How does T.S Eliot reading differ from yours?
The first and most significant difference I found between T.S Eliot´s reading out loud of his poem and my own is that he didn’t pause when he changed of line. I on the other hand, did and this changed the significance of the first 7 sentences of the poem. When I read it out loud my self I didn’t understand the relation of the last word at each line and the line from which it belonged. Other difference I found was on line 9, T.S Eliot made a short pause after the comma at the end of that line I did a longer pause which also affected the rhythm. The last two lines of the first stanza made more sense when T.S Eliot read them because I didn´t pause as long when I changed from line 16 to line 17. Also, T.S Eliot rose his voice in line 26 in which I actually lowered my voice. The author also continued more fluently from line 27 to line 28 than I did. Obviously I wasn’t able to pronounce properly those words in German. On the other hand my pronunciation of neither was very different from T.S Eliot’s pronunciation. On the next stanza I read louder the Look! (Line 48). In line 56 I did a shorter pause and so it wasn’t clear that the speaker had changed. The main difference was on pronunciation at the end of the last stanza, I had the impression that from line 70 to line 73 T.S Eliot made a more notable English accent and at the end he changed to a French accent. I didn´t do the English accent and didn´t pronounce Hypocrite correctly.
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The first and most significant difference I found between T.S Eliot´s reading out loud of his poem and my own is that he didn’t pause when he changed of line. I on the other hand, did and this changed the significance of the first 7 sentences of the poem. When I read it out loud my self I didn’t understand the relation of the last word at each line and the line from which it belonged. Other difference I found was on line 9, T.S Eliot made a short pause after the comma at the end of that line I did a longer pause which also affected the rhythm. The last two lines of the first stanza made more sense when T.S Eliot read them because I didn´t pause as long when I changed from line 16 to line 17. Also, T.S Eliot rose his voice in line 26 in which I actually lowered my voice. The author also continued more fluently from line 27 to line 28 than I did. Obviously I wasn’t able to pronounce properly those words in German. On the other hand my pronunciation of neither was very different from T.S Eliot’s pronunciation. On the next stanza I read louder the Look! (Line 48). In line 56 I did a shorter pause and so it wasn’t clear that the speaker had changed. The main difference was on pronunciation at the end of the last stanza, I had the impression that from line 70 to line 73 T.S Eliot made a more notable English accent and at the end he changed to a French accent. I didn´t do the English accent and didn´t pronounce Hypocrite correctly.
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I. The Burrial of the Dead
T.S Elliot seemed to me the most confusing and difficult poet I had ever read. However, there were some things I was able to get from his poem “The wasteland”. In the first part “The Burial of the Dead” I saw the continuous contrasting T.S Eliot uses either to confuse the reader or to enrich his poetry. In line 5 T.S Eliot says “Winter kept us warm…” How could winter keep someone or something warm? Something I don’t understand is why T.S. Eliot chose to be a Lithuania-born German girl. As he states in line 12 when the narrator states: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.”
T.S. Eliot also creates an abrupt change, in my opinion, when he passes from describing nature and simple things such as seasons and drinking coffee, to describing his feelings or the narrator, Marie’s feelings “My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, and I was frightened”(line 15).
Continuing on with the poem, the speaker in this poem starts narrating the branches growing from beneath the stone and gives an image of a dry place with no water or life. When T.S Eliot narrates: “There is shadow under this red rock…”(line 25) in this sentence I thought shadow could have several meanings: Darkness, Evil, or Fear. It turns out that further in the poem I was shown that what that shadow represented was fear. As we go on, the speaker says “ And I will show you something different from either/ Your shadow at morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In this part I think the shadow at morning striding behind you represents the past of whomever the speaker is talking to, and the shadow at evening represents the future since it is what stands in front of you and you meet it eventually. The fear that the speaker will show in a handful of dust might be death, most of the people are afraid of death even if they don’t admit it and a way of showing death might be with the ashes of someone who has died already.
Further on I was confused when T.S. Eliot first mentions the Hyacinths and all that part. At first I thought that Marie had a boyfriend when she was little and that he gave her Hyacinths which led to her being called the hyacinth girl. However, it didn’t make sense with the rest of the poem; I thought that it should be connected with death somehow. Maybe since it was in apostrophes it was someone else besides Marie talking. It could be a girl who had died, or it could be Marie’s image of death. She was brought hyacinths to her grave and she was the hyacinth girl. Here again, the speaker is confused or wants to confuse the reader since she contrasts as she says: “I was neither/Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,/Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”(lines 40-41) From any point from which we look at this, it’s contradictory. If she wasn’t alive, she was supposed to be dead. If she didn’t know anything she couldn’t be looking into the heart of light, because light is knowledge, security, truth. Finally, if she was looking into the heart of light, it couldn’t be silence because silence represents the darkness, the unknown, the lies, or also the death.
