What are the times, according to the the poet, when one find oneself alienated?
Answers
Explanation:
Alfred Prufrock ascends the stairs to a room where fashionable women are drinking tea and discussing art. Prufrock has almost turned back several times, acutely conscious of his aging appearance. Now he anticipates, with dread, his interactions with the women. He fears that they will regard him as an alien species, like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s board. The sense of being alone within one’s consciousness, unable to connect to or communicate with others or to feel at home anywhere, pervades “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The theme of alienation runs through all of Eliot’s major poems.
I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones. “What is that noise?” The wind under the door. “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?” Nothing again nothing.
In Part II of The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,” a mysterious woman speaks to an equally enigmatic listener. The setting could be a palace, a temple, or merely a luxurious bedroom. The woman could be a queen, a prophetess, or an aging aristocrat awaiting her lover. Whatever the case, the questions are spoken aloud, and the answers are kept silent. The speaker and listener seem alienated from each other. Whether someone is praying to a goddess, petitioning a queen, consulting a prophetess, or just talking to herself, no answer is provided for such questions.
Descend lower, descend only Into the world of perpetual solitude, World not world, but that which is not world, Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Desiccation of the world of sense, Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit; This is the one way, and the other Is the same, not in movement But abstention from movement; while the world moves In appetency, on its metalled ways Of time past and time future.
In “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets, the poet visits the ruins of a grand country house and meditates on time. Part III describes so-called real time, the everyday world, where humans are perpetually distracted by the past and future. In this passage, the poet describes what lies below the surface of modern life: alienation, the sense of being cut off by consciousness and paralyzed while the world passes by. Appetency means “desire or longing.” Metalled ways evokes technology and warfare. The poet suggests that the greed and violence of modern life leave the individual in spiritual solitude.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” J. Alfred Prufrock approaches an encounter with a room full of women having tea. Prufrock hesitates at the door to look back at the street and then slowly climbs the stairs, his shyness, self-doubt, and dread increasing as he climbs. “Time for you and time for me” implies that he expects to meet one person in particular. Prufrock uses time to tamp down his fears and bolster his courage. Eliot uses time to reveal the extent of Prufrock’s dysfunction. Prufrock moves in slow motion while his mind changes constantly. The effect makes readers acutely aware of Prufrock’s consciousness.
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
In “The Burial of the Dead,” the first part of The Waste Land, an unidentified speaker portrays a hot, dry, dead land and invites the reader to seek shelter. The lines allude to the first Scripture reading in the Anglican burial service. Psalm 39:4 reads, “For man walketh in a vain shadow.” The Old Testament frequently uses the shadow of a rock as an image representing shelter, water, and therefore mercy. In Eliot’s wasted land, the rock brings no relief. Without past or future, there remains only the present, and in the present there exists only fear.
Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Eliot named “East Coker,” the second of the Four Quartets, after his family’s ancestral village. On a summer night in this village, the poet envisions the ghosts of his seventeenth-century ancestors dancing at a wedding. Here, the poet plays on multiple meanings of “time” to comment on multiple themes. Time represents the pattern of the music, the dancers’ motions, the seasons, and the constellation. The wedding dance completes and expresses the eternal cycle of life and death: fertility, mortality, decomposition, and regeneration.