Myth And Religion In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Myth and religion in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Introduction

Thomas Stearns Eliot's work, The Waste Land, is one of the single most important poems written in the 20th century. The poem is incredibly hard to grasp, mainly because of two reasons. Of the one part, simultaneity and the lack of chronological order creates a chaotic feeling in the reader Of the other part, the poem itself is a collage of approximately 30 other works of art. This intertextual nature makes the composition turn into a “heap of broken images”. As Wyndham Lewis states in his work, Man Without Art, the poem is a “cross-word puzzle of synthetic literary chronology, of spurious verbal algebra” (as cited in Williams, p.7). In this work of art, concerning intertextuality,

As it is written in the first two lines: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land...”. April carries the connotation of Easter, and this Christian 'feast' is strongly connected with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. April is cruel, because it brought death for the Savior. However, beside death there is hope and possibility for life as well, as Jesus is resurrected from the dead. In the title, “The Burial of the Dead”, the word 'burial' implies one of the unavoidable rituals of human life, and at the same time expands the image to the suffering and passion of Jesus himself. Death is not to be taken as the final end, rather it should be seen as the possibility for rebirth. This is where other religions, namely Hinduism and Buddhism also create a connection with the poem. The concept of reincarnation defines death as “as a cycle from rise to fall and then from fall to rise” (Liu,

This story is made into a desperate journey “through a waterless desert”, maybe that of the wandering Jew (p. 22). The second stanza of Part V opens with the following lines: “Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road”. This section is similar to the one in “the Burial of the Dead”. Again, the miracle of Moses in the desert is invoked, however in the current situate even he is unable to sprang water from the rock and make the land fertile. To linger further on the water symbol, the “dry sterile thunder” suggests a world without rain, thus without water, which can not be a home for new life. In the fourth stanza the journey to Emmaus appears once more. Beside the two disciples, there is a third person, a “hooded” figure “wrapt in a brown mantle”. The presence of this unknown figure can be seen as a hallucination caused by the lack of water and the endless wandering. As opposed to this, the hooded man can be associated with Jesus or, in other terms, the Hanged Man. The card of the Hanged Man was the one which Madame Sosotris was unable to find in her Tarot pack of cards. ( Williamson,