From Baudelaire's Spleen: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Nothing could drag on as these lame days do When, beneath the flakes, each season of snow lies, Boredom, the fruit of morose indifference, Takes a fearful and immortal aspect. permanence. Consider the manifestations and consequences of boredom in The Waste Land. When The Waste Land was published, IA Richards found in the multiplicity of its voices an articulation of the “fate of an entire generation.” And although Eliot discourages interpretations of the poem as a critique of the contemporary world, he concedes: “A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience; his verses may only be for him a means of speaking about himself without betraying himself. ; yet for his readers what he wrote can become an expression both of their own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation. » Eliot's observation is particularly significant in an analysis of boredom in The Waste Land, for although the poem may present the reader with a series of wounded episodes that illustrate the gradual collapse of a crippled and destitute civilization, life (“Oed' und leer das Meer”), but more importantly, it is emblematic of the internal crisis. This is not to say, however, that the poem should be viewed reductively and literally in terms of events in Eliot's private life, but one should see these events deeply connected to the poem, and their essence of pain, of boredom and misfortune repercussions on something obscure, emotional and psychic level. Certainly, the vaguely anecdotal structure ("a pile of broken images") of The Waste Land, on the one hand favors a multiplicity of emotional representation in its characters, while on the other hand, and perhaps for this reason, it resists any unitary interpretation. and attempts to go beyond “a man’s personal intuition”. Section 1, for example, which addresses the reader directly with the quote from Baudelaire "You! hypocritical reader! - my double, my brother!" suggests that he too, by extension of being questioned, is afflicted with the same symptoms from which the speaker suffers. So, in the epigraph, the reader is presented with the image of the Cumae Sibyl, for whom the granting of long life was initially very important. but ultimately, with a gloomy view of the prospects such a life held for him, his existence became an agony of eternal boredom. Aging steadily, but with no end in sight, she looks to the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. And his situation is not unlike that which the other speakers also consider to be theirs. They live in a culture that is decayed and withered, but which will not expire, and they are continually reminded of its past glory. Indeed, they have no hope that their situation will improve in the future either. Current life has lost all its charm and death is seen only as a welcome release from boredom for those who suffer. The first line of the first section, “April is the cruelest month…” depicts the disruption of this eternal peace. finally reached by those who have waited a long time for liberation from their boring existence. Unlike the description of April in the Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to which he alludes, and where spring is a season of renewed life, joyfully and unambiguously, after the "death" of winter, April in The Waste Land is presented as an active aggressor (there are five present continuous verbs - "breeding", "mixing", "stirring", "covering", "feeding" - which are used at the end of each of the firstlines) which disturb the "dull roots" who were more satisfied to be left alone by the winter which kept them warm, covered in "forgetful snow" (lines 3 to 6) than to be surprised by the renewing powers of sun. Lilacs, with their associations of romantic nostalgia, are indeed “born,” but born of death. Until the advent of April, all life had found in winter some sense of relief, of relief from the intolerable obligation to choose to continue living a boring life. Unlike Life in Baudelaire's extract, Eliot's Life in Winter prefers the "gloomy indifference" of winter rather than the momentary blooms of intuitive living on soil that promises no nourishing qualities, but on the contrary, reminds them of a painful past and a discouraging future. (“Memory and desire”). Memories, past lives and their memories merge with the present. Marie's childhood memories are painful. The simple world of cousins, sledding and coffee in the park was replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting from the war: a certain hour of conversation in Central Europe, recalled against the spring backdrop of alternating sunshine and rain; bits and pieces of the old, established order of what was thought to be civilized life; a child's memories of an adventure on a sleigh, in which fear ("I was afraid") was inextricably mixed with the feeling of intoxication caused by abandonment of life and which is repeated in adults , by a retreat in a safe, but a meaningless and boring routine. “In the mountains, one feels free./ I read most of the night and I go to the south in winter”: are reflections of an ambivalent state in which “freedom” is a memory replaced by more reassuring boredom of the present. an ordered life, cloistered in safety with his books. And this practice of "reading in the evening", which would otherwise be considered good practice, is (although in the prevailing mood of "not to be disturbed") emblematic of Mary's desire to escape the reality of oppressive boredom that surrounds him for a perhaps more pleasant life. Sexual boredom in sections II and III is a recurring theme in The Waste Land and perhaps in its literal biological reference echoes the same late and dilatory reluctance to reproduce as the "dull roots" of The Burial of. the dead seem to suffer from it. While the knight fisherman who "sat on the shore/fishing, with the barren plains behind him" is unable to restore vitality to his own lands due to his sexual disability (resulting from a choice on his part ), nature in section 1 as well. Like the lady's lover in A Game of Chess, they prefer to refrain from monotonous acts of reproduction. Her state of mind suggests not an interest in her lover, but rather a macabre preoccupation with loss and death ("I think we're in rat alley/Where the dead have lost their bones"). The description of the dark, candlelit, closed room, with its increasingly claustrophobic effect, highlights the lady's bored frustration at being forced to wait, while in the meantime she uses her time to articulate fragments of old songs. Eliot juxtaposes this sterile encounter. between an upper-class lady, with the helpless fertility of a lower-class lady, but the latter's sexual experiences are also far from satisfactory. Pregnancy is presented as a sordid burden, with the wife's health and appearance deteriorating, while the husband remains unsympathetic and irresponsible. The characters are trapped in time, emphasized by the repetition of the bartender's calls (recalling the feeling of stagnation), and.