Summary of Robert Browning's Andrea del

Sarto
Browning has vividly portrayed the Andrea and his love is displayed through his monologue.
Andrea del Sarto in detail
Andrea del Sarto is a painter who has worked in the court of French king Francis I. He loves Lucrezia in his youth and he could not marry her
at that time. He marries her when she is widowed. But, she is not faithful to him. This is conversation between Lucrezia and Andrea del
Sarto. Lucrezia wants to leave him forever even his love for her is not yet all diminished. The following paragraphs deal with this issue in
detail. This is total summary of the monologue.

Andrea praises Lucrezia's beauty

Andrea del Sarto asks his wife to sit beside him and listen to him. He beseeches to wait and stay for some time to relax and be inspired
through her smiles. But, Lucrezia is not faithful to him. She is ready to go out as his cousin (actually lover) is whistling to call her. She needs
money to pay off the debts. For that purpose, Andrea has to draw a picture. The picture will be sold and the money is kept into the hands of
his wife to clear the debts. For that, he needs inspiration. The smile of the loved wife can help him get inspiration. But, she is reluctant to
smile as she is between the two. One is beside her and the other is calling for her staying outside. Andrea loves her. Even he knows that she
is going to part with her, she urges to stay with him some more time. He begins to admire her beauty. He says her ears are so beautiful that
even pearls hanging from ears can disturb her beauty. He loves her voice and the serpentine beauty. He says her face is like moon and has
been loved by all but she does not love any. This brings smile on the beautiful face of Lucrezia.

Remembrance of Andrea's mistakes

The smile hurled at Andrea awakens the spirit that he begins to convince Lucrezia to stay with him. He says that autumn grayness has filled
in his life and as well as in his art. Hence, he wants her to stay with him. He wants to speak volumes on his failure in bringing great art from
him. He would have got name and fame if had walked in the way of Michael Angelo and Rafael. They have not kept their art for money but
for the service of God. The popes and kings admired them for their great paintings. They have earned name and fame. But because of
Lucrezia, he has to go after money rather than in the ways of great painters. He can draw faultless paintings. But coercion of his wife and
nagging nature of her made him deceive the king Francis I of France. He is appointed as a painter to decorate the royal chambers. He has
spent his time in drawing paintings in royal palace. He has been given money to procure needed paintings and for his future paintings. But,
for Lucrezia's insistence, he has built a house for her by deceiving the king and stayed in Italy. Now, he cannot show his face to king or
officers. He cannot come out in daylight as royal officers may recognize him. Those who know him in Italy scold him. Thus, he is restricted to
his palatial home. He remembers the respect he got from the king in France. King used to look at his paintings when he draws coming close
to him which is not possible to any subject of that country. He is appreciated by the courtiers. They used to look at him with surprise looking
at the ease of drawing. He is perfect painter as Lucrezia who is perfect beauty. In the beginning, she is a model for his paintings. Later, she
had become better half of him. But, insistence of money has made Andrea Del Sarto deceive king. He let his parents die in misery. Even in
such situation, he is not ready to leave her. Her smile can pay all the sorrows of him generated by her. She does not like painting and does
not know the nuances of it. He tries to say how difficult it is to paint and how his peers are still lagging behind to complete a simple work.

Inspiration and success

He could not convince her and this leads to disappointment in him. Even he tries to say how importance she is to him. She is the sole
inspiration to his pictures. She has been a model for his drawings. If she seems happy, it will provide more inspiration to draw. He says that
praise or blame does not work on him. If any painter is praised, he is inspired and paints. Otherwise, if one is blamed for his drawing, he will
have anger to show what he is. But, these two do not work on him. He is not perturbed and not moved like mountain. But the smile of
Lucrezia can inspire him. Even this could not satisfy her. With this, he says there are no nagging wives for painters who have excelled in their
paintings. Yet, he does not blame her, but he blames himself that inspiration should not come from external influences but to come from
inner spirit. Angelo or Rafael is inspired themselves. That is the reason they have excelled. Thus he blames himself for his bad plight.

His understanding of capability and will

Andrea del Sarto laments on his situation saying that he has the capability but there is no will or inspiration for him. Those who have will lack
in capacity. This is what he feels. He is still in the infatuation of Lucrezia. The combination of will and capacity is rarest of rare. Only those
come out and get name and fame. He has been dependent on Lucrezia for his inspiration. He stayed in France for painting beautiful pictures
for King Francis. At that time itself, he used to imagine her face that she will surely be happy for his position as he had been supported as
Rafael has attained. He used to surmise that one day or the other he will become like Angelo and Rafael. This is not the opinion of him but
the opinion of Angelo too. Once he has spoken about Andrea with Rafael which has been over heard by him. Andrea clearly wants to win the
 heart of Lucrezia and for her calling back; he leaves the great life in France. The king used to be near him. He used to listen to the jingling
sound of king's chain. But, he has left such honor for the sake of Lucrezia. But now he has lost the glory. He needs compensation for that in
the form of smiles to be hurled at him all the time. That is the reason he says with Lucrezia to stay with him. But, Lucrezia says it is the waste
of time to stay with him even that evening.

He compares himself as bat

Andrea compels and at times tries to convince to stay with him as she is the source of his inspiration. Lucrezia wants to clear the debts of her
lover and hence she asks to draw a picture which can clear the debts of her friend's friend. He asks to sit beside him. The presence will
rejuvenate him to draw wonderful master pieces and it will provide more money. Then he can give not only for her friend but also for her
dress frill. Andrea compares him with bat. The bat could not tolerate the sunshine and wants to stay among the four walls closed. Now he is
also in the same position. He has left the glorious monarchs presence in France and living a life of solitary confinement in his palatial which
he embezzled under the pressure of Lucrezia to own a house. Now he cannot show his face to anyone. Now he stays in Italy. Even though
he fears that some French officials on tour may see him. They may curse him for his betrayal and spat on his face. He is ready to bear it but
he does not incline to leave the presence of her. He wants to prove how talented he is and how great her husband is to Lucrezia. In this
attempt, he quotes what Angelo has spoken of him and what Rafael has mistaken in the Virgin Mary picture which has been sent Rafael's
disciple Vasari.

Talking about his excellence in art with Lucrezia

It is the great attempt of Andrea to get Lucrezia to be with him. He sacrificed a lot for her. If pictures of virgin Mary's' are taken of Rafael and
Andrea. If they ask anyone to tell which picture they want to take for devotional purpose they surely select Rafael's. If you ask why you have
selected Rafael's, they tell you that Andréa has Lucrezia as his model. Still Rafael's Mary is technically defective. Andrea cannot say to the
world that it is defective. But with his wife he can say that. Even though it is technically wrong it is filled with the soul of Rafael. It is the
presence of heavenly inspiration which helped him filled with soul imbibed picture even a child can understand. Andrea's pictures are
technically perfect and at the same time they are soul less.

He questions himself
In the monologue, he does attempt by attempt to get her. This time she stands at the window perhaps she wants to communicate with her
lover as he is whistling outside the house in night. But Andrea says that there has prevailed darkness and stars are appearing in the sky. The
mount Morella has been shrouded by night but city walls are looking bright as guards have lit the lights. He says the owl is crying that might
be the sarcastic reminder that fellow is whistling. So he says her to come inside the house. He says that the house is filled with melancholy.
He wants her to change mind of going away from him. At the same time, his conscience pricks him by saying that it has served him right as
he has deceived the king and the money is misappropriated in the construction of house. He has not taken care of his poor parents who are
born, lived and died in poverty. He is always taken away by the beauty of Lucrezia and he shunned everything. After all these, his heart says
that she is gifting smile not to please him but to get money from him to pay off the debts of her lover. He questions himself that what lacks in
him and what the lover of her can provide her.

Lucrezia leaves Andrea

Still he loves Lucrezia as a crazy being. He wants create some hope in her by saying that whether he is summoned by French king. Then he
will paint Virgin Mary not her as a model but she is offered to sit beside him listening praises of Angelo looking at his artistic excellence.
Thus, he tries to persuade her. He thinks that this has not worked but tries to have her sit for that evening. He asks her to go for next day. He
says her presence help him draw beautiful drawings which will bring more money. Then she can pay off the debts of her cousin (actually her
lover). But this also does not work. Then he begins to chide himself that he has deceived the king which cannot be corrected. He is not a
good son as he has left his parents die in misery and poverty. It is also not revocable. He loses his hope of keeping his wife with him and
says lastly that if in heaven there may be a chance to paint the walls of new holy city. There are four painters i.e. Leonardo, Angelo, Rafael
and Andrea. The three do not have wives. But, Andrea has wife. He leaves that position to have Lucrezia. He is ready to pay anything for
her. He wants to see happiness in her eyes. For that he is ready to give up anything. All his attempts to keep her with him become futile. A
whistle noise is heard and Lucrezia is allowed to meet her lover. Thus, Andrea is left alone and he dies at the age of forty three due to
plague. Thus the life of Andrea has ended without recognition of his sacrifices. This is dramatic monologue by Robert Browning.

ANDREA DEL SARTO – BROWNING

ANDREA DEL SARTO – BROWNING
 It is also called ‘The Faultless Painter’.
 This dramatic monologue is narrated by Renaissance painter Andrea del sarto to his wife Lucrezia.
 Andrea del Sarto was an Italian painter from Florence, whose career flourished during the High Renaissance and early Mannerism.
 Though highly regarded during his lifetime as an artist senza errori (‘without errors’), his renown was eclipsed after his death by that of his contemporaries,
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.
 Andrea begs Lucrezia that they end a quarrel over whether the painter should sell his paintings to a friend of his wife’s.
 He acquiesces to her wish and promises he will give her money if she will only hold his hand and sit with him by the window from which they can survey Florence.
 He admits to feeling a deep melancholy, in which “a common grayness silvers everything”(line 35) and hopes she can pull him from it.
 He tells her that if she were to smile for him, he would be able to pull himself from such sadness.
 Andrea considers himself a failure as an artist, both because Lucrezia has lost her “first pride” (line 37) in him and because he has only one talent: the ability to
create faultless paintings.
 Though many praise him for creating flawless reproductions, which he admits he does easily, with “no sketches first, no studies” (line 68), Andrea is aware that his
work lacks the spirit and soul that bless his contemporaries Rafael and Michel Agnolo (Michelangelo).
 Considering himself only a “craftsman” (line 82), he knows they are able to glimpse heaven whereas he is stuck with earthly inspirations.
 He surveys a painting that has been sent to him and notes how it has imperfections he could easily fix, but a “soul” (line 108) he could never capture.
 He begins to blame Lucrezia for denying him the soul that could have made him great, and while he forgives her for her beauty, he accuses her of not having
brought a “mind” (line 126) that could have inspired him.
 He wonders whether what makes his contemporaries great is their lack of a wife.
 Andrea then reminisces on their past. Long before, he had painted for a year in France for the royal court, producing work of which both he and Lucrezia were
proud.
 But when she grew ‘restless’, they set off for Italy, where they bought a nice house with the money and he became a less inspired artist.
 However, he contemplates that it could have gone no other way, since fate intended him to be with Lucrezia, and he hopes future generations will forgive him his
choices.
 As evidence of his talent, he recalls how Michelangelo once complimented his talent to Rafael, but quickly loses that excitement as he focuses on the imperfections
of the painting in front of him and his own failings.
 He begs Lucrezia to stay with him more often, sure that her love will inspire him to greater achievements and he could thereby “earn more, give her more”.
 Lucrezia is called from outside, by her cousin, who is implicitly her lover, and Andrea begs her to stay.
 He notes that the cousin has “loans” that need paying, and says he will pay those if she stays. She seems to decline the offer and to insist she will leave.
 In the poem’s final section, Andrea grows melancholy again and insists he does “regret little …would change still less”.
 He justifies having fled France and sold out his artistic integrity and praises himself for his prolific faultless paintings.
 He notes again that Lucrezia is a part of his failure, but insists that she was his choice. Finally he gives her leave to go to her cousin.
 Andre Del Sarto is unique in Browning’s dramatic monologue oeuvre because of its incredibly melancholic tone and pessimistic view of art.
 Andrea de Sarto was a Renaissance painter who was regarded highly by his contemporaries because of his technical skill.
 Michelangelo was especially fond of Del Sarto’s work, and it was he who introduced Giorgio Vasari to Del sarto’s studio. Vasari, however, was highly critical of his
teacher, alleging that, though having all the prerequisites of a great artist, he lacked ambition and that divine fire of inspiration which animated the works of his
more famous contemporaries, like Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.
 Browning links this shortcoming with several other issues, principally Sarto’s marriage to an unfaithful wife, Lucrezia del Fede, whose constant demands for
money for her family and lover led him to neglect his own parents and misappropriate money given him by Francois I of France.
 She is the interlocutor of this dramatic monologue.
 Who is mentioned as ‘serpaentine beauty’? Lucrezia.
 According to Browning twilight compares to? Life and art.
 What picture does Browning like to paint? His wife.
 How does he compare Lurezia to ? Madonna.
 Del sarto is ? an Italian painter.
 Which king is mentioned in Andrea Del sarto ? French kIng Francis.
 In the opening of the poem, what is the request of del Sarto? To love him.
 The setting of Andre Del Sarto is the painter’s studio in evening.
 Andre Del Sarto was first published in the volume entitled Bell and Pomegranate.
 Which painter alone has a wife? Andrea.
 How Andrea’s parents died of? Poverty.
 How much coins that Andre earn silver coins and for what? 13 silver coins and she needs to buy a frill for her dress.
 “the urbinate who died five years ago”- whose death was referred in this line? Rafeal.
 What is the cause of Andrea’s failure? The character of his wife.

