Eliot, the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the giants of modern literature, highly distinguished as a poet, literary critic, dramatist, and editor and publisher. Lil has prematurely aged; she’s running out of time. It is tempting to read the woman on the “burnished throne” as Eliot’s wife, Vivienne; the passage then becomes a dissection of an estranged relationship. Upon meeting Philomela, Tereus falls instantly and hopelessly in love; nothing must get in the way of his conquest. In contrast to modernist poets such as Cendrars and Appollinaire, who used the choot-choot of trains, the spinning of wheels, and the billowing of fumes to evoke their era, or philosophers such as Kracauer and Benjamin, who dove into the sports shows and the arcade halls in search of a lexicon of the modern that is itself modern, Eliot is content to tease modernity out of the old. Study Guide Navigation. Kevin, Pingback: A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Burial of the Dead’ | Interesting Literature. The Waste Land e-text contains the full text of The Waste Land. Berkow, Jordan ed. Eliot, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Eliot writes of “satin cases poured forth in profusion,” “vials of ivory and coloured glass,” an “antique mantel” and “the glitter of […] jewels.” Both the woman and the room are magnificently attired, perhaps to the point of excess.
We now move to one of the most popular sections of ‘A Game of Chess’, especially when it comes to analysis of the themes of The Waste Land as a whole: we find ourselves in a pub in the East End of London, and to the other end of the social spectrum. She accuses the man of remaining quiet and of not telling her what he is thinking. GradeSaver, 26 October 2007 Web. Snatches of dialogue follow. One of the paintings in the room depicts the rape of Philomela, a scene pulled from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Waste Land By T. S. Eliot About this Poet T.S. It seems plausible that the woman in the room is addressing the narrator. Quotation and allusion is of course a quintessential component of Eliot’s style, particularly in "The Waste Land"; the poem is sometimes criticized for being too heavily bedecked in references, and too dependent on previous works and canons. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Waste Land.
The Waste Land study guide contains a biography of T.S. Death is the only way out for her. The best student edition of Eliot’s poem is The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions), which comes with a very helpful introduction, as well as contextual information and major critical responses to The Waste Land.
It is important to recognize that Eliot culminates this passage with an invocation of both Eastern and Western philosophy; he even says so himself in his... What is the mood of "A Game of Chess" by T.S. In the original story, King Tereus’s wife bids him to bring her sister Philomela to her. The Best TV Shows About Being in Your 30s. The mood is sad and filled with futility. The Wasteland explores a future dystopian world where government and technology have taken over our lives. When Eliot evokes dance-hall numbers and popular ditties, he does so through the “Shakespeherian Rag.” When he imitates the Cockney talk of women in a pub, he finishes the dialogue with a quotation from Hamlet, so that the rhythms of lower-class London speech give way to the words of the mad Ophelia. Elliot, an up and coming playwright, wants his first production to start a revolution. Her dayculminates with plans for an exc… In summary, ‘A Game of Chess’ begins with a long description of an ornately decorated room in which a woman is sitting on a ‘Chair’ like a throne (the first line of ‘A Game of Chess’ is actually an allusion to a line from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne …’). The speechless Philomela becomes a nightingale. Time to make a decision, to leave her husband?
