Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, Essay Example

Eliot’s religious references, both obscure and obvious, give peace and order in the otherwise deserted and fragmented waste land. The message of death is also apparent, as Eliot alludes, ”I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (30). Essentially, in order to have peace, we must accept that we are going to turn to dust. Eliot provides imagery of randomness and uncertainty, however death is always certain. By looking at the poem through the lens of religion, it gives order to the structure, in the sense that Eliot’s constant use of religious symbolism give order to the fragmented nature of the poem.

Eliot uses dysfunctional sexual imagery as a means to portray the vastness and nothingness of the waste land. Specifically, Eliot uses imagery of infertility, which directly refers to the emptiness of the barren landscape. Lines 23-24 illustrates this infertile waste land: “And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.” Eliot also uses disorder and uncertainty to allude to sexual dysfunction, which also references the infertile waste land of the broken, modern world.

Eliot’s disapproval of the British empire is evident in his poem, thus his use of fragmentation to portray the breakdown of past empires, such as the Roman, Egyptian and Mughal empires. He sees the collapse of the British empire in the wake of WWI in relation to those past collapsed empires, and the current state of Britain and the Western world is dysfunctional and broken. Eliot imagines and uses symbolism and metaphor to refer to the breakdown of civilization in his poem, which directly references the breakdown of the British empire and how it effects British society.

Works Cited

Eliot, Thomas Stearns, and Lawrence S. Rainey. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Yale University Press, 2006.