the wasteland, part ii

The Wasteland T.S. Eliot

A Game of Chess, the second section of Eliot’s five-part 1922 poem is broken into two separate poems: one revolving around a moment in the life of a wealthy woman in a very unhappy, apparently loveless marriage. Considering the way she addresses the person who one assumes is her husband or lover, she has a very erratic personality and is paranoid (or at the very least anxious) about her life its circumstances. Despite her affluence, she is disdainful of the dreariness of the wealth around her. One is made aware of when one poem merges with the other at the first repetition of the phrase, “hurry up please its time.” At this change, the reader is plunged into a totally converse scene (although the theme is very similar). Two women are discussing the current situation of a mutual friend whose life has been enormously weighed down by her having five children and a husband in the army who is never home – the concern in question is that he’ll get her pregnant with their sixth child and that she will not be capable of bearing it – literally and figuratively. The poem ends with the pub closing and the two friends saying goodnight to one another.

This setup makes for a venn diagram of poetry; though it transpires in two opposite places (a palace of a house and a pub-like setting), the people are very similar. There is erratic, pretty paroxysmal hopelessness followed by a collective, mournful hopelessness – that head-shaking, “what-a-shame” sort.

Themes dealt with here are the bourgeoisie versus normalcy, the repetition of “hurry up please its time,” the concepts of emptiness and loneliness, the use of teeth, bones, and the idea that life and love are both games (though not necessarily playful ones).

The elements of symbolism and allusion to outside works of art and literature in this piece are at first somewhere between daunting and annoying – mainly in the sense that they’re hard to keep track of. The references are reserved more for the first half of the poem that focuses on a wealthy lifestyle, likely to accentuate the notion of the upper class being better educated (although the “lazy” stereotype fits the bill a bit better).

To describe Part II of The Wasteland in a succinct manner would go a little something like this:
Life is an unhappy game; it is easy to ignore until it has been recognized that life’s general bareness has seeped into the lives of us all.