An Introduction to W B Yeats
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is regarded as not only the most important Irish poet, but also as one of the most important English language poets,
of the 20th century. He was a key figure in the Irish Cultural Revival, his later poems made a significant contribution to Modernism, and he was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Yeats’s life, and his poetry, bridged the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a youth he studied art in fin de siècle London and absorbed the prevailing
outlook of aestheticism, which was also expressed in the writing of Oscar Wilde, and the painting and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites. He was also
influenced by the French Symbolist poets, and developed a lifelong interest in mysticism and the occult, which fed into his poetry, lifting it above the
concerns of everyday life.

His early poems, the first being published when he was twenty, are characterised by a dreamy romanticism in both their form and content. He was
interested in the Gaelic language, song, and folklore, and used effects borrowed from Gaelic literature in his own poems. He wanted to reawaken
Ireland to its ancient literature. According to an article written a year before his death, his efforts had a mixed reception. On the one hand,

these evocations of Celtic beauty, heroism, and strangeness wakened . . . Ireland's ears to the sound of its own voice speaking its own music. [1]

While on the other,

political societies and the press turned against his aesthetic purposes. The poems in The Wind among the Reeds (1899) were termed "affected," "un-
Irish," "esoteric," "pagan," and "heretical." [2]

Yeats’s poetic style underwent a number of transformations as he grew older, becoming leaner and more direct. Unusually for a poet, he wrote his best
work late in life, between the ages of 50 and 74. His greatest period is generally said to have begun with the publication of The Wild Swans at Coole in
1919, and by the end of his career he was ranked along with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, as a foremost modernist poet.

Yeats's grandfather and great-grandfather were Protestant rectors, but Yeats himself rejected Protestantism because of the materialism with which he
felt it to be associated, and in London he joined the Theosophical Society, having met its co-founder, Madam Blavatsky. He was also a member of the
occult Order of the Golden Dawn. He considered himself to be a visionary, like William Blake, whom he admired, and devised his own mystical view of
life, which owed more to paganism and oriental religion than to Christianity, which he set out in A Vision (1925, revised 1937).

In A Vision he developed his theory of 'gyres', which lies behind the concept of the 'widening gyre' in the opening lines from ‘The Second Coming’
(quoted above). 'Gyres' were spirals of cyclic time which widened to the point of collapse, and in those lines Yeats expressed the idea that world history
was spiralling out of control towards the end of an era, and that an apocalypse was drawing close. He returned to the theme in ‘The Gyres’, from Last
Poems, expressing his view that the approaching end of our civilisation was not necessarily a matter for despair. In fact it was an inevitability about
which we could 'laugh in tragic joy', and 'Rejoice!'.

Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;

We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.

...
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word 'Rejoice!'
[‘The Gyres’]

Throughout Last Poems Yeats faces the decline of his own ageing body, as well as that of civilisation, but finds ample reason to rejoice in response to
art, dance, nature, and sensual pleasure.

Yeats lived through a turbulent period in Irish history, including the rise and fall of Parnell, the Easter Rising of 1916, and ultimately, in 1922,
independence from Britain. He joined the Irish Nationalist cause as a youth, and in 1922 became a senator in the Irish Free State. But although he was
a 'fiery young Nationalist' [3], and his work was embedded in, and drew upon, the politics of his day, his writing is far from being overtly political. He
was opposed to literature being used as a vehicle for political propaganda, feeling that:

The danger to art and literature comes today from the tyranny and persuasions of revolutionary societies and forms of political and religious
propaganda. [4]

Yeats said of the dramatist J. M. Synge, whose plays he put on in the Abbey theatre:

He was the man that we needed because he was the only man I have ever known incapable of a political thought or of a humanitarian purpose . . . he
was so little a politician that the world merely amused him and touched his pity. [5]

Irish politics was a theme to which Yeats frequently returned, particularly in the middle phase of his career, but he was responding as an individual to
the turmoil and violence which was on the one hand tearing his country apart, and on the other hand setting it free. In his poem ‘Easter 1916’ his
concern is to commemorate the individuals who suffered and died in the struggle to bring about what he calls 'A terrible beauty', and in his Nobel
lecture he drew attention to the 'monstrous savagery' perpetrated on both sides of the conflict.

A trumpery dispute about an acre of land can rouse our people to monstrous savagery, and if in their war with the English auxiliary police they were
shown no mercy they showed none: murder answered murder. [6]

The themes of Yeats's poetry transcend political argument, and the Ireland we see in his poems owes as much to the ancient myths and legends which
had fascinated him during his visits to his grandparents in Sligo, as to the political events of his day. He expressed his Nationalism through a
passionate desire to revive the Irish literary tradition, and worked towards this end by founding clubs and societies, and by setting up an Irish national
theatre. He wanted to revive the spirit of the ancient oral tradition of Gaelic folklore and song, to

bring the imagination and speech of the country, all that poetical tradition descended from the middle ages, to the people of the town . . . It seemed as
if the ancient world lay all about us with its freedom of imagination, its delight in good stories, in man's force and woman's beauty, and that all we had
to do was to make the town think as the country felt; yet we soon discovered that the town could only think town thought. [7]

He felt it important to promote literature through theatrical performances, he says, because

the great mass of our people, accustomed to interminable political speeches, read little [8]

With the help of Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, a fellow Nationalist who was also interested in Irish traditional folklore, and was herself a playwright,
he set up the Irish National Theatre Company, which took up residence in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The plays they put on brought them into
frequent conflicts with the public, the press, and the religious establishment. The most notorious was J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western
World,presented in 1904, which initially had to be performed under police protection because it caused riots due to its implication that the rural Irish
tend to glamorise lawless thugs, but later became a regular part of the theatre's repertory. In 1923 they produced The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean
O'Casey, which drew directly upon the conflict between the Irish and the British and stirred up a lot of Irish feeling.

Yeats's own plays drew on the same sources of inspiration as his poems. He was also fascinated by Japanese Noh plays, to which Ezra Pound
introduced him while working as his secretary, and was influenced by them in the writing of a number of short plays, such as At the Hawk's
Well (1916), Four Plays for Dancers (1921), Wheels and Butterflies (1934), and The King of the Great Clock Tower (1935).

Another important source of inspiration in Yeats's life and writing was his unrequited love for the actress and Irish Nationalist activist Maude Gonne,
who played the leading role in his most successful play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), and to whom he proposed, only to be rejected. It is generally
accepted that it was this love which inspired the passages about love and passion in his poems and plays. He later proposed to her daughter, but was
rejected by her too.

Yeats’s poems frequently took mystical flight, into regions where it was not easy for the reader to follow, but he also had a 'balancing streak of common
sense' [9] and he could bring us down to earth with a bump with stark honest lines such as these:

I have found nothing half so good

As my long-planned half solitude,
Where I can sit up half the night
With some friend that has the wit
Not to allow his looks to tell
When I am unintelligible
Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.
[‘The Apparitions’, from Last Poems, 1936-1939]

In those lines we see the direct, colloquial, modern voice, which influenced later poets of the 20th century. His mystical temperament is still present in
his reference to 'apparitions', but the worst being 'a coat upon a coat hanger' is surely a reference to the stark reality we all have to face - the fear of
death; his coat is there, but he isn’t in it. We also see the change Yeats's style and tone had undergone when we compare those lines to the romantic
opening lines of his best-known early poem:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made
[‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’]

He had come a long way from his original stance of ‘a romantic exile seeking, away from reality, the landscape of his dreams’. [10]

Yeats's ardent pursuit of the occult and spiritual was idiosyncratic, and cannot in itself be said to have been a major influence on the generation of
poets to come, but in leaving behind the escapist romanticism of his youth and developing a stronger, leaner, more direct style in response to the
changing times, he became a leading figure in modernist literature, and could be said to have opened a door through which later British, Irish, and
American poets followed.

In Yeats's old age, in ‘Under Ben Bulben’, (a hill in Sligo, near which he was buried), he addressed future Irish poets:

Irish poets, learn your trade,

Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up,
All out of shape from toe to top,

Truth of Human Life in Yeats's Poetry

William Butler Yeats's later poetry is particularly characterized by a stark, naked, brutal and even coarse truth about the fragmentation of modern human life. The
poet was caught "between two worlds." His poetry reflects the clash of opposites. Yeats saw man as torn in conflict. For him, the human existence is made up of
antinomies: the spiritual and the physical, the sensuous and the artistic, the past and the present, the personal and the impersonal, physical decay and intellectual
maturity. These conflicts are ever present in Yeats' poetry.

To Yeats, the modern civilization has made our fundamental consciousness of ourselves so blunt that we have not been able to differentiate between our own
inner voice and the reason. The rise of democracy and mob (mafia) violence which he witnessed in Ireland and Europe did not appeal to him. He felt that these
events reflected a brutalization of humanity. In A Prayer for My Daughter, he wishes that his daughter should remain free of "intellectual hatred" which has
corrupted beauty and innocence. In a process of glorifying the ideals of democracy, Yeats spoke against it, or rather against the shape it was assumed in the
civilization around him.

Yeats was not over-impressed by the scientific progress made by modern man. He foresaw the destruction and chaos looming large before his eyes. The sordid
and common life led by the people, their imagination and spirit blunted and barren have disgusted Yeats. This view of the Irish people becomes a statement of
universal validity in the twentieth century-the truth of which may, of course, is unpalatable and unpopular. In Easter 1916, Yeats celebrates the transformation of
the Irish people under the spell of violence. For once, they "resigned their parts in the causal comedy"-a woman who spent her days in "ignorant good-will" and
"her nights in argument", and the "drunken vainglorious lout" were transformed. "A terrible beauty is born" the sordidness has been discarded to show vitality and a
spirit of independence. But, Yeats raised hidden, but bitter truth and questioned on the martyrdom of the rebels "needless death after all"? However, unpopular,
Yeats does not fear the truth.

The evil fragmentation of our civilization is best expressed in The Second Coming. Yeats bluntly puts the truth before us-"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold",
and "anarchy is loosed upon the world". The fragmentation in our lives can cause disorder and corruption. The good people, unfortunately lack conviction, while
the bad pursue their wicked ends with passionate intensity. The falcon, the symbol of intellectual power, has got free of the control of the falconer, who represents
the heart or soul. In other words, the intellect's progress is directionless at these times, and separated from human instinct. In such a situation, the future seems
bleak-a brutal and savage force is about to take over. All this might have sounded pessimistic and certainly unappealing to his readers, but we cannot deny the
basic truth of his vision. In the situation, Yeats wants to seek some kind of beauty and permanence beyond all the ugliness, corruption and impurity. Thus, in his
Sailing to Byzantium, the wish is not merely to escape sensuality and mortality, but also the impurity and corruption of this world-the "complexities of mire and
blood". Byzantium presents the ideal world, free of the "dissipations and despairs" of the modern world, and, representing the unity of all aspects of life. In
Byzantium, there is none of the multiplicities, hate, strife or confusion which is peculiar to the everyday life of men and women.

The Byzantium poems bear out the contention that Yeats presents the clashing opposites of the human situation "country-city, sensuality-intellectuality, dying-
unageing, body-soul, flesh-spirit, holy-unholy". We may not agree with his way of reconciling the opposites, but we are fully conscious of the fragmentation in the
human being and society of today. "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young/we loved each other and were ignorant", Yeats says in one of his poems. He was always
bewildered by the problem of the dissociation of power and knowledge-again a fact true to the human situation. As he questions in Leda and the Swan, are we fully
aware of the actions done or their significance? Man, according to Yeats, was faced with a fragmented life, unable to achieve the unity of being, where all
contradictions are resolved. Only art and philosophy triumph over tragedy; only wisdom can teach us the value of tragic gaiety-that is his rejoinder to "hysterical
women" who say that something "drastic" should be done. Byzantium to him represented that point in history where "religious, aesthetic and practical life was one
and architects and artificers spoke to the multitude and few alike." All in all, Yeats' poems present the truth about the human situation and he does not hesitate to
use blunt and brutal terms to express it.

