Waste Land Essay: Impact of Images on the Structure of The Waste Land

Impact of Images on the Structure of The Waste Land      Ã‚   Many of the images that give bounds to the structure of "The Waste Land" relate to the annual cycle of life with which ancient peoples closely bound up their own lives. Eliot himself points out the importance of the ancient cycle of life by acknowledging a "general indebtedness," as the anthologists' introduction to the poem points out, to Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and especially the volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. These two volumes deal with ancient beliefs about cycles in the life of vegetation and with ceremonies meant to insure fertility. (Introduction 2146)    References to the vegetation myths are sprinkled throughout the poem. For instance, Stetson's friend asks, "That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ Has it begun to sprout?" (lines 71-72) As a footnote to the text points out, this is a distortion of the ritual death of a fertility god who was reborn later in the year, symbolizing the death of plant life in winter and its rebirth later in spring. (note 8, 2149) The details of the rituals differed from culture to culture, as did the name of the god, but all stemmed from the response of a people to the dying and rebirth of plant life through the seasonal cycle. (Introduction 2146) The poem, in fact, begins with the regeneration of plant life in April, in which lilacs begin to sprout from the "dead land" and in which "dull roots" are revived with "spring rain." (lines 1-2, 3-4) Other references to the ritual death and rebirth of a fertility god can be found, for instance, in the fourth section, "Death by Water." In this section , the death of Phlebas the Phoenician is associated with a ritual at Alexandria in which a representation of ... ...e quest restores both the fertility of the land and the potency of the king.    Works Cited and Consulted: Abrams, M.H., et al. Footnotes to "The Waste Land" in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Volume 2. General Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Abrams, M.H., et al. Introduction to "The Waste Land" in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Volume 2. General Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Footnotes to "The Waste Land" in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Volume 2. General Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. "The Waste Land" in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Volume 2. General Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993.