Andrea+Murray

T.S. ELIOT



The reason why I chose T.S. Eliot:



TEN T.S. ELIOT ANALYSIS  * "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock"

Despite his general uneasiness and waning confidence in his writing, the poem still holds moments of hope, where Eliot reflects that “there will be time to wonder, ‘Do I dare?’.” Here, Eliot puts off his doubts to another day and age, but almost in the next line, he reverts to the stabbing uncertainties planted by critics, expressed in his physical signs of age, such as “how his hair is growing thin” and “how his arms and legs are thin.” After these quotes, the stanza returns to the repeated questioning of the authors’ right to “disturb the universe.” The perpetual tug-of-war between these two mindsets creates an unsettling double-take on Eliot’s true feelings of his own writing. ‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍In this poem, Eliot explores his own "greatness" (84) and the gnawing insecurity that comes with "the eyes" (56) that critique his every move. In a startling //No Exit//-esque feeling, he mentions the "eternal Footman" (85), much like the valet, to symbolize death without giving the world anything of value. ‍ ‍‍‍‍‍‍‍  Scattered among the lines of the poem are outside references, such as "I know the voices dying with a dying fall," (52) which is a reference to Shakespeare's play //Twelfth Night//, as well as "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (92) which is a response to Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress." These echoes refer to Eliot's conscious efforts to be a remarkable poet, much like these other well-known authors. He comforts himself with the shields of canonical literature to avoid the critics and his self-doubt, where he questions his right to "disturb the universe" (46). Structurally, Eliot’s poetry constantly repeats itself, adding to the poet’s stuttering confidence on his own work. In the third stanza, the first two lines both echo the image of yellow mist wrapped around a house, but with minute changes in the wording, contributing to an edited feeling, as if he meant to change or correct the first line, but kept both drafts of the first sentence in. "Hysteria"

By transitioning from the “laughter” of the woman being “lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat,” Eliot uses the journey from the anatomical ‍‍‍‍‍outside to the inside ‍‍‍‍‍to explain how he is “drawn in” to the woman’s mad ecstasy. As he focuses on one region after another in this woman’s mouth, Eliot creates the idea of tunnel vision and a gradual loss of control for where his mind takes him, especially as he ends up “lost,” implying his complete lack of knowledge for how he arrived within her larynx. Despite the positive connotation of the word “laughter,” the use of “‍‍‍‍‍‍bruised ‍‍‍‍‍‍” in Eliot’s description implies a ‍discomfort caused by the woman’s laughter ‍. Within the “dark caverns of her throat,” Eliot describes himself as “bruised” as a result of the contractions within the laughter. Although bruises can be seen on the surface of the skin, they suggest a deep pain at bone-level and an extreme sensitivity to touch, which directs Eliot’s poem to a darker place. Both the “ripple of unseen muscles” and the speaker’s newfound “bruises” suggest a pain that infects the man and the woman from deeper than skin-level.

<range type="comment" id="23836">‍‍‍‍"La Figlia Che Piange" ‍‍‍‍

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">By using commands for all the verbs in his first stanza, Eliot implies a subject who does not do what he wants her to do. <range type="comment" id="429743">As if directing an actor, Eliot paints a cliché scene of how the subject should “stand and grieve,” by leaning “on a garden urn” and clasping her “flowers to [her] with a pained surprise,” but maintaining her beauty and composition by keeping the “sunlight in [her] hair.” As he follows with the conditional tense and a mournful tone, the first stanza, in contrast, describes something that he wishes could have happened. He laments the way the situation lacked such a clear resolution as his Hollywood-esque directing with his statement “So I would have had him leave.” Unfortunately, the situation did not unfold without someone mentally “torn and bruised.” <span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">In the last stanza, Eliot returns to the past tense, reflecting on the same “pained” events and how their icy hands reach from the past to chill him in the present. He turns over the image in his mind, insinuating self-doubt and considerations of how these lovers “should have been together.” He uses the tense “should have been” in a rather ambiguous way, both to suggest his own longing for that outcome and his questioning of the actual results of that outcome. Obviously these “cogitations” bother him and interrupt his thoughts both at “midnight” and at “noon,” endlessly circling his head like vultures hunting for scraps, as second-guessing pecks away at the assured finality of the present. <span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"Gerontion" <span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">A crucial theme in this poem is the disillusionment and expatriate sentiments Eliot, and many other writers, felt after World War I.

Even in the first two lines, Eliot’s self-doubt begins to resurface in his bristling description of himself as an “old man” in the middle of a drought, a “dry month” for his poetry. However, with his strong accusation that he has “lost [his] passion” due to the “terror in inquisition,” his first statement seems to undermine some clearly strong thoughts. He suggests that his musings are simply the thoughts of an old man in a “dry season,” but in reality, he carries as much force and strength in his opinions as a hurricane on the coast of the Gulf.

“These tears shaken from the wrath-bearing tree” describes the forced apologies that governments give after committing a new atrocity against humanity.

