Allusions in the Wasteland【艾略特《荒原》中用典的详细解读】(全英文,超详细)

The Allusions in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

The Waste Land is an important poem. It has something important to say and it should have an important effect on the reader. But it is not easy.

In Eliot's own words:

"We can say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning."

"Tradition cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour."

Eliot is dealing with the loss of meaning and significance of many things, and so he continually contrasts the present with the past, often using literary allusions to help to arouse in the reader the response he wants. For this reason he gives some of these allusions in a set of notes. However, he merely says where they come from or gives them in the original Italian or French or German. These notes give the actual allusions, translated into English where necessary, and printed in such a way that the reader can see the allusion and the relevant passage in the poem at the same time. For instance, a passage from the poem is on page 3 and the allusions to it are on page 2.

The notes have also amplified Eliot's notes in some cases, with valuable help from three excellent books:

Stephen Coote: The Waste Land in Penguin Master Studies 1985

B C Southam: A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T S Eliot

Faber and Faber, 1968

George Williamson: A reader's Guide to T S Eliot

Thames and Hudson, Second Edition, 1967

It is a pleasure to thank Sheila Davies for her translation of Baudelaire's Au Lecteur

Allusion are numbered and you will seldom have to scroll down more than a page to find the comment on the allusion

The comments on the allusions are in frames.

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The Waste Land

"Nam sibyllam quiden Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβιυλλα τι θελεισ; respondebat illa: A

"αποθαειν θελω."

Pound

For

Ezra

il miglior fabro B

A For I once saw with my own eyes the Sybil at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys

said to her "What do you want?" she answered, "I want to die."

B 'il miglior fabro' means ' the better craftsman', a well-deserved tribute to Ezra Pound. Eliot sent the original manuscript of The Waste Land to Pound, and as Eliot said 'the sprawling, chaotic poem left Pound's hands reduced to about half its size and in the process it was changed from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem,'

Photo-copies of the manuscript, with the changes made by Pound, are available in book form, and fully support Eliot's acknowledgment of his debt to Pound.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

April is the cruelest month, breeding 1

Lilac out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth with forgetful snow, feeding

Life with dried tubers. 7

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee 8

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 12

And when we were children, staying at the archduke's ,

My cousin's , he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. Ands down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read much of the night, and go south in the winter. 18

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man 21

You cannot say, or guess , for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, 23

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, 24

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

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There is shadow under this red rock, 26

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

1 to 7 Critics usually contrast the description of spring with the opening of the general Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. To regard April, the harbinger of spring, as 'the cruelest month' is natural for the dwellers in the waste land, who are afraid of life, who are 'living and partly living'. What the general Prologue says more clearly but with less charm

than Chaucer in modern English is

When that April with its sweet showers

Has pierced the drought of March down to the root

And filled each plant with so much moisture

As made it burgeon forth in flowers

8 to 18 are a reverie.

12 I am not a Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German. This is the strained, neurotic reaction of a dispossessed person at a time when only German nationality or protection could ward off the threat of danger. This line anticipates the vision of anarchy, of fleeing refugees, in lines 367 to 377.

21 Son of man Ezekiel 2:3 "And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me even unto this very day."

23 broken images Ezekiel 6:3 "Behold I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places. And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken; and

I will cast your slain men before your idols."

24 the cricket no relief

“the cricket no relief” is an echo from Ecclesiastes 12:5, where the preacher describes the desolation of old age: "Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets."

26 There is shadow under this red rock

Isaiah 32:1, 2 describes the blessing of Christ's kingdom:

"Behold a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment. And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and as a covert from the tempest; As rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

Frisch weht der Wind 31 Fresh blows the wind

Der Heimat zu Towards my homeland

Mein Irisch Kind, My Irish child

Wo weilest du Where do you linger?

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

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They called me the hyacinth girl."

– Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, and I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed' und leer das Meer Desolate and empty the sea 42

31 Frisch weht der Wind

This is a song of innocent and na?ve love from Tristan and Isolde, which is a work of passionate love. A young sailor, feeling the wind blowing toward his homeland, sings of the girl he loves.

42 Oed' und leer das Meer

The dying Tristan is waiting for Isolde's ship, but the lookout reports that the sea is desolate and empty.

Between these two scene there is, by way of contrast, a modern love affair, beautiful but ultimately meaningless.

Even in love she is neither living nor dead.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, 43

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) 48

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

43 Madame Sosostris

Madame Sosostris and the Taro cards represent ancient magic and ritual, here reduced to the insignificance of vulgar fortune telling. Eliot says of this passage: "I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: Because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part v.

The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the 'crowds of people' and Death by Water is executed in part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate , quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself."

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48 Those are pearls that were his eyes

The Tempest, Act 1 ii , 394

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Unreal city, 60

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many. 63

Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled, 64

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. 68

60 Unreal city

Baudelaire: "O teeming city, city full of illusions,

Where ghosts accost the passerby in broad daylight."

63 I had not thought death had undone so many

Inferno, Canto 3: "And behind it came so long a train of people, that I should never have believed death had undone do many."

(In this canto Dante describes the :"dreary souls who lived without blame and without praise . . . who were not rebellious, nor were faithful to God, but were for themselves."

Dante also call them "these wretches that never were alive."

64 Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled

Inferno, Canto 4: "Here as mine ear could note, no plaint was heard, except of sighs, that made the eternal air to tremble, not caused by torture but from grief felt by those multitudes, many and vast."

This canto deals with people - like Socrates - who lived virtuously but never knew the Gospel. So two kinds of people live in the modern Waste Land: those who are secularised and those who have no knowledge of the faith.

68 With a dead sound at the final stroke of nine.

Eliot says that he often noticed this when the clock of St Mary Woolnoth struck nine.

In lines 60 to 68 Eliot is dealing with man's spiritual bankruptcy. He does this by recreating life about him by using the language and ideas of the past.

In the modern Waste Land where people are living and partly living, they have no standards of right and wrong, of virtue and sin, that individuals or society accept or live by. Eliot uses the reminders to Dante to contrast this with another, more aware time. The people in Dante's Hell

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were people who had sinned to various degrees and were punished in different circles of hell. Like the people James Thomson spoke of, who were

gratified to gain

that positive eternity of pain

Instead of this insufferable inane.

There I saw one I knew; and stopped him, crying: "Stetson! 69

"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! 70

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden 71,

"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's foe to men 74

"Or with his nails he'll did it up again!

"You! Hypocrite lecteur! Mon semblable, mon frère!" 76

69 Stetson is the representative commuter

70 Mylae was one of the battles in the Punic war, a sordid trade war. By choosing this war rather than the similar and more topical 1914 - 1918 war, Eliot is making the point that all wars are similar.

71 The corpse you planted in your garden

In ancient fertility rites, images of the gods were buried in the fields.

74 Oh keep the Dog far hence

Dirge sung by Cornelia in THE WHITE DEVIL by John Webster

Act 5, Scene 4:

Call for the robin redbreast and the wren,

Since o'er the shady groves they hover

And with leaves and flowers do cover

The friendless bodies of unburied men.

Call unto his funeral dole

The ant, the fieldmouse and the mole

To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm.

But keep the wolf far hence, that's foe to man

Or with his nails he'll dig it up again.

It is not such an odd step from wolf to dog. In the old testament the dog is not a friend to man, but even sometimes feeds on corpses. And Psalm 22 verse 20 has "Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog."

76 "You! Hypocrite lecteur…"

This is the last line of Au Lecteur (To the reader), the poem that is the preface to Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) which is Charles Baudelaire's manifesto. It is addressed to the reader and means: "You, hypocrite reader, my image, my brother."

Translation of Au Lecteur by Sheila Davies

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Stupidity, indiscretion, sin and meanness

Take over our minds and wear away our bodies,

And, full of remorse, we affectionately nurture our wrongdoings In the same way that beggars feed titbits to vermin.

Our sins are strong-willed, our repentance cowardly;

Making gushing confession becomes a habit.