Yeats and the Romantic Tradition

William Butler Yeats is regarded as one of 'the last romantics' who successfully bridged the gap between the romantic tradition of the 19th century and the
modernist literature of the 20th century which was produced in direct opposition to that tradition. He was considered both a Romantic and a modern poet. His
poetry falls into three distinct categories of phrases.

His first period, sometimes known as the 'Celtic Twilight' is one of self-conscious romanticism, highly influenced by Spenser, Blake and Shelley. His early works
were full of melody and decoration, often based on Irish myth and folklore, had a strong mystical and dreamlike element in it. The poetry composed during this time
was in the Romantic and late-Romantic style. His second stage starts roughly from 1914 to the late 1920s. During this period, his style becomes precise
considerably, and dreams and melody are increasingly banished in favor of psychological reality and politics. His poems were more nationalist and concerned
about the liberation of Ireland from the grip of British rule. His third and final period takes and reconciles elements from both his earlier periods, but adds
something new. Poetry from this period is less, public than earlier work, and often highly personal, but it also develops Yeats' theories of anarchy, violence and
tragedy in human history. The works of poetry during these period talks more about the truths of fragmentation of human and effects of modern inventions in
humanity.

Yeats comes under the group of the last generation of the romantic poets. He was the members of the Rhymer's Club and the poets and painters of the pre-
Raphaelite school, and his early writings were fabricated by this association. From the poets of these eras, he learnt the necessity of form and pattern of art and
craft, the devotion to ideal beauty, which may doom an artist to a life of loneliness in the modern materialistic society. He of course later dwelt on the basic
limitations of the art for art's sake cult, as also of the divided personalities of the young artists of 'the tragic generation', and bent all his efforts towards the devising
of effective ways of avoiding their fate. His youthful imagination was nourished on the poetry of Shelley and in his 'day-dreaming' childhood, he was apt to pose as
Manfred, Prince Athanase and Alastor. Moreover, the first poet whom he studied and edited was Blake, the poet painter who fabricated a mythology of his own to
keep his originality and uniqueness intact, and his own early poetry has all the characteristic flavor and limitation of the typical romantic verse-a tendency to
escape into the land of romance or peaceful bosom of nature, flirtations with lovely phantoms or figures of folk-lore and superstition and fondness for poetic words,
for 'pale' and 'yellow' color and vague epithets and descriptions as well as wavering rhythm.

Tennyson was heavily impressed by Keats's romantic tradition in poetry. Tennyson later influenced Rossetti, and WB Yeats followed the romantic tradition of
Rossetti. All these poets: Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, had a remarkable eye and an ear for verbal music. Rossetti is a decadent poet, but the seeds of his
decadence are to be found in Tennyson and, before that, in Keats. Keats, Tennyson and Rossetti have a common way of dealing with love in a frustrated way.
Their frustrated love in the poetry is idealized and sensual, a self-mortifying love.

Yeats, under the spell of this grim magnificence, began by writing poems which were similarly dreamy, weary, and nostalgia. His early poems were based on
Victorian individualism and he desperately wrote on love frustrated theme:

Although our love is waning, let us stand

By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.
(Ephemera)
This personification of Passion was almost a Romantic cliché the phrases like, 'man whom Sorrow named his friend', 'odorous twilight', and 'Dim powers of drowsy
thought' and also his facile grammatical inversions are full of depression towards love and women. In later life, when revising these poems, he removed the
inversions, purged the epithets, and modified the Keatsian dullness. The later version is harder, less 'poetic' in the Romantic sense, less sentimental.

His first book of poems, The Wandering of Oisin, contains no political implications; the Irish poems in it, according to Yeats himself, are not truly Irish. Down by the
Salley Gardens is an exception, being merely a trimmed version of an Irish folk song. And the fairies which appear in certain poems here, later suppressed, are
trumpery little English fairies, degenerate descendants of Oberon and Titania. Similarly the Irish ballads in this collection are, like some of the ballads of Rossetti
and Swinburne, the copybook exercises of an intellectual-

But Father John went up,

And Father John went down;
And he wore small holes in his shoes,
And he wore large holes in his gown.
The naive simplicity of this poem is not vital and true to the poet's personality than the simplicity of Rossetti's Stratton Water.

As for the long narrative title poem, The Wandering of Oisin itself, it is very derivative (he later considered it to be full of the Italian color of Shelley) and no more
Irish than Tennyson's Voyage of Maeldune. The epithets are often clichés and the rhythms are sometimes the more vulgar rhythms of the Romantics, sometimes
feeble--especially when he is using the rhyming couplets of Morris.

Yeats, who received the Romantic inspiration largely through the more enervated verse of Morris, ran the risk of being deprived of vigor and crude simultaneously.
The dangerous influence of Morris is noticed in Gilbert Murry's verse translations of Greek tragedy which have made something evasive, languid, and feminine out
of an original that was masculine, hard, and direct. Morris, on receiving The Wanderings of Oisin, said to Yeats, 'You write my sort of poetry'.

Yeats' later poems all show a zest, and this zest is something distinct from Romantic enthusiasm, something more virile and less contaminated with self-pity. There
is plenty of self in it, but it takes the form not of a young man's escapism, which hankers for the wings of a dove, but of an old man's self-confidence who thinks he
has the wings of an eagle. A new Yeats emerges with the publication in 1910 of The Green Helmet, a collection of poems purely free from any taint of romantic
myth and legend. There is no dreaminess, no abstractness in the presentation of material. His style became leaner, more refined and more austere.
With Responsibilities, published in 1940, we get Yeats, who can handle issues of public affairs with a shrewd personal detachment, somewhat touched with irony.
His later poetry is tinged with realism and rings a modern note. He was now dealing fairly directly with contemporary experience, some of it historical, some of it
casual and personal. As well as admitting contemporary matter into his poetry, he was also admitting moral or philosophical problems. And he was expressing
many more moods, not only the 'poetic' ones. He was writing at one moment as a cynic, at another as an orator, at another as a sensualist, at another as a
speculative thinker. His poetry was sometimes critical, sometimes near to nonsense. The critical poetry pleased us because we demanded that a poet who had
meddled with the world should admit it. The nonsense elements pleased us too, for nonsense poetry was the one nineteenth-century Romantic self-indulgence
that had escaped stigmatization. But on the whole it was Yeats's dryness and hardness that excited us. Like a typical romantic poet, he started with personal
problems and conflicts and sought to create a general philosophy of life and history out of it.

Among School Children by William Butler

Yeats: Introduction
The poem Among School Children was written in 1926 by WB Yeats after he visited to a convent school. After the restoration of independence in Ireland, WB
Yeats became the Senator in parliament. As a public man, he visited schools so as to find the quality of education and the problems faced by the schools. In this
poem, we see the poet as an academician, as the critic of philosophy, as the lover of Maude Gonne, and as the supporter of organicity.

This poem of Yeats is recognized as one of the most difficult poems and is praised for its smooth flow from the direct consideration of the school children, to the
memory of Maude Gonne, to his passionate philosophical conclusion and to the puzzle of the human existence. The main subject of the poem revolves around the
interpretation of matter and spirit. The major theme of the poem is the process of aging, the creation and the love.

The poem consists of eight stanzas of eight lines each. It employs a rhyme scheme of ababaabcc, popularly known as ottava rima. He has got mastery over the
excellent use of language in this poem. His prosaic language is too brilliant and polite. The selection of words is quite refined.

The first stanza is setting: Yeats is walking along with a kind old nun who is answering his questions, when he suddenly notices little girls looking at him. These
girls remind him of Maude Gonne. He thinks Maude Gonne who now old must be as pretty as the girl when she was a little school girl. Stanzas 5 to 8 are
extensions of the poet’s wonder at life and change. He states that if mother would think their children would grow old and ugly and one day die, then she would not
give birth to her kids. Then the poet begins to think of the philosophies about the life and reality and their propounders. However big philosophies one propound,
he/she has to face the bitter reality of life that is aging and death. In the last stanza the poet puts a confusing question about the existence of the life which is not
related to his visit to the convent and to his meditation. He concludes that the dancer cannot be separated from the dance.

Byzantium by William Butler Yeats:

Introduction
Yeats wrote the poem Byzantium after the poem Sailing to Byzantium, apparently dissatisfied (it is said someone pointed out its drawbacks) by the former poem:
The first poem's title includes 'sailing to' but the poet presents himself as already (and easily) reaching there!

In this second poem on the subject of the artist becoming the part of the eternal world of perfect art, Yeats shows the process of purification of the artist that burns
his physical and lowly self and refines it to an eligible spiritual artistic self. This poem represents the voyage and is written from the point of view of the initiating
individual who watches the uninitiated, unpurged spirits arriving from beyond the "gong-tormented sea" which separates Byzantium's reality from the flesh and
blood reality of the twentieth century world. The subject of this poem is the nature of the final escape from the round of re-incarnation. This poem is parallel to
sailing to Byzantium. As in the earlier poem, the first stanza here is concerned with the flesh-and-blood world that is being left behind, the world of "unpurged
images". After that opening stanza, the miraculous golden bird, the purgatorial flames, even the spirits crossing the sea, are all recalled, but in reverse order to
their appearance in the earlier poem, for both the setting and the point of view have here changed completely. "Byzantium", usually discussed as a companion
piece to "Sailing to Byzantium" written four years later, takes up the actual process by which the artist creates his images and, in a bold stroke by Yeats compares
the creative process to the soul's journey after death. Some commentators have seen "Byzantium" as "a description of how art is created". Others have
emphasized the poem as "a symbol of the heaven of man’s imagination". "Byzantium" is finally about both art and the soul or, about "life, death and art." This great
poem, Yeats claimed did warm his back into life. The soul, liberated from life, must travel back through its past life, live events over again until it finds or perhaps
becomes an image that breathless mouth. This miracle by which the poet encounters an image of the soul is hailed as "death-in-life and life in death" (not in the
sense of Coleridge or Eliot.)

Byzantium by William Butler Yeats: Critical

Appreciation
 Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler
Yeats: Introduction
The title “Sailing to Byzantium” suggests an escape to a distant, imaginary land where the speaker achieves mystical union with beautiful, eternal works of art.
Byzantium is the old name of Constantinople or Istanbul, which was the capital of the Eastern section of the Roman Empire. It was famous for its mosaic art and
metal enameling.

After its conquest by the Turks in 1453, it saw the revival of Greek art and culture. Here in this poem ‘Byzantium’ is a symbol of a country of art and philosophy
which transcends the limits of time and nature.

"Sailing to Byzantium" is quite a short poem, consisting of four rather simply put together stanzas (abababcc, all in roughly iambic pentameter). In the first, the
poet describes the natural world, where the young of all species - birds, fish, people - are busy loving, reproducing and "commending" the flesh. Though these
"generations'" are "dying" from the moment of their birth, they do not notice it. "Caught" in the "sensual music" of life, they "neglect monuments of unaging intellect"
- works of art, religion or philosophy, the products of man's non-physical imagination. But what place is there among these young sensualists for an old man whose
senses have already begun to fail?

In the second stanza, Yeats describes the old age as a stage in man’s life when he becomes almost incapable of indulging in sensual sensations. He becomes a
virtual scarecrow. Unless he betakes himself to the study of art, he is like ‘a tattered coat upon a stick’. The poet, therefore, decides to go to the Byzantium, which
is a traditional place of art, and engage himself there with the study of the treasures which the place offers. The poet has called Byzantium “holy”, for it is the
center of spiritual and intellectual activity and not a place suitable for physical and sensuous pleasures of life.

In the third stanza poet describes that as soon he arrives in Byzantium, he prays to God's saints to come down from heaven and teach him to appreciate art. The
saints are superb artists of Byzantium, who created the "monuments of unageing intellect" and who are supposedly its guardian angels. He sees them with
imagination's eye standing in God's holy fire like figures in mosaic work, standing against a background of gold. He invokes them to come down with rapidly
spinning motion and teach him how beauty of art is to be experienced and enjoyed. He wants them to become the “Singing masters of his soul” and to purify his
heart. In other words he wants them to teach him to listen to spiritual music, as distinguished from the sensual music. The poet after getting rid of all sensual
desires would like to be transformed into some object of art having an eternal value.

