San Jose State University Week 5 The Waste Land Book Discussion I have the solution for this but you can find more information by online sources. I have at

San Jose State University Week 5 The Waste Land Book Discussion I have the solution for this but you can find more information by online sources. I have attached solution file below too. Please answer the 3 question below. (600 to 750 words max) you are allowed to use any source to answer these 3 questions.

For the discussion board this week, I want you to focus on the Wasteland lines 321-330 (the first stanza of What the Thunder Said) and answer the following questions:

What is happening in the stanza? (200 to 250 words)

What feeling is Eliot evoking through his word choice? (200 to 250 words)

How does this stanza fit within Eliot’s broader point in the Wasteland? (200 to 250 words)

>>>Here is the Stanza (321-330)<<< ----> V. What The Thunder Said <----- After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience The Connell Guide to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land by Seamus Perry Contents NOT ES Eliot in the bank 14 The role of Ezra Pound 20 Introduction 3 Who is speaking? 36 A summary of the plot 6 Stravinsky and The Waste Land 50 What is The Waste Land about? 14 Ten responses to The Waste Land 64 What does the epigraph do? 21 Vivien Eliot in The Waste Land 68 Why is The Waste Land difficult? 30 Do we need to spot the references? 34 What is wrong with April (1-18)? 40 What is the waste land (19-30)? 44 What does the German mean (31-42)? 49 What does Madame Sosostris foresee (43-59)? 55 What happens on London Bridge (60-76)? 57 Who are these women (77-172)? 62 What is the Fire Sermon (173-214)? 81 What does Tiresias see (215-265)? 88 What do the Thames maidens sing (266-311)? 93 Who is Phlebas (312-321)? 97 What is that sound (322-394)? 98 What does the Thunder say (395-433)? 105 Is The Waste Land a pessimistic poem? 117 Introduction The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is not far from a century old, and it has still not been surpassed as the most famous and, moreover, the most exemplary of all modern poems. In many ways, it continues to define what we mean by modern whenever we begin to speak about modern verse. Part of that modernity lies in the way it is sometimes referred to as a difficult poem; but, at the same time, as Ted Hughes once observed, without denying its genuine kinds of difficulty, it is also genuinely popular, and not just among the cogniscenti or the degree-bearing. “I remember when I taught fourteen-year-old boys in a secondary modern school,” Hughes once said, “of all the poetry I introduced them to, their favourite was The Waste Land.” My own experience as a tutor confirms that students – once they allow themselves to become immersed in its rhythms and patterns, and as they begin to worry less about obscurity and start 3 attuning themselves instead to the interplay of its voices – take to the poem in a way they do to few others. Not for nothing was it included, in its entirety, in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972), a decision replicated in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), edited by Philip Larkin, a poet not known otherwise for his hospitality to modernism. For the poem has indeed achieved what Eliot had conceived as an ideal: it is a committed work of the imagination that manages to speak to the broadest constituency of readers, as an Elizabethan play engaged the whole theatre. Wordsworth hoped for a work of “Joy in widest commonalty spread”; and commonalty might seem in as short supply as joy in The Waste Land; but in truth it shares the predicament it imagines with all the generosity, self-awareness, and inclusive tact of Wordsworth at his most characteristic. The poem’s appeal is intellectual, certainly, but also visceral, as much about rhythms as it is about references; it is by turns wittily cerebral, ugly, tender, disabused, damaged, resilient, poignant. It is a place where you come across lines with all the barren immediacy of Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road and the brilliantly psychologised horror poetry of 4 her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be savagely still but find, also, an unexpected lyrical loveliness that uplifts a wholly contemporary kind of perception – “Trams and dusty trees” – a powerfully unproclaimed sympathy: After the event He wept. He promised ‘a new start.’ I made no comment. What should I resent? It fulfils in miniature the demands that Eliot made of the great poet at large: “abundance, variety, and complete competence” – the first of those criteria of greatness all the more surprising, and moving, to find accomplished in a poem that has its starting place in so barren a human territory. The poetry is modern in a wholly self-conscious way, just as James Joyce’s Ulysses bears the marks of its own ingenious self-invention on every page; and, like Joyce’s masterpiece, the modernity of Eliot’s poem stems in large part from a strikingly powerful awareness of what’s past. My aim in this short book has been primarily to point out some of the fruits of that acute historical awareness – besides, I hope, sharing some of my own admiration of, and pleasure in, the extraordinary voicings and counter-voicings of this perpetually great work. 5 A summary of the plot The Waste Land is a modernist poem and not a piece of narrative so it does not have a plot exactly; but, full of thoughts of Shakespeare as it is, its division into five movements might dimly remind us of the five progressive acts of a play; and it certainly has a trajectory of a kind. The poem has not always appeared that way: some reviewers thought it lacked any shape at all. Conrad Aiken, an astute familiar of Eliot’s from Harvard, announced in his review of the first edition that “we must with reservations, and with no invidiousness, conclude that the poem is not, in any formal sense, coherent”. F.R. Leavis, an early champion, asserted: “It exhibits no progression.” After several decades of dedicated critical and scholarly labour and ingenuity, there are probably few admirers of Eliot now who would say so quite so flatly: the poem has come across in most critical accounts for the last 50 or more years as a fully coherent piece of art, even if the coherence in question is sometimes a matter of an intently deconstructive self-consciousness. Indeed it is perhaps possible for criticism to make the poem feel a little too thoroughly organised, thus missing out on something of that sense of rebarbativeness and dissonance to which its early readers often responded, and which probably still forms an important part of the feelings of most people 6 when they encounter it for the first time. “The progress in The Waste Land, for there is progress,” Helen Gardner said in one of the most helpful early books on Eliot, “is not the progress of narrative, movement along a line, the progress of an Odysseus towards his home or of Bunyan’s pilgrim from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.” It is, she says, rather, “a deeper and deeper exploration of an original scene or theme”, which usefully conveys both a sense of progressing somewhere purposefully and a sense of getting nowhere fast at the same time. So how should we try to understand its organisation? Aiken himself went on to suggest in his review that “Mr Eliot is perhaps attempting a kind of program music in words” – as though he were emulating a tone poem by Richard Strauss, such as Don Quixote or Till Eulenspiegel, in which the music seeks, without using words, to describe episodes in the title character’s story and to evoke the fluctuations of his adventuresome emotions. The Waste Land has many characters, not just one; but, as Eliot’s own note to line 218 observes, in a way all the characters are parts of a single consciousness or, as Eliot says, a little mysteriously, “personage”; and while no narrative exactly, you can see the poem as a symbolic depiction of the vicissitudes of that consciousness. The musical analogy has appealed to many critics: “the organisation which it achieves as a work of art… 7 may be called musical”, said Leavis. “If it were desired to label in three words the most characteristic feature of Mr Eliot’s technique,” said I.A. Richards, “this might be done by calling his poetry a ‘music of ideas’.” (Both were picking up a theme from Eliot himself, who spoke in several places about the parallel between music and poetry.) Allowing for the obvious difficulties, here is an attempt to summarise the plot of the poem, to many points of which I shall be returning later in this book. I. The Burial of the Dead The poem opens with a voice, unidentified, apparently speaking on behalf of an ‘us’, also unidentified, characterising the coming of spring in a starkly counter-intuitive way, as the unwanted re-imposition of a vitality happily lost through the dormancy of the preceding winter. This voice then merges, unannounced, into a recollection of episodes that occurred, at some unspecified time, in Munich and on vacation in the mountains: the poem only lets us know that a speaker is called ‘Marie’, a member of a grand family. The verse then goes through another transition, both in register and location: now the voice emerges from a dry and stony desert, invoking a biblical resonance in its address to “Son of Man” (which 8 comes from Ezekiel) to whom a prophetic voice promises to show “fear in a handful of dust”. The next episode, the recollection of a desperately tongue-tied encounter between the speaker and a young woman, comes framed by two bits of German, both taken from Wagner’s great love opera Tristan and Isolde. And then another abrupt change: we hear a dubious clairvoyante, Madame Sosostris, casting someone a fortune with a pack of tarot cards; and then another: a different ‘I’ again remembers crossing London Bridge, bumping into an old acquaintance, and enquiring in what seems a deranged way about a bit of bizarre gardening: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?” II. A Game of Chess Eliot offers a diptych of female portraits. The first, which opens with an allusion to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, describes a woman in an immensely elaborate and thickly odorous drawing room; she is described in a confusingly ornate and sophisticated syntax; a painting on the wall depicts an ancient story of sexual violence. She conducts a fraught, one-sided non-conversation with a man, presumably her husband, whose thoughts remain darkly unarticulated. Then, jumping to the other side of London, a second study portrays a woman talking in a pub as closing time approaches: she has 9 a tangled and inconsequential story to tell about a friend, Lil, and the homecoming of Lil’s husband, Albert, after his time in the army during the Great War. The section ends with the drinkers ejected from the pub, bidding each other goodnight. III. The Fire Sermon A view of the desolate Thames, described in an anonymous voice haunted by poetry of the English Renaissance (Edmund Spenser, Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare). The heterogeneity of the succeeding verse is disorientating: a scrap of an obscene ballad about a brothel-keeper; a lovely line from the French poet Paul Verlaine; some uprooted fragments of Elizabethan English; a non sequitur of a story about an ambiguous encounter with a merchant from Smyrna. And then we arrive at what Eliot’s note describes as “the substance of the poem”, narrated by a version of Tiresias, an aged blind prophet from Greek myth: he watches the seduction of a typist by an opportunistic “house agent’s clerk”, and gently intuits her thoughts after the clerk has gone. Another ‘I’ enters the poem, recalling the sound of music from another London pub, and the glory of the interior of a London church; and then we return to an evocation of the Thames, both the contemporary waterway of “Oil and tar” and the glittering river of the reign of Elizabeth I. Wagner 10 now returns to the poem, this time with a quotation from his opera cycle The Ring¸ which opens with the singing of the three beautiful Rhinemaidens. Except Eliot offers us not Rhinemaidens but Thames maidens, whose unhappy experiences in love are charted down the length of the urban river, from Richmond and Kew in Surrey down to its estuary, where the river empties out into the sea, at Margate in Kent. Descending now into the poem’s greatest moment of studied incoherence, some scraps of St Augustine juxtapose abruptly with a repeated fragment of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon; and at this point of linguistic near-collapse, the section closes in fire. IV. Death by Water A short section describes the physical dissolution of one Phlebas, a sailor from Phoenicia, whose corpse has fallen apart after a fortnight in the ocean. A moralising voice warns the reader to remember his example. V. What the Thunder said The opening lines evoke an arid desert-scape with a reiterative, sparse power. We tune in, briefly, to the voice of a traveller, whose journey is mysteriously haunted by an elusive third figure 11 whose presence is felt but who can never be observed. With a startling change of perspective, a bleak panorama opens up of crowds swarming over the “endless plains” of a ruined Europe; in a no less startling change, some vampiric figure briefly enters the poem; and in a further transition, the poem focuses in on an abandoned chapel, its door swinging in the dry wind. At this point, in a poem that has been full of aridity, rain seems about to arrive, and the thunder that heralds its appearance speaks in Sanskrit. The noise of the thunder is interpreted as the first syllable of a word of moral instruction in three ways: as “Datta”, meaning ‘give’; as “Dayadhvam”, meaning ‘sympathise’; and as “Damyata”, meaning ‘control’ (according to Eliot’s note). After each of these routes to spiritual transformation is announced, the poem hesitantly responds to their challenge, one by one: in the giving that would be constituted by “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender”; in the sympathy that would overcome the isolation of the individual, each locked in the prison of himself; and in the control that would have arisen in a loving response that (as the grammar conveys) never occurred. The poem then invokes its presiding landscape, “the arid plain”, for the last time, before an extraordinary crescendo of apparently heterogeneous fragments taken from nursery 12 rhymes, Latin poetry, Dante, Thomas Kyd and others; and the poem closes with a final invocation from the Sanskrit: “Shantih shantih shantih”, which, as Eliot’s note tells us, is the formal close to an Upanishad, meaning ““The Peace which passeth understanding” is our equivalent to this word” – or, as the first edition of the poem had it, “‘The Peace which passeth understanding’ is a feeble translation of the content of this word”. (Eliot was confirmed in the Church of England in 1927.) The poem has certainly glimpsed the grounds for such peace in its closing passages, and there is some feel to the last pages of a journey being completed; but The Waste Land can hardly be said to have won its way through to consolation in any straightforward way, and Eliot’s programme music does not end with an untroubled major chord. 