We walk with gay abandon along fouled-up pathways, Believing that our cheap tears will wash away the stains of filth. It is Satan of the three-pronged fork who,

On the pillow of evil, gently rocks our entranced spirit,

And the precious metal of our free will

Is all vaporised by this cunning alchemist.

It is the devil who grasps the cords that entangle us.

In whatever is repugnant we find charm.

Each day we take one step nearer down to Hell,

Blind to its horrors as we cross the stinking gloom.

Just like a penniless lecher who kisses and nibbles

The shriveled up breast of an old tart,

We filch from life's journey our furtive pleasures

Which we squeeze as we would an old orange.

Holding on fast, writhing around like a million worms,

A race of Demons holds an orgy in our brains,

And, when we breathe, Death floods our lungs,

An invisible river of stifled groans.

If rape, poison, murder or fire

Have not yet embroidered their pretty designs

On the insignificant canvas of our pitiful destinies,

It is because our souls, alas, are not taut enough.

But of all the jackals, panthers, lice,

Apes, scorpions, vultures and serpents,

The yelping, howling, snarling, creeping monsters

Of the loathsome menagerie of our depravity,

There is one that is even uglier, more wretched, more vile

than all the rest;

Though he utters no savage cries nor thrashes about in a frenzy, He would gladly reduce the world to a heap of débris,

And with one great yawn swallow up the earth.

He is Ennui! - his eye brimming over with an ineffectual tear,

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He dreams up scaffolds while he smokes his opium.

You know him, reader, this insidious monster,

Hypocrite reader, - my kinsman - my brother!

I

I A GAME OF CHESS

The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, 78

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up the standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wings)

Doubled the flames of seven branched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and colored glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid - troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odors; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia, 93

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. 94

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the colored stone,

In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene 99

The change in Philomel, by the barbarous king 100

.So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon these walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing, hushing the room enclosed.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

]II A GAME OF CHESS

This section of the poem deals with sex without love, especially within marriage, just as Fire Sermon deals with sex outside marriage.

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The title refers to a game of chess in Women Beware Of Women, a play by Thomas Middleton 1580 - 1627. While the duke is seducing Bianca in the gallery in view of the audience, his confederate is distracting her mother-in-law's attention with a game of chess.

78 The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne

An empty, rich woman is sitting at her dressing table. The reference is to Antony And Cleopatra, Act I, Sc 2, line 194, in which Enobarbus describes Cleopatra at her first meeting with Anthony.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,

Burn'd on the waters, the poop was beaten gold,

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them

And later in line 239: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety; other women cloy

The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry

Where most she satisfies.

The allusion to Antony and Cleopatra contrasts voluptuous femininity and romantic love, and the artificial and sterile personal relationships in the waste land.

93 laquearia A paneled lacquered ceiling

In his notes Eliot refers us to The Aeneid, Book 1 line 726

The chandeliers that hung from the gold fretted ceiling

Were lit, and cressets of torches subdued the night with flames

Translation by Cecil Day Lewis

94 coffered Decorated with sunken panels

99 sylvan scene Eliot's note refers us to Paradise Lost Book 4, line 140,describing the scene before Satan when he first arrives at the borders of Eden.

and overhead up-grew

Insuperable height of loftiest shade,

Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,

A sylvan scene, and, as the ranks ascend,

Shade above shade, a woody theatre

Of stateliest view.

Framed by this sylvan scene we see a reminder of Philomela.

100 The change in Philomel

Tereus, king of Thrace married Procne , a girl from Athens. She missed her sister, Philomela, and sent Tereus to fetch her. Tereus fell in love with Philomela and raped her. He then cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling Procne, but she still found out. The sisters revenged themselves on Tereus by killing his son, Itylus, and setting his flesh before Tereus at a banquet. The gods took pity on these people and changed them into various birds: Tereus into a hoopoe, Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale.

Swinburne also uses this myth in The huntsman's chorus in Atalanta In Calydon:

And the brown bright nightingale amorous

Is half assuaged for Itylus

And the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,

The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Eliot uses the nightingale as a symbol of beauty born out of suffering, but in the waste land it only sings "Jug, jug" to dirty ears. In Elizabethan poetry, "jug, jug" was a conventional way of representing birdsong, but it was also a crude, joking way of referring to the sex act.

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"My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. stay with me. 111

"Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.

":What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

"I never know what you are thinking. Think".

I think we are in rat's alley

Where the dead men lost their bones

"What is that noise?"

The wind under the door.

"Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing?

"Do you remember nothing?"

I remember those are pearls that were his eyes. up to here

"Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

But O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag -

It's so elegant

So intelligent "What shall I do now? What shall I do?

"I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

"With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

"What shall we ever do?"

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

"When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said -

"I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,"

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

"Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

"He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

'You have them all out Lil, and get a nice set'

He said, 'I swear I can't bear to look at you.'

And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert

He's been in the army four years he wants a good time

And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.

A conversation starts at line 111. The woman in quotation marks, her husband not. The woman is sharp, shrill, irritable, the man detached and melancholy. Eliot puts his words in quotation marks, probably to imply that he does not answer at all, but merely says those words to himself.

Oh is there, she said, Something o'that I said

Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look."

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

"If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can't.

But if Albert takes off, it won't be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.

The chemist said it would be all right but I've never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said.

What you get married for if you don't want children?"

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

"Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me to dinner to get the beauty of it hot -"

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

Goonight Bill, Goonight Lou, Goonight May, Goonight. Ta ta, Goonight

Good night, ladies, goodnight, sweet ladies, good night, good night. 172

172 Good night, ladies

Ophelia's last words before she drowns herself, driven mad by Hamlet's pretended love for her and then his feigned indifference.

Hamlet, Act 4, scene 5, line 55

What does Eliot achieve with the allusions in A Game of Chess?

The emotions aroused by the physical beauty and charm of Cleopatra, the passions in the rape and revenge of Philomela, the intensity of feeling and hurt that drove Ophelia to suicide, have no place in the lives of the rich or the poor, "living and partly living" in the waste land.

III THE FIRE SERMON

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf 173

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land unheard. The nymphs are departed 175

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. 176

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . 182

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long

But at my back, in a cold blast I hear 185

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The rattle of bones and the chuckle spread from ear to ear.

The Fire Sermon was preached by the Buddha against the fires of lust, anger, envy and other passions that consumed men.

However, the trouble with any sermon is that, as Prospero said,

"the strongest oaths are straw to the fire in the blood."

173 The river's tent is broken

The river's tent evokes the image of the shelter provided in summer by the leafy boughs of trees overhanging a river, a shelter now lost through the loss of leaves at the end of summer. But 'the river's tent is broken' suggests a deeper and more solemn meaning. Perhaps the loss of some sacred or mystic quality. In the Old Testament, a tent can be a tabernacle or holy place because the wandering tribes of Israel used a tent as a portable tabernacle. In Isaiah 33: 20 we have a reminder of the time when the tabernacle was a tent: "Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be moved, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken." And in Isaiah 33:21 the statement that a river gives power and safety: "But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ships pass thereby."

175 The nymphs are departed

Edmund Spenser celebrates the beauty and joy of marriage in his beautiful lyric, Prothalamion, using the Thames as a perfect pastoral setting. The nymphs that Eliot refers to are probably those described in the lines

There in a Meadow, by the river's side,

A flocke of Nymphs I chauncéd to espy

All lovely daughters of the flood thereby.

176 'Sweete Themmes runne softely till I end my Song'

is the refrain from Prothalamion. (Prothalamion is a song or poem in celebration of a forthcoming wedding.)

182 By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept

Psalm 137 is the lamentation of the Israelites exiled to Babylon, yearning for their homeland. It starts: "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion."

'Leman' means an unlawful lover, so the phrase 'the waters of Leman' is associated with lust. Lac Leman is the French name for Lake Geneva. Eliot worked on The Waste Land at Lausanne, a town near Lake Geneva. in 1922.

185 But at my back, in a cold blast I hear

Andrew Marvel in TO HIS COY MISTRESS:

Had we but world enough and time

This coyness, Lady, were no crime, . . .

