The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot Essay Sample

T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land is inescapably about communication as a whole. From the intricacies of the story, to the way Eliot presents the Waste Land itself, communication is one of the most prevalent themes interwoven into the poem throughout. This essay will explore how Eliot himself communicates this idea of communication across the whole of the Waste Land.

I – The Burial of the Dead

Eliot's Waste Land pins down, in its very opening, the underlying desire for isolation among the occupants of it, with the notion that the “cruellest month” is one where they are interrupted from their insular lives where the “Winter ke[eps them] warm”, implying that the preferred state of the “us” (which implies universality to this worldview) in the Waste Land is one where they can stay holed up in private, while the “memory and desire” remains unstirred. There is no need, nor any want for communication among the occupants of the Waste Land as they are presented in these first few lines of the Waste Land. This sets the undercurrent of communication in the poem as an unsuccessful pursuit. The lack of motivation to communicate, but an unspoken agreement on the wants of the “us” conveys the ever-present feeling of the monotonous, uniform individuality found in the Waste Land's residents.

Shortly after, we have a contrast to this, from our first definable first-person point of view. In choosing to present this segment as a first-person account, Eliot is already communicating to the reader that despite this underlying desire for solitude, there are still some people who want to share their thoughts and experiences, albeit mashed together, in a way only differentiated by register, and importantly, by language. Eliot chooses to have a speaker argue “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch“ (Interestingly, without a capitalisation on Deutsch, perhaps implying an insincerity that prevents it from being a proper noun?), meaning “I am not Russian, I come from Lithuania, a real German”. There is a desire here to be seen as one desires to be seen, rather than as something that the speaker doesn't find themself aligning with, and they communicate this want. However, this also stems from an initial misunderstanding, or a misidentification, which indicates that communication in the Waste Land either happens explicitly, or it doesn't happen at all. The effect that a shift in language has on the reader could be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, it creates a sense of universality of the message Eliot seeks to communicate to us, implying that these same notions of understanding and interpersonality can exist outside of what we can understand, or exactly that idea of being beyond understandable. Eliot could be using this foreign unfamiliarity to make his inaccessibility even less accessible, a barrier between the reader and the text.

Eliot goes on to suggest that communication is impossible in the culturescape of the Waste Land, introducing the idea of it as “stony rubbish”, viewable in “a heap of broken images” (which all later resurface in Part V, implying a cyclic nature to perception and communication), so already, the information to take in is poorly expressed by the very environment, leading an observer to never be able to “say, or guess, for [they] know only” this amalgamation of imagery and ideas, nothing more. The “only” here also implies a lack of creativity, or of imagination, suggesting that there's no need for communication, truly, seeing as there are no thoughts to share. (Another theme that recurs across the poem).

However, this lack of thought is not met with the same, but rather with the definite “I will show you something different”, a promise to teach, and to communicate “fear in a handful of dust”, a reference to the ultimate futility of human life, the simple terror of death. This is also interestingly linked to Eliot's epigraph:

"For once I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' She replied, 'I want to die.'"