Waste Land Essay: Isolation from a Noble Past -- T.S. Eliot Waste Land

The Waste Land Isolation from a frightful Past Desire to return to a noble noncurrent is a central theme of T. S. Eliots The Waste Land. The narrators of the poem consistently show dissitisfaction with the present, and describe, with yearning, the quality of the past furthermore, Eliot portrays the contemporaneous world as irredeemably deep in thought(p) to the looker of antiquity. In The Waste Land, the theme of isolation from a noble past is represented by descriptions of the environment, sexual corruption, and self-mechanization. Eliot opens The Fire Sermon with a apposition of antiquity and modernity that is centered around the Thames River. The mystical past of the river has been destroyed, and the talker laments the current condition of his environment The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, unlifelike boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors Departed, have left no addresses. By the water of the Leman I sat down and wept (177-82) Although this section is written in the present tense, the speaker operator the Thames of the past. The Thames of the past was not polluted, and there were nymphs, giving it a mystical attribute however, these nymphs are departed now, and the river is nothing like it used to be. Eliot also juxtaposes unlike poetic styles to further distinguish the past from the present. Amid a group of unrhymed, rhythm-less lines, he writes, Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song (175... ...ing lost the sense of Good and Evil, has ceased to be alive (46). This living death is seen very clearly during and immediately after the sexual encounter of the clerk and typist. Eliot uses loneliness of environment as well to juxtapose past and present, especially when describing the abortive city. The destruction brought about by post-war modernity is rampant also in the description of the Thames R iver. Finally, Eliot shows the lack of vitality of modern people through their automatic self-mechanization. The characters of the present in The Waste Land have no want to make, or live by, their own choices, and let the machine of life carry them where it may. The result is a stark depiction of the automation, isolation, and despair that define the contemporary world.Work CitedEliot, T. S. The Waste Land. Collected Poems Harcourt New York, 1963.