But at my back I always hear

Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

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192 And on the king my father's death before him

Eliot's note refers to The Tempest, Act 1, scene 2, line 390. Ferdinand has just heard Ariel singing "Come unto these yellow sands"

and says

Sitting on a bank

Weeping again the king my father's wreck,

This music crept by me upon the waters,

Allaying both their fury and my passion

With its sweet air

193 White bodies naked on the low damp ground

The drowned Phoenician sailor of Line 47 is a kind of fertility god whose image is thrown into the sea each spring to symbolize the death of summer, without which death there could be no

resurrection of the new year. Southam claims that 'the white bodies' here refer to the image of the fertility god taken out of the water to symbolize the god's resurrection.

197 The sound of horns and motors

John Day in THE PARLIAMENT OF BEES:

When of a sudden, listening, you shall hear,

The noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring

Actaeon to Diana in the Spring

Where all shall see her naked skin.

199 O the moon shine bright on Mrs Porter

The words come from a ballad popular with the Australian troops in world War 1. Mrs Porter was a legendary brothel keeper in Cairo.

202 Et 0 ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole!

"And O those voices of children singing in the copula!"

Paul Verlaine in Parsifal.

Southam claims that Verlaine is referring to Wagner's Parsifal and its music. In the Grail Legend, the children's choir sings at the ceremonial foot washing before the knight Parsifal restores the wounded Anfortas, the Fisher King, and so lifts the curse from the waste land.

Line 205 So rudely forced refers again to the rape of Philomela by Tereus. 'Tereu' is the Latin vocative form of Tereus.

This interpretation of the nightingale's song is found in ALEXANDER AND CAMPASPE BY John Lyly:

'Oh, tis the ravished nightingale

Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu! she cries.'

'Tereu', being the vocative, implies that she is addressing Tereus.

Line 211 C.i.f. London is the price, including cost, insurance, freight to London.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back 215

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Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, 218

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives 220

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, 221

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled female dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -

He, the young man carbuncular. arrives,

A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare

One of low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. 234

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is over, she is bored and tired,

Endeavors to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defense;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall 245

And walked among the lowest of the dead.) 246

Bestows one final patronizing kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit.

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

"Well now that's done: and I am glad it's over"

When lovely woman stoops to folly and 253

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand

And puts a record on the gramophone.

215 At the violet hour

This refers to Dante's PURGAT0RY, Canto 8.

It was the hour when a sailor's thoughts,

the first day out, turn homeward, and his heart

yearns for the loved ones he has left behind,

the hour when the novice pilgrim aches

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with love: the far off tolling of a bell

now seems to him to mourn the dying day.

Translation by Frank Musa.

(A pity I did not have Musa's translations of Inferno and Paradiso.)

218 I Tiresias

In lines 218 to 220, Eliot refers to the prophetic powers of Tiresias and the fact that he was bi-sexual, quoting Ovid's METAMORPHOSES in Latin. But we can settle for a free translation: Tiresias saw snakes mating in the forest. He hit them with his staff and was changed into a woman. Seven years later he saw the same two snakes and hit them again. As he had hoped, he was turned back into a man. Because he had experience as both a man and a woman, Jove called him in as an expert witness in a quarrel with his wife, Juno. He was arguing that in love the woman enjoys the greater pleasure; she argued that the man did. Tiresias supported Jove. Juno then blinded him out of spite. To make up for this, Jove gave him long life and the power of prophesy. Eliot also points out how the point-of-view in The Waste Land changes: "Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem."

220 the evening hour that strives

Eliot refers us to Sappho's prayer to the Evening Star:

Oh, Evening Star that brings back all

That shining Dawn has scattered far and wide,

You bring back the sheep, the goat,

And the child back to its mother.

221 and brings the sailor home from sea

Eliot says he meant the longshore fisherman who returns at nightfall.

234 Silk hat upon a Bradford millionaire

The manufacturing town of Bradford produced many new-rich millionaires during the first World War

245 I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

Tiresias is a key figure in King Oedipus by Sophocles because he knew that the pollution in Thebes came from Oedipus himself, and it is to prove him wrong that Oedipus embarks on his searching inquiries. Note that in Thebes the people, the soil and the animals were all made infertile.

246 And walked among the lowest of the dead

The Odyssey Book 10, lines 488 to 495 has the first reference to Tiresias in literature. Circe speaks:

Son of Laertes and seed of Zeus, resourceful Odysseus,

You shall no longer stay in my house when none of you wish to;

but first there is another journey you must accomplish

and reach the house of Hades and revered Persephone,

there to consult with the soul of Teiresias the Theban,

the blind prophet, whose senses stay unshaken within him,

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to whom alone Persephone has granted intelligence

even after death, but the rest of them are flittering shadows.

Translation by Richmond Lattimore

253 When lovely woman stoops to folly

In The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith, Olivia returns to the place where she was seduced and sings:

When lovely woman stoops to folly The only art her guilt to cover'

And finds too late that men betray, To hide her shame from every eye,

What charm can soothe her melancholy, To get repentance from her lover,

What art can wash her guilt away? And wring his bosom, is to die.

And wring his bosom, is to die

"This music crept by me upon the waters" 257

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street,

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street

The pleasant whining of mandolin

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls 263

Of Magnus Martyr hold 264

Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats 266

Oil and tar

The barges drift 268

With the turning tide

Red sails

Wide to leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

The barges wash

Drifting logs

Down Greenwich reach

Past the isle of dogs.

Weialala leia 277

Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester 279

Beating oars

The stern was formed

A gilded shell

Red and gold

The brisk swell

Rippled both shores

Southwest wind

Carried down stream

The peal of bells

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White towers

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

"Trams and dusty trees

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew 293

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees 294

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe."

"My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event

He wept. Promised 'a new start'

I made no comment. What should I resent?"

"On Margate Sands. 301

I can connect

Nothing with nothing

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people, humble people who expect

Nothing."

la la

To Carthage then I came 308

Burning burning burning 309

O Lord Thou pluckest me out 310

O Lord Thou pluckest

Burning 312

257 "This music crept by me upon the waters" See line 192

263 Fishmen are workers at nearby Billingsgate market.

264 Eliot says he regards the interior of Magnus Martyr as one of the finest of

Christopher Wren's interiors

266 The river is the Thames. The song of the three Thames daughters starts

here . From 292 to 306 they speak in turn.

268 The barges drift Some of this scene is based on the description of the

river at the start of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

277 Weialala leia The lament of the Rhine-maidens because the beauty of

the river has been lost with the theft of the river's gold. As in the Grail legend, the theft has brought a curse.

279 Elizabeth and Leicester were thought to be lovers. In Froude's Elizabeth

(Vol I chapter 4) there is a letter about a trip they took on the Thames.

293, 294 Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew undid me. Eliot refers us to Canto 5 in Dante's Purgatory, which deals with those who died a violent death. At its end a woman from Sienna whose husband had suspected her of adultery and had her pushed out of a window in Maremma, speaks to the Pilgrim:

Oh please, when you are in the world again

and are quite rested from your journey here,

Oh please remember me! I am called Pia

Sienna gave me life, Maremma death,

as he knows who began it when he put

his gem upon my finger, pledging faith.

Mark Musa comments on how this short speech reveals her gentle and considerate

Page 17 of 26

nature: "when you are in the world again and quite rested from your journey here"

294 Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees The first two Thames

daughters (292 to 295, 296 to 299) simply accept what happens to them.

301 "On Margate Sands. Eliot started writing The Waste Land on Margate Sands when he was recovering from a breakdown. But Eliot would deny the relevance of this. He said: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmit the passions which are its material."

308 To Carthage then I came St Augustine's Confessions: 'to Carthage then

I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.'

309 Burning burning burning From The Fire Sermon, which Eliot sees as

corresponding to the Sermon on the Mount. The Buddha says that "forms are on fire, … impressions received by the eye are on fire: and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire. And with what are these on fire? With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation."

The Fire Sermon can be found in Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translation, Harvard Oriental Series.