13 What is The Waste Land about? Eliot was typically self-deprecatory about any momentous claims made for his poetry. “I am used to having cosmic significances, which I never suspected, extracted from my work (such as it is) by enthusiastic persons at a distance,” he once half-mock-lamented. The Waste Land has had more than its share of cosmic significances extracted, often about the sick soul of Western man. “Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world,” he is reported to have said later in life, adding: “To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” ELIOT IN THE BANK After some time as a school teacher – where he had John Betjeman among his pupils, 14 something remembered in Betjeman’s verse autobiography Summoned by Bells – Eliot took a job in Lloyds Bank in March 1917. He enjoyed the post: “It is a great satisfaction to me to have regular work,” he told his mother; and he was evidently good at it. In 1918, he attempted to volunteer for both the United States army and navy, without success, and his employers were pleased to see him back and One should never be too ready to take Eliot’s self-deprecation (or, indeed, anyone’s) at face value; but he was certainly right that people were ready to interpret the poem from the beginning as the statement of the dismay of an epoch. “The agony and bitter splendor of modern life are in this poem,” as the editor Harriet Monroe put it, saying what lots of people felt – F.R. Leavis, for example, who found a keen expression of “our present plight … the final uprooting of the immemorial ways of life, of life rooted in the soil… the troubles of the present age” (New Bearings in English Poetry¸ 1932) or I.A. Richards, who described the poem as “a clearer, fuller realisation of… the plight of a whole generation, than they find elsewhere”. Eliot would come to regard this sort of reaction among his appreciative early readers as set him on “new and more intricate work”; by the beginning of 1920 his salary had been raised to £500, a mark of how highly he was regarded. “I am supposed to be a profound economist,” he told his mother, comically; but he was accomplished enough to be entrusted with sorting out some of the many complications of Germany’s war debts, “and trying to elucidate knotty points in that appalling document the Peace Treaty”. The sense of the fragmentation of modern Europe which infests the poem was drawn from more than an acquaintance with the newspapers. Aldous Huxley visited him and found “the most bankclerky of all bank clerks. He was not on the ground floor nor even on the floor under that, but in a sub-subbasement sitting at a desk which was in a row of desks with other bank clerks.” Ezra 15 “nonsense”: “I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.” Nevertheless, despite his later remarks, such an epochal impression was not simply the work of cranky or wilful misreading for Eliot evidently worked into his poem material drawn from wide realms of modern history and politics: the poem is acutely conscious, for example, that its stage is contemporary Europe, in the aftermath of the Great War and amid the confusions of a troubled peace. In his notes to the poem, Eliot adduces Herman Hesse’s recent book In Sight of Chaos (1920), a book which charismatically portrays a Europe going down the tubes fast; and a sense of the important contemporaneity of the poem is bolstered by Eliot’s admiration for Joyce’s newly published novel Ulysses (1922) and its depiction of “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” – not very true to the feel of Joyce’s Dublin, in fact, but a good description of the world of Eliot’s poem. Among the other errors in interpretation that his poetry had encountered, Eliot later said, were “having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience”. Mary Hutchinson, who knew Eliot, certainly took the main reference of The Waste Land to be personal: “Tom’s autobiography”, she wrote after hearing the poem, “a melancholy one”. It is a poem centrally preoccupied by the failure of Pound was no less dismayed by such employment: “it is a crime against literature to let him waste eight hours vitality per diem in that bank”; and he attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise funds from wealthy admirers to buy Eliot out, somewhat to Eliot’s consternation. When his health finally broke in the autumn of 1921 the bank gave Eliot paid leave to recuperate, “very generously”, as he 20th century; but it was banking’s loss. While visiting him at Lloyds once day, I.A Richards was quizzed by one of the senior staff about the merits of Eliot’s work. Richards assured him that Eliot was indeed, in Richards’s view, a good poet. The banker, who comes out of the story very well I think, expressed relief and offered an institution’s... Purchase answer to see full attachment