A Gliederung of Eliot’s The Waste Land
Sections are determined by stanza breaks in the poem.
- Spring to winter: Statement of how awful it is to be awakened; moving into memories of lost opportunities for love
- Broken images: 1st vision: Hyacinth girl
- Madame Sosotris: mysteries of ancient religious transformation
- Unreal City: Dante, secular world which is neither good nor evil, limbo
- Cleopatra : upper classes; historical, public tradition
- Dialogue between man and hysterical woman : middle class, personal, contemporary)
- Pub Scene: lower classes, urban environment
- The river: nymphs, fishing (pastoral)
- Rape -- jug jug
- Unreal City : Mr. Eugenides
- Violet hour: Tiresius; typist and young man carbuncular
- Music on the waters
- Song of the Thames River’s daughters
- Crucifixion
- Approach to the Chapel: no water, only rock
- The third who walks beside you: Vision of Cities: lamentations of women
- The Empy Chapel
- Indian Section: thunder speaks
- Fragments
I. The
Burial of the Dead (asking the question; starting
the journey; crossing the threshold)
II. A
Game of Chess (the first incomplete, unsatisfactory
answer: sex without love in marriage; the road of trials)
III.
The Fire Sermon (a second unsatisfactory answer:
sex without love outside marriage; various temptations)
IV.
Death by Water (the nadir, sparagmos, symbolic death)
V. What
the Thunder Said (the final hopeful, or at least
on-going answer; reconciliation with parental figures, the return )
One way to understand the structure of The Waste Land is to see it as a traditional Romantic lyric, such as Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode." In his essay on "Structure and Style in the Greater Romatic Lyric," M.H. Abrams defines the essential structure of these poems as the posing of a question, followed by a series of incomplete or unsatisfactory answers, finally resolved by an answer which offers some hope or on-going possibility. (The pattern is, not coincidentally, quite similar to the basic structure of the pastoral elegy.)
Since The Waste Land is a quest poem, another structural schema that you can use to look at the poem is Joseph Campbell's account of the hero's quest. See my charts of the stages in the hero's journey, illustrated in the Star Wars triology.
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Dr. Elisa Kay Sparks (sparks@hubcap.clemson.edu) Last updated: November 21, 1999 |