310 O Lord Thou pluckest me out St Augustine's Confessions: "I entangle my

steps with these beauties, but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out." Eliot says that : "The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident."

312 burning In Canto 25, Dante reaches the last stage of the mountain of

Purgatory, where he meets those who atone for the deadly sin of lechery, by fire.

'As long as they must burn within the fire

the cure of flames, the diet of the hymns -

with these the last of their wounds is healed.'

Translated by Mark Musa IV DEATH BY WATER

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, the deep sea swell

And profit and loss.

A current under the sea 315

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

he passed the stages of his youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew 319

Page 18 of 26

O you who turn the wheel and turn to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once as handsome and tall as you.

Helen Gardner described Death by water as "a passage of ineffable peace in which the stain of living is washed away."

Southam points out that "This section is a close adaptation of the last seven lines of a French poem Dans le Restaurant written by Elliot in 1916 - 1917."

Here is a translation by Southam:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight drowned,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the swell of the Cornish sea

and the profit and the loss, and the cargo of tin.

An undersea current carried him far,

Took him back through the ages of his past.

Imagine it - a terrible end for man once so handsome and tall.

315 and 316 A current under the sea

This is again on the theme of sea change of Line 48: Those are pearls that were his eyes

319 Gentile or Jew That is, all mankind.

(The Jews in this case mean the faithful and the gentiles those who

rejected God.)

V WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces 322

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation 326

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains 327

He who was living is now dead

And we who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Here is no water, but only rock 331

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop and think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one cannot neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountain

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

Page 19 of 26

And also water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

No the cicada and dry grass singing

But the sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water 359

Who is the third who walks always beside you? 360

When I count there is only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Wrapped in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

– But who is that on the other side of you? 366

What is the sound high in the air 367

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal 377

A woman drew her long black hair out tight 378

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that tolled the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells 385

What the thunder said

Eliot says in his notes: "In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous, (see Miss Weston's book) and the present decay of eastern Europe." (The book is Miss Jessie L Weston's From Ritual to Romance on the Grail legend. He says it "will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do.") 322 to 330 refer to the events from the betrayal and arrest of Jesus until his death, as described in John 18.

Page 20 of 26

艾略特荒原被称为现代派诗歌里程碑原因

艾略特荒原被称为现代派诗歌里程碑原因 （1）大量引用典故和神话故事，意象丰富。诗中穿插6种语言，引用的神话和典故包含东西方35个作家56部作品。 （2）运用蒙太奇手法，把神话、宗教、典故等看似毫无关系的场景与现代都市的生活片断奇妙地剪接在一起。共同纳入一个以荒原为中心的象征结构，表达某种中心和关系。 （3）跨越时空界限，在时间上无前后，在空间上无界限。 （4）意象新奇怪诞，语言复杂多变。《荒原》里有口语、书面语、古语、土语和外国语。语言雅俗相结合。 （5）《荒原》是艾略特与埃兹拉.庞德两位英语诗歌大师合力的结晶。《荒原》原稿有８００多行，后经过埃兹拉.庞德删减，才成为现在的４３４行。艾略特对审稿人庞德表达了由衷的敬意。 （6）《荒原》既不属于抒情诗，也不属于叙事诗，在那个时代，开创了一代新的诗风。 怎么看待荒诞派戏剧的荒诞 （1）荒诞派戏剧的哲学基础是存在主义哲学和非理性主义，文化传统就是反传统。荒诞派戏剧作家关注人类生存状态这一严峻的问题，但荒诞派戏剧的荒诞在于“将现代人的困乏转变成亢奋”，将浓郁的悲凉用喜剧的形式，闹剧的形式来表现。 （2）传统的现实主义戏剧的灯光、布景、道具等等都服从于现实主艺术真实的、典型的总的原则。而荒诞派戏剧反对的就是这种真实的、典型的环境和气氛。他们认为，世界的本体就是荒诞，因此，作为戏剧舞台同样也是荒诞的。艺术家的任务就是要通过直喻把握世界。 （3）荒诞派戏剧的荒诞，是面对人的生存条件的荒诞不经所引起的抽象的恐惧不安之感。他们在表达这个主题时，故意不用合乎逻辑的结构和明智的理性去阐明人的生存处境的不合理性、荒诞性,而是直接用形象表现对理性的怀疑和否定。

浅析艾略特《荒原》的死亡主题

浅析艾略特《荒原》中的死亡主题 摘要：纵观艾略特的《荒原》，死亡主题几乎覆盖了全诗的内容。本文通过探讨自然生物的死亡、人类情感的死亡、精神信仰的死亡这三个方面来揭示《荒原》的死亡主题。 关键词：《荒原》死亡主题 引言：《荒原》共分为“死者的葬仪”“对弈”“火诫”“水里的死亡”“雷霆的话”五部分，深刻地揭示了西方社会中人们的精神世界犹如战后的物质世界一样，满目疮痍，巳经干涸得像一片荒原。全诗让人感受到世人徘徊挣扎在生与死的矛盾之中，而死亡的映射充斥在全诗之中。文学作品中不乏“死亡”这一主题。按照弗洛伊德的假说，人生来便有一种“死的本能' 也正如费尔巴哈所说的，死亡是与生倶来，深入骨髓的。《荒原》开头的引文中，西比尔的回答“我要死' 揭示了全诗的主题。荒原人象征着战后的欧洲人，他们生活在战争带给他们的荒原中，没有爰情，只有动物般欲望的爰情荒原，缺乏宗教信仰的灵魂也犹如一片荒原，因而活着的荒原人生活极端枯燥乏味，感受不到活着的快乐与意义，这种虽生犹死的生活使他们渴求死亡的归宿，去天堂寻觅永恒的幸福，而同时“生的本能”强烈地对抗着这“死的本能' 但最终死亡还是占了上风。 一、自然生物的死亡 《荒原》发表于第一次世界大战后，战争的残酷厮杀和争夺，彻底摧毁了西方人传统的基督教义、生活价值观念和道德准则，《荒原》就是有感于此而写成的。艾略特在《荒原》中多处描绘生活在废墟中并丧失了信仰的芸芸众生。战后的欧洲正如诗中所写：大地荒芜一片，土地龟裂，万物枯竭。当时的欧洲陷于严重的政治、经济危机之中，人们缺乏精神信仰，迷茫地生活着。在第一章“死者葬仪”中，开首的诗句“四月是最残忍的一个月，荒地上长着丁香……死亡的气息扑面而来，本应是万物复苏，舂意盎然的四月却满目荒凉，诗句“枯干的球根提供少许生命”“枯死的树没有遮荫。蟋蟀的声音也不使人放心，焦石间没有流水的声音”勾勒出一番自然界生物垂死的画面，整个画面灰色而阴郁。后面几章的诗句“那淹死了的腓尼基水手”“那被绞死的人”

