Friday, March 15, 2013
Scoring The Waste Land
Greetings, all! I promised, I think, to create a thread to open up discussion of The Waste Land, since we were barely able to get started on it this past Wednesday; I'm hoping a good many of you might be inclined to drop by this space before Monday's class and make an observation, raise a question, etc., about this poem's relationship to music and our class inquiry. Eliot himself called it "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling," and I.A. Richards referred to it as a "music of ideas." Regarding the latter characterization, what is the music and what are the ideas? What observations might we be inclined to make about the intersection of poetry and musical form here (especially on the heels of our encounter with both The Waves and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)? I'll offer this one thought: we might not be inclined to think sonata form is relevant to this fractured and fragmented modernist work, but nevertheless there does seem to be the presence of an exposition in Part 1 ("The Burial of the Dead") in which the basic themes -- sterility, dryness, death, uncertain rebirth -- get introduced. That might beg the question of whether we can then speak of there being development and recapitulation sections. Anyway, if we get started here we can be that much more efficient when we meet on Monday. We'll start with Eliot, then move to the scheduled jazz poems; because we have some extra time available to us on Wednesday, too, either before or after we listen to A Love Supreme, the jazz poems might be able to be spread across two class sessions. Have a nice weekend!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think that looking at this poem in the context of a sonata form, especially focusing on the motif of water, makes a lot of sense.
ReplyDeleteThe smallest references to this life source are the most interesting to me. One I found particularly miniscule but strangely unexpected was the description of the hyacinth girl: her hair being described as wet (38). I realize this seems really insignificant but that is perhaps why I found it so interesting. The smallest of details in here show the juxtaposition between life in past, present, and future for inhabitants of the wasteland - the once-present water is now only alive in memories and descriptions.
Mostly unrelated topic:"What the Thunder Said" blatantly states that "there is no water" (359), yet throughout the poem there is the fear of death by water, the fisherman, the river Thames. The water always feels present and is usually surrounded by or thought of in conjunction with a type of music. For instance, the "weialala leia" (290) as a boat is rowed; the begging of one narrator, "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song" (176), and even the musical qualities in "What the Thunder Said" of the "Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop" (358) of water and refreshment. It seems to me that the lack of water in this poem could be also a lack of music - perhaps the transcendent, higher-up music of the spheres.
I think the point in the poem where music really jumped out at me was the various instances where Eliot used repetition. Like from line 117 to 124, the speakers ask repetitively about what sound can be heard, then answer with the repetitive word, "Nothing." Then, Eliot repeats the phrase, "Hurry up please it's time," three times within four lines. Retreading this after our discussion on the musical qualities of repeats made those lines really stand out for me as being "musical ideas."
ReplyDeleteOn a further note, the nightingale yet again graces us with her presence on line 100, filling the desert with her "inviolable voice." Like Keat's poem, the nightingale is yet again the most knowledgable when it comes to music.
I believe that one way we can look at this poem in the context of our class is to pay attention to the sounds that Eliot orchestrated. In listening to it, there is a certain musical quality that is produced. Take for example the stanza that opens What The Thunder Said, the consonance gives it a nearly musical quality when read aloud, such as the lines “The shouting and the crying/Prison and palace and reverberation/Of thunder of spring over distant mountains”(325-327). This passage provides a perfect example of what Eliot has done in the poem. Reading these lines aloud leaves them with the reader, almost ringing in their head. As Ezra Pound would say, “in the best verse, a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base.” It seems that Eliot embodies this assertion with The Waste Land as there are many examples of verses which produce this “residue of sound.” In achieving this, Eliot seems to have overcome, to some extent, the music-literary border. Much the same way we were discussing Bob Dylan and whether or not he is a poet, in listening to The Waste Land as opposed to applying literary criticism(as much as that is possible for us literary critics) we have approached a similar question: Is T.S. Eliot a musician?
ReplyDelete