Strangely, on the previous section of the poem and on the following, which is the one of Madame Sosostris, there is no season described or mentioned which makes the reader hard to locate them in a chronological time on the poem. It’s interesting how T.S. Eliot uses the future and the past in this part of the poem. I think that it is very important that Madame Sosostris’ prediction is here before is very important because it makes the reader search for the prophecies throughout the poem. Something that called my attention the second time I was reading the wasteland was that I noticed that T.S Eliot used this strange metaphor “(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)”(line48). The pearls in his eyes can mean several things to me however I’m not sure which one did he mean or if he did mean any of them at all. My two options are that the pearls in his eyes mean that he is dead and that’s why his eyes look white, or is that he is blind. The look frightens a bit if you think you are talking of white eyes and you are making an emphasis to what those eyes do. “Fear death by water”(line 55) I did not understand the meaning of this line until I finished reading the whole poem, then is when I understood how all what Madame Sosostris had predicted just like Tiresias became truth.
T.S Elliot seemed to me the most confusing and difficult poet I had ever read. However, there were some things I was able to get from his poem “The wasteland”. In the first part “The Burial of the Dead” I saw the continuous contrasting T.S Eliot uses either to confuse the reader or to enrich his poetry. In line 5 T.S Eliot says “Winter kept us warm…” How could winter keep someone or something warm? Something I don’t understand is why T.S. Eliot chose to be a Lithuania-born German girl. As he states in line 12 when the narrator states: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.”
T.S. Eliot also creates an abrupt change, in my opinion, when he passes from describing nature and simple things such as seasons and drinking coffee, to describing his feelings or the narrator, Marie’s feelings “My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, and I was frightened”(line 15).
Continuing on with the poem, the speaker in this poem starts narrating the branches growing from beneath the stone and gives an image of a dry place with no water or life. When T.S Eliot narrates: “There is shadow under this red rock…”(line 25) in this sentence I thought shadow could have several meanings: Darkness, Evil, or Fear. It turns out that further in the poem I was shown that what that shadow represented was fear. As we go on, the speaker says “ And I will show you something different from either/ Your shadow at morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In this part I think the shadow at morning striding behind you represents the past of whomever the speaker is talking to, and the shadow at evening represents the future since it is what stands in front of you and you meet it eventually. The fear that the speaker will show in a handful of dust might be death, most of the people are afraid of death even if they don’t admit it and a way of showing death might be with the ashes of someone who has died already.
Further on I was confused when T.S. Eliot first mentions the Hyacinths and all that part. At first I thought that Marie had a boyfriend when she was little and that he gave her Hyacinths which led to her being called the hyacinth girl. However, it didn’t make sense with the rest of the poem; I thought that it should be connected with death somehow. Maybe since it was in apostrophes it was someone else besides Marie talking. It could be a girl who had died, or it could be Marie’s image of death. She was brought hyacinths to her grave and she was the hyacinth girl. Here again, the speaker is confused or wants to confuse the reader since she contrasts as she says: “I was neither/Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,/Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”(lines 40-41) From any point from which we look at this, it’s contradictory. If she wasn’t alive, she was supposed to be dead. If she didn’t know anything she couldn’t be looking into the heart of light, because light is knowledge, security, truth. Finally, if she was looking into the heart of light, it couldn’t be silence because silence represents the darkness, the unknown, the lies, or also the death.
Strangely, on the previous section of the poem and on the following, which is the one of Madame Sosostris, there is no season described or mentioned which makes the reader hard to locate them in a chronological time on the poem. It’s interesting how T.S. Eliot uses the future and the past in this part of the poem. I think that it is very important that Madame Sosostris’ prediction is here before is very important because it makes the reader search for the prophecies throughout the poem. Something that called my attention the second time I was reading the wasteland was that I noticed that T.S Eliot used this strange metaphor “(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)”(line48). The pearls in his eyes can mean several things to me however I’m not sure which one did he mean or if he did mean any of them at all. My two options are that the pearls in his eyes mean that he is dead and that’s why his eyes look white, or is that he is blind. The look frightens a bit if you think you are talking of white eyes and you are making an emphasis to what those eyes do. “Fear death by water”(line 55) I did not understand the meaning of this line until I finished reading the whole poem, then is when I understood how all what Madame Sosostris had predicted just like Tiresias became truth.
Unreal City is one of the most puzzling parts of this poem since it continues afterwards but in another part with a different story but with the same beginning. In this part of the poem, were the speaker is apparently a man although I can’t be sure of it, there is a reference to “brown fog” in London which sounded strange because usually fog is grey or white. This made me think that what the author meant to communicate was that London was dirty, contaminated so much that even the fog, which was always pure and cold was brown and dirty. Once again, there are contradictions in this part of the poem a “dead sound” usually sounds are alive, in movement, something dead is supposed to be quiet and still. However, the author may have also made reference to a “staccato” noise very sharp and precise. I thought it was really twisted when the poem goes: “‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?/ ‘ Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?/ ‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, / ‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!/ ‘You! Hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable, ---mon frère!’”(lines 71-76) I think there must be a connection between the flowers be it hyacinths or any other type of flower with death since in both cases flowers are mentioned in the poem death is mentioned nearby. On the other hand, I didn’t understand why did the author became so aggressive with the reader and insult him in another language. Did he believe the reader was an ignorant who wouldn’t understand the meaning of the last sentence? Was he repressed by his readers? Why does he have to come up against me after I have gone all this trouble for analyzing his enigmatic work?!
II. A Game of Chess
I was able to understand better this second part of the wasteland. At first it was describing a lady who appeared to be so majestic, so elegant and pure. She sat in a chair that resembled a "burnished throne"
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