In the fourth stanza Yeats imagines what this immortality would be like. It is, of course, far from the traditional concept of immortality - angels choiring, etc. This is
the heaven of art, where the artist himself becomes the artifact. Yeats has renounced his earthly body, he would not like to re-born in the same or in any other
earthly shape. He will reject all physical incarnations, because all living beings are subject to mortality and death. He would like to become something eternal and
imperishable. He would take the shape of the golden bird, the kind of bird which Grecian goldsmiths are believed to have designed for the pleasure of an emperor.
As a golden bird, a work of art, he would be beyond decay or death and would therefore be unlike the “dying generations” of real birds. As a golden bird, he will be
placed on a golden bough, and he will appear to be singing songs of all times to an audience of the lords and ladies of Byzantium. His song, when he becomes a
golden bird, will be that of spiritual ecstasy and he will be surrounded, not by the young lovers and other animal creatures of the sexual cycle, but by an audience
that is elegant and abstract. In Byzantium, he will have no age; past, present and future are all one there.

Art, Immortality, Religion and Spirituality in W.B. Yeats' Sailing

to Byzantium

The numerous analyses of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" seem to fall into two main groups:
Firstly, a minority of critics like John Crowe Ransom feel that the poem is "more magical than
religious . . . and its magnificence a little bit forced."

Secondly, a great majority of critics that praise it for its perfect structure and its magnificent
exaltation of art. Typical of this second group are Louis MacNeice, who writes: "Yeats is still,
though reluctantly, asserting the supremacy of art, art, as always for him, having a supernatural
sanction."

Kenneth Burke feels, "there is in Yeats, an intensification of Keats's vision of immortalization,

not as a person, but by conversion into a fabricated thing. It is not a religious immortality that is
celebrated here, but an aesthetic one."

Actually, both of these groups have misinterpreted the poem. A close analysis of "Sailing to
Byzantium" establishes this judgment quite well. To do so, let us briefly recall Yeats's
intellectual biography up to the time of his writing this poem.

Although for a short time in the late 1890's Yeats believed in An for Art's sake of the English
variety and was influenced by French Symbolism, he soon decided that the emphasis in such a
religion of art was a fundamental distortion of the vital relation that had existed between religion
and art in the past, and in an important essay entitled "The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900) called
for "a return to the way of our fathers ... a return to imagination" that would restore art to its
proper function as "the garment of religion." He writes:

"How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress, the world,
and lay their hands upon men's heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion as
in old times?"

This conviction expressed frequently in his prose volume entitled Ideas of Good and Evil and
elsewhere, never left Yeats. As C. M. Bowra has said in explaining the difference between Yeats
and Mallarme:

"Yeats does not regard poetry as complete in itself, with its own ritual and meaning. He sees it as
part of a larger experience, as a means of communication with the spiritual world which lies
behind the visible. For him the poet is almost a medium, and interpreter of the unseen, and his
poetry is the record of the revelations given to him."

The point of all this is that, except for a brief devotion to a religion of art in his youth, Yeats
always, whatever the ingredients of his theology, kept art as "the garment of religion as in old
times," so that to speak of the immortality referred to in "Sailing to Byzantium" as "not a
religious immortality . . . but an aesthetic one" is contrary to all that we know of· his expressed
beliefs.

Yeats's own private religion, after his early rejection of Christianity, was indeed a hodgepodge,
containing at various times elements from Irish folklore, Blake's system, Brahmanism,
Buddhism, and (especially in his later years) the culture of the Byzantine Empire about the time
of Justinian I. In spite of his rejection of Christianity, there are a few poems in his later years,
like" A Prayer for My Son," that are definitely Christian, and he always admitted that he shared
with Christians the belief, for example, in the miraculous immortality of their sainted dead. In"
Vacillation" he says:

"Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we

Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?

The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,

Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,

Healing from its lettered slab."

Yeats's specific attitude toward Byzantium that is most relevant to the poem "Sailing to
Byzantium" is expressed in A Vision. Why does he say, "I think if I could be given a month in
antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before
Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato."

He answers in the next sentence, "I think I could find in some little wine shop some
philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending
nearer to him than to Plotinus even." The spirit of this early age one of nearness to the
supernatural (which Yeats would recover in "Sailing to Byzantium ") is not that of the artist
creating his religion making his own "artifice of eternity."

On the contrary, says Yeats, the artists of that happy time "were almost impersonal, almost
perhaps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject matter and that
the vision of a whole people . . . and this vision, this proclamation of their invisible master, had
the Greek nobility." Yeats similarly in the humility of his religious attitude in this poem prays
from his weakness as " a dying animal" that the messengers from" God's holy fire" may "gather
me/ Into the artifice of eternity."

But let us consider in more detail the...... arguments of the critics. What about the group who find
"magic" predominant in the poem ? Elder Olson contends that in the last two stanzas the
monuments become "insouled" and the art animate: the monuments, he says, prayed to for life or
death, as beings capable of motion from sphere to sphere."

Arthur Mizener says that "Yeats for a moment asks us to fancy the figures stepping [from the
gold mosaic] as his singing masters." But the poem does not say this: the appeal is no more to the
works of art or to the artists than the prayer of the Roman Catholic is to the statues of the saints,
or the sculptors of the statues, before which he kneels. The appeal of the Roman Catholic is to
the saints, whose lives on earth are commemorated, and whose present spiritual existence in the
other world is represented, by the monuments. Such is the poet's attitude toward the" sages" in
"Sailing to Byzantium." He does hot say, "Come from the gold mosaic." He says:

"O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire. . . . "

The sages are to come from the holy fire, not from the gold mosaic, which, like the statues of
saints for the Catholic, is merely the visible representation of the sages and the holy fire. If Yeats
meant that the art might actually become animate, he would be little more than an idolater, or,
even if he meant it only as a metaphor, it would be on about the same intellectual level as a fairy
tale for children.

Of course, from a strictly rationalist standpoint, coming from the holy fire would be crude magic,
but this symbol for a mystical, spiritual conta1lt with the holy dead has considerable religious
sanction and therefore a certain degree at least of intellectual dignity.

We revert to the fairy tale magic, however, if we interpret the last verse of the poem as does John
Crowe Ransom, who says of the poet:

"In Byzantium, in his next life, he will be a mechanical bird made of gold." But the poet does not
say this. He says:

"Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make ...

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake."

Yeats was faced, as Dante had been in the Paradiso, with the exceedingly difficult task of
conveying the idea of immortality in a concrete, poetic form. Dante chose, among other figures,
the figure of the Rose; but Yeats's short poem had already emphasized the swift decay and death
of everything natural; "Whatever is begotten, born, and dies."

Therefore-and here again is the answer to the group of critics who maintain that this is primarily
an aesthetic and not a religious immortality -to what that is concrete but not natural could he turn
except to art for a symbol of immortality? And it is only a symbol, specifically a simile, in the
poem (" such a form as ...").

What, then, are the similarities between his immortal life and the mechanical bird that make the
simile appropriate? The bird in the Emperor's palace that Yeats had read about was beautiful in
appearance, enduring and precious (made of gold), and capable of singing songs that were both-
beautiful and full of wisdom, not "sensual music," but singing

"To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come."

These characteristics, he no doubt felt, make this figure an appropriate one to express in concrete
form the joys of immortality-especially appropriate since such mechanical birds actually existed
in the historical Byzantium, of which Yeats said in A Vision: "I think that in early Byzantium,
maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were
one."

Starting from this remarkable historical city, Yeats made Byzantium his very unorthodox but
devoutly religious version of the New Jerusalem, in which "holy city" the poet, the "dying
animal," is primarily concerned, not with the art, but with the spiritual life visibly represented by
the art.

A Dialogue of Self and Soul

A Dialogue of Self and Soul belongs to the later phase of Yeats’ s career. Yeats had matured both physically and mentally by this
time. Even though he was long past his sexual prime, he felt rejuvenated. The anxiety over aging which had pursued him since his
earliest days [as is reflected in his early poems such as “ When you are Old” (The Rose 1893)] was gradually lessening. He seems
to have come to terms with the natural cycle of events. Moreover, his philosophy had matured as is reflected in A Vision (1925)
which went through two more editions by 1933. Yeats was familiar with the Greek intellectual tradition but became serious only
after 1900. He had also read Nietzsche. However, in his later poetry he revises and redefines these traditions. The Romantic strain
is never too far off even in the mature poetry. The world of imagination remains triumphant over that of spiritual speculations.

The poem “ A Dialogue of Self and Soul” ’ , according to Robert Snukal, ‘ is based upon the choice between a noumenal and a
phenomenal world, between a retreat into pure mind or the repeated fall into matter.’ The poet persona chooses the world of
here and now as is affirmed by the gradual ascendancy that is given to the Self, which in the second half of the poem becomes
the sole speaker. Although the poem is entitled a ‘ Dialogue’ , by the second half the Self’ s domination over the Soul is so
complete that it ceases to be a dialogue. Yeats follows the Medieval tradition of dialogue between the body and the soul but
makes certain changes: instead of Body we have Self. George Russell noted in his book Song and Its Fountain (1932) that “ [. . .]
[Yeats’ s] imagination was dominated by his own myth of a duality of self.” This motif of a projected image of the self has its
foundations in the Romantic tradition (painting and poetry) and overlaps with the idea of the doppelganger and alter ego so
prevalent in nineteenth-century fiction such as Stevenson’ s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), with slight
variations in Bram Stoker’ s Dracula (1897), or, Oscar Wilde’ s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) which fictionalizes the
dichotomy.

A Dialogue” relies on such antinomies or ‘ masks’ as it is explained in the simultaneous contraction and expansion of the two
cones, which Yeats calls the “ gyre” . By this time he had internalized his philosophy that he could write an entire poem based on
its central symbol of the gyre. In A Vision he explains the antithetical movement of the gyre wherein when the outer (objective)
cone expands, the inner (subjective) contracts and at their extreme positions, a reversal of movements takes place. Yeats aligns the
symmetry of this structure with that of the different phases of moon. He divides the soul into what he terms Four Faculties, two
pairs of contraries: termed Will and Mask, Creative mind and the Body of Fate. This division derives from Blake’ s dictum:
‘ Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human
existence.’ His most sustained exposition of his theory of the anti-self and Mask is in the long essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae
published in 1917 wherein art/poetry is seen as extending the self. “ A Dialogue” is structured as a gyre wherein Self and Soul
portray antithetical cones. The poem begins with the Soul at its highest intensity therefore completely dominating the Self.
This poem takes up the theme of the conflicting desires of the poet’ s Self. It uses the imagery of the tower and the winding stairs
among other things. The winding stairs in itself replicates the movement

of the gyre.

Part I of the poem is dialectical, alternating between the Soul and the Self. The first stanza is given over to the Soul which is in
ascendance. Yeats has the lunar cycle in mind (ll. 7). He incorporates the Christian tradition of Dark Night of the Soul in his own
system of philosophy as espoused in A Vision. ‘ Dark Night of Soul’ or ‘ The Ascent of Mount Carmel’ or ‘ Spiritual Canticle’
deals with the notion of mysticism. According to this tradition, an individual soul must first reach an understanding that it is arid
without its Maker, therefore in need of fulfillment and illumination.

Winding…. Stair:

Yeats had bought the ancient Norman tower, which late in life, stood for, among other things, Irish history, aristocracy, and traditon. Its
vertical stairs became a symbol for the idea of the whirling gyre. Because of its journey in time, the tower helped Yeats summon sould of
the dead.

The hidden pole: A reference to the pole-star

Then begins its descent to know itself, marked by a set of attempts on individual self to rid itself of various kinds of temptations
and dependencies. Having progressed into this period of increased detachment the soul reaches darkness as it has purged itself of
desire and appetite. Now, having gone through purgation, the soul is in a state which is open to illumination.

That quarter where all thought is done: according to A Vision, the last quarter of the lunar month (Phases 22-28) is marked by an
‘ Abstraction’ that has for its ‘ object or result the elimination of intellect’ .

