In our chat about Eliot’s “Waste Land” on Tuesday, I tried to outline a way of reading the poem faithful to its radical, collage form. Keeping track of a motif as it appears throughout Eliot’s long poem offers us a way of noticing patterns and of thinking about how the poem uses repetition to develop its meanings. Recall some of the motifs I pointed to:
zombies: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many.”
wet/dry: “Here, said she,/Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,/(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)”
exile: “Frisch weht der Wind/Der Heimat zu/Mein Irisch Kind,/Wo weilest du?”
fragments/fragmentation: “A heap of broken images”
polyglossia/Babel: ““You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
men and women/romance: “Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not/Speak, and my eyes failed . . .”
nature: lilacs, tubers, hyacinths, “brown fog”
(As you can see even from these examples, motfs are not exclusionary – – sometimes they intersect and double-up.)
Here is your goal for our next foray into “The Waste Land“: choose one of these motifs; find three instances of the motif in the rest of the poem; annotate each instance, explain how this motif connects to other instances.