Course Poetry lll

Department English
Semester 3rd (Weekend)
Topic Eliot’s Symbolism in Poetry

Submission June 2021

Student Name Qaiser Nadeem

Reg No MELT0719303

Symbolism In T. S Eliot Poetry.

Symbolism suggests an image with a host of associations. For instance, rose is generally a symbol of
beauty, but Eliot makes it represent Virgin Mary. Coriolanus stands for proud and selfish man. Eliot
makes it a representation of The lost leader and isolation and spiritual alienation. According to Edmund
Wilson, symbolism is the medley of Images; the deliberately mixed metaphors, the combination of the
grand and the prosaic manners; the bold Amalgamation of the material with the spiritual. Images imply
pictures or other sense impressions conveyed in Words. An image in poetry is a word or expression
which appeals directly to the sense organs. The function of Images is to concretize an abstract idea or an
inner state of mind so that it may be clear to the readers.

Water
In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot’s characters wait for water to quench their
thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of
standing water. Although water has the regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also
lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from The Waste Land. Traditionally,
water can imply baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus Christ, and Eliot draws upon these
traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides solace, and water brings relief elsewhere in The
Waste Land and in “Little Gidding,” the fourth part of Four Quartets. Prufrock hears the seductive calls
of mermaids as he walks along the shore in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but, like Odysseus in
Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 800b.c.e.), he realizes that a malicious intent lies behind the sweet voices: the
poem concludes “we drown” (131). Eliot thus cautions us to beware of simple solutions or cures, for
what looks innocuous might turn out to be very dangerous.

Fire
Fire is used as a symbol sometimes of lust and sensual attachment, and sometimes as the purifying
flame of purgation. In other words, fire in the poem appears as a symbol of two opposite concepts. In
“The Fire Sermon” we get a fusion of St. Augustine’s “cauldron of unholy loves” and Buddha’s sermon in
“Burning burning burning burning”. Here fire is a symbol of lust.

The Fisher King

The Fisher King is the central character in The Waste Land. While writing his long poem, Eliot drew on
From Ritual to Romance, a 1920 book about the legend of the Holy Grail by Miss Jessie L. Weston, for
many of his symbols and images. Weston’s book examined the connections between ancient fertility
rites and Christianity, including following the evolution of the Fisher King into early representations of
Jesus Christ as a fish. Traditionally, the impotence or death of the Fisher King brought unhappiness and
famine. Eliot saw the Fisher King as symbolic of humanity, robbed of its sexual potency in the modern
world and connected to the meaninglessness of urban existence. But the Fisher King also stands in for
Christ and other religious figures associated with divine resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of “What
the Thunder Said” fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder
sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliot’s scene echoes the scene in the Bible in which Christ performs
one of his miracles: Christ manages to feed his multitude of followers by the Sea of Galilee with just a
small amount of fish.

Philomela
In "A Game of Chess" the reference to the rape of Philomela by the "barbarous king" symbolizes
lust and is linked with the violation of the three Thames-daughters where also lust plays the
chief role. Both these situations have an obvious connection with the theme of sterile love dealt
with above. Our contemporary waste land is largely the result of lust as distinguished from love,
and lust defeats its own ends.

Music and Singing

Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he
symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama, was in decline
while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with low culture by
juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and
Australian troops. Eliot splices nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men,”
and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, as the title, implies a song, with various lines repeated as
refrains. That poem ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowning—a
scene that echoes Odysseus’s interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another
way in which Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions. Elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics
as a kind of chorus, seconding and echoing the action of the poem, much as the chorus functions in
Greek tragedies.