Berkow, Jordan ed. Not affiliated with Harvard College. Choose an adventure below and discover your next favorite movie or TV show. Racked with lust, he steals away with her and rapes her in the woods –- the "sylvan scene” Eliot mentions. It may seem at first ironic that he relies so much on Ovid, the Bible, Dante, and other older works of literature to describe the modern age, but Eliot’s method is an essentially universalist one. There is an apocolyptic mood with images of dryness and draught. Synthetic humanoids live and work together with natural born humans in a society manipulated and controlled by the governing entity known as The State. When she asks him what he remembers, he replies by quoting the same Shakespearean allusion we encountered in ‘The Burial of the Dead’: ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes.’ There’s a strong suggestion that the man is scarred by some sort of trauma and has blocked out much of his life and refuses to talk or think about it. Chess belongs therefore to this lifeless life; it is the quintessential game of the wasteland, dependent on numbers and cold strategies, devoid of feeling or human contact. About The Waste Land. As the women leave the pub, their cries of ‘Good night’ merge with the words Ophelia says as she leaves the stage for the last time in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.’ Ophelia has already gone mad, spurned by Hamlet and used as a pawn by her father Polonius as part of his political scheming; shortly after this, she will be found dead, having (probably) drowned herself. Snatches of dialogue follow. First Tristan and Isolde, now Cleopatra: twice now Eliot has alluded to tragic romances, filtered from antiquity through more modern sensibilities -– first that of Wagner, the great modernizer of opera, and then that of Shakespeare, perhaps the first “modern” dramatist. It’s facetious to suggest that she’s on the lavatory – though note the ‘odours’ of the ‘perfumes’ surrounding her, suggesting that she is at her toilet, if not on one; it’s also worth mentioning that Eliot’s original draft of The Waste Land actually contained a description of a woman, Fresca, ‘at stool’, literally on the toilet. Lil is apparently on pills, unhappy in her marriage, and mother to none. Synthetic humanoids live and work together with natural born … The man’s replies are often cryptic. She accuses the man of remaining quiet and of not telling her what he is thinking. Eliot? We are not sure who the woman is: perhaps Eliot’s wife Vivienne, perhaps a stand-in for all members of the upper crust, perhaps simply an unnamed personage whiling away the hours in a candlelit kingdom. The Best TV Shows About Being in Your 30s. II. Add the first question. Time for what? This artistic depiction of sexual violence foreshadows several other, modern moments in the poem, such as the woman Lil who is much put-upon (literally) by her husband later in ‘A Game of Chess’, and the young man who ‘assaults’ the typist in ‘The Fire Sermon’. Interaction is reduced to a set of movements on a checkered board. He then ties her up and cuts off her tongue so that she may not tell others of what has happened. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Upon meeting Philomela, Tereus falls instantly and hopelessly in love; nothing must get in the way of his conquest. Eliot, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. The Waste Land literature essays are academic essays for citation. Interesting Literature is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon.co.uk. Image: A large chess game inside Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD, USA (picture credit: Jyothis), via Wikimedia Commons. When Eliot evokes dance-hall numbers and popular ditties, he does so through the “Shakespeherian Rag.” When he imitates the Cockney talk of women in a pub, he finishes the dialogue with a quotation from Hamlet, so that the rhythms of lower-class London speech give way to the words of the mad Ophelia. Kevin, Pingback: A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Burial of the Dead’ | Interesting Literature. The Question and Answer section for The Waste Land is a great What might the game allegorize for Eliot? The woman, despairing, asks the man what they are going to do – what they are ever going to do – which reinforces the idea that their lives are empty of meaning and they struggle to find ways to make their existence matter. When he finds out that he has been served his son for dinner, Tereus flies into a rage, chasing both Philomela and his wife out of the palace, and all three of them transform into birds. Yet the women they are associated with – Cleopatra in the case of the first, Ophelia in the case of the second – both grasped the nettle (or the asp, in the case of Cleopatra) and took their own lives. Finally, when the woman asks him whether there is anything in his head, he replies with another quotation, this time not from Shakespeare but about Shakespeare, a jazz song from 1912 called ‘Shakesperian Rag’. The call for last orders from the barman, repeated throughout this final section and rendered in capitals, cuts