Reading Notes W 13: Eliot, esp The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, Part B

The poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, the earliest of T.S.Eliot’s major works, was completed in 1910 or 1911 but not published until 1915. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to “force the moment to its crisis” by somehow consummating their relationship. The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian. The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence. The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader “something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; He will show you fear in a handful of dust” The third  section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. In the final section the speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage . The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The section concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins.