurrection so one way we could have the corpse that's been planted come back again is to have it fertilize the ground and feed and nourish a plant another perhaps more grotesque way of seeing that corpse again is for the dog to unearth it with its claws that's no real rebirth at all it's just digging the ground up to try to recapture what has already died yet is decomposing on the ground and this last line we get another quote from Baudelaire a line that Baudelaire had used in his poems you hypocrite liked or Molson blah mon frere you hypocrite reader my likeness my brother and here again Elliott seems to be speaking directly to the reader you hypocrite reader my likeness my brother we are not exempt from the same pains in the same realization set all of these figures all of these voices in the burial of the dead have had to consider

Channel: Mr. Huff's Literature Class

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Keywords: The Waste Land (Poem), Burial (Quotation Subject), T.S. Eliot, The Burial of the Dead, Poetry

Id: LIX_rJ2Qm8M

Length: 31min 55sec (1915 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2015