Assignment Writing
Topic :
Modernist literature
Name : Ravina Parmar
Batch year : (2019-2021)
Roll no. 17
Enrollment no : 2069108420200031
Submitted to : Smt. S. B. Gardi English Department Bhavnagar
✍️ Abstract :
In the poem The Waste Land Eliot used a lot of characters, myths, and various aspects from various religions. So defining the significance of one thing is very difficult. Because the poem is like a collection of various images. It is not about one thing or not about a single subject. And also the poem waste land doesn't have a single meaning but it is more for various interpretations. The poem is an amalgam of Western, Hinduism and Buddhist concepts and allusions but integrates elements from many more cultures. There are sudden changes of time, location, speaker, and even language (with fragments of German, French, Sanskrit, etc.). The poem is interesting to explore as an art piece of modernist experimentation. So this assignment is to define the role and the significance of the Tiresias. Here we find the important role of Tiresias. This assignment is trying to justify Tiresias position in this Poem. Here Tiresias is not a mere spectator but a disconnection that assigns him almost omniscient authority rising above the other voices with a tone of certainty and providing a balance to the dislocated atmosphere.
✍️ Key words :
The waste land, modern poem, T. S. Eliot, Tiresias
✍️ Introduction :
The poem 'The Waste Land' is written by Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was an American-born British poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. ( Ronald Bush)
He has won the Nobel prize for literature in the year of 1948. With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste Land, Eliot won an international reputation. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. The poem’s original manuscript of about 800 lines was cut down to 433 at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. The Waste Land is not Eliot’s greatest poem, though it is his most famous. Nevertheless, Eliot was unequaled by any other 20th-century poet in the ways in which he commanded the attention of his audience.
Notable works :
✍️ "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
✍️ The Waste Land (1922)
✍️ Four Quartets (1943)
✍️ Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
The Waste Land poem is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. ( Valentine Low ) In this poem we can find that the hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts that Eliot peppered throughout the poem. In addition to the many "highbrow" references and quotes from poets like Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Ovid, and Homer, as well as Wagner's libretti, Eliot also included several references to "lowbrow" genres.
The poem is divided into five sections. The first,
"The Burial of the Dead",
"A Game of Chess",
" The Fire Sermon",
" Death by Water" and
" What the Thunder Said".
✍️ Research Objective :
The research objectives of this study are as follow:
To define the position of Tiresias in this poem.
Which are the references of Tiresias I'm this poem.
What was the role of Tiresias in the poem The Waste Land.
To define Tiresias as the heart of the poem.
Tiresias as a metaphorical voice of Eliot.
✍️ The significance of Tiresias in the poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot :
👉 Tiresias in Greek mythology :--
In Greek mythology Tiresias was the blind , immortal, telling about the future. He was Theban seer, the son of one of Athena’s favourites, the nymph Chariclo. He is a participant in several well-known legends. Among the ancient authors who mention him are Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and Ovid.
In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus, the king of Thebes, calls upon Tiresias to aid in the investigation of the killing of the previous king Laius.
Eighteen allusions to mythic Tiresias, noted by Luc Brisson, fall into three groups: the first recounts Tiresias' sex-change episode and later his encounter with Zeus and Hera; the second group recounts his blinding by Athena; the third, all but lost, seems to have recounted the misadventures of Tiresias.
Hera was displeased, and she punished Tiresias by transforming him into a woman. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes; depending on the myth, either she made sure to leave the snakes alone this time. As a result, Tiresias was released from his sentence and permitted to regain his masculinity.
Tiresias have vast experiences of life, as he was cursed
He was famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. Tiresias participated fully in seven generations in Thebes, beginning as advisor to Cadmus himself.
The figure of Tiresias recurs in later European literature, both as prophet and as man-woman, in many works. And in the myth we find that Tiresias died after drinking water from the tainted spring Tilphussa, where he was impaled by an arrow of Apollo.
👉️ Tiresias in the poem The Waste Land :--
In the poem The waste land we can see that the many references of the Tiresias. At some point we can see that T. S. Eliot using ' I ' is for whom that is not clear. So at some point we can say that this ' I ' is for Tiresias. In the opening of the poem we can say that Tiresias presents as a human being.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
( The Waste Land)
Thus Tiresias seems to become the transitional gure that permits Eliot to regure the ‘heap of broken images’ of ‘ The Burial of the Dead’ in his mind, even if by ‘What the Thunder said’ he has only managed to ‘shore against his ruin’; it still appears that Tiresias has allowed for progression, in the speaker’s resolve to seemingly reclaim these disjointed ideas, images and emotions which litter the text.