Satos ancien blade: Yeats received a gift from a japanese admirer of his poetry. The sword was wrapped in an emroidered silk. The sword
was oned by the family of the person for 550 years. It had been forged 550 years ago. Thus the sword syblolized ancient wisdom, and the
wrpped silk symbolized anima mundi Yeats revises this Christian mystical tradition slightly. In the third section of A Vision, which
deals with life after death, the soul goes through reliving its earthly life, gradually reaching a blessed state, after many
incarnations. This notion of reincarnation goes back to Plato. Another addition Yeats makes to this section is his concept of Anima
Mundi, according to which it is possible for the souls of the dead to communicate, through Anima Mundi, with writers and artists.
The second stanza is given over to the Self. Sato’ s sword which is “ still razor-keen, [. . .] like a looking-glass / Unspotted by the
centuries” and the wooden scabbard which is “ tattered [. . .] faded adorn” symbolize changelessness of heart. (ll. 3-4, 8). The
embroidery which is torn from a court lady’ s dress symbolizes aristocracy. Aristocratic values are sympathetic to art and culture.
The winding and binding (of the wooden scabbard) refer back to the System, viz. the winding and unwinding of the Great Memory
(Anima Mundi) or the memory of a race. Great Memory works through the individual artists. In dying a poet contributes to the
wealth of the racial memory and in using it in the life-time he unwinds it. Gradually the Soul is shown as loosening its hold on
the argument. The Soul’ s rejoinder starts with a rumination over imagination before moving on to the noumenal. “ Ancestral
night” that is mentioned in Stanza 3 has its bearing in the Christian mythology. Yeats distinguishes night and day in his
philosophical system. Night is suggestive of one God associated with denial of self and Christ’ s sacrifice. It is also associated with
Socrates. Here the soul turns towards spirit seeking knowledge. These are some of the associations Yeats makes with the Dark
Night of the Soul. Day holds pagan associations, linked as it is to Homer and many Gods. It is a Nietzschean idea backing the
affirmation of self. Here the soul turns away from the spirit and is life affirming. Even here the subject of ageing comes up but
that is more in the context of imagination. The Christian spiritual tradition may be able to deliver from the cycle of death and
birth, but only if the attention is removed from all earthly things. The Self in Stanza 4 picks up where it left off in the second
stanza. The sword mentioned earlier was forged by Montashigi in fifteenth-century. Again the dialectic between night and day is
set up.

The sword with its embroidery of flowers is seen as emblematic of day or the pagan tradition as opposed to the tower which
signifies the night or the affirmation of soul. The “ crime” talked of in ll.8 is the same one of participating in the natural cycle of
birth and death. The Self is gaining in intensity by showing willingness to go through the cyclicity of nature. The crime of death and
birth: The familiar theme in Yeats’ s poetry. Life and death is what awaits a being caught in the cycle of nature. Montashigi: according to
Jeffares, a sword maker who lived in Osafune in the early fifteenth century. Hearts purple: ‘ If I say “ white” or “ purple” in an ordinary
line of poetry, they evoke emotions so exclusively that I cannot say why they move me; but if I bring them into the same sentence with such
obvious intellectual symbols as a cross or a crown of thorns, I think of purity or sovereignty’ . I set / for emblems: the conscious process of
emblem creation, symbol making, is an important theme in Yeats’ s later work. The basin of the mind: The basin full to the brim and
overflowing is an image, which suggests, for Yeats, plentitude. He was fascinated by the Irish myth of a river overflowing with beer. Horn of
plenty is another such image suggestive of plentitude. Deaf and dumb and blind: The end of all consciousness. Is from the Ought, or Knower
from the Known: in the technical terms of A Vision, these four entities are, respectively, Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate – that
is, desire and its object, and intelligence and its object. The soul is speaking of a condition when the human faculties will no longer be
distinct from one another, a condition outside the reincarnative cycle. Only the dead can be forgiven: the Self contradicts this at II 27. The
Soul talks of the spiritual fullness in the last stanza of Part I. “ Is” and “ Ought” ; “ Knower” and the “ Known” are antinomies.
“ Is” corresponds to the will, “ ought” to “ mask” ; “ knower” to creative mind and “ known” rational mind. In both the sets
one state aspires for its opposite. But the intellect cannot make the distinctions when imagination is given full play. The confusion
sets in as the intellect becomes completely non-functional. (ll. 4-7). The Soul is speaking of a condition where the human faculties
are no longer functional. By the end of Part I the Soul’ s argument is considerably weakened as compared with its earlier
certitude. Part II is dominated by the Self, thereby expressing Yeats’ s belief in the life of the body. The notion of reincarnation is
used here. According to Robert Snukal, “ one of the ways in which the myth was couched was in terms of sight; that is, to be
aware of this world is to be blind to heaven.” It is not much farther from the Christian mystical tradition wherein the soul’ s
progress is discussed through deprivation and purgation. In order to ascend to Heaven, the soul must leave all the earthly
temptations behind. The “ drop” mentioned in ll.1 is that of oblivion which a living man is supposed to have drunk. In the first
two stanzas of Part II the poet persona is trying to relive his life imaginatively from boyhood to manhood. He has no regrets as
he states in Stanza 3, “ I am content to live it all again” . (ll.1). The body and the decrepitude which sets in the form of old age
are no excuse for opting out of the self and glorifying soul. The strength of the self that it derives from its apparent weakness is
owing to the power of imagination. As against the soul the body suffers decrepitude but because it summons imagination to its
optimum use, it can triumph over the soul. No matter how mistaken he is and how often he is led into the ditch the poet
persona would opt for life. My tongues a stone: the soul falls silent because it has verged on sacred mysteries beyond articulation in
human speech. Yeats himself sometimes felt the same incapacity: ‘ I tried to describe some vision to Lady

Gregory, and to my great surprise could not. I felt a difficulty in articulation and became confused’ . Ditches: see II 19. Ignominy of boyhood:
compare ‘ a Prayer for my Son’ . It seems that between parts I and II, we have moved from the last quarter of the Great Wheel of
reincarnations – the quarter of God – to the first quarter of the lunar month (phases 2-8) – the quarter of nature, in which a man slowly
extricates himself from a state of complete absorption in the physical world. The Self seems to be speaking partly about the growth of a man
in the course of one lifetime, partly about the growth of a man’ s spirit through many incarnations – phase 2 is called the Child. The
unfinished man…brought face to face with his own clumsiness: compare this rabid self-sketch with Yeatss self descriptions: ‘ Perplexed by
my own shapelessness, my lack of self possession…’ ‘ on passing a tobacconist’ s I saw a lump of meerschaum not yet made into a pipe.
She [Maud] was complete; I was not’ . Disfigured shape / The mirror of malicious eyes / casts upon his eyes: ‘ I have found that if many
people accuse one of vanity, of affection, of ignorance, an ignoble image is created from which the soul frees itself with difficulty, an
undiscerned self-loathing’ ; if men speak much ill of you it makes at moments a part of the image of yourself – that is your only support
against the world – and that you see yourself too with hostile eyes’ . Blind mans ditch: The legendary blind Irish poet, Raftery is said to
have written a poem celebrating the beauty of a peasnt girl which drove some young men crazy. They set out to see and verify for
themselves whether she was indeed the beauty Rafter’ s song made her out to be. Unable to find their way at night, they were drowned in
a bog of Cloone. Yeats celebrates this as a triumph of imagination in his poem “ The Tower” . Wintry blast: a proud woman: for example,
Maud Gonne. Forgive myself the lot! : according to the soul, purgation can be achieved only in death, but the Self, as it moves towards its
zenith, is willing to take responsibility for its own salvation. So great a sweetness flows: the same phrase appears in ‘ Friends’ , l.27. We
must laugh: ‘ There is in the creative joy an acceptance of what life brings…which arouses within us, through some sympathy perhaps with
all other men, an energy so noble, so powerful, that we laugh aloud and mock in the terror or the sweetness of our exaltation, at death and
oblivion’ . We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest: the whole volume is full of blessings – compare the first two lines
of ‘ Blood and the Moon’ ; ‘ Coole and Ballylee, 1931’ , II. 44-45: ‘ whatever most can bless / The mind of man’ ; and ‘ Vacillation’ IV 10:
‘ I was blessed and could bless’ . Yeats wrote to Ethel Mannin that ‘ our traditions only permit us to bless, for the arts are an extension of
the beatitudes’ . Once again Yeats’ s sexual anxieties come to the fore. “ Frog-spawn” and the fecundity of the ditch are
metaphors for the seminal fluid. In the “ blind man” , one can pick up a reference to Raftery (“ The Tower” ) who was blind but
created a beautiful wench. (Stnz. 3 ll. 3-4). In “ The Tower” the poet says that the people jostled among themselves to catch a
glimpse of this girl but were led astray. One of them even drowned. The point Yeats’ s persona is making in both these poems is
that the life of imagination is far richer than any philosophical or mystical speculation. The “ proud woman” in the last line of
Stanza 3 could be either Helen or Maud Gonne. By now Maud’ s charm has worn off for Yeats and he sees his early wooing of
her as a “ folly” , especially as this woman is not a “ kindred of his soul” . In the last stanza there is a sense of peace and
tranquility. Despite the (subjective) Self having the last word against the (objective) Soul, nothing is resolved or diffused; all the
contradictions are held in balance. Yeats’ s cyclical theory of change contains some elements of Nietzsche’ s theory of the eternal
recurrence, as is espoused in the declaration of the Self figure in the concluding stanzas of the poem. The noumenal and the
phenomenal are held in check at the end of the poem. On the one hand the poet persona will not shirk from the worldly
responsibility. On the other hand he sees this in accordance with God’ s blessing.

The antinomies in the poem are held in a tenuous unity. At about the age of twenty-four Yeats became obsessed with the
sentence “ Hammer your thoughts into unity.” “ Unity of being” came to be a central aim of his activities thereafter and is most
nearly approached in The Tower and the subsequent poems. As he approached old age he came to accept that his optimism for
political unity of Ireland was misplaced but he retained his belief in the source of such a unity in the Anima Mundi, the reservoir
of archetypes of images or myths of the central experiences of the tribe

Thomas Sterne Eliot - Biography and Works

Thomas Sterne Eliot is the most influential poet of the twentieth century, and also a great dramatist and critic. Born in America, he became a citizen of England
later, and began the modernist movement in English literature, which was especially marked by his modern epic The Waste Land.
Eliot was influenced by French symbolism, helped to establish the imagist movement, and brought the forgotten metaphysical poetry to popularity with the claim
that good poetry must be a balance of emotion and intellect. He was an anti-romantic who said that he was a classicist in literature: he believed that poetry is the
conversion of emotion based on personal experience into something that is universally and humanly significant. He also advocated for standards of tradition along
with the originality of personal talent.

Eliot's first major poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917), revealed his original and highly developed style. The poem shows the influence of certain
French poets of the 1800's, but its startling jumps from rhetorical language to cliche, its indirect literary references, and its simultaneous humor and pessimism
were quite new in English literature.

"Prufrock" created a small literary satire, but The Waste Land (1922) created uproar. Some critics called the work a masterpiece, others a hoax. While this long,
complex poem includes many obscure literary references, many in other languages, its main direction is clear. It contrasts the spiritual bankruptcy Eliot saw in
modern Europe with the values and unity of the past.

Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" (1930), far different from The Waste Land in tone and mood, is more musical, direct, and traditional, and in its religious emphasis,
tentatively hopeful. Four Quartets, his last major poem, is a deeply religious, often beautiful, meditation on time and timelessness. It includes four sections: "Burnt
Norton" (1936), "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942).

Eliot also wrote several verse dramas. Murder in the Cathedral (1935), his first major play, is based on the death of Thomas Becket. On the surface, The Cocktail
Party (1950) appears to be a sophisticated comedy, but it is really a deeply religious and mystical work. Eliot's other plays include The Family Reunion (1939), The
Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1958). Eliot's Complete Poems and Plays (1909-1950) was published in 1952. Selected Essays is a
collection of his important prose.

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: Summary

The poem begins with a section entitled "The Burial of the Dead." In it, the narrator -- perhaps a representation of Eliot himself -- describes the
seasons. Spring brings "memory and desire," and so the narrator's memory drifts back to times in Munich, to childhood sled rides, and to a possible
romance with a "hyacinth girl." The memories only go so far, however. The narrator is now surrounded by a desolate land full of "stony rubbish."
He remembers a fortune-teller named Madame Sosostris who said he was "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" and that he should "fear death by water."
Next he finds himself on London Bridge, surrounded by a crowd of people. He spots a friend of his from wartime, and calls out to him.
The next section, "A Game of Chess," transports the reader abruptly from the streets of London to a gilded drawing room, in which sits a rich, jewel-
bedecked lady who complains about her nerves and wonders what to do. The poem drifts again, this time to a pub at closing time in which two
Cockney women gossip. Within a few stanzas, we have moved from the upper crust of society to London's low-life.
"The Fire Sermon" opens with an image of a river. The narrator sits on the banks and muses on the deplorable state of the world. As Tiresias, he sees
a young "carbuncular" man hop into bed with a lonely female typist, only to aggressively make love to her and then leave without hesitation. The
poem returns to the river, where maidens sing a song of lament, one of them crying over her loss of innocence to a similarly lustful man.
"Death by Water," the fourth section of the poem, describes a dead Phoenician lying in the water -- perhaps the same drowned sailor of whom
Madame Sosostris spoke. "What the Thunder Said" shifts locales from the sea to rocks and mountains. The narrator cries for rain, and it finally comes.
The thunder that accompanies it ushers in the three-pronged dictum sprung from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata": to
give, to sympathize, to control. With these commandments, benediction is possible, despite the collapse of civilization that is under way -- "London
bridge is falling down falling down falling down."