By creating enjambed lines such as “Unnatural vices / Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues / Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes,” Eliot highlights the unnatural crossbreeding of words and causes that spring from the war. The “heroism” and “crimes” both came from the war and both birthed mismatched roots. By breaking up “vices” from “heroism” and putting “heroism” on the same line as “virtues,” Eliot explores how the words should be matching up and where the disparity between the sources of the word could be found in the post-World War I years. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">"Morning at the Window"

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Despite the clear sentence structure of Eliot’s observations as he looks out through the “brown waves of fog,” Eliot’s <range type="comment" id="488450">‍‍‍‍ambiguous punctuation ‍‍‍‍and lack of punctuation add a physical and mental presence in the poem. By only using two periods, Eliot’s lines flow as freely and densely as the “fog” he describes as it twists “faces from the bottom of the street,” just as the poem’s structure is muddied.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Eliot’s remarks about the housmaids’ “damp souls” echoes both the moisture-infused weather and the maids’ fungus-esque disposition. Despite the dreary weather, <range type="comment" id="559474">‍‍they seem to thrive ‍‍in the moist habitat, just as the maids continue to return to work at a job that seems like a dampener of happiness.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">By remarking on an “aimless smile” from a passerby on the street, Eliot pushes his own downtrodden mood on the weather. As soon as he sees the smile, it “vanishes along the level of the roofs,” symbolizing the happiness that eludes him.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"The Hollow Men"

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">By combining “headpieces filled with straw” with the image of “the stuffed men leaning together,” <range type="comment" id="568063">‍‍‍Eliot creates the shape of a fire-starter. ‍‍‍With the heads of the humanoid creatures bowed together, the “hollow men” create an image akin to a pyre. With the heads of the “stuffed men” close, the physical shape forms a mental association with a shared brain space or a community conscience. Only one spark in one mind is necessary to light the rest of the group with a contagious fire.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Eliot’s repetition of “in death’s dream kingdom” capitalizes on the physical and mental distance the speaker feels from the eyes. The speaker does not even have a name for the physical place where the eyes came from.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">The image of the cactus in the speaker’s description of the “dead land” furthers the idea of this unapproachable and mentally prickly area that the speaker does not wish to intrude on.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"The Waste Land <span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">I. The Burial of the Dead"

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Despite the normal connotations of each word and the conventional punctuation in the first stanza, Eliot uses enjambed lines to suggest a new connection to each line. The line format implies that April is “the cruelest month” because it breeds, “lilacs out of the dead land” mix, and “memory and desire” stir with the coming of the new month. Read without the line breaks, however, April is now the cruelest month because it gives birth to living plants in the “dead land” and mixes “memory and desire,” whereas the preferred winter had “forgetful snow” to cover those memories and desires.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Time passes with an unfocused irregularity in the first stanza, jumping from April to summer, then to a childhood memory, but the tone of the passage maintains a nostalgic darkness. The immutable emotions, “memory and desire” reveal the disconnect in the physical passage of time and the healing of old wounds.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">More images of the “dead land” and the plants that sprout from it juxtapose to Biblical references in order to emphasize how little the “son of man” knows about religion. The “dead tree” and the “cricket” refer to the human’s aging process, and how he derives no comfort from the knowledge that he ages daily because the “heap of broken images” that represent his torturous memories and desires persist, even into the oldest of age. The speaker tempts the man with the “shadow under this red rock,” a Biblical reference to a valuable rock that provides shade from the sun and running water, which, the speaker promises, will make his life on the dusty earth under the hot sun a fearful memory.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"The Waste Land <span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">II. A Game of Chess"

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">After the initial barrage of overwhelming elegance, the rhythm of the lines slowly disintegrates into a jumble of syllables and nonsensical words. Parallel to the rhythmic crumble, the woman laments, “What shall we ever do?” as the nonsense increases. Only by reciting her schedule for “the hot water at ten,” “a closed car at four,” and a “game of chess” for the next day can she hold onto what is left of the order in her life, symbolized by the rhymes in the last and third-to-last lines.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">By changing from a distinguished tone of forced regularity to a common vernacular of regular vulgarity, the poem’s shift in tone dictates both a change of scenery, characters, and ideals. In the first half, the high-class woman speaks of a “game of chess” as a normal part of her schedule, whereas in the second half, the two women talk about giving a man “a good time” as part of their daily business. As well as the crassness, the second half carries new characters, one who worries about her friend’s beauty and well-being and another who “can’t help” but “look so antique” due to her five children, whereas the first half only talks about the elegant lady and her partner in conversation. While the elegant lady tries to hold on to her daily “hot water at ten” and other pieces of schedule, the common women accept change in their relationships, as seen with Lil’s disintegrating marriage with Albert that she takes as a fact of life.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"<range type="comment" id="519579">The Waste Land <span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">IV. Death by Water"

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">By using an alliteration in the name “Phlebas the Phoenician,” Eliot’s writing suggests a childlike interpretation of Phlebas’ death. The alliteration hearkens to a name one might find in a children’s book, which adds to the juvenile feel of the character. Also, Eliot writes that Phlebas “forgot the cry of gulls,” as if Phlebas simply moved away from the sea and thus does not remember the small details of life by the seashore. By focusing on these small details, Eliot draws attention away from Phlebas’ actual death, adding ambiguity to the scene by giving a dead body functions that only a living person can actually produce.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">With the use of the “whirlpool” model of Hell, Eliot focuses again on how everyone must pass the “stages of…age and youth.” He addresses his last stanza to “gentile or Jew” to contribute to the features in Phlebas that can be seen in any person, such as the natural progression through life and death.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"The Waste Land <span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">V. What the Thunder Said" <span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">As in the other parts of “The Waste Land,” by using broad examples of “sweaty faces” and different landscapes such as the “gardens” and the “stony places,” Eliot attempts to address the world in his first stanza of “What the Thunder Said.” “He who was living is now dead” serves as an example that “we who were living are now dying” as a natural part of life’s processes.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Just as in “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot brings back the reference to the prized rock in the desert that provides water as a symbol of hope in religion, but his constant repetition of “water” or “a spring” only serves to highlight the lack of any such natural element in the desert.

<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Between the unwavering accusations and the repetition in the fourth stanza, the speaker suggests his jealousy of the religious figure “walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle” on the road. He returns to his original question after digressing to small details such as whether the third figure is “a man or a woman” to symbolize the tenacity necessary for those who seek faith.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">WORKS CITED >
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