Here is no water but only rock
Drawing from my last interpretation about the Thames the sea, water, and the path of life, The lack of water in this next stanza represents death, or maybe where the dead go. There is no water and thus no hope for life according to the stanza, and the later mention of dry sterile thunder may be a representation of the lack of options post-mortem?
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Interesting that Eliot used the sea to represent loss, whereas elsewhere the water in nature, ie. the Thames had been represented in a very positive manner. Maybe the sea may represent the final destination in life, as where the Thames created and supported life, the sea is where the Thames eventually flows, and similarly, life flows into death.
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Interesting to note how The Fire Sermon begins with such a powerful natural representation of the land. The nymphs which may represent youth are gone, and the land is brown, signifying death.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.
I wonder if this signifies a departure from organizations of religion and spirituality as can be signified by the people walking in rings and the clairvoyant mystic herself?
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Do these lines have something to say about the relationship that we have to death, or somehow an allusion to empty promises of religion? Perhaps the silence may signify something about the lack of evidence for faith, as the heart of light could somehow signify God?
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire,
With the themes of death and religion persisting throughout the Wasteland, does this cruelty of April, which is the time that the lilacs grow, signify a sort of cruelty that is giving birth, with the questions of religion looming unanswered above us?
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
The idea of dying for a lack of love, instead of lust or loss for/of love, is interesting. most death in poems in relation to love, is due to a loss or a lust for a specific love, not a general lack of it.
Strive not to speak, poor scattered mouth;
To me, this reads like a warning of the results of the Industrial Revolution and the rampant construction, the destruction of nature, and the self-consumed nature of humans.
An iron cortex of its own.
I find that the juxtaposition between the themes of nature and what is man-made in this poem is fascinating.
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made,
I found the lines to be fairly interesting, as Frost uses repetition of the word "made", but also aliterates it to the final word of the line previous, which provides a little extra emphasis on the word "made."
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
I've always found the Rhymescheme of this poem to be very interesting. AABA BBCB DDED EEEE. The unmatched syllable from each stanza sets up the rhyme scheme for the next stanza, until the final stanza where they are all the same rhyme.
yellow wood
Frost's poetry often has a whole lot of nature. To me, a lot of his work seems almost as though he was a semi-modern, American Romantic.
in the name of an historic race
When comparing this to Adams' piece, it is interesting that the sense of meaning for the two texts is completely different, where Adams is concerned with experience, Du Bois centers on the matter of identity. Perhaps because Adams has never encountered a moment where the perceived societal worth of his identity was weighed in correspondence to his ancestry or the color of his skin.
Canaan
Mildly interesting note about Canaan, aside from the religious connotation, was that it was situated at a crossroad in the Middle East and was known as being a place where many different races, cultures, and ethnicities converged and mixed together.
He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
This notion of the double self can, at least in some way, be related to the dynamic between the Dynamo and the Virgin from Adams's work. Where the Dynamo represents a newfound wondrous, subliminal even, progress; the virgin represents an older, I suppose in Adams's mind perhaps, more natural Sublimity. These two are conflicting internal identities that Adams has created and thus pondered the relationship between. Similarly Du Bois draws attention to the "double self" where Black people in America have two conflicting identities, one of being American, and one of being a Black person in America. Of course the differences between the two conflicts are that one contains a horrific and continued history of the treatment of Black people in America, and the other is a more spiritual issue that concerns the fears of losing the wonder of the Virgin Mary to the mechanism of progress.
the best chemist in the place had probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or automobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force of all, though the rays were unborn and the women were dead
Not sure whether the author is trying to compare/ contrast the relationship of art/religion to machinery or the people that create either to one another.
dynamos
Honestly I had no idea what a dynamo was and to this point, I found it very hard to discern what they may be. Found it difficult to understand the relevance of this word, that I have never heard, to the “Great Exposition” or the figures of Langley and Adams
His chief interest was in new motors to make his airship feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new Daimler motor, and of the automobile, which, since 1893,
how does this mechanical, scientific idea relate to the aforementioned ideas of art and literature?