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: ANALYSIS

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: Critical Analysis
Eliot's The Waste Land is an important landmark in the history of English poetry and one of the most talked about poem of the 20th century. It is long
poem of more than four hundred lines in 5 parts entitled: 1) The burial of the Dead; 2) A Game of Chess; 3) The fire Sermon; 4) Death by Water; 5)
What the Thunder Said.
The Waste Land draws much of its symbolism and narrative framework from the mythological story of the quest for the Holy Grail, the sacred cup
that Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper. The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound. It was written during the autumn of 1921, in Switzerland, where
the poet was just recovering after a serious breakdown in health caused by domestic worries and over work. The poem presents a bleak and gloomy
picture of the human predicament in the twentieth century. Ina way it presents the "disillusionment of a generation." The gloom and despair of the
poet are mirrored in this poem.
The Waste Land has given rise to more critical analysis and scholarly interpretation than just about any other poem. Critics and readers are still
arguing over what it means.
The Waste Land, a poem in five parts, was ground breaking in establishing the form of the so-called kaleidoscopic, or a fragmented modern poem.
These fragmented poems are characterized by jarring jumps, in perspective, imagery, setting, or subject. Despite this fragmentation of form, The
Waste Land is unified by its theme of despair. Its opening lines introduce the ideas of life's ultimate futility despite momentary flashes of hope. The
poem goes on to present a sequence of short sketches following an individual's baffled search for spiritual peace. It concludes with resignation at the
never-ending nature of the search. The poem is full of literary and mythological references that draw on many cultures and universalize the poem's
themes. According to legend, only the pure of heart can attain the Grail. In the version of the Grail myth that Eliot draws on, a wasteland is awaiting a
miraculous revival-for itself and its failing ruler, the Fisher King, guardian of the Holy Grail. The Waste Land appeared in the aftermath of World War I
(1914-1918), which was the most destructive war in human history to that point. Many people saw the poem as an indictment of the postwar
European culture and as an expression of disillusionment with contemporary society, which Eliot believed was culturally barren.
The theme of the poem is the spiritual and emotional sterility of the modern world. Man has lost his passion, i.e. his faith in God and religion; his
passion to participate in religion and this decay of faith has resulted in the loss of vitality, both spiritual and emotional. Consequently, the life in the
modern wasteland is a life-in-death, a living death, like that of the Sibyl at Cumae. According to Eliot's philosophy, in so far as we are human beings
we must act and do either evil or good, and it is better to do evil than to do nothing. Modern man has lost his sense of good and evil, and this keeps
him from being alive, from acting. In the modern desolate and, there is a life-in-death, a life of complete inactivity, listlessness and apathy. That is
why winter is welcome to them, and April is the cruelest months, for it reminds them of the stirrings of life and, "They dislike to be roused from their
death-in-life."
The poem thus presents "a vision of dissolution and spiritual drought". This spiritual and emotional sterility of the denizens of The Waste Land arises
from the degeneration, vulgarization, and commercialization of sex. Eliot's study of the fertility myths of different people had convinced him that the
sex - act is the source of life and vitality, when it is exercised for the sake of procreation and when it is an expression of love. But when it is severed
from its primary function, and is exercised for the sake of momentary pleasure or momentary benefit, it becomes a source of degeneration and
corruption. It then represents the primacy of the flesh over the spirit, and this result in spiritual decay and death.
The title "A Game of Chess" suggests that sex has become a matter of intrigue, a matter of moves and counter- moves, a source of momentary
pleasure, a sordid game of seduction and exploitation of the innocent. There is the fashionable society woman who, despite all her pomp and show,
despite all the luxury with which she is surrounded, is bored and hysterical as a consequence. Her love, too, suffers from mental vacuity and is unable
to keep up even small conversation.
Sex- relationship in the middle is equally mechanical. This is seen in the mechanical relationship of the typist and the clerk. The typist gives herself to
the clerk with the sense of total indifference and apathy. There is neither repulsion nor any pleasure, and this absence of feeling is a measure of the
sterility of the age. It is just animal like copulation. The songs of three Thames daughters clearly show that they have been sexually exploited, but
they can do nothing about it. They and their people are too poor and too apathetic to make any efforts of the betterment of their lot. Not only has sex
been vulgarized and commercialized there also prevailed abnormal sex- practices of various kinds. Thus Mr. Eugenides is a homosexual and Hotel
Metropole is a hot bed of homosexuality, a relationship which is essentially sterile. All Europe is burning with lust and sexuality.
However, it would be wrong to say that The Waste Land merely depicts the disillusionment of the post- war generation, and that it is a mere diagnosis
of the distemper of the modern age without any solution or hope of salvation. It, no doubt, deals with the tragedy of the modern age, but it also
shows that tragedy is at the heart of life, all life, in all ages. The past and the present are telescoped, and it is thus shown that what is happening in
the present age did also happen in the past. For this reason, it will be wrong to call the poem "a sigh for the glories of a vanished past"; Eliot has not
glorified the past at the expense of the present. Rather, he was revealed, the resembling contrasts between the past and the present. Sexual sins,
perversion of sex, have always led to degeneration and decay. The sexual sins of the King Fisher and his soldiers laid waste his kingdom; and ancient
Thebes was laid waste because its king was guilty of the sin of incest. Sexual violence has always been there: Philomela was raped and her tongue was
severed so that she may not reveal the crime. Reference to Elizabeth and Leicester in the song of the daughters of the Thames shows the sex-
relationship in the past also has been equally futile and meaningless. In all these respects, the present resembles the past. The only difference is that
in the past, suffering and penance resulted in spiritual regeneration and return to health: Philomela was transformed into the bird of golden song and
King Fisher was cured and his kingdom redeemed.
Thus, the poem also makes promise and prophecy. It suggests that regeneration is possible, as it has always been possible, through suffering and
penance. In the last section of the poem, the thunder is already heard and the clouds are there. Thus a promise is held out of the coming of the rain of
divine grace, only if man will repent and do penance as the King Fisher and the King Oedipus did. Eliot brings together the wisdom of the East and the
West and shows that spiritual regeneration can come, if only we heed the voice of the thunder: Give, sympathize, and control.
It must be clearly understood that The Waste Land is a social document of our times, a poem which throws light on the problems and perplexities of
modern civilization. Eliot is not enamored of the golden past nor does he heave a sigh for the vanished glory of the past. He is not an escapist or a
romanticist; he is a stern realist who laid his hand on the pulse of the modern man. He does not believe that all was beautiful and glorious. At the
same time, Eliot is not pessimist rather than despair it is hope that sustains The Waste Land.
The theme of The Waste Land is essentially the spiritual experience of man; it has to be related to its background. In the world of today, one cannot
ignore the social, secular, commercial and technical compulsions of the modern world. Eliot has referred to the past in order to show the similarity of
the problems of both ages and how the experience of the past can help in finding solutions of the problems of our time.
Moreover, the past has another advantage over the present. It showed the courage and vitality of the human spirit; it had the capacity to do things
both good and evil. People then were not inert, lazy and bored. Elsewhere, Eliot wrote that the quality which distinguishes humanity is its capacity to
do good or evil. Vigor and vitality are the secret of any civilization or a great period in history. In the modern age, spiritual paralysis has overtaken
man. This is due to our secular democracy, commercial interests and mechanical and technological progress which has eroded man's faith in religion,
moral values and individual development and achievement. Man may be an atom in this great universe, but he is an intense atom, capable of yielding
energy and power. It is this latent power which needs to be discovered and utilized.

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: Summary of

Section I – Section V
The first section of 'The Waste Land' is known as The Burial of the Dead which refers to the burial of the dead, fertility gods in Frazer's The Golden Beer and the
burial service in the Christian Church. In both these cases, death is followed by re-birth, but in the modern wasteland rebirth is very doubtful, and people live in a
stage of life-in-death.

The condition is presented through four scenes of The Burial of the Dead "The common note in all these scenes is fear; the contrast arises from the various
attitudes towards fear. The theme is first stated in the famous opening lines, the comment on the cruelty of spring time, the pain of new life stirring after the torpor
of winter, and we pass to a reminiscence of summer coming with a shower of rain, and then sunlight and an hour of casual talk in the Hofgarten at Munich". In the
second scene we pass through Ezekiel's valley of dry bones and witness frustration in love in the episodes from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and the hyacinth
garden. Then we are introduced to Madame Sosostris, the famous fortune-teller. Now we step in London winter. We see a crowd of people crossing London
Bridge. They are slaves of time, each with his eyes fixed before his feet, watching the next step only. The poet recognizes one figure, Stetson, and then there is a
conversation between them. From the reference to London, one may think that the civilization referred to is a modern one. But the presence of Stetson, who was
with the protagonist in the 'ships at Mylae' makes this passage visionary and timeless.

The Game of Chess

The theme of A Game of Chess is the sterility and meaninglessness of life without love in the wasteland which have been presented through the portrayal of two
types of modern women in different social circumstances. These are the only two scenes in A Game of Chess and both these scenes present the contrast between
life in a rich and magnificent setting, and life in the low and vulgar setting of a London pub. We first see a woman who, surrounded by luxury and by art-works, is
nevertheless reduced to shirking frustration. The horror of her condition lies as much in her burning need for love as in any lack of religious faith. In the squalid
pub-monologue that follows, we see a lower class counterpart: 'a tragi-comic presentation of the brutalizing of a poor woman' life because of the gross indifference
to her as a person. In these portrayals of women we notice that sexual passion without the soothing power of ecstatic love is the cause of suffering and tragedy.
The objective correlative for this second scene of the poem is taken from Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women. In this play a game of chess is played to
distract attention from a seduction. Livia plays chess with the old widow, while her daughter-in-law, Bianca, is being seduced by the Duke, and the seduction is
described ironically in terms of the moves of the pieces on the board. When one of the characters in the play says, "We shall play a game of chess," it simply
shows their intention to carry on their unlawful physical relationships. Similarly, in A Game of Chess the game has been used as a ruse to cover up unwarranted
sexual relationship which is indicated in the story of the violation of Philomela. The unlawful satisfaction of sex shows the seed of future tragedy in the play and it is
also the source of disquiet to the individual self in the poem. It causes apprehension of some undefined danger, the premonition of the "knock upon the door"
which is the symbol for death.

The Fire Sermon

The theme of this section is that passion and sensuousness human nature are the sources of misery and suffering in this world and Eliot finds a suitable objective
correlative in the Lord Buddha's Fire Sermon. Lord Buddha tells his disciples and priests:

"All things, O priests are on fire ....... The eye, O priests, is on fire: forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by eye are on fire, and
whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant or indifferent, or originates in dependence on impression received by, that is also on fire.” "And with what are these on
fire?" “With the fire of passion, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief and despair are they
on fire."

The Lord Buddha tells us that passion is the source of suffering and evil in this world and a person can get Nirvana if he wins over passion. Eliot gives his attention
to the theme of passion of sex in The Fire Sermon. He is also indebted to St. Augustine's doctrines. According to St. Augustine, sin is the source of passion which
cause misery. Eliot is influenced by St. Augustine's analysis of human suffering as presented in The Confession and he has combined the doctrines of Lord
Buddha and St. Augustine in The Fire Sermon. Eliot himself admits, "The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the
culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident."

