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My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand. T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
These five words begin Eliot’s landmark 1922 poem The Waste Land, but the full first line of the poem’s opening section, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, continues beyond the word ‘month’ with the word ‘breeding’ (after a comma).
- T. S. Eliot
- 1922
- “April is the cruelest month, breeding. lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. memory and desire, stirring. dull roots with spring rain.” ― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
- “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only. There is shadow under 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”
- “For you know only a heap of broken images” ― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
So, for Eliot’s speaker in The Waste Land, ‘so many’ have been ‘undone’ by the recent death and devastation of the First World War. And this chimes with a phenomenon often witnessed in the poem: so many of its characters are experiencing a kind of living death, or a deadened form of life.
Collection of sourced quotations by T. S. Eliot on death. Discover popular and famous death quotes by T. S. Eliot.
The cultural degeneration from Shakespeare to popular music is emblematic of the decline and debasement seen throughout The Waste Land. Eliot has interestingly affixed an “O O O O” to the beginning of the song, which is reminiscent of the final lines of Hamlet: “The rest is silence. / O, o, o, o.”. It’s so elegant.
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Eliot's Poetry. The Waste Land Section IV: “Death by Water” Quotes. Previous Next. Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.
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