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26 FEATURES
EVERY MOMENT is ETERNAL
"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?"
AIDAN RANKIN FINDS SPIRITUAL STRENGTH IN EVERYDAY ACTIONS RATHER THAN SHALLOW ACTIVISM
teachings as to Christianity, Judaism or the Hellenic tradition. Eliot is concerned with finding the truth underlying the spiritual traditions of East and West. He is searching for the common source of our many and varied expressions of faith, and of the hope that springs from the impulse towards faith. The poem is replete with images of rebirth in the midst of chaos and dissolution. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," is one of the closing lines, and it is in these fragments that we find hope. They give us a sense of continuity and stability that equips us to come to terms with change and hope for a better future.
OR GRANDIOSE
To T.S. Eliot asked, or rather
demanded, in The Waste Land.
Many readers have interpreted this poem as a work of radical pessimism, depicting a mass society traumatised by war, degraded rather than liberated by technology and experiencing a breakdown of shared values. In other words, The Waste Land evokes the beginning of the modern era. Yet there is another interpretation of The Waste Land, as there is of modernity itself, which has brought blessings as well as calamities. For Eliot wrote the poem, his greatest, less as a pessimist than as a spiritual seeker. When the poem was published in 1922, he had not yet fully embraced the Christian faith reflected in Ash Wednesday, The Four Quartets and other later works. The Waste Land is therefore a trawl through the cultures and civilisations of humanity for signposts to spiritual renewal.
BLUEPRINTS
One of the lessons of the previous century to be learnt must surely be that hope does not lie in grand designs or utopian blueprints. For in such abstractions we lose our most hopeful human characteristic: that of sympathy. In a literal sense, sympathy means the capacity to 'feel with other human beings or creatures. It enables us to see them as individuals like ourselves, at once unique and part of a complex whole. Misplaced idealism takes away hope because it reduces individuals to mere
As such, the poem's cultural reference points owe as much to the Vedic
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