These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins Quote Art Drawings

In this week'southward Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses one of the most famous lines from T. Due south. Eliot's The Waste Land

'April is the cruellest month' – the five words which don't, strictly speaking, constitute the 'start line' of T. Due south. Eliot's The Waste Land, equally I have previously discussed – has become 1 of the most famous quotations plant in twentieth-century poetry. Another celebrated line from Eliot's 1922 poem, 'These fragments I have shored confronting my ruins', appears almost the end of the 434-line modernist poem. And the pregnant of the latter quotation is about equally elusive.

Fragmentation is both a theme and a formal feature of The Waste matter State. The fragmentary nature of sure passages from Eliot's 434-line poem mirrors the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation of Europe after the Offset World State of war. National borders were changing, and citizens' fretfulness were shot to bits – both those of the recently returned soldiers, suffering from shell-daze or PTSD, and, in many cases, their wives and sweethearts who had had to proceed the home fires burning, raising the children and working to make ends meet, in the men's absenteeism.

The first half 'A Game of Chess', the second section of The Waste State, captures this through the conversation between the upper-grade adult female ('My nerves are bad tonight') and her husband or lover, whose listen is nonetheless inhabiting 'rats' alley' total of the basic of 'dead men': well-nigh certainly an allusion to the trenches of northern France. Although the man ostensibly seems to be responding to the woman's questions, there is a sense of dislocation betwixt them, an inability to hear or speak to each other. They are talking at cross purposes. As Eliot's verse form repeatedly shows, relationships and marriages accept become fragmented, with men and women declining to sympathize each other.

All this is true, and nonetheless it would exist easy to overstate the extent to which The Waste Land is all that stylistically fragmented. Much of the poem is written in iambic pentameter, although with multiple departures from this. Information technology remains, however, like Eliot'due south poesy as a whole, haunted by the 'ghost' of that most quintessentially English language metre ('ghost' is a word I have borrowed from Eliot's essay, 'Reflections on Vers Libre'), the iambic pentameter verse line.

However, all that begins to fall apart in the final, largely unpunctuated section 'What the Thunder Said', which Eliot wrote in a sort of trance while convalescing at Lausanne in Switzerland post-obit a nervous breakdown. He had previously gone to stay in the seaside town of Margate (where, The Waste product State tells usa, the speaker cannot connect anything to anything else: more fragmentation), simply it was on the shores of Lake Geneva that Eliot wrote the final part of the verse form. 'I wasn't fifty-fifty bothering whether I understood what I was saying,' every bit he afterwards confided.

And it is towards the end of this concluding part of The Waste Country – indeed, just three lines earlier the poem'south very last line – that we see the line, 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins.' The meaning of the line, in itself, is fairly straightforward: the verb 'shored' hither is used in the sense of supporting something that would otherwise reject. In other words, the speaker is attempting to commencement his own ruin by supporting the 'fragments' that remain, preserving them against further decay.

This wasn't the first time Eliot had made reference to fragments, or, for that thing, the preserving or collecting of fragments in society to shore something up from utter disaster. In his 1915 poem 'Hysteria', for instance, his male speaker had talked of 'fragments' of the afternoon being 'collected', and then as to avert his afternoon (his appointment?) with his female person companion beingness a consummate write-off. But by 1921, when he wrote the concluding part of The Waste matter Land, his vision had become more ambitious, moving from carefully observed and socially awkward situations (usually, as in 'Hysteria', 'Portrait of a Lady', or 'Prufrock', involving doomed relationships betwixt the sexes) to the imminent pass up of civilisation itself.

'These fragments I have shored against my ruins.' But which fragments? Or whose? The placing of this line tells u.s.a. peradventure everything nosotros need to know, for it comes viii lines into this concluding section or poesy paragraph of The Waste Land. After a casual nod to the figure of the Fisher Rex at the offset of this section, this 'phonation' of the poem then gives way to a myriad other voices: to children's nursery rhymes ('London Bridge Is Falling Downwards'), Dante'southward Purgatorio, Tennyson ('O swallow consume'), and a sonnet by Gerard de Nerval. Then, hot on the heels of all this, that reference to these fragments which the voice of the verse form has 'shored confronting' his ruins.

The fragments are the fragments of European civilisation, repeated and quoted in Eliot's poem in an attempt to shore them up and preserve them. For all of its radical stylistic approach to grade and layout (although, we I remarked earlier, this attribute of the poem can as well exist overstated), the final vision of The Waste State is conservative: a (peradventure futile) effort to preserve or conserve culture from permanent decline and dissolution.

Oliver Tearle is the writer ofThe Hugger-mugger Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History , available now from Michael O'Mara Books, andThe Tesserae, a long poem about the events of 2020.

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Source: https://interestingliterature.com/2021/06/these-fragments-i-have-shored-against-my-ruins-meaning-analysis/amp/

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