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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 5 page paper analyzing the symbolism of water in Eliot's landmark poem. It concludes that water, in the world of the Waste Land, stands for sustenance, healing, and faith, and for the orderly and proper progress of the universe; it is only through the restoration of balance that the Waste Land can be healed. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_Wastelan.doc
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
again and again. This paper will analyze the symbolism of water in this landmark poem, and look at how it functions in the Waste Lands world. The first water image
we encounter in Eliots poem occurs in line four, when the poet tells us that "dull roots" are stirred with "spring rain" in April, that "cruelest month". The rain in
this context would be nurturing, except that the title of this section -- "The Burial of the Dead" -- leads us to suspect that the people speaking are the
dead themselves. April with its spring rain feels cruel to them because even dumb plants are awakened and coaxed back into life, but the dead are not; they can no
longer participate in life, they can only remember it. The next stanza actually describes a lack of water; "the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ and
the dry stone no sound of water" (Eliot, line 22-23). The dry, dead vegetation described here is the opposite of the lush, moist imagery in the first stanza; although the
dead lying in their graves are indeed dead and past restoring, still they appreciate the rain, the change of seasons, the warmth of the blanket of snow. In this section,
everything has been parched almost to nonexistence. The stanza closes with a line from a German translation of Tristan and Isolde, meaning, "Desolate and empty is the sea." Although the
sea is water, it can be a wasteland too. This returns us to the poems theme: a land, and by extension a culture, laid waste. The next stanza shows us
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, with the bad cold. Flipping through her fortune-telling cards, she shows us a Phoenician sailor (whose element, presumably, is the desolate and empty sea), and Belladonna,
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