But the exact references we find in chapter three : The Fire Sermon . Yet Eliot's placement of Tiresias at almost the exact halfway point is revealing of his value. Here we can see that the poem structurally, Tiresias appears to be a transitional and bridging gure, perhaps representative of a turning point in thought for Eliot and, as in a ve-act tragedy, and his brief appearance could thus highlight Tiresias as a pivotal character.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
( The Waste Land)
Tiresias laments the contemporary degeneration of love into lust. Here Tiresias presents his vast experience of life and it's various aspects.
Musing upon the king(Fisher) my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him. ( The Waste Land)
This line shows us a relationship with king Fisher. Tiresias has suffered all, he is of the past and also of present. As the brother of King Fisher he mourned his sickness and impotency. Again we can see that the Tiresias come in between the poems.
Further in the fire sermon we have lines like Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon..
Here we can say that Tiresias now muses on various kind of sex abnormalities like homosexuality. There is we find the street hotel that is the place known for homosexuality in the post was London. Here T. S. Eliot first mentioned Tiresias by name during a single section of "The Fire Sermon," but he alludes to him obliquely throughout the poem. In his own notes, Eliot says that Tiresias is an important unifying figure in The Waste Land, and it is clear that this role is closely connected with Tiresias's union of male and female in his own person. He introduces himself in just these terms:
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, (The Waste Land)
Here Tiresias describes an early evening scene in a city. Although blind, Tiresias is a seer, so he can see all human activity, like a god. Eliot’s notes reveal that what Tiresias sees creates the poem’s contents. Here Tiresias observes a typist after she comes home from work. Like the woman in “A Game of Chess,” the typist prepares for a visitor.
" And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead. "( The Waste Land)
Tiresias observes a rather pathetic sexual encounter between a typist and a clerk and reminds us that he once foretold this encounter. As a hermaphrodite, Tiresias identifies with both parties. Here Tiresias’ recognition of its ironic unsuitability for the incident described, rendered more poignant by the emphatic ellipses. In this way, Tiresias’ significance is highlighted by his judgmental position in the poem.
" O City city, I can sometimes hear Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. " ( The waste land)
Here we can see that Tiresias roams modern London and hears timeless sounds, including music from an ancient instrument and the chatter of fishermen. Magnus Martyr, a church in London, evokes Tiresias’s memory of the Ionian era of ancient Greek history, which took place centuries before Homer wrote about such events in The Odyssey. Tiresias transcends time. He can foresee the future, but he lives in the present as well as the past.
" Who is the third who always walks beside you? When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle …'"
( The Waste Land)
The “brown mantle, hooded” suggests a ghostly monk. However, readers may note that the mystery man is also Tiresias, who might be either a man or a woman. It can be or it can't. Because that depends on your reading and interpretation. Your reading must be different but that is my way of looking.
✍️ Conclusion
Thus, Tiresias seems to represent the internalised understanding of the speaker, which Eliot is fundamentally attempting to seek out. Each man, arguably, is his own prophet, and seemingly ‘the waste land’ is a state of mind, the essence of which is conveyed to the reader by the destabilising and disorientating mixture of allusions, images and voices. It is through the prophetic omniscience of Tiresias that this is communicated; thus he is the gure at the heart of the poem, at once bridging the gap between male and female characters, as well as connecting the present state of ‘the waste land’ to the future, foreseeable resolution and recovery. Whether he is viewed as the mythological prophet, the metaphorical voice of Eliot, or the embodiment of every character in the poem, it is evident that the text would seem disunited, and purposeless, without his presence.
✍️ Work cited :
Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Eliot, T S, and Frank Kermode. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1998.
Low, Valentine (9 October 2009). "Out of the waste land: TS Eliot becomes nation's favourite poet". Timesonline. Retrieved 6 June 2011.
Luc Brisson, 1976. Le mythe de Tirésias: essai d'analyse structurale (Leiden: Brill).
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. Tiresias. 6 Feb. 2020, www.britannica.com/topic/Tiresias.
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