Describe the western society as a wasteland, where everything is bleak and life is dying. The first few words reveal the poet's deep pain, endless disappointment and sadness. In spring, everything is revived and business is full, but in the poet's pen, London, the symbol of modern civilization, is a withered wasteland. In this lifeless habitat, people are neither born nor dead. Although they are still alive, there is only disillusionment and despair in their hearts, and the world in front of them is only lust like the sea. In this suffocating reality, people are full of vulgar and humble desires, and the cloud of death hangs thick over the western world, and people die in a daze. Poets compare the real society to hell, and modern people regard it as a ghost without soul.
Chapter II Games
The lust and sin of men and women in the upper class described in Virgil's Enette, Ovid's Metamorphosis and Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra are superimposed on the despicable physical transactions in the lower class, highlighting the modern life of spiritual decay and moral degradation. Wu Bie is quoted from the story of Philumella being raped and killed by King Tiros in Metamorphosis, which naturally and powerfully expresses the profound theme of the poem. Playing chess is fighting, symbolizing the intrigue of modern people and comparing ancient atrocities with modern evils. Eliot thinks that modern people are repeating the sins of ancient people, the world is addicted to the desires of animals, and people have become inhuman walking corpses, saying that they are "in a rat's nest, the dead have no bones."
Chapter III Fire Control Commandments
Show the vulgar, dirty and sinful life of London, a modern wasteland: in the hymns of the holy church, the world repeats the cruelty of the iron furnace; In the bright moonlight, Deng mother and daughter are engaged in prostitution; In the hazy fog, businessmen run for money; Spiritual emptiness of young men and women in sexual intercourse to kill time; Mud left by people after playing floats on the poetic Thames. In the poet's view, the fire of lust not only destroys nature, but also destroys human nature, resulting in this "reality of nothingness and nothingness." He begged the Buddha to let the fire of burning things sweep away all his desires and save mankind: "burn, burn, burn/Lord, save me/Lord, save me/burn".
Chapter IV Death in Water
Tong * * has only 10 lines, and each line is a symbol with profound meaning. Some people say that its symbolic content is comparable to Dante's purgatory. People die in the ocean of desire, forget everything before death, and let him reflect quietly in the ocean of desire of death. The sea in Eliot's works is both a symbol of lust and purgatory, which makes people realize their sins before they die. In fact, Eliot wants modern people to face up to their sins and wash their souls.
The fifth chapter Thunder's words
Returning to Europe is a dry wasteland. The poem begins with the crucifixion of Jesus, symbolizing the disappearance of European beliefs, ideals and lofty spiritual pursuits. The poet believes that since then, Europe has become a terrible wasteland. People are eager for the water of life, looking forward to the emergence of the savior, the recovery of the world and the reconstruction of the soul. He used biblical allusions to describe the image of Jesus after his resurrection. However, Christ didn't come back, but he heard an earth-shattering noise-a symbol of revolution. Eliot thinks that the socialist revolution is a disaster for mankind. Finally, the poet warned people with thunderous words: only by giving, sympathizing, restraining and converting to religion can the earth recover and people get rid of the situation of immortality and obtain permanent peace.
abstract
The hope of resurrection in the withered wasteland-vulgar and ugly people who are still alive-runs through the cold and hazy picture of the whole poem as a main line, which profoundly shows the true face of the western society, which is full of human desires, spiritual degradation, moral decay, mean and wretched life, ugliness and darkness, conveys the disgust, general disappointment and disillusionment of Westerners to the world and reality after World War I, and shows the mental illness and spiritual crisis of a generation. At the same time, the poem attributed the decline of western society to human's "original sin" and regarded the restoration of religious spirit as a panacea to save the western world and modern people, which was Eliot's answer.
The Waste Land has made more artistic achievements than other modernist poems, and it is a masterpiece worthy of reference and serious study. This lyric poem is diverse in style and eclectic in expression, which softens some characteristics of symbolism, imagism and metaphysics. In the poem, sentences and hymns, lyricism and satire, descriptions and epigrams, solemn and elegant poems and humorous proverbs are intertwined into colorful scenes. A large number of allusions (the author quotes 36 writers, 56 works and 6 foreign languages), symbolic techniques such as metaphor, suggestion, association and correspondence, and modern poetic expressions such as image superposition and space-time interlacing are handy for poets. He even boldly adopted the methods of symbol in symbol, myth in myth, interweaving myth with reality, mixing ancient and modern, and integrating reality with reality, which made poetry highly abstract and philosophical organically unified, greatly enriched the means of expression of poetry and expanded the ideological content of poetry. The shortage of artistic expression in The Waste Land is that there are too many allusions, and imagination, association and suggestion are very casual, which makes the poem difficult to understand and makes the general readers flinch. Without more than 50 comments added by Eliot himself, many places can't be understood.
As the first school of western modernism, symbolism in the later period made a unique contribution to the development of literature. Its successful experience in artistic creation and development has enriched the means of expression of poetry, enhanced its artistic appeal and influenced various schools of modernism. Symbolist writers pay attention to expressing their inner world, which is also an expansion of the literary field. However, the mystery and obscurity caused by symbolism's excessive pursuit of expression in art, pessimism in content, religious mysticism and reactionary and retrogressive social views should be denied.