39 pages • 1 hour read
T. S. EliotThe Waste Land
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form
The form of the poem is at once conservative and radical. There are no fixed stanza forms. Each section, identified by its own title, maintains its own stanzaic sequencing, thus creating a feeling of fragmentation. Grounded in the classical expressions of Renaissance and Elizabethan verse, Eliot uses one of that era’s signature forms—blank verse, a grand and stately verse form designed to elevate speech into august poetic form without the singsong-y distractions of insistent regular rhyming. Deftly, Eliot imbeds subtle rhyming echoes within and between lines to enhance the aural experience, but the poem is largely unrhymed. Although blank verse can use any one of a number of formal structures, Eliot uses part iambic pentameter—one of the most traditional and recognizable verse forms recalling the iconic tragedies of William Shakespeare and the grand verse meditations of John Milton.
That Eliot uses such an elevated form to recreate the moral corruption of a world adrift in inanities—bored and amused to spiritual paralysis by its own irrelevancy—creates the irony central to the poem’s scathing indictment of its era. Each line alternates between stressed and unstressed syllables, lending itself to elevated recitation and allowing for dramatic pauses and subtle emphasis. Eliot regularly, audaciously breaks from that form in moments that are at once intrusive and jarring. Blank verse—and by extension, the poem argues, culture itself—can no longer hold. The imperial dignities of blank verse are regularly, playfully interrupted. The poem lapses, for example, into lines from a foreign language; it inserts quoted material from a variety of works from antiquity and classical literatures each following their own formal devices; it periodically collapses into the onomatopoetic babbling of nonsense; it spontaneously breaks into fragments of music—patterns mimicking the ragged syncopations of songs—and thereby shatters the dignity and gravity of blank verse. That kaleidoscope of forms thus creates both chaos and order, suggesting the unsuspected power of art to provide stability, order, and organization in a wider waste land world collapsed into fragmentation.
Meter
Given that the poem experiments with a variety of verse forms and regularly violates the expectations of rhythm and rhyme, the poem’s meter—how it impacts the ear and creates its sense of music and movement—is also varied, always subtly shifting, and feels at once predictable and yet improvised. That metered effect is created not only by the variations in the blank verse form but also in the use of a meter device known as enjambment. The beat of a poem comes from how the poet structures lines that steadily and reliably move to a closing mark of punctuation—a period, a question mark, an exclamation point, or even a semi-colon. This movement toward closure indicates an idea has reached its completion; it is a kind of punctation-al tidiness allowing for easy recitation and regular cadenced meter.
Scanning the more than 400 lines of the poem reveals how seldom lines close, how seldom Eliot uses end-stops. Rather, lines lead one into the other, swiftly and elegantly but defiantly bursting the limits of a single line. With the end of the lines left open, the poem compels a reader to swiftly read without meditative pause, without reflection, without respite. One line recklessly moves and drops into the next, creating a feeling being jammed up against each other. These opening lines from “The Game of Chess” exemplify enjambment:
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion (Lines 77-85);
It is a long haul to the comma, a perilous aural journey to that semi-colon. Where does the meter break? Where is the beginning, middle and end of the idea? The meter allows no breaks, no pauses, no reprieve. Enjambment thus uses meter to create a kind of acoustic urgency, a breathless rush line into line. One line immediately shuttles into the next, compelling the reader to keep moving in a kind of chaotic anarchy. Enjambment inevitably creates a breathless feeling (try reading the entire passage from “A Game of Chess” aloud). Images collapse into one another. The alternative to following one line into the next is to pause, to hang over the end of an unfinished idea as if suspended over some cliff, perilously suspended between words within an idea. Additionally, with enjambment, the reader cannot relax into the easy singsong-y feeling implicit in end-stops—a shallow approach to poetry that the poem mocks in its echoes of pop music and pub ragtime. Enjambment creates a dramatic meter, a cadenced feel distinct to itself. Supremely, however, Eliot’s use of the metric complexity of enjambment allows the poem to assert its theme: From fragments coherence can emerge and chaos can find its way to structure. The ear must define the meter; the ear must work with enjambment to create an original and compelling coherence—it is the assertion of the interactive energy of the reader.
Voice
The voice speaking in a poem is created by diction, inflection, sentence structure, emotional consistency, and experience. The voice telling a poem, thus, creates the poem’s coherence. The Waste Land is a narrative without a unifying, signature narrator. It is rather a narrative told by a variety of unrelated voices who each speak in turn though never one to another. Reading the poem is rather like walking through an apartment building where every door is open and a person catches bits of something being said in each separate room. Those voices create the poem’s feeling of alienation and emotional isolation—voices that speak in solitude and to no one in particular.
The general narrative of the poem is an unnamed poet out for a late afternoon stroll in his London. The narrator is clearly educated given the breadth of the poem’s allusions to a wide range of poetry (among other allusions). He is a shadowy figure walking alone—an introspective, hypersensitive isolate profoundly disturbed by the walking dead feel to his post-war London. Everywhere he looks he sees evidence of a civilization lost: “I had not thought death had undone so many” (Line 63). Like the Tiresias figure from mythology invoked in “The Fire Sermon,” the narrator shares sensitivity equally with men and women; like the Greek seer, he is gifted/cursed with insight into the broken lives of those around him. He projects the poem into the psyche of a number of characters who either demonstrate or share his feeling of a sterile world—spiritually dead and drifting into emotional and psychological paralysis. He is an adept ventriloquist, tapping into a range of voices from the regal cadences and elevated diction of the woman in the burnished chair, to the ragged vernacular of the women in the pub.
The shifting narrative voices creates a jarring feeling to the poem offering a sense that no single voice can be sustained for too long as voices assert their presence and fade into irrelevancy. No single experience, nor singular narrator, maintains or sustains emotional feeling. Marie blurs into Madame Sosostris who blurs into the woman in the chair who blurs into the drunken women in the pub who blur into the office typist, and so forth. Fragments become the narrative whole, bits create the poem’s order, voice unintentionally creates a choral feeling.
That this accidental collision of voices sustains a kind of paradoxical cacophonous harmony is the best the poet-narrator can offer. He is useless like the Fisher King. In the closing section, he acknowledges that the restoration of authentic spiritual vigor and life to the contemporary zombie world is beyond his power as the poem collapses into its final cascade of fragmentary lines and images. Peace eludes him, accentuated by the desperate incantation of the word “Shantih.”
Related Titles
By T. S. Eliot
