Ceremonies In The Waste Land Essays - Holy Grail, Free Essays

Ceremonies In The Waste Land Essays - Holy Grail, Free Essays Ceremonies in "The Waste Land" Ceremonies are prevalent throughout T.S. Eliot?s poem "The Waste Land". Eliot relies on literary contrasts to illustrate the specific values of meaningful, effectual rituals of primitive society in contrast to the meaningless, broken, sham rituals of the modern day. These contrasts serve to show how ceremonies can become broken when they are missing vital components, or they are overloaded with too many. Even the way language is used in the poem furthers the point of ceremonies, both broken and not. In section V of The Waste Land, Eliot writes, "After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over diezt mountains He who was living is now dead" (ll. 322-328). The imagery of a primal ceremony is evident in this passage. The last line of "He who was living is now dead" shows the passing of the primal ceremony; the connection to it that was once viable is now dead. The language used to describe the event is very rich and vivid: red, sweaty, stony. These words evoke an event that is without the cares of modern life- it is primal and hot. A couple of lines later Eliot talks of "red sullen faces sneer and snarl/ From doors of mudcracked houses" (ll. 344-345). These lines too seem to contain language that has a primal quality to it. From the primal roots of ceremony Eliot shows us the contrast of broken ceremonies. Some of these ceremonies are broken because they are lacking vital components. A major ceremony in The Waste Land is that of sex. The ceremony of sex is broken, however, because it is missing components of love and consent. An example of this appears in section II, lines 99-100, "The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king/ So rudely forced"; this is referring to the rape of Philomel by King Tereus of Thrace. The forcing of sex on an unwilling partner breaks the entire ceremony of sex. Rape is not the only way a broken sex ceremony can take place. The broken ceremony can also occur when there is a lack of love, as shown in lines 222-256. This passage describes a scene between "the typist" and "the young man carbuncular". What passes between these two individuals is a sex ceremony that is devoid of love and emotion (except for, perhaps, the emotion of lust on the part of the young man). The typist is indifferent to the whole event and the young man?s "vanity requires no response" (l. 241). For a ceremony to be effective, the participants have to have some degree of faith in what they are doing. They must believe that the ceremony will result in something worthwhile. The participants in this broken ceremony had no faith in what they were doing; they were just going through the motions. This is made obvious when the secretary says "?Well now that?s done: and I?m glad it?s over.?" (l. 252). Another way that broken ceremonies (broken due to lack of components) are presented in the poem, are ceremonies of nature. It seems as though the waste land is always waiting for the ceremony of rain, the bringing of water, to the dry land. For most of the poem the water never arrives because there is always something missing. In lines 331 and 332 Eliot says, "Here is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water". In line 342 there is, "dry sterile thunder without rain". The lack of water in ceremonies of nature that require it, lead to a broken ceremony.. Even at the beginning of the poem Eliot tells us that we, "know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water." (ll. 21-24). Clearly this is wrong, and this lack of water is a main theme, and a main broken ceremony in The Waste Land. Conversely, ceremonies can also be broken when there are too many components in the ceremony, a something extra that serves to