Mythical Method in The Waste Land: Eliot

The design of the He do the Police in Different Voices, well known as The Waste Land is mythic that it conceives and takes final shape from the perspective of the poet as sheer. Eliot was considers as mythic poet not because he uses a known myth for the skeletal structure of the poem but because his artistic point of view is always formed by mythic perspective. Mythic conscious conceive a real world as unified, individual and self-contained despite apparent contradiction in both the universe and human affairs. The profane world of illusion which an ordinary man thinks to be real is not more than “a broken bundle of mirrors”--- in words of Pound, a fragrant that never cohere.

In the waste land the spring time of fertility and regeneration, is opposed to profane time that merely makes change--- Grontion depraved may is here April, the cruelest month. Water with its life giving gifts, its spiritual association with the ritual washing of Christ’s feet, and its identification with the river nymphs of fertility is juxtaposed to the profane desiccation of the waste land where hot water came at ten to complete the empty routine of bath, when Mr. Porter and his “daughter” of the prostitute house wash their feet. The thunder that heralds rain here dry thunder, its message coming in a language few man can understood. The beneficent death by water that transformed the father’s bones into something rich and strange that drowning of Phelbas, without hope of transformation. All other mythic conscious are brought to bear on his opposition of the meaningful sacrificial death and the pointless death in life which are the condition of the waste land.

Time and space as man can measure them are dissolved as the poet visionary with the steady singleness of the perspective merges literary, mythic and historical figure into mythic equivalents. All questers are one: Tiresias, Ferdinand, Adonis, and Denial. The twentieth century man hailing Stetson. All victims are one: Philomel, the Rhyme Maidens, the man with three staves, the hooded Christ and the fisher King. All suffers violation. The sinners share a mutual degradation: the typist and the young man, Madame Sosotris, the merchant of Eugenides and Lil. Eliot tells us we cannot understand any of the part of a great poem without knowing some sense of the whole. Once the total sweep of the poem is recognized, we can examine each of the section as it fits into this design.

“The Burial of the Death” opens as echoes of Sibyl’s poignant wish fades into the bitter yearning of the lifeless society of the waste land for death in the midst of the earth renewal. In London, it is Chaucer’s season. The entire passage documents inhabitants’ failures: their inability in love, their rootlessness in present--- without a past, desperately looking for a horoscope for the glimpse of the future. A sterile planting evoking Baudelaire specter of Ennui, that closes the part one. Paragraph shows The Waste Land is indeed a living hell without the hope redemption. The speaker, like the others, is neither living or dead, knows nothing as he looks into “heart if light, silence”.

The game of chess forther documents the inhabitants the failures in the waste land. In this paragraph, we experiences two kind of sterility: fist the staled synthetic richness of the upper class and the ulcleen vacuous smugness of the pub woman. The violence is universal in the rape of Philomel, in Lil’s aboration and in the madness of Ophelia.