Tag: american literature

“Sweet Thames run softly till i end my song”

Sweet Thames, run softly, cause I speak not loud or long

Intertextuality and double meanings, the decay of modernity, the wonders of love and the sanctity, the confusion and the double standards of sexuality, of cahstity and of the idea of marriage. The third section of The Waste Land is an intense section, and honestly, it has it all. The Fisher King reappears, Eliot keeps alluding to classical literature and to Shakespeare’s The Tempest like he did in the previous sections, and he intertwines the present and the past, the then and the now to show the interconnectedness of, well, humanity.

I think possibly one of my favourite things about this part is the stilted post-love scene, the one where “the typist home at tea time” turns away and looks at herself in the mirror for only a moment.

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half formed thought to pass:
Now that’s done and I’m glad it’s over.
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

III. The Fire Sermon, lines 249-256

I love how every second line of this stanza is written in iambic pentameter, whilst the other lines are almost iambic but not quite there. It feels like the stanza is trying to be a sonett, trying desperately to tell a love story of the ages, but reality just falls that little bit flat and for this typist, a love story like that was just never in the cards (Madame Sosostris’s or anyone else’s). However, she smoothes her hair and puts her favourite tunes on, and in one way or the other, she is fine anyway.

Oh well.

These musings are in no way a good analysis of this wonderful part of the poem, but that’s not really the point either. I just wanted to ramble for a moment as this section is one that both intrigues, confuses and fascinates me, and I hope you find something in it that can make you go “hmmmm,” too.

-Andrea

“hurry up please”

it’s time

A little wile ago I posted an impromptu mid-American lit assignment-reading of the first part of “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot, and just for the fun of it, I’ve decided to make this into a mini series. The post, where I discuss why I really like this poem and read the first part can be found here, so in this post I think we’ll talk a bit more about the second part on its own!

“II. A Game of Chess” is where Eliot’s fragmentation really starts to show: this is not only where his character voices start to blur and go hazy, but where the shape and format of the poem starts to change.

The first part of the second part (okay, hang tight, this might get a bit confusing) sketches a noble woman taking in her surroundings, questioning her life and her everyday. In this part, Eliot’s use of imagery is exquisite and exuberant – you as the reader can almost feel yourself revelling in satin fabrics and lush candle light. The noble woman’s thoughts are disjointed and fragmented, however, and her existence is not a happy one, no matter the jewels and riches she owns.

The second part of the second part (told you this was gonna get bad) is a disjointed conversation between two speakers, neither of which we know the identity of, but whose state of mind we know is anxious, paranoid or at the very least strongly uncertain. This is one of my favourite stanzas of the poem, if only for the line “I think we are in rat’s alley / where the dead men lost their bones.” Normally lines like this don’t really get to me, but this one is just so wonderfully creepy and kind of stands out starkly from the rest of the poem. This is also where Eliot quotes Shakespeare for the second time in about 5 stanzas, saying “those are pearls that were his eyes”, and thus writing himself into the literary historical canon, changing the meaning of that sentence to no longer be about 15th century ships but to now pertain to desperate back alley abortions. Awful subject matter, wonderful poetic implementation.

The third part of the second part (nearly there!) is The Gossip’s part, and this is also delightful. This part is another one that starkly contrasts the rest of the poem, but to be fair, that’s kind of the point of the whole poem, isn’t it – to just be one big contrast, conveying a conflicting set of confusing emotions and situations. In this last part of “A Game of Chess”, we meet a woman in what seems to be a pub, dishing out the gossip on another character whose husband has been away fighting in the first world war. The story gets more and more into the dark secrets and life of the woman not present, Lill, it feels like it is told on a single breath with half a pint recklessly clutched in an eager hand, and it is only occasionally interrupted by the bar keep or pub owner shouting “HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME”. Time to close the pub down, no doubt, time to get the gossips out, but as a reader you’re inevitably left wondering “time for what else, though?”

Gosh, I love this poem and all its strange features and characters.

(Gosh, this thumb nail is wonderful – definitely keeping that one)

-Andrea