What does T.S Eliot say about Moral Decay of World in his Poem, The Waste Land?

Moral Decay of World in T.S Eliot Poem, The Waste Land

The Waste Land written by Eliot brings in some serious issues associated with modern human lives, in a very atypical way. The deadly skull, drawbacks, emptiness and futility of the ‘modern life’ have been portrayed in this poem very convincingly and successfully. Eliot used the technique of ‘fragmentation’ to show that our modern life is fragmented and scattered like his poem. The title clearly suggests that the poem is certainly not about a romantic or fantasy kingdom, rather it hints a ‘waste land’; an unproductive, lifeless, and water-less place that symbolizes modern Europe by referring to London city. Besides, these disillusionment's have been connected to the past and also with the future; the poem links its correlation with the past by referring to mythical elements and with the future by it vision.

 

 

Eliot’s depiction of modern life’s vacuity is easily understandable if we can picture the time when it was written, the post-World War I. At a time when traditional stabilities of society, religion and culture seemed to have crashed dramatically in the hands of ‘rapid change’ of both social and technological in every sphere of human lives. Modernity destroyed the old order of any kind, be it social, ethical or religious; thus made people to doubt on the previously established assumption of self, divine, world and so on.

The poem is divided into five sections. And each displays a bizarre, mundane and futile modern life symbolically, where sometimes we have found direct reference to real city (London) and sometime through rhetorical suggestion. As we explore through the poem, the mundane and vain modern life’s imagery become evident. Starting with the section titled ‘The Burial of the Dead’ that represents a physical wasteland and the buried human consciousness that was compared to a corpse hidden in April, ‘the cruelest month’. The second section entitled ‘A Game of Chess’ where we experience sexual abuse and lifeless relationship between lover and beloved, similarly, between husband and wife. This section brings in two poles apart scenario to show the sexual failure. The first one deals with upper class modern carnal love, while the other one depicts lower middle class or working class problem in terms of sexual relationship between married couples, the third section titled ‘The Fire man Sermon’ that mainly displays human lust and desire for sex. We have seen the prostitution just right over the Thames River in this section. Eliot suggests that London city is burning out of lust and desire.  Eliot continues till section fine entitled ‘What the Thunder Said’ to search out a possible solution to the problem that modern life is affected with. During the journey up to section five, we have been introduced with some grave predicaments of our modern life including ignorance, sexual abuse, lust, hypocrisy, hyper-reality, the vain purpose of life and so on.

However, Eliot presents the mundane life of London, often depicting physical or bodily set-up. Actually, symbolically it goes beyond portrayal and reaches the soul.

To sum up we can say that by the dawn of the 20^th century, traditional stabilities of society, religion, and cultural seemed to have weekend, the pace of change to be accelerating. The unsettling force of modernity profound challenged traditional way of structuring and making sense of human experience. Because of the rapid pace of social and technological change, because of the mass dislocation of populations by war, empire, and economic migration; and because of the mixing in close quarters of cultures and classes in rapidly expanding cities, modernity disrupted the old order, upended ethical and social codes, cast into doubt previously stable assumptions about self, community, the world and the divine.