Link: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/18993 here you can view the full text of the poem
Entry: Upon reading Canto three of Dante's Inferno, I immediately noticed lines 55-56: "I should never have believed death had undone so many". I knew exactly where I had heard it before. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" borrows Dante's line almost directly in lines 60-63: "Unreal city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over the London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many". I knew when reading Eliot's poem that this was a reference to someone at sometime, because Eliot was so careful to keep large notes to accompany his masterpiece. I had not paid much attention to where Eliot took this line from at the time, but now that I am reading Dante it is as if I cannot forget the line in terms of either text. The words ring in my head as both beautiful and foreboding; it is easy to see why Eliot borrowed them. It is also very easy to see other similarities in this small section of lines. In the Inferno, Dante describes entering hell, and also describes people thronging en mass to cross the Acheron. This scene in canto three is similar to Eliot's image of an "unreal" city as that which is hell like, in the sense that hell is not a place on earth, but of a different realm. And Eliot's note of London Bridge crowded with people is similar to that of the crowd gathering to cross the river in the comedy.
In line 64 of the Waste Land, Eliot includes another note referring to Dante's Inferno. He quotes lines 25-26 of canto four that say: "Here, as far as could be heard, there was no weeping/ except sighs which caused the eternal air to tremble". Line 64 of the Waste Land reads "Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled". The sighing that occurs in the Inferno is that of those in Limbo. Because they are in a state of constant suspension, they sigh from want of a place that is at peace; they are in hell, yet not really in a way, and they are certainly not in heaven. This type of longing is what Eliot wanted to replicate in his poem. The citizens of London are indifferent to the world around them, living without passion, and in a state of constant longing. The European world wants truth or beauty to believe in and hold on to, but never actually finds any such thing. Similarly, the scholars that are in Canto four's limbo sought intellectual truth, but never reached the ultimate truth of God, and thus are also in a state of longing for their lack of faith.
In addition, while discussing in class Dante's many landscapes I distinctly remember our professor calling certain areas "wastelands". Eliot's entire motif for his poem is that the post world war one Europe is a wasteland - destroyed and barren. This wasteland is empty or any truth or true beauty, which is very reminiscent to hell's position away from the beautiful city of God. Just like the Comedy is organized into canto and circles of punishments, Eliot's poem is organized in sections that focus on specific elements of certain types of life. For example, the scene of part one is that of London Bridge, while section two depicts the fancy living of a gentlewoman. Not only is the act of division scene in both texts, but both Eliot and Dante are master's of working what they perceive as the social norms and ills of their day. Both works are encyclopedic in their references, and thus provide such please for scholars and students alike.
No comments:
Post a Comment