Themes & Symbols in The Poem "The Waste Land"

Themes & Symbols in the Poem "The
Waste Land"
T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” was published in
1922 and depicts the devastation and despair brought
on by World War I, in which he lost one of his close
friends. According to the poet Ezra Pound, the poem
represents the collapse of Western civilization.
Thematically and rhetorically, "The Waste Land"
describes a postwar landscape of fractured identity and
people who are unable to connect meaningfully with
others or the world that surrounds them.
The Fragmented Form of the Poem as a Symbol

Unlike traditional poems, tidy connections and neat
organization are largely absent in "The Waste Land." For
example, the poem opens with “April is the cruelest
month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing /
Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”
At first glance, the opening might sound like we're being
offered a more pessimistic take on April's 'sweet
showers' in the prologue of Chaucer’s "Canterbury
Tales." But such expectation gets shattered by the time
you reach line 11: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus
Litauen, echt deutsch [“I am not Russian at all; I come
from Lithuania, I am a real German”]. The line fragments
the two languages and jolts the lyrical opening. As
pointed out on the website Poetry Genius, even the
German text quoted above is fragmented, as it omits the
subject of the sentence “Ich [I]” deliberately to indicate
lack of identity.
Water, Symbols of Birth, Death and Resurrection
Water, a predominant symbol of birth, death and
resurrection, appears throughout the poem. As in the
opening, water signifies the giver of life, a symbol of
fertility. Yet it also stands for death: “Fear death by
water,” or “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” a
literary allusion to a character in Shakespeare's "The
Tempest" who had been drowned so long under water
that his eyes have turned into “pearls.”
The symbolic meaning of water as an emblem of death
climaxes in the section “Death by Water,” which deals
with a deceased Phoenician. “A current under sea /
Picked his bones in whispers," Eliot writes. "As he rose
and fell / He passed the stages of his age and youth /
Entering the whirlpool.”
Yet in “What the Thunder Said,” water symbolizes the
hope -- the resurrection of the desolate wasteland:
“Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves / Waited for
rain, while the black clouds gathered far distant, over
Himavant.”
Drought as Symbol of Death

Although the poem deals with war's physical and
emotional effects, the speaker of the poem uses drought
as a symbol of death: "Here is no water but only rock /
Rock and no water and the sandy road / [...] There is not
even silence in the mountains / But dry sterile thunder
without rain [...]" Throughout these and others, drought is
the symbol of death. To heighten the anxiety of waiting
for rain, the speaker says that even the thunder, which
indicates the possibility of rain, is “sterile,” thus killing
what hope of rain there is in this stricken landscape.
Symbols of Disconnect between Human and Natural

Worlds
In the section “A Game of Chess,” the speaker of the
poem derides the how modern world has lost touch with
nature. The organic life-giving nature has turned into
inorganic lifeless objects: “The Chair, she sat in, like a
burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble, where the
glass / Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
[...]” Fruited vines belong to nature, and not to an
artificial object like chair, for example. The characters in
the poem have isolated themselves into an artificial
world “drowned in synthetic perfumes.” Such mismatch
between what is natural and what is artificial pokes fun
at the sense of personal disconnect in “The Waste
Land,” one of the poem's recurring themes.
Centralized Theme
By simply looking at the symbols and their meanings
illustrated above, you can easily deduce the major
themes of "The Waste Land:" despair of living in the
modern world -- fragmented, empty, nonspiritual and
unnatural. However, under such overarching themes are
sub-themes such as resurrection. The poem's last lines,
"Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih
shantih", translate to "Give. Sympathize. Control. /
Peace peace peace." Some readers interpret those lines
as acceptance of a spiritually inert culture. Others say
they're a prescription for improving it.
Who is Tiresias in "The Wasteland"? Explain
the modernist 'logic' that is written into the
"structure of the whole."
Tiresias is the narrator of "The Fire Sermon." He is
obviously meant to be the blind seer of Greek myth, and
in the Wasteland he muses over the meaningless of
everything. Is there something more specific you wanted
to know? The "modernist logic" could take up a book
(and probably has) but in short form, the poem is made
of several seemingly unrelated sections connected just
by the guiding hand of Eliot to ultimately suggest a
world full of stuff but empty of meaning. It starts in April,
with flowers, and ends on a dry body of water, with
twists and turns along the way, connected solely by a
feeling and perspective, which makes it modern
(plotless) and less classicist.

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Themes & Symbols in the Poem "The

The Fragmented Form of the Poem as a Symbol

Drought as Symbol of Death

Symbols of Disconnect between Human and Natural

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