Fire Sermon Summary and Analysis

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Sofilda Totoni March 3rd, 2011 Lit 216 “The Fire Sermon” Analysis. This section, and the longest of Elliot’s “The Waste Land”, depicts poor, gloomy, lethargic scenery in which the themes of lust, sexual ambiguity, moral degradation, spiritual melancholy, abound throughout the poem. The poet himself often embodies the role of ancient and mythological figures to which he alludes in order to strike the reader’s infatuation.

He continually reminds us that beauty, love, passions which was once food for the soul, are turned to slaves of our egoistical, materialistic, relished physical needs.

The central character is the poet himself who often takes on the roles of the Fisher King and Tiresias in order to convey his message. The other characters, Actaeon and Dian replaced by Sweeney and Mr. Porter, Thames’s daughters, The clerk and the typist, Queen Elizabeth with her suitor Earl of Leicester;-all these are foil and flat characters who although taken from, and alluded to past, famous literary works, their presence and revelation is to unveil the narrator’s major themes and ideas.

These characters are stereotypes or archetypes throughout the work.

The scenery and images implied in the work play a major role in describing and interpreting the contextual setting of a pictorial framework. Elliot opens this section with the image of a river in late autumn, or early winter: “The River’s tent is broke; the last fingers of leaf clutch and sink into the wet bank.

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the nymphs are departed. Elliot cites here Spencer’s “Prothalamion” with the line: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song”. He takes us to Spencer’s Thames and ‘bridal song’ that suggests celebrating life and happiness along Thames. He quickly changes scenery and contrasts this setting with the one he’s witnessing.

To Build A Fire Critical Analysis

He’s sitting by the Leman-French for Lake Geneva, where he witnesses degradation, elements of the modern world-“empty bottles, sandwich papers, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends”. Then Elliot starts weeping. His tears are reference to a passage from the Bible, Psalm 137, in which the people of Israel cry by the river as they remember Jerusalem. The image of death and urban decay is further revealed:-“a cold blast, bones rattle, and a rat creeps through vegetation /dragging its slimy belly on the bank”. The rat symbolizes grossness, filth, moral corruption of the modern world.

The rat also illustrates Elliot’s spiritual world; he feels disappointed, belittled “fishing in the dull canal”, and just like the rat who creeps through trash in search for food, the poet himself is in search for food for the soul, he wants to infiltrate through the rubbish material he is presented, and find the spiritual muse for his further works. Elliot takes on the role of The Fisher King alluding to Jessie L Weston’s “From Ritual to Romance” and its description of the Grail Legend.

The poet also combines the “Tempest” Shakespeare’s drama elements which are also used in earlier lines of “The Waste Land” in referral to Grail Legend. Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck/and on the king my father’s death before him. The ill, impotent King Fisher embodied by Elliot, describes the wasteland that stretches before him: -white bodies naked on the low damp ground” and bones scattered in a little dry garret/Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year” Once again, the rats appear again to portray a hell setting. Elliot proceeds to the allusion of John Day’s “The Parliament of Bees” that describes the tale of Actaeon and Diana accordingly referred by “Sweeney and Mrs. Porter. “The sound of horns and motors which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs.

Porter in the spring” Later on he alludes to Verlaine’s Parisfal , where Parisfal resisted the seduction of Kundry which in turn as a sign of respect washed his feet paralleling with the adulteress who washed the feet of Christ to be redeemed. It is evident that throughout these lines the love motif becomes apparent and indicative of young, passionate emotions which later on turn to lust and immorality. The next four bizarre lines: Twit twit twit/jug jug jug/ So rudely forc’d Tereu; refer to describe the sound of Philomela as nightingale. Twit, twit twit –seem to recall a bird’s song.

It all goes back in” A game of Chess” to the story of the woman who was violated and took her revenge. “So rudely forc’d” refers to Tereu’s violation. The moral degradation goes on as the narrator takes us to another scene and image description. The “Unreal City” takes the reader back to London. Mr Eugenides , the Smyrna merchant, carrying a pack of of forbidden mysteries, invites the narrator to luncheon at Cannon Street hotel and a weekend at the Metropole.

The narrator then takes on the role of Tiresias, the “Old man with wrinkled female breasts”. Elliot does it again. He evives, recasts once again mythology as a modern aspect to compare cheap sexual encounters with the pure and noble young love. Tiresias, the blind prophet, ironically sits back and watches the young clerk and typist indulge in sex and lust, looking beyond the potential romance that any relationship carries. “Endeavors to engage her in caresses …flushed and decided , he assaulted at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; After the passionate sex has been consummated, the young man departs as a stranger creeping up in darkness “gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit”.

The young woman barely notices his departures, showing a gesture of indifference “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over”-she feels alone, empty in vague, and lost in confusion-“ Paces about her room again, alone/smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone” The musicality of the poem takes the poet and the reader to quiet, peaceful and relaxing places:-a public bar in Lower Thames/The pleasant whining of a mandolin/Where fishermen longue at noon/the walls of Magnus Martyr hold inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold” The splendor serenity is disrupted by the lamented song of Thames three daughters ”Weilalala leia-Wallala leialala”.

The poet here takes the theme and the story from Spencer’s Gotterdammerung “The Rhine daughters”. The three daughters sing and weep about their mournful love stories and betrayals. One of them recalls the promises her lover made “ He wept. He promised “a new start”.

She scornfully recalls and regrets those times with deep shame and embarrassment:- “I can connect nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands”. Among the Rhine’s daughter’s tragic stories, Elliot recalls and brings back Queen Elizabeth’s and Earl of Leicester relationship which although in reality characterized by a pure and noble-natured relationship, in the poem is depicted as heroic and passionate, thus following the trend of contemporary life.

The author again alludes to past authoritative figures by means of irony and parody to whip the social occurrences and trends that ruin such purity and nobility. The poem ends with the references to St Augustine’s Confessions and Buddha’s Fire Sermon which represent the western and eastern asceticism. Just as the title of this section of poem suggests, Buddha warned against surrender to the senses which are “on fire”. When the disciple becomes purged of passion , he becomes free”-Through metaphor, symbolism, and allusion the sermon thus serves as a lesson preached and delivered to the reader with a strong message: “Do not surrender to the dangers of youthful lust” Elliot’s style, language and form makes him the father of modernism.

His use of irony, satire, dramatic monologues, language slangs and shifts to foreign phrases; the quotations and citations to mythology, Old Testament, historical figures; the intensive notes which are deep and obscure, the musical tones that penetrate the poem;-these and other artistic elements give the poem a disjointed nature but unique at the same time.

Citations and References:

Elliot’s footnotes Eliot, T. S. (1963).

Collected Poems, 1909-1962.

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Gish, Nancy (1988).

The Waste Land: A Student’s Companion to the Poem.

Boston: The sixth edition of The Norton Anthrology of English Literature.

Jennifer Sorensen Emery-Peck “Tom and Vivien Eliot Do Narrative in Different Voices: Mixing Genres in The Waste Land’s Pub”