So...are we sure Coleridge was the only one on drugs?

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"April is the cruelest of months..." this line alone is what lets me know that Eliot experienced finals week. Okay but seriously, at first glance, these poems seem like sheer madness akin to some of Coleridge's drug-induced poems (*cough cough* Kubla Khan *cough*), but these poems actually have some sort of meaning. I must admit though that this is my fourth time going through these poems (twice with Abernathy and twice with my dad) and it still makes little sense to me. Especially since so much of it is up to interpretation.

With both of them I can't help but picture the aftermath of some sort of battle--this is the strongest when reading "The Waste Land" mainly because it opens up with the flowers blooming on top of bodies that were covered in the snow. The entire poem reeks of death...and can anyone please answer why on earth in section III (The Fire Sermon) they are washing their feet in soda water? But in a sense, I think this is supposed to leave you with a sense of confusion and disbelief as well as a heavy sense of sorrow. Death comes in the strangest of ways and in the most unexpected of ways and everyone is running out of time. "Hurry up please it's time." So encouraging. I feel like Yeat's "Second Coming" touches on an idea of a battle as well but focuses on the aftermath: the Second Coming of the Lord. I agree with what Will said about how it reads a lot like Revelation.

P.S. I commented on Will and Ethan's posts.

Comments

  1. Brenna StringfellowJanuary 15, 2018 at 6:24 PM

    Yes I think section III was pretty screwed up if you ask me. From the soda water to naked bodies laying on the ground and then fishing behind some gas house. I do agree with you how it reeks of death its everywhere even when it talks about the people coming over London Bridge are undone by death. With the "Second Coming" I do believe it somehow relates to the book of Revelation and the coming of the Antichrist

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  2. Ethan LafontJanuary 15, 2018 at 8:39 PM

    These two passages we read were just so gloomy. I'm hoping that, just like the Second Coming of Christ, our readings take us into happier places haha. In all seriousness, I have to say I enjoyed "Second Coming" a lot due to the way it ended, and left that little nod towards a large battle, which does feel like a preface to the battle that will take place in the end times.

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  3. Michael TurnerJanuary 15, 2018 at 8:54 PM

    There always seems to be that death and apocalypse connection throughout literature. Of course we also get death and glory, death and peace, death and anything else you can think of. Even the Bible goes into life after "death."

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