across the conversation of the women, but also, by extension, highlights the fact that Lil is trapped in her marriage and her reproductive cycle. In the Greek myth, retold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus; the gods took pity on her and she was turned into a nightingale, though she continued to accuse Tereus (thus the bird’s call of ‘Jug Jug’). The trappings of a wealthy modern life come at a price. In summary, ‘A Game of Chess’ begins with a long description of an ornately decorated room in which a woman is sitting on a ‘Chair’ like a throne (the first line of ‘A Game of Chess’ is actually an allusion to a line from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne …’). Copyright © 1999 - 2020 GradeSaver LLC. GradeSaver, 26 October 2007 Web. Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email. A Game of Chess. We now move to one of the most popular sections of ‘A Game of Chess’, especially when it comes to analysis of the themes of The Waste Land as a whole: we find ourselves in a pub in the East End of London, and to the other end of the social spectrum. They are both trapped in a cycle of repetition. She’s only thirty-one years old, but she already looks ancient – largely because she took abortion pills to ‘bring … off’ her latest pregnancy, as they already have too many mouths to feed. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! The only escape is death, and that seems unthinkable. In the original story, King Tereus’s wife bids him to bring her sister Philomela to her. After over 30 lines describing the woman in her room, which are rendered largely in blank verse, we then move to a more fragmentary style of verse which is far less ornate, as we read a conversation between a woman (presumably the same woman) and her male lover. Quotation and allusion is of course a quintessential component of Eliot’s style, particularly in "The Waste Land"; the poem is sometimes criticized for being too heavily bedecked in references, and too dependent on previous works and canons. Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines. Storyline The Wasteland explores a future dystopian world where government and technology have taken over our lives. He is reduced to quoting other people rather than giving personal, heartfelt answers to the big, personal questions put to him by the woman, which neatly mirrors what T. S. Eliot himself is doing: quoting other people. ‘A Game of Chess’ is the second section of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, the impact of which was profound and immediate. Interaction is reduced to a set of movements on a checkered board. It is tempting to read the woman on the “burnished throne” as Eliot’s wife, Vivienne; the passage then becomes a dissection of an estranged relationship. It’s a life of stiff routine: the hot water goes on at ten, and a roof over the convertible car at four to take them out if it’s raining, and a game of chess while they wait, ominously, for a knock at the door – whether a ghost from the past or a new guest to bring meaning to their lives, the man cannot say. Study Guide Navigation. Her dayculminates with plans for an exc… Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. The mood is sad and filled with futility. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The speechless Philomela becomes a nightingale. Chess belongs therefore to this lifeless life; it is the quintessential game of the wasteland, dependent on numbers and cold strategies, devoid of feeling or human contact. Chess belongs to this lifeless life; it is the quintessential game of the wasteland, dependent on numbers, devoid of feeling or human contact. "The Waste Land Section II: “A Game of Chess” Summary and Analysis". The title partly alludes to a game of chess played in Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women, but also to another of his plays, A Game at Chess. In contrast to modernist poets such as Cendrars and Appollinaire, who used the choot-choot of trains, the spinning of wheels, and the billowing of fumes to evoke their era, or philosophers such as Kracauer and Benjamin, who dove into the sports shows and the arcade halls in search of a lexicon of the modern that is itself modern, Eliot is content to tease modernity out of the old. This section takes its title from two plays by the early 17th-centuryplaywright Thomas Middleton, in one of which the moves in a gameof chess denote stages in a seduction. The setting is a decidedly grandiose one. Section III: "The Fire Sermon" Summary and Analysis, Section I: "The Burial of the Dead" Summary and Analysis. In the modern age, Eliot seems to say, escape is not so easy. The carving of a dolphin is cast in a “sad light.” The grandiose portraits and paintings on the wall are but “withered stumps of time.” By the end of this first stanza, the room seems almost haunted: “staring forms / Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.” The woman, for her part, is a glittering apparition, seated upon her Chair (Eliot capitalizes the word as if it were a kingdom) like a queen, recalling Cleopatra -– and thus yet another failed love affair.