What is the main content of The Waste Land?

The Waste Land is a modernist poem, which is divided into five chapters. Chapter One: "Funeral of the Dead". This chapter does not directly write about the funeral ceremony of the deceased. Headlines imply symbolic and implied meanings. It implies the decline and death of western bourgeois civilization and the decadent, sad and ignorant psychological reality of modern westerners. The beginning of this poem is gloomy and abrupt. April is the cruelest month. Lilacs grow on the wasteland, mixed with memories and desires, so that the spring rain urges the second verse of those plain root-bud poems to point out the theme with abstract and solemn sentences: Europe is in ruins, the land is dry and the vegetation is withered, which vividly shows the decline of the whole western civilization. At the same time, this symbolic image also implies that Europeans indulge their selfish desires and lose their religious beliefs, leading to spiritual and spiritual emptiness; Those who violate God's precepts and forget the existence of God will be in big trouble. Chapter II "Games". Through the description of women from several different social classes, the post-war social atmosphere is truly reproduced, which seems to show the degeneration of women, but in essence reflects the degeneration of the whole human nature and civilization: in addition to luxury and enjoyment, there are gaps that cannot be filled, and boring topics such as "wearing dentures" are nagged. In short, there is only ugliness, not beauty. The second upper-class woman is a whiny and bossy woman. Chapter III "Fire Commandment". Extend the theme of the second chapter: the fire of desire burns in every corner of the world. Throughout the article, we use the comparison between the past and the present to expose the evils of modern times. At first, I quoted a poem from Spencer's Wedding Song, describing the fairy swimming in the Thames, singing the beautiful scenery of nature and happy mood. Then, the poet wrote about the vulgar and obscene lives of various characters in London. The poet borrowed Tiresias, a blind man who can predict the future, from Ovid's Metamorphosis as a bystander. Finally, I quote Sakyamuni's fire commandment and St. Augustine's confession. The ascetic monks in both the East and the West are opposed to the fire of lust. They all emphasize the need to burn out the fire of human desire with the sacred flame, so that human beings can be reborn and return to simplicity. This poem strongly reflects Eliot's desire to seek spiritual export from religion and save human society. The fourth chapter "Death in Water" is very short, with only ten lines in total. Still use the allusions in the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Through the story of Phoenician sailor Philippas indulging in drowning in the sea, people are warned not to repeat the same mistakes, suggesting that only by converting to religion and God can they be saved. The fifth chapter is "the words of thunder". At the beginning, the story of Jesus' crucifixion in the Bible and the New Testament is implicitly used, and it is still repeatedly emphasized that modern Europeans have lost their religious beliefs and are in a state of "death despite life" and "life is death". After the publication of the long poem, the word "wasteland" itself became a symbol of the decline of western civilization and became a famous "wasteland view" in the western world.