The Waste Land

The overall theme of ôThe Waste Landö is the search for redemption or coming to terms and acceptance of life. This is particularly difficult in a godless world, one that Eliot uses imagery to convey in the poem. Like a man in his youth, the world used to bring images of fertility and seasonal change brought new life, but now in the existential world there is only sterility, ôA heap of broken images, where the sun beats / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / and the dry stone no sound of water,ö (Eliot, lines 22-24). Kroll (p. 160) maintains Eliot uses such barren imagery as an allusion to another time of decay, that of the Middle Ages, ôEliot is associating the decay, sterility, and decadence of modernity with the blighted land of the grail myth.ö

Living in an existential modern world basically dooms one to being

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ilemma one can find some solace and harmony, (i.e. redemption). Eliot uses all kinds of imagery of birds throughout the poem, from the nightingale and hawk to the swallow and the cock. At one point the speaker uses bird imagery to provide an account of what real union is like. It is not the lack of water, or rock, or sound that is missing in life but the purposeful meaning or harmony to the combination. As Eliot (lines 355-358) writes, ôBut sound of water over a rock / Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees / Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop / But there is no water.ö The bird imagery appears to represent the moments in life that are reconciled or harmonious, where one feels as in tune with nature and self as all of the planet and heavens. Sanders (p. 30) maintains that the bird imagery is purposefully used by Eliot because he is an ôimagistö and feels in such union or harmony in the context of creating this work, ôwhen the natural song of the bird is nearly indistinguishable from its human ventriloquistÆs; when the voice of the bird-bard, completely at one with his subject, approximates that condition which poets call æmusicÆ for lack of another æword,Æ and whichùto the true ImagistÆs way of thinking at leastùis n
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1345
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)