This poem, I suppose, I can only describe as wild.
“The
Wasteland” changes both it’s subjects and characters so quickly, that I often found
it extremely hard to catch up to what was happening, and by time I did the
narrator was already off to the races with something else entirely. I am still not
completely sure what the narrator was saying at certain points, but I could
still figure out some things – their was a fortune teller who supposedly was
the smartest woman in Europe, the narrator was meeting a friend of his in a
hotel, that the narrator often refers to the river Thames and the London
Bridge, and then at the end of the poem, the London Bridge fell down. The other
half that happened is still a complete mystery to me.
After reading,
I am not really sure what the title is supposed to refer to. From my best
guess, I suppose “The Wasteland” could refer to the narrator himself? It seems
the deeper we go, the more stressed and less cohesive the narrator becomes,
making me believe that this is the narrator’s descent into something. Perhaps insanity?
Perhaps something else? I’m not quite sure. But I can not shake the feeling
that the narrator by the end is not completely there, no matter what the
reason.
In lot
of ways, this poem reminds me of a book I once read called “White Noise”, that
book was narrated by a man who slowly was loosing his mind and often
interjected random bits into his inner dialogue that had nothing to do with the
story or his internal struggle.It seems like this poem is very similar in that regard, the narrator isn't very strong or reliable. For that I love the narrator of the poem because those are always the most interesting, but at the same time I do not like it because it makes hard to understand at times. This poem really feels like the beginning of
the ‘post-modern’ movement that would later arise.
P.S. I commented on Eliza and Osten's posts.
Comments