Waste Land Essay: Ceremonies and Rituals :: T.S. Eliot Waste Land Essays

The risky Land Ceremonies and Rituals Ceremonies are prevalent throughout T.S. Eliots poem The surplus Land. Eliot relies on literary bloods to illustrate the specific values of meaningful, effectual rituals of native society in contrast to the meaningless, downhearted, sham rituals of the modernistic day. These contrasts serve to state how ceremonies shadower become broken when they are missing decisive components, or they are all overloaded with too many. Even the way language is use in the poem furthers the point of ceremonies, both broken and not. In share V of The Waste Land, Eliot writes, After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the polar silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The yelling and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead (ll. 322-328). The imagery of a primal ceremonial is evident in this passage. The last line of He who was living is now dead shows the passing of the primal ceremony the data link to it that was once viable is now dead. The language used to describe the way out is very rich and vivid red, sweaty, stony. These words evoke an event that is without the cares of modern life- it is primal and hot. A couple of lines later Eliot talks of red glowering faces sneer and snarl/ From doors of mudcracked houses (ll. 344-345). These lines too seem to contain language that has a primal quality to it. From the primal roots of ceremony Eliot shows us the contrast of broken ceremonies. Some of these ceremonies are broken because they are lacking vital components. A major ceremony in The Waste Land is that of sex. The ceremony of sex is broken, however, because it is missing components of love and consent. An example of this appears in section II, lines 99-100, The pitch of Philomel, by the barbarous king/ So rudely forced this is referring to the infraction of Philomel by King Tereus of Thrace. The forcing of sex on an unwilling partner breaks the whole ceremony of sex. Rape is not the only way a broken sex ceremony can take place.The broken ceremony can also occur when there is a lack of love, as shown in lines 222-256. This passage describes a scene between the typist and the young man carbuncled.