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

  All is Not Well in The Waste Land           Eliots The Waste Land doesnt make sense. No point how many symbols and allusions are explained by critics or Eliot himself, no matter how many fertility gods and Eastern philosophies are dragged into it, the poem does not make sense. But then, it doesnt rent to in order to be good or to induce a purpose. All it needs is to have typifying, 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 seem to have any hope of being righted until the end - in the last few lines.   In every time, in every place in The Waste Land, something is wrong. The origination of the poem is one where April, the season when growing things return after winter, is the cruellest month, breeding/L ilacs out of the dead land, the son of man knows only a heap of unordered images, and there is fear in a handful of dust. Each symbol and each allusion contains a grotesque element - 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 hot flash this year?/Or has the sudden 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 track/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 device prophet, foretells the scene of a woman who endures the caresses of her lover, and, glad when they are over and he is g one, forgets about the incident entirely. She merely puts a record on the gramophone.   The descriptions are lots shocking and ugly, especially in the midst of a beautiful scene.