Line #48 Literature/TheWasteLand


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_waste_land.png]]
2	[[caption-width-right:350:''I will show you fear in a handful of dust.'']]
3
4	->''April is the cruellest month, breeding\
5	Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing\
6	Memory and desire, stirring\
7	Dull roots with spring rain.''
8
9	''The Waste Land'' is Creator/TSEliot's most famous poem, as well as the most famous Modernist poem. It is mainly about how the world is hopelessly lost and how life cannot be regenerated. It is also [[MindScrew incredibly confusing.]] [[http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Full text here]]
10
11	Not to be confused with ''Literature/TheWasteLands'', the third book in Creator/StephenKing's ''Franchise/TheDarkTower'' series. (Though the book makes open references to the poem.)
12	----
13	!!This work contains examples of:
14	* AllThereInTheManual: Eliot's annotations. Except that [[TheWalrusWasPaul they just raise further questions.]]
15	* TheAnnotatedEdition: Provided by Eliot himself.
16	** You can also get a Facsimile Edition of the poem, incorporating photographic images of the entire manuscript, including everything that was cut before publication, and with further notes.
17	* ArcWords: "Unreal City," "fear death by water," and "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME," to name but a few.
18	* AsTheGoodBookSays: Two of the lines from The Waste Land make an allusion to the Bible. The annotations show that line 20 alludes to Ezekiel 2:1, while line 23 alludes to Ecclesiastes 12:5.
19	* BadassBoast: I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
20	* {{Bathos}}: Tiresias won't stop going on about the fact that, despite the fact he is no longer a woman anymore after seven years of being one thanks to the Goddess Hera, he's been left with a pair of huge sagging breasts. He usually points this out after the poem says something meaningful or dark.
21	* BilingualBonus: There are some lines that are in German, French, and Italian, and some Sanskrit words.
22	** The Latin epigraph translates to: Once with my own eye I saw the [[AgeWithoutYouth Sybil of Cumae]], hanging in a jar, and the boys were saying to her: "What is it you desire?" She responded, "I wish to die."
23	*** Oh, and the dialogue there is in Greek.
24	* BreadEggsMilkSquick: The narrator in the first "Unreal City" section talking to Stetson. "That corpse you planted last year in your garden..."
25	** Perhaps not as squicky as it first appears; "That Corpse" might refer to the Corpse Flower, whose fragrance resembles rotting meat.
26	** Though, considering that he just mentioned the battle of Mylae...
27	** The narrator of the first section of A Game Of Chess suggests this agenda: "The hot water at ten. / And if it rains, a closed car at four. / And we shall play a game of chess, / [[EyeScream pressing lidless eyes]] and waiting for a knock upon the door."
28	*** "Lidless eyes" might just be referring to [[TheInsomniac inability to get restful sleep]].
29	* BreakingTheFourthWall: When he calls out to the "hypocrite reader".
30	* CasanovaWannabe: The house agent's clerk in The Fire Sermon.
31	* CatchPhrase: HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.
32	* CityNoir: Unreal City.
33	* ChessWithDeath: at minimum nodded to by the section A Game Of Chess, with the conversation drifting heavily to suggestions of a LivingMemory style vision forged from a painful memory.
34	* CrapsackWorld: It is ''The Waste Land'' after all.
35	* DeadPersonConversation: With Stetson. Tiresias also mentions doing this during his career as a Hellenic mystic.
36	* DyingDream: One interpretation is that the second-person protagonist is hallucinating the scenes as they wander lost and dying of thirst in the desert.
37	* EmotionlessGirl: The typist home at teatime.
38	* {{Expy}}: In his annotations, Eliot mentions the three Thames-daughters, who are expies of the Rhine-maidens from the ''Götterdämmerung''.
39	* FanDisservice: There's a really unflattering sex scene, possibly a rape scene.
40	* GratuitousFrench, GratuitousGerman, GratuitousItalian, and gratuitous Sanskrit.