The game of sex is played over and over again by the characters presented in The Fire Sermon and in this game the females are more less or passive and
indifferent players. They surrender to sexual assaults because of their poverty, helplessness and miserable conditions of life. The poem opens with the Thames in
winter, and the poet contrasts the defilement of its pure waters by modern nymphs and the heirs of city directors in the modern waste land against the idealized
picture of the Thames during the Renaissance as presented by Spenser in Prothalamion. Then we meet Sweeney and Mrs. Porter in the spring. We are once
again in London 'under the brown fog of a winter noon.' Here we are introduced to Mr. Eugenides, the homosexual Smyrna merchant who invites the protagonist to
lunch with him at the Cannon Street Hotel. Now for the first time the poet identifies the speaker with Tiresias, the blind old seer who is a witness to acts of loveless
sensuality between the poor typist girl and the young man carbuncular. The speaker now passes through the locality of happy fishermen who chatter merrily and
play sweet music. They live by the river and the church. Then we are introduced to three Thamis-daughters whose song brings us back to the squalor and dirt of
the Thames as presented in the opening lines of this section. It is the song of the Thames-daughters that the reference to the amorous affairs of Queen Elizabeth I
and Leicester is made. The song of the Thames-daughters reveals that each one of them has lost their virginity. The section closes with a reference to Lord
Buddha and St. Augustine who taught their disciples that the passion is the source of suffering in this world.

Death by Water

In the third section the possibility of purification of the soul lay in the release from the burning flame of lust through asceticism of Lord Buddha and St. Augustine.
This section also describes the possibility of becoming free from the fire of passion, not by self-discipline, but by water which washes away all the stains of the
body as well as of the soul. The death by water, 'with its suggestion of ineffable peace,' is another form of purgation. Here the Phoenician sailor is deprived of his
lust for profit and loss and sensuous pleasures of the body by the currents which pick the lust from the bones of not only Phlebas but of all people, because he is
all of us, the last line insists, making the identification with us. He reverses as the rhythm of his life as he enters the vortex.

What the Thunder Said

In this section the protagonist turns from the water that drowns in the last section to the water that saves. He attempts to achieve peace by coming under the
shadow of religion, but even religion falls him as the commands of the thunder are violated in the Waste Land. The quest for salvation and inner peace have been
expressed through three objective correlative, the Journey to Emmaus, the approach of the Chapel Perilous and the present decay of Eastern Europe. These three
themes are but illustrations of one single theme; the falling down of the temporal world, and the promise of a revivification through the spirit. This section of The
Waste Land marks a turning point in Eliot's work since the satire of the world is accompanied for the first time by a message of hope; the poem is no longer
ironical, destructive, and negative. The relation between the scene of universal desolation, the symbol of the cock, the sensual symbol of the hair, the notion of
sympathy and the religious exhortation at the end of the poem is made clearer by this remark.

The poem shows the way of release from the spiritual death and finds its solution in the hoary wisdom of India. The opening lines of the poem prepare for the
Christ's crucifixion, then we see the agony of parched throated sensibility in the 'mountains of rock without water,' the nightmare reversals in the vision of the
Chapel Perilous, and the Imagery of the thunder's message.

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: Critical

Analysis
Eliot's The Waste Land is an important landmark in the history of English poetry and one of the most talked about poem of the 20th century. It is long poem of
more than four hundred lines in 5 parts entitled: 1) The burial of the Dead; 2) A Game of Chess; 3) The fire Sermon; 4) Death by Water; 5) What the Thunder Said.

The Waste Land draws much of its symbolism and narrative framework from the mythological story of the quest for the Holy Grail, the sacred cup that Jesus Christ
drank from at the Last Supper. The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound. It was written during the autumn of 1921, in Switzerland, where the poet was just recovering
after a serious breakdown in health caused by domestic worries and over work. The poem presents a bleak and gloomy picture of the human predicament in the
twentieth century. Ina way it presents the "disillusionment of a generation." The gloom and despair of the poet are mirrored in this poem.

The Waste Land, a poem in five parts, was ground breaking in establishing the form of the so-called kaleidoscopic, or a fragmented modern poem. These
fragmented poems are characterized by jarring jumps, in perspective, imagery, setting, or subject. Despite this fragmentation of form, The Waste Land is unified by
its theme of despair. Its opening lines introduce the ideas of life's ultimate futility despite momentary flashes of hope. The poem goes on to present a sequence of
short sketches following an individual's baffled search for spiritual peace. It concludes with resignation at the never-ending nature of the search. The poem is full of
literary and mythological references that draw on many cultures and universalize the poem's themes. According to legend, only the pure of heart can attain the
Grail. In the version of the Grail myth that Eliot draws on, a wasteland is awaiting a miraculous revival-for itself and its failing ruler, the Fisher King, guardian of the
Holy Grail. The Waste Land appeared in the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918), which was the most destructive war in human history to that point. Many
people saw the poem as an indictment of the postwar European culture and as an expression of disillusionment with contemporary society, which Eliot believed
was culturally barren.

The theme of the poem is the spiritual and emotional sterility of the modern world. Man has lost his passion, i.e. his faith in God and religion; his passion to
participate in religion and this decay of faith has resulted in the loss of vitality, both spiritual and emotional. Consequently, the life in the modern wasteland is a life-
in-death, a living death, like that of the Sibyl at Cumae. According to Eliot's philosophy, in so far as we are human beings we must act and do either evil or good,
and it is better to do evil than to do nothing. Modern man has lost his sense of good and evil, and this keeps him from being alive, from acting. In the modern
desolate and, there is a life-in-death, a life of complete inactivity, listlessness and apathy. That is why winter is welcome to them, and April is the cruelest months,
for it reminds them of the stirrings of life and, "They dislike to be roused from their death-in-life."

The poem thus presents "a vision of dissolution and spiritual drought". This spiritual and emotional sterility of the denizens of The Waste Land arises from the
degeneration, vulgarization, and commercialization of sex. Eliot's study of the fertility myths of different people had convinced him that the sex - act is the source of
life and vitality, when it is exercised for the sake of procreation and when it is an expression of love. But when it is severed from its primary function, and is
exercised for the sake of momentary pleasure or momentary benefit, it becomes a source of degeneration and corruption. It then represents the primacy of the
flesh over the spirit, and this result in spiritual decay and death.

The title "A Game of Chess" suggests that sex has become a matter of intrigue, a matter of moves and counter- moves, a source of momentary pleasure, a sordid
game of seduction and exploitation of the innocent. There is the fashionable society woman who, despite all her pomp and show, despite all the luxury with which
she is surrounded, is bored and hysterical as a consequence. Her love, too, suffers from mental vacuity and is unable to keep up even small conversation.

Sex- relationship in the middle is equally mechanical. This is seen in the mechanical relationship of the typist and the clerk. The typist gives herself to the clerk with
the sense of total indifference and apathy. There is neither repulsion nor any pleasure, and this absence of feeling is a measure of the sterility of the age. It is just
animal like copulation. The songs of three Thames daughters clearly show that they have been sexually exploited, but they can do nothing about it. They and their
people are too poor and too apathetic to make any efforts of the betterment of their lot. Not only has sex been vulgarized and commercialized there also prevailed
abnormal sex- practices of various kinds. Thus Mr. Eugenides is a homosexual and Hotel Metropole is a hot bed of homosexuality, a relationship which is
essentially sterile. All Europe is burning with lust and sexuality.

However, it would be wrong to say that The Waste Land merely depicts the disillusionment of the post- war generation, and that it is a mere diagnosis of the
distemper of the modern age without any solution or hope of salvation. It, no doubt, deals with the tragedy of the modern age, but it also shows that tragedy is at
the heart of life, all life, in all ages. The past and the present are telescoped, and it is thus shown that what is happening in the present age did also happen in the
past. For this reason, it will be wrong to call the poem "a sigh for the glories of a vanished past"; Eliot has not glorified the past at the expense of the present.
Rather, he was revealed, the resembling contrasts between the past and the present. Sexual sins, perversion of sex, have always led to degeneration and decay.
The sexual sins of the King Fisher and his soldiers laid waste his kingdom; and ancient Thebes was laid waste because its king was guilty of the sin of incest.
Sexual violence has always been there: Philomela was raped and her tongue was severed so that she may not reveal the crime. Reference to Elizabeth and
Leicester in the song of the daughters of the Thames shows the sex- relationship in the past also has been equally futile and meaningless. In all these respects,
the present resembles the past. The only difference is that in the past, suffering and penance resulted in spiritual regeneration and return to health: Philomela was
transformed into the bird of golden song and King Fisher was cured and his kingdom redeemed.

Thus, the poem also makes promise and prophecy. It suggests that regeneration is possible, as it has always been possible, through suffering and penance. In the
last section of the poem, the thunder is already heard and the clouds are there. Thus a promise is held out of the coming of the rain of divine grace, only if man will
repent and do penance as the King Fisher and the King Oedipus did. Eliot brings together the wisdom of the East and the West and shows that spiritual
regeneration can come, if only we heed the voice of the thunder: Give, sympathize, and control.

It must be clearly understood that The Waste Land is a social document of our times, a poem which throws light on the problems and perplexities of modern
civilization. Eliot is not enamored of the golden past nor does he heave a sigh for the vanished glory of the past. He is not an escapist or a romanticist; he is a stern
realist who laid his hand on the pulse of the modern man. He does not believe that all was beautiful and glorious. At the same time, Eliot is not pessimist rather
than despair it is hope that sustains The Waste Land.

The theme of The Waste Land is essentially the spiritual experience of man; it has to be related to its background. In the world of today, one cannot ignore the
social, secular, commercial and technical compulsions of the modern world. Eliot has referred to the past in order to show the similarity of the problems of both
ages and how the experience of the past can help in finding solutions of the problems of our time.

Moreover, the past has another advantage over the present. It showed the courage and vitality of the human spirit; it had the capacity to do things both good and
evil. People then were not inert, lazy and bored. Elsewhere, Eliot wrote that the quality which distinguishes humanity is its capacity to do good or evil. Vigor and
vitality are the secret of any civilization or a great period in history. In the modern age, spiritual paralysis has overtaken man. This is due to our secular democracy,
commercial interests and mechanical and technological progress which has eroded man's faith in religion, moral values and individual development and
achievement. Man may be an atom in this great universe, but he is an intense atom, capable of yielding energy and power. It is this latent power which needs to be
discovered and utilized.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S.

Eliot: Summary
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one of the first remarkable poems of the city man and is also the first notable poem of T.S. Eliot. Prof. Pinto hails the poem
as a landmark in English poetry because it marks a complete break with the 19th century tradition. Eliot presents the despair and passivity of a middle-aged man,
Alfred J. Prufrock.

He is in love, but his love song is never sung, He meditates too much and his cowardice is his Achilles' heel. He is haunted by the problem whether he should
reveal his love to the lady and he is undone. The poem is typically not of the 20th century but, of all ages. It deals with the emotional frustration and despair,
hollowness of human beings living at any period in history.

Eliot's Love Song does not sing in praise of love. The title of the poem raises our expectation that in this poem we shall hear how a lover lays bare his heart at the
feet of his beloved. But nothing of this sort happens in the poem. The title of the poem is ironic. The point of calling this poem a Love Song lies in the irony that it
will never be sung; that Prufrock will never dare to voice what he feels".

This poem is an investigation of the disturbed consciousness of the typical modern man who is overeducated, powerful, anxious, and emotionally artificial. The
speaker of the poem, Prufrock is addressing a lover, with whom he would like to somehow consummate their relationship. But he cannot “dare” an approach to the
woman: He starts hearing the remarks others make about his weaknesses. He becomes conscious of his growing age and unkempt clothing. He rarely thinks of
himself and cannot enjoy even a peach. He does not have the courage to do anything in life except thinking and thinking. At the end of the poem, he hears the
mermaids singing for each other and he surely knows they won’t sing to him.

Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

as a Dramatic Monologue
'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' by T. S. Eliot has been described as a dramatic monologue because it is an attempt at self-expression by a sentimental
middle aged gentleman over the teacups. It is dramatic in the sense that it shows us the personality of Prufrock and not of the poet. It is a monologue because in
this poem only one character does all the talking from beginning to end. In this sense it is a dramatic monologue. In a dramatic monologue the presence of a silent
listener or listeners is implied.

In The Love Song the monologue may be taken as an address to you who as Eliot himself says, 'is a companion or a beloved'. But if 'you', is taken for another
aspect of the same person, it will be more appropriate to call it 'interior monologue.' The interior monologue has been characterized as the speech of a character in
a scene, having for its object the direct introduction of the reader into the interior life of a character, without any intervention in the way of explanations of
commentary on the part of the author. The Interior monologue aims at portraying the most intimate thought and is not meant for any hearer. That is why the term
'dramatic monologue' may, strictly speaking, be inappropriate for the poem. In a dramatic monologue the presence of the other character or other characters is
always felt: one character is speaking to the other, even though the latter may be silent. In this poem Prufrock is more speaking to himself, in fact, all the time
speaking to himself. It would, therefore, be more appropriate to call the poem as 'interior monologue' than a 'dramatic monologue.'