As the women leave the pub, their cries of ‘Good night’ merge with the words Ophelia says as she leaves the stage for the last time in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.’ Ophelia has already gone mad, spurned by Hamlet and used as a pawn by her father Polonius as part of his political scheming; shortly after this, she will be found dead, having (probably) drowned herself. Racked with lust, he steals away with her and rapes her in the woods –- the "sylvan scene” Eliot mentions. Synthetic humanoids live and work together with natural born humans in a society manipulated and controlled by the governing entity known as The State. Unthinkable. Continue to explore the world of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with our summary and analysis of the third section, ‘The Fire Sermon’. Finally, when the woman asks him whether there is anything in his head, he replies with another quotation, this time not from Shakespeare but about Shakespeare, a jazz song from 1912 called ‘Shakesperian Rag’. She’s only thirty-one years old, but she already looks ancient – largely because she took abortion pills to ‘bring … off’ her latest pregnancy, as they already have too many mouths to feed. Chess belongs therefore to this lifeless life; it is the quintessential game of the wasteland, dependent on numbers and cold strategies, devoid of feeling or human contact. The dialogue grows more fractured and the closing time announcements become more frequent, and finally the stanza devolves into a quotation from Hamlet: Ophelia’s final words to Claudius and Gertrude, “Good night ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.”, This section once again ushers in the issue of biographical interpretation. The carving of a dolphin is cast in a “sad light.” The grandiose portraits and paintings on the wall are but “withered stumps of time.” By the end of this first stanza, the room seems almost haunted: “staring forms / Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.” The woman, for her part, is a glittering apparition, seated upon her Chair (Eliot capitalizes the word as if it were a kingdom) like a queen, recalling Cleopatra -– and thus yet another failed love affair. This section takes its title from two plays by the early 17th-centuryplaywright Thomas Middleton, in one of which the moves in a gameof chess denote stages in a seduction. This FAQ is empty. Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Eliot? ‘A Game of Chess’ is the second section of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, the impact of which was profound and immediate. Storyline The Wasteland explores a future dystopian world where government and technology have taken over our lives. From which a golden Cupidon peeped out. But perhaps a death like Ophelia’s is the only way out of the horror-show that is the waste land. Choose an adventure below and discover your next favorite movie or TV show. She complains that her nerves are bad, and requests that he stay with her. First Tristan and Isolde, now Cleopatra: twice now Eliot has alluded to tragic romances, filtered from antiquity through more modern sensibilities -– first that of Wagner, the great modernizer of opera, and then that of Shakespeare, perhaps the first “modern” dramatist. She occupies a splendid drawing room, replete with coffered ceilings and lavish decorations.
Eliot's "The Wasteland": Portrait of a Desolate World, View Wikipedia Entries for The Waste Land…. II. That said, “A Game of Chess” is considerably less riddled with allusion and quotes than “The Burial of the Dead.” The name itself comes from Thomas Middleton’s seventeenth-century play A Game of Chess, which posited the said game as an allegory to describe historical machinations –- specifically the brewing conflict between England and Spain. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. This section once again ushers in the issue of biographical interpretation. Not affiliated with Harvard College. The woman, despairing, asks the man what they are going to do – what they are ever going to do – which reinforces the idea that their lives are empty of meaning and they struggle to find ways to make their existence matter. About The Waste Land. The Waste Land literature essays are academic essays for citation.
Chess belongs to this lifeless life; it is the quintessential game of the wasteland, dependent on numbers, devoid of feeling or human contact.
The Fire Sermon” is in essence a sermon about the dangers of lust. The call for last orders from the barman, repeated throughout this final section and rendered in capitals, cuts across the conversation of the women, but also, by extension, highlights the fact that Lil is trapped in her marriage and her reproductive cycle. ‘A Game of Chess’ is the second section of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, the impact of which was profound and immediate. Image: A large chess game inside Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD, USA (picture credit: Jyothis), via Wikimedia Commons. / And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.”, The last stanza of the section depicts two Cockney women talking in a pub at closing time – hence the repeated dictum: “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.” The subject of conversation is a certain Lil, whose husband Albert was recently released from the army after the war. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! They are both trapped in a cycle of repetition. The poet’s trick is to plumb the old in order to find the new. Chazelle, Damien.
Again the word “drowned” appears, and with it comes the specter of death by water. We are not sure who the woman is: perhaps Eliot’s wife Vivienne, perhaps a stand-in for all members of the upper crust, perhaps simply an unnamed personage whiling away the hours in a candlelit kingdom.
The man replies with a list of things they do – that they always do. You can read ‘A Game of Chess’ here; below, we offer a brief summary of this section of Eliot’s poem, but we’ll stop and analyse the more curious aspects of it as we go, pointing out its most curious features. Interaction is reduced to a set of movements on a checkered board. Some of the details point to failed romance or failed marriage: the “golden Cupidon” who must hide “his eyes behind his wing,” the depiction of Philomela’s rape –- an example of love cascading into brutality and violence -– and even the woman’s “strange synthetic perfumes” drowning “the sense in odours.”.
Lil’s husband has been demobbed from the army and will want ‘a good time’, so – the speaker tells us – Lil should get some false teeth. The world this woman – who calls to mind Belinda from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock – inhabits is upper-crust, and very false. The setting is a decidedly grandiose one.