The Waste Land

[Gray]

How do you interpret these words from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot?

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Then spoke the thunder
D A
Datta:what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
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(I arrived at this when I heard a professor saying in an interview that these are some of the most beautiful words in English language. I know that it is difficult to interpret especially to a non-native like me )
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First lesson - English, not english. I, not i. ~A student of English

[Happytofita]

[Happytofita]

By the way, I have heard that it took him 3 years to write the poem.

[Gray]

[Gray]

[Happytofita]

The Burial of the Dead is in the Waste Land. The latter consists of five parts (if it is appropriate to call them so):
I. The Burial of the Dead
II. A Game of Chess
III. The Fire Sermon
IV. Death By Water
V. What the Thunder Said

Gray, I used to know The Burial of the Dead by heart.
Gray, you should ask someone else for an interpretation. I am not the right person. I think one needs to read the whole poem to be able (at least) to form an idea about it. I also think that one needs to read about modernism to understand the poem.

These are my favorite verses:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'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!'

In this stanza, I think people are like robots. They have lost their humanity. To have a better idea about this stanza, watch Charlie Chaplin's movie of 1936, Modern Times.




: o)

[Gray]

Yes, the machines have influenced us as never before and the movie or the poem would not be out-of-date in a foreseeable future, at least... not until someone interprets it the human way
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First lesson - English, not english. I, not i. ~A student of English