Fwd: Re: AtDtDA(28): God Didn't Do This?...What the Thunder Said...Eliot..also section V.!

[Mark Kohut]

  Home : English : Poetry Study Guides : Eliot's Poetry : The Waste Land Section V: "What the Thunder Said"
   
                       - Navigate Here -AnalysisContext--------------------"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"The Waste Land Section I: "The Burial of the Dead"The Waste Land Section II: "A Game of Chess"The Waste Land Section III: "The Fire Sermon"The Waste Land Section IV: "Death by Water"The Waste Land Section V: "What the Thunder Said"Four Quartets: "Burnt Norton"Four Quartets: "East Coker"Four Quartets: "The Dry Salvages"Four Quartets: "Little Gidding"--------------------Study QuestionsFurther Reading               The Waste Land Section V: "What the Thunder Said" 
    Summary 
  The final section of The Waste Land is dramatic in both its imagery and its events. The first half of the section builds to an apocalyptic climax, as suffering people become "hooded hordes swarming" and the "unreal" cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. A decaying chapel is described, which suggests the chapel in the legend of the Holy Grail. Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and the rains come, relieving the drought and bringing life back to the land. Curiously, no heroic figure has appeared to claim the Grail; the renewal has come seemingly at random, gratuitously. 
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  The scene then shifts to the Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where thunder rumbles. Eliot draws on the traditional interpretation of "what the thunder says," as taken from the Upanishads (Hindu fables). According to these fables, the thunder "gives," "sympathizes," and "controls" through its "speech"; Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunder's power. The meditations seem to bring about some sort of reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting on the shore preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his imminent death or at least abdication. The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children's song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant of "Shantih shantih shantih"--the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as "the peace which passeth understanding," the expression of ultimate resignation. 



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Subject: Re: AtDtDA(28): God Didn't Do This?
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:52:12 -0400
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