The Waste Land

Submitted by Lacy Holleman on Mon, 03/11/2013 - 19:35

I would like to begin by saying that I have no idea what was going on for most of the Waste Land. Even after reading through a couple of times, looking at Eliot's notes, and skimming through a some of the "critisisms". I've always been really bad at "getting" poems, and most of the allusions and meanings in this one went right over my head. I'm probably misunderstanding even the parts that I think I did understand

That being said, there was one line in Part III that I feel I comprehended, so I'm just going to write about that. The line reads: "By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...". According to the footnotes, this is a biblical allusion, referring to the mourning of the Jewish people for Jerusalem. In  the poem the narrator is weeping for the people and things that are missing from the Thames. It parallels the mourning for days gone by experienced by all of the people that were left alive after the war. 

Comments

Jeff Drouin

Mon, 03/11/2013 - 20:31

This is one of the most difficult poems ever written, Lacy, so don't feel bad if it was nearly incomprehensible. What you've done here -- pick a spot that did make some sense and start to engage with it -- is the best way to proceed when confronted with confusing material. Start with something you think you can grasp, and then build out from there.

Part III deals largely with "the departed nymphs": the loss of regenerative energy as a result of the war's devastation. In the line you picked out, Eliot is indeed referring to a Biblical passage that deals with loss of the homeland. One way to start getting a foothold on this part would be to look up the passage in the bible that this comes from, and see if anything in it resonates with The Waste Land.