These seem to freeze and control the movement in the first seven lines. This despairing opening voice is universal and dislocated; it is not in a narrative, nor does it speak to the reader. The clarity and authority of this voice mark it as the voice of propriety, wanting to maintain clear boundaries and rules, and, at its most extreme, hoping to halt forward movement and stop the proliferation of possibilities in life or language. Harriet Davidson, “Improper desire: reading The Waste Land” , The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, (David Moody ed.), Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2000, pp121-131.
The exuberant season evokes the sense of death and dreariness only; on the contrary, “Winter kept us warm”. This paradox discloses the feeling of the people who are afraid of death and seems to yearn for the living death which is put into immediate contrast with Sibyl’s wish to escape her living death of immortality through a real death. The result in a nutshell is that people are always in a dilemma whether to keep changing and hold desire or to be tortured in immortality like Sibyl. And “sadly the only alternative to the human world of thwarted and degraded desires, loss, change, and confusion is a barren waste.” ibid p131.
The last image I will discuss in this paper is the hyacinth girl.
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They call me the hyacinth girl.”M. H. Abrams (General Editor), The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Fourth Edition), New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979, p2266.
The girl murmurs these words out with urgent hurt simplicity. They sound childlike words, self-pitying, spoken perhaps in memory, perhaps by a ghost, perhaps by a wistful woman now out of her mind. As to the symbolic meaning of this image there are still some ambiguities at different levels. But the researchers have reached the agreement at the level that she was drowned. It is not difficult to find in her the shadow of Shakespeare’s mad Ophelia who fell into water in the condition that she has lost her consciousness which derives from her disillusionment of love. No doubt Hamlet is responsible for the death of Ophelia though, Ophelia drowns herself whatever to say. Different from Ophelia at this point, the hyacinth girl is probably drowned by the man. We get this implication from his encounter with Madame Sosostris, the famous clairvoyante. She spreads her pack and selects a card as close to his secret as the Tarot symbolism can come, “the drowned Phoenician Sailor”. When Sosostris says “I do not find The Hanged Man”, the man is not clear whether to feel happy or not. Hence his inability to speak, his failed eyes, his stunned movement, neither living nor dead and knowing nothing. We can get such a conclusion that the hyacinth girl is the embodiment of people’s disillusionment of love, the worse is that this love is very possibly murdered by people themselves.
These three images are the objective correlatives for Eliot’s sensibility. From these three images we can draw an outline of the waste land, the fear to death, the fear to living and the disillusionment of love. These are also three big problems faced by and still perplexing many modern people even today.