艾略特荒原中英对照

(一)艾略特是中国现代朦胧诗歌的鼻祖 在网上，很多对中国现代诗歌(包括朦胧诗歌)起源和继承的评论是似是而非 的。这可能是由于一些国内不懂外文的评论家的错误导向所致，也有可能是由于 自己就没有理解好中国的现代诗歌，而混枭了自己的观点，也误人子弟。中国的 现代诗歌，究其源泉是由于五四时期由胡适等人发起的白话文运动，白话诗也就 应运产生。一个很有意思的现象是，很多著名的作家严肃的学者并没有留下多少 白话诗歌，只有一些类似嘻皮士的文人们，象刘半农，徐志摩等等，为了和女人 的打情骂俏而留下过一首半首。 中国早期的现代诗歌应该是继承于欧洲而不是美洲。这得益于一些留学欧洲 学人的推荐和传播。象卞之琳，徐志摩，李金发等等，所写的诗歌继承了欧洲维 多利亚式的风格，并没有多少的创新，节奏的和谐和词澡的华丽是其主要的特点， 但并没有什么心灵的震动，是沃斯瓦斯和波尔莱特在中国的翻版，甚至从中可以 看到雪莱和拜伦的影子。从中很少看到美洲惠特曼的影子，大概惠诗歌中的自然 和平民的形象和这些留学欧洲的没落贵族的口吻不太合适所致。很多人把这几个 人归结为现代朦胧诗歌的起源。其实是不当的。这时候的诗歌还只能是现代诗歌 而不是朦胧诗歌，当然，相对于旧体诗歌意象和词汇的运用已经有了朦胧的感觉。 中国诗歌在七十年代末八十年代初期，有一个特别辉煌的复兴时期。一批经 过文革，上过山下过乡的知识青年们用在煤油灯下的知识积累，带着对生活的感 性体验，在马可雅夫斯基和莱蒙托夫的指引下开始中国诗歌的新一轮革命。这期 间杰出的诗人有北岛，舒婷等。在八十年代的中末期，中国诗坛终于迎来了大爆炸的时期。在理论领袖谢冕的指引下，一批批锐意的具有现代意识的中国诗人们 以严辰主编的诗歌报为阵地，纷纷打出旗号，成立山头，一时间中国的诗歌流派 竟然有几十家之多。所写的诗歌讦曲骜牙，常人难以读懂。这就是后来广被非议 的现代朦胧诗。 为什么称为现代朦胧诗？这是为了区别 于以唐朝李商隐为代表的古体朦胧诗 歌。中国的现代朦胧诗直接继承于艾略特，Pound等人的诗风,摈弃了近代诗歌徐 志摩等人所提倡的维多利亚的模式。(EzraPound是和T.S.Eliot同一时代的诗人。 他有一首特别著名的诗【在一个地铁站口】，短短两句，却成为美国60年代诗歌 革命的启动之作)。对艾略特,国内的文学史书鲜有介绍，他们多数倾向于介绍19 世纪末和20世纪初的文学大家和诗人。记得有一本人民文学出版社出版的【外国诗】，好象是收录了艾略特的【荒原】，没有什么介绍，似乎国内对他的地位不 是特别的推崇。因此，不揣简陋，在此将T.S.Eliout介绍一番，并将其长诗“ The Waste Land" 翻译一部份。 (二)T.S.Eliot简介 在诗歌和文学评论上，作为一个诗人，Thomas Stearns Eliot占据着独一无 二的地位。他不仅仅是靠写作来表现自己的情感，对定义所谓的现代派的风格和 趣味也有着莫大的帮助。他们摈弃了叙述性的方式及贵族式的维多里压风格，代 之于精确聚焦而又让人惊奇的意象来表达，那种圆滑的充满诱惑而又有讽刺韵味 的语言对美国现代诗歌有着巨大的影响。当然这种影响不是直接正式的而是从思 想和哲学的高度来影响的。他的作品中弥漫着一种寻求人生意义的味道；这种对

The Wasteland of T.S.Eliot【艾略特长诗《荒原》的主旨+背景+框架+内容的概括分析】(全英文)

T.S. ELIOT: THE WASTELAND This poem was written for the most part while in a sanatorium in Lausanne in Switzerland recovering from nervous exhaustion (not the least cause of which was his marriage to Viv). A revolutionary poem both stylistically- and thematically-speaking, Pound described it as the ‘justification of our modern experiment, since 1900’. Although this is a difficult poem to sum up (the vastness of its scope has made some critics describe it as the epic of the Twentieth century and even Eliot conceptualised it as a collection of separate poems rather than one whole poem), there are a number of technical and thematic features which are worth noting. Formal Strategies: Heteroglossia / Montage: multiple voices succeed each other with alarming and bewildering rapidity. There is, notwithstanding a bizarre footnote crediting the figure of Tiresias with more importance in this respect than he has, no single, central speaker who unifies the multiplicity of perspectives offered in the poem. This is not a single dramatic monologue. Rather, many different chunks of the text (there are no clear demarcations) seem to be snatches (mini-monologues) uttered by different, individually recognisable personalities. At other times, there are passages seemingly uttered by oracular voices possessed of an almost visionary, prophetic, even Biblical quality (e.g. in the first and final sections). At other points, the voice is almost incantatory: e.g. the beginning where a speaker or perhaps a chorus of voices seems to lament the return of life in springtime. The Absence of a Traditional Narrative Development: no plot, no consistent flow of thought (logical or associational) to assist the reader in making sense of the poem. The effect of this accumulation of discontinuous voices is to release a flurry of implications whose swiftness and dense complexity make the poem difficult to apprehend, let alone digest. In short, this is a poem seemingly without coherence which simply begs the reader to unify it even as it denies the reader the normal means to do so: there simply is no continuity of setting, voice, narrative or style. In the place of these, one finds: Naturalistic Description: Eliot focuses for the most part on the more sordid and depressing details of the contemporary metropolis (such urban poetry represented a radical departure from the traditional focus on the natural landscape and on the agreeable, the beautiful and the ideal in Romantic poetry and its derivatives). The poem serves up something akin to a montage of visual images that explore city life and the lives of its inhabitants by juxtaposing images, scenes, dramatic vignettes containing fragments of conversation, etc. At times, these images assume an almost phantasmagoric dimension (e.g. “Unreal city”). Sordid urban images commingle with images of the desert/aridity to the point where, quite clearly, they are meant to comment upon each other: to wit, modern life in the city is being compared to an arid, sterile waste. Recurring Leitmotifs: these, in accumulating significance, become evocative symbols: these are scenes, images and allusions that are repeated in separate contexts and, by dint of which, assume symbolic resonance: e.g. hibernation, the desert; the rock; water; drowning (the allusions to the drowned Alonso in The Tempest, Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet, a drowned Phoenician). As these motifs return in new contexts, they bring with them suggestions and associations from former contexts and evolve into “progressively denser nodes of connotation and feeling” (Perkins 504) and, in so doing, become symbols. This process also serves to link the diverse parts of the poem together. Eliot both draws upon established symbols and forges images into fresh symbols that include: fire (lust), death (this can sometimes mean literal death, sometimes the living death which these Wastelanders lead), rebirth, and water (arouses a mixture of longing [it quenches thirst], fascination and fear [death by drowning]). Recondite Allusions:

艾略特与荒原

象征主义作家艾略特与《荒原》 艾略特生平与创作 （一）生平 T?S?艾略特（1888-1965），英美诗人、剧作家和批评家，后期象征主义的代表，西方现代诗歌中开一代诗风的先驱。 艾略特出生于美国密苏里州的一个名门之家，祖籍英国。他从小生活在当地宗教那种强调义务与职责的浓郁影响下，而母亲作为一个不太成功的诗人，则在儿子身上寄托了诗与文学的期望。 1906年，艾略特进哈佛大学攻读哲学和英法文学，开始写诗。这期间，他接触到法国象征主义诗人波特莱尔和儒尔·拉福格的作品。迷恋拉福格对浪漫主义激情的批判态度。1909年获学士学位。第4年接着读硕士课程，与讲授“法国文学批评”的老师巴比特结为至交，巴比特反对卢梭主义的“滥情主义”，提倡“非个人化”，主张建立秩序与权威，这种学术观点给艾略特打上了深深的烙印。这些影响使他一心向往法国。 1910年，他在巴黎度过了“浪漫的一年”（艾略特语）。他进入巴黎大学研修法国文学，并在法兰西学士院听帕格森每周举办的哲学讲座，经历了短暂的“帕格森主义”的皈依。后来又游历伦敦、慕尼黑，写出早期重要诗作《普鲁弗洛克的情歌》等。 1911年，一方面是父母的要求，一方面是“哲学的呼唤”，他离开欧洲返回哈佛大学，成为专攻哲学的研究生。1913年任哲学系助教，大学哲学协会主席。但在3年的哲学研究之后，他又向往欧洲了。 1914年，艾略特接受哈佛大学为他提供的奖学金，重返欧洲。一路上经历比利时、意大利、德国，最终到达伦敦，进入牛津大学，开始了他哲学家、诗人、欧洲人、美国人几重生活的人生阶段。这期间他结识了庞德等一批旅欧的美国作家，并在摒弃浪漫主义崇尚古典主义的观点上不谋而合。已经成名的庞德非常赞赏艾略特的诗才，将其《普鲁弗洛克的情歌》推荐给芝加哥的《诗刊》杂志发表。艾略特一边按原计划写他的哲学博士论文，一边参加一些文学集会，开始在欧美一些刊物上发表诗作。 1915年，他与英国姑娘维芬结婚，放弃了回哈佛申请博士学位的机会，从

