The waste land by T S Eliot

This was my facebook post i had posted in sem 3

★ Characters of THE WASTE LAND BY T. S. ELIOT:-

The Cumaean Sibyl :- appears in the epigram at the head of the poem. A guest at a Roman feast in the satirical novel by Petronius, c. 27–66 a.d., The Satyricon, relates her story. Granted eternal life by Apollo, she neglected to ask also for eternal youth and lived a life in death, continually withering but never dying.

★ Ezra Pound :- American poet, author of The Cantos, edited The Waste Land, cutting it in half and giving it the shape and texture that define it as the ground-breaking work it is. In recognition of his craftsmanship, Eliot dedicated the poet to him, using the Italian inscription translated as “the better craftsman.”

☆ the poet narrator :- recites the poem, assuming many voices. In his own voice, he seems to be an intellectual and ineffectual man, tormented by a sense that history has run down, civilization has decayed and that culture, while comforting to his lonely soul, describes the failures and torments of mankind but cannot bring salvation.

☆★ Marie :- is the poet’s first interlocutor. She tells him over coffee of her past in Austria and of her cousin, who was the Archduke Rudolph, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and how she used to go sledding in the mountains.

★ Isolde, the heroine of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, is referred to in the quotation from the opera beginning at line 31. She falls desperately in love with Tristan, who had been sent by his king, Mark, to bring her back to him as a bride. Tristan falls in love with her, too, after they drink a love potion.

★ Madame Sosostris is a clairvoyant and tarot card reader, a fortune teller. As she turns over the cards in her deck, she introduces several of the characters present in the poem through allusion:

★★ the drowned Phoenician sailor :- refers to Phlebas the Phoenician, whose death is the subject of the “Death by Water” section of the poem.

★ the man with three staves, Eliot states in his notes, he associates with the Fisher King, the impotent ruler of the waste land, and the prevailing spirit of The Waste Land.

★★ the one-eyed merchant is a figure that may be associated with Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant in the third section of the poem who propositions the narrator.

★★the Hanged Man, Eliot says, he associates with the dying god and with the hooded figure in the last section of the poem, that is with Jesus as he was after his resurrection, when he appeared to some of his disciples on their way to Emmaus.

★★Stetson is a figure the narrator encounters on London Bridge, representing survivors of war.

★★“She” is the way Eliot identifies the wealthy and nervous woman in the richly appointed salon that begins the second section of the poem.

★★Cleopatra, the hot-tempered and volatile Egyptian queen, as she is portrayed in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, is present by allusion as a precursor spirit to the woman Eliot refers to as “she,” because her chair is compared to Cleopatra’s barge on the Nile.

★★tereus and Philomela are pictured over the mantelpiece. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of how Tereus raped his wife’s sister, Philomela, and how he was changed into a hawk and she into a swallow.

Gossip in a dive is an unidentified cockney women who tells the story of:

★★lil, a woman who has had five children and an abortion and is old beyond her years. She would like to break off sexual relations with her husband.

★★lil’s husband is returning from the army and, according to the Gossip, will be looking for “a good time” with another woman if his wife is unavailable.

barman calls out that the bar is closing as the Gossip tells her tale.

★★Ophelia is the young woman used by her father and spurned by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play, who dies by drowning. In the poem, the goodnights the bar patrons exchange segue into her last words in Hamlet. Mrs. Porter is the keeper of a brothel in a bawdy song from which Eliot quotes.

Her daughter is one of her prostitutes.

★★Sweeney, one of her clients, is a recurring figure in Eliot’s poetry and represents a rather degenerate example of the human species, governed by lust and greed.

★Mr. eugenides is the merchant referred to by Madame Sosostris. He propositions the narrator.

★★★
☆☆Tiresias, to whom the poet compares himself and who, Eliot explains is his notes, represents the point at which all the characters in the poem converge, is a character from Ovid’s Metamorphoses who existed serially as both male and female. In his final embodiment as a male he was blind but had the power of prophecy.

★the typist lives in a small bed-sitter.

★the Clerk is a vain young man who visits her.

★★the rhine Maidens, the spirits of the Rhine River from Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, are parodied as thames Maidens, the spirit of the Thames.

★ Queen elizabeth i and her favorite, leicester, are imagined on the Thames, contrasting the opulence of the Renaissance with the industrial waste of Eliot’s time.

★★Saint Augustine, an early Church Father, is alluded to in the line referring to Carthage. Augustine wrote The Confessions in which he tells of his conversion from a dissolute youth to a life of religious asceticism.

★★ the buddha’s sermon in which he spoke of everything being on fire is referred to in the repetition of the word “burning.”

☆☆ roman soldiers are suggested by the allusion to “torchlight red on sweaty faces” in the final section of the poem, which presents the capture, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus in a series of images and allusions.

★★ the thunder is personified and made to speak the words of Prajapati, the Hindu God of creation.

★
the Prince of Aquitaine is a character in a poem by Gerard de Nerval, an early nineteenth-century French poet whom Eliot quotes. The prince, like the poet/narrator, laments the fallen glory of his condition by using the image of a fallen tower.

★★★★★
Hieronymo is a character in the Elizabethan revenge tragedy,

the Spanish tragedy, by Thomas Kyd. Eliot’s allusion suggests the vicissitudes of his own emotional condition when caught between the despair engendered in him by the waste land around him and within himself, and the as-yet-unrealizable possibility of salvation.