What Role does the City Play in Eliot's Poetry.

T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is the most influential poem in our modern age. In this poem city plays a very important role. In the poem Eliot clearly points out the aridity of the modern urban civilization.

Role of the City Play in Eliot's Poetry:

In the poem Eliot describes the barrenness of city life in modern civilization. He describes London as an "Unreal City". The figures who inhabit the unreal city are like the inhabitants of Baudlaire's 'Paris', are like those in Dante's 'Limbo'. The dead routine of the office-goers shows the futility and the emptiness of civilization. The city dwellers have no faith in any religion. The offices and factories in London begin at nine, which is the time of Christ's crucifixion. It indicates that when business life begins, Christ is no more. In the modern civilization, the world of commerce is entirely different from the world of God. Business and spirituality cannot go together.

In any big city, one will come across the evil of gambling in different forms. In the poem Eliot mentions Madame Sosostris a society fortuneteller. Under the law, fortune telling is a criminal and undesirable business, so Madame Sosostris is afraid of police. She has a pack of seventy eight cards, through which she tells the fortune of her customer.

In the poem we find that the people of upper class society are suffering from various types of mental illness. The fashionable society woman called the Lady of Situation is bored with her urban waste land and has become extremely neurotic. Her lover, too, suffers from mental exhaustion. He says:

I think we are in rat's alley

Where the dead men lost their bones. Eliot mentions the perversion of sex in the poem. Eliot cites the instance of German princess in the first part of the poem. This is the parallel to the love- affairs of Queen Elizabeth with the Earl of Leicester in the Tudor Period. In the city we find the mechanical sex relationship. The city dwellers use sea for animal pleasures.

Thus, through the city life Eliot portrays the death-in-life which is a major theme of the poem The Waste Land.