艾略特各时期作品特点

二．从艾略特的各时期主要著作特点来具体发掘“非个人化”理论的内涵艾略特的文学创作大致可以分为三个时期，每个时期都有较大的变化。第一时期包括1915年至1922年的创作，主要作品有《普鲁弗洛克的情歌》和《诗集》。艾略特这一时期的创作通常被称为“通往《荒原》的历程”。第二个时期包括1922年至1925年的创作，主要作品有《荒原》和《空心人》。《荒原》是艾略特的代表作。《空心人》通常被认为是艾略特描写精神空虚的“现代人”的代表作。第三时期包括从《灰星期三》开始，一直到他晚年的戏剧创作。 第一个时期的作品情调低沉，常用联想、隐喻和暗示来表现现代人的苦闷。在《普鲁弗洛克的情歌》中，艾略特描写了一个中年男子在求爱途中矛盾变化的心理，这个男子过于敏感、过分内省、过度压抑自我，反映了现代人的空虚和怯懦。在《诗集》中，艾略特进一步表达了自己对西方现代社会风起不振的一种厌恶，反映了第一次世界大战后西方知识分子的悲观和失望。 第二个时期的作品集中表现了西方人面对现代文明濒临崩溃、希望颇为渺茫的困境，以及精神极为空虚的生存状态。如在《空心人》中，艾略特描绘了西方人精神空虚的生存状态： “我们是空心人 我们是稻草人 互相依靠 头脑里塞满了稻草。唉! 当我们在一起耳语时 我们干涩的声音 毫无起伏毫无意义 像风吹在干草上 或像老鼠走在我们干燥的 地窖中的碎玻璃上。” 诗人以“空心人”、“稻草人”来比喻现代人内心世界的危机。全诗弥漫着浓郁的悲观主义和虚无主义气氛。 第三个时期艾略特继续进行诗歌艺术的探索，同时思想开始出现变化。一般认为《灰星期三》标志着艾略特最终转向了天主教。艾略特在加入了英国国教之后曾在《兰斯劳脱安特罗斯》的序言中声明自己在“政治上是保皇党，宗教上是英国国教教徒，文学上是古典主义者”，表明诗人已从早期那种精神无所依托的荒原状态转向了宗教的怀抱。长篇组诗《四个四重奏》作为艾略特后期创作的重要作品，描写了一个皈依宗教的人在寻找真理的过程中的精神历程。

艾略特的荒原中所有的象征意义

艾略特的荒原中所有的象征意义 艾略特引用大量的典故（作者引用36个作家、56部作品和6种外文）、腓尼基水手与商人的意象（43－59，312），渔王的意象（189－190，424－433），罗马神话中的狄安娜与阿格坦思意象（196－200），寻找圣杯的意象（378－395）， 圣杯是耶稣在最后的晚餐上用过的酒杯,他当时举杯对门徒们说:“这是我的血,为赎众人的罪而流出来。”耶稣罹难时,他的门徒就用这个杯子接他的血。后来,这个杯子变成了圣物,只要放进水,杯中就会出现一条银鱼,而且取出之后还会自动再出现一条,取之不尽。不过,只有最圣洁的童贞骑士,才能在历尽艰险之后找到圣杯。等等。 基督教经典《圣经》中的荒原意象（20－30，331－359，322－330），佛教经典《佛经》中的火诫涅盘意象（302－305），古罗马诗人维吉尔的《伊尼德》和奥维尔的《变形记》以及英国诗人弥尔顿的《失乐园》中有关苦难与升华的意象（92－110，203－206），中古基督教哲学家圣奥古斯丁的《独语录》中的迦太基人意象（301），中古诗人但丁的《神曲》中的炼狱意象（293－296），莎士比亚的《暴风雨》（48）和《安东尼与克里奥佩特拉》（77）以及波德莱尔Charles Baudelaire的《恶之花》（76）中有关享受与纵乐的意象，等等。 以下是文中一些典故的出处： 序言：古罗马佩特罗尼斯《风流韵事记》西比尔向主神奥丁预言了奥丁的双生子“光明”将被“黑暗”所扼杀之后,表示:“我要死。” 第一节前几行：乔叟《坎特伯雷故事集》序诗中最开头的几行诗：“当四月的甘露渗透了三月枯竭的根须，沐灌了丝丝茎络，触动了生机，使枝头涌现出花蕾” “玛丽”： 1913年版，玛丽?拉里希伯爵夫人，前奥地利女王的侄女 的回忆录，My past “人子啊，你说不出……”《旧约以西节书》中写道“他对我说，人子啊，你站起来，我要和你说话。”又写道“在你们一切的住处，城邑要变为荒场，邱坛必然凄凉，使你们的祭坛荒废，将你们的偶像打碎，你们的目像被砍倒，你们的工作被毁灭。” “枯死的树没有遮荫。蟋蟀的声音也不使人放心，”：《旧约?传道书》说“人怕高处，路上有惊慌，杏树开花，蚱蜢成为重担，人所愿的也都泼掉，人归他永远的家，吊丧的在街上片来” “这块红石下有影子，（请走进这块红石下的影子）”：《旧约?以赛亚书》“必有一个人象避风所和避雨的隐密处，又象河流在干旱地，象大盘石的影响子在疲乏之地。” “风吹得很轻快， 吹送我回家去， 爱尔兰的小孩，……”：瓦格纳的歌剧《特利斯坦和伊索尔德》(Tristan and Isolde)里一位水手所唱的情歌，特利斯坦是一位正直勇敢的骑士,在替自己的叔父康沃尔国王迎娶新娘伊索尔德时,两人误喝了“爱的迷药”,双双陷入爱河,不能自拔,最终导致了一场悲剧

艾略特《荒原》中的死亡意蕴

天津师范大学津沽学院本科 学年论文 题目：艾略特《荒原》中的死亡蕴味 系别：文学系 学生姓名：郭清源 学号：08570212 专业：汉语言文学 年级：2008级 完成日期：2011年5月4日星期三 指导教师：任媛

艾略特《荒原》中的死亡蕴味 摘要：论文主要探讨艾略特长诗《荒原》中的死亡意蕴及其表现，简要概述艾略特其人及诗歌，描述《荒原》诗歌的写作背景，以及当时的社会环境对诗人诗歌创作的影响，主要从死亡意蕴在艺术作品中的体现，宗教观念对艾略特《荒原》创作的影响，及《荒原》作品中的意象和诗歌总体体现的死亡意蕴三个方面对《荒原》进行探究。 关键词：艾略特；荒原；死亡

目录 一、介绍《荒原》诗歌的写作背景 (1) 二、死亡意象在艺术作品中的体现及《荒原》诗歌中的死亡意象体现 (1) 三、结论 (4) 参考文献 (5)