Prufrock is a neurotic character and his love-song, which will never be uttered, outside the inferno of his own mind, is a monologue of a man of abnormal
sensibility. He is the center of the poem and what passes within his consciousness is the warp and woof of the poem. The poem is concerned with the self-
revelation of Prufrock who is a neurotic person. He is going to a sophisticated party, apparently a ladies' occasion of a cultural kind. He has a special mission, for
he is in love with one of the ladies and is going to declare it. But he is an irresolute person for whom the simplest decision is a matter of strain, speculation and
distress. The various images such as those of the evening 'like a patient etherized upon a table', the yellow fog likened to a cat, and Prufrock's own conception of
himself as a worm 'pinned and wriggling on the wall' reveal his indecision, despair and passivity. As we descend deeper into his consciousness, the past and the
present are fused and merged. The triviality of his past experiences is suggested by images like 'I have measured out my life with coffee-spoons' and 'the butt-
ends of my days and ways.' His romantic past is suggested by the lines, 'And I have known the arms already, known them all/Arms That are braceleted and white
and bare'. This is contrasted with his that misfortune and physical decay.

Prufrock is a tragic figure. His tragedy is that of a man who is unable to commit himself to any faith that would sustain him. His tragedy is a dual one: Prufrock is in
love, and just as ethically he cannot bring himself to propose to his lady. He is conscious of his own growing age, his bald head, and his impotence. That is why he
does not 'dare disturb the universe'. His spiritual distress, his helplessness and despair are pointed out as the characteristics of modern life with its sick hurry and
divided aims. At the same time his tragedy is 'at the heart of life because it is a 'recurrent phase' in human civilization. Thus the portrait of Prufrock is more than
that of a particular person or a particular age. Prufrock is the most incisive portrait of a type of individual who represents a phase of diseased civilization, where life
has been reduced to an endless succession of trivialities. Prufrock, like other remarkable literary figures, is an individual representing a universal type.

Prufrock represents a split consciousness, a division between heart and head, or, to be precise, a paralysis of heart through over conscious. The desire of the
heart failing to find fulfillment in action, begins to feed upon itself, and the emotional impulse to act or to come to a decision is repressed by over scrupulousness.
The result is emotional frustration, and self-dissection or self-deprecation. In the case of Prufrock the problem is complicated by the fact that he is smart, but
middle-aged man who is naturally more timid in love making than a hot-blooded youth. Prufrock, thus, is unable to make his mind and, prefers dreaming about love
and beauty to doing something real and fruitful for securing the love of the woman he desires to possess.

Use of Irony and Sarcasm in Eliot's The

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Irony is a literary device by which a writer expresses a meaning contradictory to the stated one. There are many techniques for achieving irony. The writer may, for
example, make it clear the meaning he intends is the opposite of his literal one, or he that construct a discrepancy between and expectation and its fulfillment, or
between the appearance of a situation and the reality that underlies it. Irony is thus an art of indirection, juxtaposition, paradox, puns and other forms of wit in the
expression of incongruities.
Whatever his technique, the writer demands that the reader should perceive the concealed meaning that lies beneath his surface statement. There the several
kinds or irony, though they fall into two major categories; situational and verbal. Situational irony which is also known as structural irony or dramatic irony is mostly
employed in plays. One of the forms of verbal irony is sarcasm. Under the guise of praise a caustic and bitter expression of strong and personal disapproval is
given. Sarcasm is personal, jeering, intended to hurt, and is intended as a sneering taunt.

In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot has made an extended use of irony to communicate frustration and futility, squalor and seediness, neurosis, and loss
of spirituality which are characteristics of the contemporary urban civilization. There is irony even in the title of the poem and the name of the protagonist. The
name, Prufrock suggests a kind of wispy, defeated idealism, and stupidity. His tragedy is that he is a man driven by the desire for something that he cannot
achieve. Thus, while he cannot abandon the illusions of his fantasy world, he cannot accept the realities of the other world in which the women talk about
Michelangelo. He veers and vacillates in his decision to propose to his lady and thus lays bare his heart to her. But as he lacks courage and self-assurance, he
puts off the 'overwhelming question,' i.e., the marriage proposal, as he says:

There will be time, there will be time, To prepare a face to meet the faces that You meet.

The title of the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is ironical. Here the irony lies in contrast, what we expect and what it turns out to be. The title makes us
expect that it will be a romantic love song addressed to the beloved. The protagonist will lay bare his heart, bubbling with effusions of love, at the feet of his
beloved. He may even grow eloquent in her praises. But nothing happens of this sort. There is no expression of love in the poem. He has even no courage to meet
the lady face to face and express his love to her. Rather, he takes delight in evading the question! That is, the declaration of love to his lady. The point of calling
the poem a Love Song lies in the irony that it will never be sung; that Prufrock will never dare to voice what he feels. He himself says

Do I dare Disturb the universe? Ina minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. The poem is an expression of his boredom, frustration and impotence. The ladies talk of Michelangelo, the
symbol of virility and strength, and also 'How is hair is growing thin! '

Prufrock is a middle-aged dandy. He is also a neurotic, a split personality, and the 'I' and 'you' are the two aspects of his personality. His love song is not sung in
the real world. It is actually the lament of a being divided between passion and timidity. The poem is an interior monologue because Prufrock speaks to himself in a
kind of daydream, rather than an intimate expression of love. He yearns for love, but because of his timidity and passivity he is incapable of attaining his love.
Instead of being a bold and adventurous lover, he is a moral coward who cannot even face the eyes of the beloved. He cannot face the X-ray eyes of the ladies,
and in their presence he feels like a worm wriggling on the point of a needle. He recapitulates the romantic daydreams of 'the mermaids singing, each to each', but
ironically enough, he knows the mermaids will not sing to him, because they only sing to the courageous and the adventurous like Ulysses and his sailors.

Not only the title of the poem is ironical, irony as a device of the contrast between seriousness and levity, the grand and the prosaic runs throughout the poem. In
the room in the salon the ladies talk of Michelangelo, which shows are artistic pretensions of the modern age. The hypocrisy of modern society is ironically
exposed. The reference to ‘Works and days of hand', a poem by an ancient Greek writer brings out an ironical contrast between the hard life of a farmer, and
Prufrock's life of inactivity. He cannot dare take a decision. There is a mingling of the grandiose with the trivial in the manner of Laforge, in the following oft-quoted
line:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Prufrock begins grandiloquently but ends by saying that his whole life has been a monotonous round of coffee drinking with the same set of people. The high style
in which he began 'I have measured out my life' raised the expectation that like Ulysses he might have measured out his strength with his compeers on the plains
of Windy Troy, but the phrase 'with coffee spoons' produces an ironic effect. It is also an illustration of Eliot's use of bathos. Irony is also used in contrasting the
trivial matter i.e. the proposal of marriage, and a lot of preparation for the task. He has 'wept and fasted, wept and prayed', but all his efforts proved abortive. He
declines that he is not Prince Hamlet, but the irony lies in the fact that he also vacillates and wavers like Prince Hamlet. In both Hamlet and Prufrock intellect
paralyses the will to act and breeds procrastination. The emotional impulse to act or to come to a decision is repressed by over scrupulousness. 'To be or not to
be' is as good a description of Prufrock as of Hamlet.

The style and language of The Love Song also produce ironic effects. Prufrock's constant use of the pompous and grandiloquent language for the trivial is ironical.
The contrast between the grandiose with the prosaic end exposes the seedy and, the triviality of modern life. Prufrock considers the trivial matter i.e. the proposal
of marriage, an overwhelming question, which is likely to disturb the universe. But we know that the heavens will not fall even if Prufrock does not succeed in his
love affair. He makes a fetish of an ordinary matter. The Irony lies in the fact that to us it appears a trivial matter, but to Prufrock it is all important. Lines like the
following:

To have squeezed the universe into a ball, To roll it toward some overwhelming question.

are highly ironical in their deification of the insignificant matter. The poet has also made use of sarcasm in describing Purfrock's dandyism. Though he is a middle
aged person with a bald head, he is fastidious about his dress and wears the trousers of the latest fashion:

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Thus, Prufrock creates in patterned language the moods of ironic and cynical repulsion, of unromantic disillusionment, and of nervous intensity which mirror his
predicament. The irony that Eliot has used in this poem to highlight the neurosis of Prufrock, reveals 'soul dampness' of modern life.

Objective Correlative in Eliot's The Love

Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The theory of the 'Objective Correlative' is one of the most important critical concepts of T. S. Eliot. He formulated his doctrine of the 'Objective Correlative' in his
essay on Hamlet and His Problems. Eliot called Hamlet 'an artistic failure'. The reason for this is that the central theme or the dominant emotion of the play, which
is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother, is for Eliot 'an intractable' material. And in this play, Shakespeare fails to find the proper objective correlative for
Hamlet's feelings.

Elaborating his theory of the 'objective correlative' Eliot writes,‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative in other
words a set of objects, a situation , a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion: such that when the external facts which must terminate
in sensory experience are given the emotion is immediately evoked.’

The theory of the 'objective correlative' has three important forms: (a) A full-fledged dramatic medium like the tragedies of Shakespeare; (b) The creation on
dramatis personae, like Prufrock and Gerontion, for the expression of points of view or experiences which are at the back of the poet's mind; (c) To express
emotions through definite objects to make them vivid, precise and complex.

Eliot's concept of the 'objective correlative' is a continuation and application of his impersonal theory of poetry, which is based on the idea that it is neither the
intensity of the emotion nor the greatness of its components that determines the poetic quality of a poem, but what matters is the intensity of the fusion, and one of
the ways in which the poet achieves this intensity is through the embodiment of an emotion in a concrete object.

The application of the term 'objective correlative' can be shown through The Love Song of J Alfred d Prufrock. In this poem Eliot presents the despair and passivity
of a middle-aged man, J. Alfred Prufrock. It is concerned with the spiritual sickness of Prufrock. This spiritual sickness of Prufrock is presented not directly, but
through images and pictures. Each image, each picture fantasy, reiterates with sharper precision this theme of Prufrock’s sterility. Because of his timidity and lack
of self-confidence he would like to escape from his neurotic conflicts even by means of anesthesia. The evening, which is apparently lifeless reflects the mental
state of the protagonist. He is like a patient etherized upon a table. This image suggests the mental vacuity of the speaker. Prufrock's indecision, hesitation, self-
pity and self disgust which are presented through a series of images are full of suggestion to the imagination of the reader. The winding streets, which lead to the
salon where he has to make the proposal of marriage, image forth the tedious mental processes which finally lead to the point of action or resolution. But he
evades a question because of his self-consciousness:

There will be time, there will be time, To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
Prufrock enters into a room where 'the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.' Michelangelo, the Italian sculptor, was known for his strength and virility. The
reference to Michelangelo brings out is own physical decay and impotency. Moreover, the lines hint that the women are sophisticated with a veneer of culture in
their behavior.

Prufrock is self-conscious of his growing age and bald head. He is greatly conscious as to what people will say of him: "They will say: But how his arms and legs
are thin." His life has been literally occupied with nothing but coffee-drinking; each day passing like a smoked cigarette. This tedium of his life is expressed through
the following lines:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons... To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways....
He remembers the sharp, pitiless gaze of the eyes that fix him as if they have already measured him to the top of his bent. His pathetic predicament is brought out
by the image of a poor worm fixed to the wall by a sharp pin-point and wriggling there helplessly:

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the
wall, Then how should I begin.
The reference to the lonely men, in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows, is a hint at his own loneliness and boredom which have compelled him to seek relief in
love and marriage. But he cannot pursue the point and disgusted with his scrupulous mind, he prefers the life of a creature in the bed of the sea. This image of the
crab shows that Prufrock is like a mindless and primitive creature. Like a crab he goes sideways about things, and gets nowhere even then. He might just as well
be at the bottom of the sea. He glances at the scene outside and finds a reflection of his own tired self on the closing day, like a child, lulled to sleep beside him.

Prufrock lacked moral courage and he is no prophet like John the Baptist. He was a coward. He often imagined that he was in the grip of Death, but Death only
mocked at his cowardice and let him survive. He was neither Hamlet, though his procrastination and passivity would make us take him for Hamlet. He was, in fact,
just like an attendant lord, Polonius. He visits the sea-beach in order to beguile the tedium of his civilized social life. The primordial image of the sea with
'mermaids singing each to each' symbolically expresses the suppressed self of Prufrock and his longing for amorous fulfillment. But the phrase 'and we drown'
brings him back from the world of romantic dream to the darkling plain of reality, to the world of scathing introspection and sterile debate.