Waste Land Essay: All is Not Well :: T.S. Eliot Waste Land Essays

  every(prenominal) is Not Well in The Waste background           Eliots The Waste Land doesnt make sense. No matter how many symbols and every(prenominal)usions atomic number 18 explained by critics or Eliot himself, no matter how many fertility gods and east philosophies are dragged into it, the poem does not make sense. But then, it doesnt need to in order to be good or to have a purpose. All it needs is to have recollecting, and something need not make sense to mean something. The meaning The Waste Land holds for me is of something wrong - something so twisted and rotten, as to be intrinsically wrong. For me, this wrongness winds itself in and out of the passages and images of the poem and doesnt have the appearance _or_ semblance to have any hope of being righted until the end - in the stretch out few lines.   In every time, in every place in The Waste Land, something is wrong. The world of the poem is one where April, the se ason when growing things homecoming after winter, is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, the son of man knows yet a heap of broken images, and there is fear in a handful of dust. Each symbol and each allusion contains a grotesque divisor - one that was already there or one incorporated by Eliot. Lines 72-73 are such a nice, normal way to speak about a garden (Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?/Or has the choppy frost disturbed its bed?), except that the thing which has been planted is a corpse, and its in danger of being dug up by a Dog.   Tie different ways of looking at life are all tainted. Someone says, I shall rush out as I am, and walk the alley/With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?/What shall we ever do? The talkative woman gossips of the problems in another womans marriage and of her abortion, ending with the last words of Ophelia, spoken in her madness. Tiresias, the blind prophet, foretells the scene of a woman wh o endures the caresses of her l everyplace, and, glad when they are over and he is gone, forgets about the incident entirely. She merely puts a record on the gramophone.   The descriptions are often shocking and ugly, especially in the midst of a beautiful scene.