作为公认的英美现代派诗歌大师，T.S.艾略特在英美乃至全球诗坛的影响是不容忽视的，他不仅在文艺理论和文艺批评上有所成就，其代表作《荒原》更是现代英美诗歌的里程碑，是象征主义文学中最具代表性的作品。 一、《荒原》诗歌的写作背景 长诗《荒原》创作于一战之后，当时整个西方社会衰败堕落，混乱无序，人们精神空虚，失去信仰、理想和追求，诗中的“荒原”即是失去了精神信仰的西方社会的象征。 来自书香门第的艾略特从小接受的是较好的教育，而婚姻家庭生活的不快乐和来自社会的消沉气息也对诗人产生了很大的影响，信仰天主教的艾略特认为只有宗教信仰才能拯救整个腐败消沉的社会，才能使人们精神的贫瘠荒原变得重新繁荣，而无信仰支撑的社会，便是世人眼中的“荒原”。精神信仰的缺失体现在文学作品中，即是死气沉沉的臆想世界。艾略特在《荒原》中向我们描绘了一个信仰缺失，死气沉沉的世界，在此，读者所能感受到的最直观最深刻的感触即是死亡，全诗笼罩在一片死亡的气息中，这种死亡的气息便象征着当时的英国乃至整个西方社会人们精神的衰败。 二、死亡意象在艺术作品中的体现及《荒原》诗歌中的死亡意象体现 在西方文学发展的历史长河里，有一个母题恒久存在于作家们地笔下，那便是“生存与死亡”。在日常生活中，人们对于死亡的恐惧，以及死亡相对于生命之美的晦暗，使得死亡成为人们所不愿触碰的话题。而我们不能忽视死亡之美，死亡意象就其现实性来说可能是非审美的，然而，在艺术境界，死亡现象也可以表现得很唯美，涂抹上哀艳凄怆的色泽①。尼采对于生命和死亡的阐释则是“肯定生命，连同它必然包含的痛苦和毁灭，与痛苦相嬉戏，从人生的悲剧性中获得审美快感”②。死亡之美作为重要的美学体现，在西方社会文化和文学形式中有很重要的地位。起源于18世纪后期英国的哥特式小说，运用阴郁悲凉的环境描写，将死亡所体现出的唯美哀艳演绎得淋漓尽致，使读者感受到了死亡意象的悲剧之美。死亡的气息和荒凉静谧的墓园，黑暗的基调及隽永的生命消逝，这些作为哥特小说重要组成元素的场景向我们展示了死亡的世界。波德莱尔在《恶之花》中向我们这样描述死亡，“死亡给人慰籍，又使 ①颜翔林.死亡美学[M].上海：上海人民出版社，2008:135. ②

外国文学经典作品解读——艾略特：《荒原》

外国文学经典作品解读——艾略特：《荒原》内容梗概 全诗由5章构成。第1章《死者葬仪》，标题出自英国教会出葬仪式。死亡是这一章的主题。诗歌在含混的意识中开场。四月是残酷的季节，以记忆和欲望折磨着人们。在玛丽的回忆中浮现出往昔的静好岁月，而如今面目全非：树已枯死，偶像已破碎，焦石间没有流水的声音，大地一片荒凉。女相士也为此感到困惑，她用纸牌给人算命，得到了死亡的预言，因为她找不到那被绞死的人耶稣，于是人注定无法获得救赎。在冬日破晓的黄雾下，人群涌过伦敦桥，死亡已经毁坏了他们。我想知道，复活是否为时不远？ 第2章《对弈》，标题出自英国剧作家托马斯密德尔顿的同名剧作，本是一个淫乱故事，诗人取其意喻指现代人的道德堕落。此章分两个场景。在富丽堂皇的卧室里，一位上流社会的无聊贵妇正在胡思乱想，她渴望所谓的传奇爱情，以为传说中的翡绿眉拉就是一个典型，而这却是一个因淫乱而复仇的悲剧。下一场景，在低等酒馆里，丽儿和女伴谈着私情、堕胎，如何对付退伍归来的丈夫。两个地位不同的女性代表了社会普遍的堕落风气。 第3章《火戒》，标题出自佛教教义。火有双重含义：是情欲之火，也是使人再生的净化之火。这章以神话中具有穿透人内心力量的双性人帖瑞西士的视角来观察，发现可爱

的泰晤士河畔已经不见了仙女的踪影，只看见公寓里一个女打字员和一个长疙瘩的青年有欲无爱的交合。不可救药的精神颓败。再生似乎已无希望。 第4章《水里的死亡》，水亦指泛滥的情欲。女相士预言的腓尼基人之死在此章获得应验。他是在欲望和金钱的漩涡中丧生的现代人的象征。 第5章《雷霆的话》充分展开了探索的主题。诗人再次描绘了一幅荒原的景象：大地荒废，布满岩石，找不到一滴水。水在这里被赋予再生的含义。荒原通过三个意象展现：耶稣复活后去埃摩司的途中，而门徒看不见他的身影；寻找圣杯的武士走向空无一人的教堂；鱼王坐在岸上垂钓，背后是那干旱的荒原。荒原是否能恢复生机？人能否获得拯救？一切都未知。在雷霆同情，克制，平安的告诫中，诗歌结束。 评论综述 艾略特的长诗《荒原》发表于1922年，被誉为现代主义诗歌的里程碑。最初发表时，由于内容晦涩难懂，评论界并不看好。随着时间的推移，《荒原》的艺术价值逐渐为人所认识。今天，这部作品在西方现代文学史上的地位已经被确定下来。 我国对《荒原》的译介始于20世纪30 年代。赵萝蕤最早将《荒原》翻译成中文。80年代以来，大陆又先后出版了

艾略特荒原读后感

战栗中幻灭的希望 ——读艾略特《荒原》有感 中文师范091 王亚文0901012031 最初课上得知要接触这部长诗，是怀着敬畏与远观的心情开始看的。在内心里总觉得这样的西方长诗巨著是高深莫测让人无从琢磨的，但在课上随着老师的指点加上自己真正肯坐下来看下去，发现虽然晦涩虽然艰深，但是作为初接触者的我们其实是可以从中得到自己的理解与收获的。 《荒原》是英国诗人艾略特的代表作，是象征主义的顶峰之作，也是20世纪西方现代诗歌的里程碑式的作品。《荒原》一诗的发表，在西方文坛引起了巨大的震动，该诗以其深刻的内涵和独特的艺术手法领导整个20世纪诗歌创作的新潮流，对现代主义诗歌的繁荣和发展产生了巨大的影响。 就我初读此诗的感觉，实在是晦涩难懂，读第一遍，除了觉得注释太多，诗太长以外，没有太多感觉。但是曾经看过艾略特认为：“诗歌，特别是20世纪的诗歌，不可能简单明了。”因此，晦涩难懂的标准也就是艾略特美学观的一部分。之所以说《荒原》具有很深的象征意义，可以说是因为它象征了现代西方文明世界是一个没有信仰、精神空虚、情欲泛滥、世态炎凉的荒芜原野，同时也象征要以宗教作为救世良方。 诗人笔下的“荒原”满目荒凉：土地龟裂，石块发红，树木枯萎；荒原人精神恍惚，死气沉沉，暗示了现代世界的精神危机，现代人类精神文化的死亡及拯救。其中第一章《死者的葬仪》，将西方社会描绘为万物萧瑟，生机寂灭的荒原。起首几句便流露出诗人深深的痛苦和无尽的失望和悲哀。春天原本该万物复苏，生意盎然，而在诗人的笔下，现代文明的象征―――伦敦却是一片枯萎的荒原。在这没有生气的栖息之所，人不生不死，虽生犹死，心中唯有幻灭和绝望，眼前的世界只泛滥着海一样的情欲。在这令人窒息的现实中充斥着庸俗卑下的人欲，死亡的阴云浓浓地罩在了西方世界的上空，人们在浑浑噩噩之中走向死亡。诗人把现实社会比作地狱，现代人视为没有灵魂的幽灵。 而《对弈》用维吉尔的《伊尼特》、奥维德的《变形记》和莎士比亚的《安东尼与克里奥佩特拉》这些作品中描写的上流社会男女的淫欲和罪恶与现实低层社会卑鄙龌龊的肉体交易叠映，突出表现精神枯萎，道德堕落的现代生活。物别是《变形记》中翡绿眉拉被国王铁卢欧斯强奸杀死后变为莺夜典故的引用，自然有力地表达了诗歌深刻的主题。对弈即争斗，象征现代人的勾心斗角，用古代的暴行和现代的罪恶相比较。艾略特认为，现代人重复着古代的人罪恶，世界放纵兽欲，人们成了丧失人性的行尸走肉，说他们“是在老鼠窝里，在那里死人连自己的骨头都丢得精光。” 在第三章《火诫》中表现了伦敦这现代荒原上庸俗、肮脏、罪恶的生活：圣洁的教堂赞歌中，世界重复着铁卢的兽行；明亮的月光下，母女登俩干着卖淫行径；昏黄的浓雾中，商人为金钱而奔走；精神空虚的青年男女在苟合中打发光阴；人们寻欢作乐后留下的浊物漂浮在昔日诗意盎然的泰晤土河。在诗人看来，情欲之火毁灭了人性也毁灭了大自然，造成了这个“乌有和乌有联结在一起的现实”。他向佛陀吁请，要让焚烧物的火来扫尽情欲，拯救人类。 接下来《水里的死亡》这一章一共只有10行，行行都是含义深刻的象征，有人说它象征的内容抵得过但丁的一部《炼狱》。人在欲海中死去，死去后忘掉生前的一切，让他静静地在死亡的欲海中反思。艾略特笔下的海既是情欲的象征，它夺去了人的生命，又是炼狱，它让人认清自己生前的罪恶。实际上艾略特是要现代人正视自己的罪恶，洗涮自己的灵魂。