41	* {{Hermaphrodite}}: Tiresias.
42	* HeroicBSOD: A possible interpretation of the typist in The Fire Sermon: "Endeavours to engage her in caresses / Which still are unreproved, if undesired. / Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; / Exploring hands encounter no defence; / His vanity requires no response, / And makes a welcome of indifference."
43	* HistoricalDomainCharacter: Marie, Countess Larisch from the beginning of The Burial of the Dead.
44	** She had become notorious a couple of decades earlier as the go-between for Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Marie Vetsera. After the Mayerling incident, she was essentially frozen out of Vienna society and went into self-imposed exile. She met Eliot in 1911 (or 1914 according to some sources) and the lines in Burial of the Dead are said to be taken nearly verbatim from her remarks during their conversation.
45	* IntrepidMerchant: Phlebas the Phoenician and Mr. Eugenides, sort of.
46	* IronicEcho: Some of the allusions, like all that nightingale business. Also some internal examples, like "death by water" and the "[[Theatre/TheTempest pearls that were his eyes]]".
47	** The Burial of the Dead's "know[ing] nothing" is echoed in A Game of Chess.
48	* LampshadeHanging: "The fragments I have shored against my ruins," at the end of the poem; referring to fragmented sentences he put before this line. Also, the second part of The Burial of the Dead mentions "a heap of broken images"-- like the poem itself.
49	* LawOfInverseFertility: Lill from the end of A Game of Chess.
50	* LiteraryAllusionTitle: Parts three and five are allusions to Buddhist works, and part one to the Book of Common Prayer.
51	* MandatoryMotherhood: "What you get married for if you don't want children?"
52	* MindScrew: the poem never makes clear what exactly is going on, following a dream-like progression between scenes and a chaotic blending of allusion, memory, and ambiguous present-tense events.
53	%%ZCE * NarrativePoem
54	* PublicDomainCharacter: [[Myth/ClassicalMythology Tiresias]] and [[Myth/KingArthurAndTheHolyGrail the Fisher King]].
55	* RuleOfThree: The three of staves is one of the tarot cards drawn, the Fisher King appears three times in the poem, there are the three Thames-daughters, the thunder strikes three times.
56	* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: Way towards the cynical end.
57	** Though it can be argued that the cynicism is moderated, to an extent, by the ending stanzas of the last canto, What The Thunder Said, in which Eliot proposes three virtues (using one of the most famous sections of the Upanishads) -- charity, mercy and self-control -- as means of escaping the sterile Waste Land of modern civilization.
58	* SophisticatedAsHell: All these different linguistic registers in one poem. It's what grabbed people's attention back in 1922, and it still has the power to do so.
59	* ShoutOut: It even ends with a massive list of all of its allusions, including Literature/TheBible, Creator/JohnWebster, Literature/ParadiseLost, Literature/TheDivineComedy, Creator/WilliamShakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Creator/PaulVerlaine, and Creator/CharlesBaudelaire.
60	* TarotMotifs: Specifically in the third vignette of part one. (Though some of the cards it mentions aren't actually in the Arcana. Eliot acknowledges this in the annotations, of course.)
61	* ThirstyDesert: serves as both metaphor for spiritual and emotional death in modern society, and as the literal threat of death from thirst and exposure in the wastes.
62	* TheIngenue: The hyacinth girl, at first.
63	* ViewersAreGeniuses: It pays you the compliment of assuming you know what it's talking about. See "ShoutOut".
64	%%ZCE * WorldOfSymbolism
65	* WrittenSoundEffect: A few times, Eliot writes out birdsong with nonsense words -- "jug jug," "twit twit twit," "co co rico," etc.[[note]]”Co co rico" is the French equivalent of "Cock-a-doodle-doo".[[/note]] The penultimate line of the poem is "Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata," words which are both the sound of thunder and a meditative mantra in Sanskrit.

Context Literature / TheWasteLand