Death And Resurrection In The Waste Land

Eliot's The Waste Land centers around death and resurrection, revealing the connection between sensuality and anxiety, between sin and sensuality. According to the poem, on account of some inexplicable insufficiency in human nature, man is liable to the temptations of flesh. Sexual temptations lead to suffering and death, man's history is nothing but "Birth, and copulation, and death ." As a result, sin, lust, evil, and death together form a circle among which there is the mutual cause and effect relation. Therefore, earthly love, even in most intense form, as in that between the lover and the hyacinth girl, with its romantic associations, will fail man in the end..Death is the destination of life, yet may also be the start of resurrection. There is opposition and mutual dependence between death and resurrection. The conception of death is the substance of The Waste Land. With Sibyl's request for death being the prologue of the poem, Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's book From Ritual to Romance provides the basic framework of resurrection of the poem, where many allusions to classical and mythological quotations , images and symbols are used to suggest the theme of death and the need of redemption. Sibyl's request for death at the beginning of the poem implies her dislike of an everlasting life, which indicates the theme of death. After the request, Marie's memory makes people associate her life with the death of her three cousins and the war.Unnatural death suggests the miserable condition of human being: Marie's three cousins; the drowned Phoenician sailor; the hanged man; Adonis killed by a bore; Cornelia's son; the death of many during the war; etc. Words indicating the meaning of death occur 25 times, which clarifying the theme of death in the poem. By demonstrating the dirty love of several women Eliot suggested the indifference between man and woman. Moreover women's being either the object or the subject of sensuality implies the misfortune of women in a male chauvinist world.It is not difficult to conclude that the poem is filled with the note of distraction, agony and extreme despair by comparing the ends of the five parts of "The Waste Land". The consciousness of death in the poemdemonstrates dialectic features. The collection of many broken elements proposes a unified concept: death is revival. In the mind of the poet, death does not belong to the future tense. Nor does it exist beyond the life. Nor does it hide behind the reality. Death exists in the present, and it is in the process of life. Moreover, it has its own life. Thereafter, human beings live in anxiety and in the fear of death.At the end of the first section, the death of Marcello is not associated with the hope of spiritual redemption and resurrection, for he has not been incorporated into the body of believers (the Church). And thus his burial is not a Christian one, but similar to the primitive burial practices of nature worshippers, without any positive certainty about salvation. Cornelia's words resemble Ophelia's distracted words at the end of the second section. The third section ends with reference to the ascendency of passion over reason; the fourth ends by referring to death, and the fifth ends in madness. The significance of such endings lies in the failure of mankind to achieve a spiritual synthesis without "faith"; and without this faith man is condemned to anxiety, despair, passion, madness, and death.The epic-like poem presents Eliot's attitude to the perennial problem of human suffering, pain, and evil. Eliot's emotions must have been deeply moved by the events of World War I, which made him speculate upon human destiny. Eliot sees suffering as inseparable from man's life. His religious sense makes him ascribe human suffering to human sinfulness. Since human nature is radically sinful, man is subject to pains and suffering at all times. Thus Original Sin and suffering are related. Thus indirectly lust, surrender to sex, passion and " Love of created beings " are at the bottom of human sufferi...