艾略特《荒原》是破坏文化的里程碑

艾略特《荒原》是破坏文化的里程碑 （2000年6月写、2014年10月改） 黄有柏 诗是语言的艺术，语言优美是精品，语无伦次是糟粕。 世界性的现代主义及后现代主义文学（包括其变种文学），在进入二十一世纪的今天，将要彻底结束，代之以创新的特色现实主义、特色浪漫主义及特色象征主义文学（即第二次世界文艺复兴）的到来。原因是现代主义文学产生的客观环境已经过去了。 以上这个客观环境怎么样？我们得简略地从头说起。二十世纪开始，由于帝国主义掠夺世界的相互争斗愈演愈烈，终于1914—1918年爆发了第一次世界大战。战后1922年艾略特发表了长诗《荒原》，《荒原》表达了战后西方一代人的幻灭，与浪漫主义传统诗歌决裂，被认为是英美现代主义诗歌的里程碑。这的确是一座里程碑，但遗憾的是它的现代主义艺术不能成其为一种艺术，而是成了破坏性的文化废墟（以废墟为艺术）。这样，它所得到的结论便是：反传统文化、破坏文化的里程碑了。请看《荒原》是怎样以废墟为艺术的呢？诗人在最后一段里毫不掩饰地写道：“这些片断我用来支撑我的断垣残壁”。诗歌的最后一段每行就是一个片断，片断之间缺乏内在的有机联系，可以说是语无伦次。引用其最后一段如下：“我坐在岸上 垂钓，背后是那片干旱的平原① 我应否至少把我的田地收拾好？② 伦敦桥塌下来了塌下来了塌下来了③ 然后，他就隐身在炼他们的火里，④ 我什么时候才能象燕子——啊，燕子，燕子⑤ 阿基坦的王子在塔楼里受到废黜⑥ 这些片断我用来支撑我的断垣残壁 那么我就照办吧。希罗尼母又发疯了。⑦ 舍已为人。同情。克制。 平安。平安 平安。” 在这段里你看得出诗歌的意思是什么吗？这种“用破碎的语言、荒谬怪诞的物景和互不相干的物体并列、重叠成毫无逻辑的整体的拼贴法”，存心不让读者理解，并不是真知的表现。全诗五个部分二十三段，其中每句话是一个片断，究竟有多少片断呢？真是数也数不清。整首诗从总体来看，句与句之间是不连贯的、由无数片断排列成的一篇流水账，是无层次的、错落杂乱的一片废墟（更谈不上诗的修辞和诗的意境了）。诗人就是这样以破坏语言、破坏诗歌为代价，采用使诗变为一堆语言废墟的直觉表现手法，来体现诗的主题（题目）是一片杂草丛生的《荒原》。这种舍本求末的伎俩并不是对诗的创新，而是对诗的破坏。 如果认可这种废墟的直觉表现手法的描绘也是一种艺术的话，那么现代主义及后现代主义诗人正在用这种手法描绘当今世界，是否说明当今世界都是一片废墟呢？这种用片断组成的直觉表现的艺术。对世界起着什么样的作用？ 艾略特这种里程碑的非诗对后世产生的负面影响是无可估量的，一个世纪以来这种非诗哺养了几代诗人，使世界诗歌由破坏性的现代主义发展为毁灭性的后现代主义（中国是“非非主义”）。难怪美国乡土派诗人威廉斯曾预言艾略特《荒原》是一个巨大的灾难。 所以说现代主义文学是建筑在世界大战废墟上的、以废墟为艺术的文学，是二十世纪文学的大灾难。对那些在这灾难性的文学废墟上建立卓著“功勋”的“大师”们，我们应该如何评价他们呢？ 值得庆幸的是二十世纪下半叶没有发生世界大战，但现代主义文学愈加发展，成为毁灭文学的后现代主义。可见文学滞后了多半个世纪。 当前，世界现代主义及后现代主义文学早已日薄西山了，但第三世界部份青年诗人（特别是中国的部份青年诗人及某些诗歌编辑部）极力支撑着这残缺的天空，致使其能够久延残喘。这些人的用意何在呢？令人不可思议。 有人说：艾略特改变了一代人的表达方式。我们要问：改好了呢？还是改坏了呢？我们举艾略特的长诗《荒原》为例认真分析一下。 《荒原》的时代背景是第一次世界大战后的西欧情景。第一次世界大战是帝国主义之间互相争夺世界利益的战争，是一场黑暗的非正义战争。战争造成千百万人生命的毁灭，造成巨大的物质财产的毁灭。 战后的1922年，艾略特发表长诗《荒原》，给这个被摧毁的世界雪上加霜，从根本上摧毁了几千年来人类精神文明结晶，摧毁了诗歌艺术，也摧毁了当今一代人及后人的精神文明，使人类精神世界变得愚昧、野蛮的黑暗世界。《荒原》表达了西方一代人的幻灭，这个一代人的幻灭，不仅是战争带来的人的肉体生命和物质世界的幻灭，也是艾略特表达方式带来的人的精神生命和精神世界的幻灭（尽管艾略特主观上没有承认这个幻灭，但客观上已造成这个后果）。 《荒原》破坏文化的表达方式被称为现代主义的里程碑，从1922年发表至今2012年已经90年了，培育了不计其数的破坏文化、破坏艺术的诗人、作家、文学家和艺术家，制造了一个被损坏了的愚昧的、野蛮的、黑暗的人类精神世界，间接地催化了第二次世界大战军国主义的产生和战后霸权主义的产生。 《荒原》破坏文化的表达方式在客观上与军国主义侵略战争摧毁人类生命和物质世界相呼应，起了助纣为虐的作用。 《荒原》破坏文化表达方式，其基本格调是：反理性、反文化。反艺术、反语言、反结构、反逻辑。《荒原》全诗分为五个部分二十三段，其中每句话是

Allusions in the Wasteland【艾略特《荒原》中用典的详细解读】(全英文,超详细)

The Allusions in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land The Waste Land is an important poem. It has something important to say and it should have an important effect on the reader. But it is not easy. In Eliot's own words: "We can say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning." "Tradition cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour." Eliot is dealing with the loss of meaning and significance of many things, and so he continually contrasts the present with the past, often using literary allusions to help to arouse in the reader the response he wants. For this reason he gives some of these allusions in a set of notes. However, he merely says where they come from or gives them in the original Italian or French or German. These notes give the actual allusions, translated into English where necessary, and printed in such a way that the reader can see the allusion and the relevant passage in the poem at the same time. For instance, a passage from the poem is on page 3 and the allusions to it are on page 2. The notes have also amplified Eliot's notes in some cases, with valuable help from three excellent books: Stephen Coote: The Waste Land in Penguin Master Studies 1985 B C Southam: A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T S Eliot Faber and Faber, 1968 George Williamson: A reader's Guide to T S Eliot Thames and Hudson, Second Edition, 1967 It is a pleasure to thank Sheila Davies for her translation of Baudelaire's Au Lecteur Allusion are numbered and you will seldom have to scroll down more than a page to find the comment on the allusion The comments on the allusions are in frames. Page 1 of 26