User:Toby Decker

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A 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. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

This excerpt from Part I of ''The Waste Land'', entitled, "The Living of the Dead" introduces the the reader to an unromantic landscape that is hostile to other forms of life.  The speaker reports that  his environment offers very little in the way of relief; the only place in which the speaker may find any semblance of "shelter" is under the "shadow of this red rock."  The speaker also considers the role of abstraction, claiming that he has something to reveal which can not be viewed by the differing shadows of the morning or evening.  Delaunay's untraditional rendering of a traditional scene  similarly explores a locale that many would consider to be a "sanctuary" or "shelter."  Delaunay positions himself to view his scene from varying standpoints, similarly exploring principles of abstraction; as David Tomlinson observes in his article entitled ''T.S. Eliot and the Cubists'', the "cubists depict a cognitive map of the object such as accumulates in the memory from a variety of experiences of it."