wasteland By T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is by far the most representative poem of the 20^thcentury. It exposes the very soul of the modern generation with all its horrors moral, spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy, disillusionment and waste. Eliot wrote the work not merely to understand the war but he wanted to show spiritual degradation through this poem.

“The Waste Land” contains five parts like

Ø The Burial of the Dead

Ø A Game of chess

Ø The fire sermon

Ø Death by water

Ø What the thunder said..

I. Burial of the dead

The first section, as the section title indicates, is about death. The section begins with the words "April is the cruellest month," which is perhaps one of the most remarked upon and most important references in the poem. Those familiar with Chaucer's poem The Canterbury Tales will recognize that Eliot is taking Chaucer's introductory line from the prologue—which is optimistic about the month of April and the regenerative, life-giving season of spring—and turning it on its head. Just as Chaucer's line sets the tone for The Canterbury Tales, Eliot's dark words inform the reader that this is going to be a dark poem. Throughout the rest of the first section, as he will do with the other four sections, Eliot shifts among several disconnected thoughts, speeches, and images.

2 A Game of Chess
 
 A Game of Chess’ is centred on female sexuality and the estrangement of relationships and marriage. The cupid, a symbol of sexuality and love, is hiding ‘his eyes behind his wing’ and Philomel is raped by the ‘barbarous king’. The ‘burnished throne’ the woman sits upon is an image derived from Cleopatra, a woman of great political power and beauty, yet commits suicide after a long and fruitless war. The woman begins on equal, if not higher, terms than the man, but her efforts in communicating with him and understanding him are rebuffed; he is the ‘barbarous king’ in a totally inverted way. Instead of forcing himself onto her, he is forcing her away from him.

3) The Fire Sermon

The first lines of this section launch directly into a long and vivid description of a litter and rat infested infested London.  The speaker fishes behind a gas house and, as told through the poem's third reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest, muses on his brother and father's death.   The scene looks more and more like something out of the trenches of the war, with naked bodies and bones strewn across the ground and rats scampering to and fro among them.

4) Death by Water

Death by Water’ is by far the shortest of the five sections of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land. The section which precedes it, ‘The Fire Sermon’, is 234 lines – over half of the entire length of the poem. 
Phlebas is the drowned Phoenician sailor of Madam Sosostris’ tarot reading which leads her to tell the narrator to ‘fear death by water’. The dead Phlebas also seems to be a merchant, as it is only after death that he forgets ‘the profit and loss’. The currents here are a homonym of the currants of Mr. Euginides in The Fire Sermon, but this time the currents aren’t hidden means of transport in his pocket, but gushes that wash over his bones, just as the rats did in the gutters.
‘As he rose and fell/ He passed the stages of his age and youth’ – Phlebas sees his life before his eyes, as many recall doing so at the brink of death. But here there is no hope for regeneration and resurrection of life. Phlebas’ contemplation of the use of his life will not bring him second chances. He is dead, ‘a fortnight dead’. Oddly, though Phlebas is dead only fourteen days, he is a Phoenician – that race is of the ancient Greek and Roman times and did not exist anymore in Eliot’s day. This incongruency suggests that death is an inevitable, universal thing that no amount of time and no change in nation can overcome.

5)what the thunder said

The final section of the Waste Land is about hope and resurrection. In the first paragraph there is an allusion to a Garden – Gethsemane – the garden that Jesus was in when the Roman soldiers took him away to be crucified.  This refers from the time before he was crucified to after it.      The next few paragraph backs up idea of wasteland and the title of the entire poem.
Datta means GIVE, Dayadhyam means SYMPATHIZE, and Damyata means CONTROL. The three D words refer to the creator of god in the Hindu religion, and they all make a sound that is similar to that which a thunder would make (thunder sometimes brings rain.) The creator of God says three things that instruct the lesser gods to (1) give things despite their nature cheapness, and (2) control their rowdy behaviors. The third is that he tells the demons to sympathize.