Free Waste Land Essays: The Lifeless Land

The Waste Land: Lifeless Land

As The Waste Land begins, Eliot enters into the barren land, which the audience journeys across with the author through the course of the poem. "The roots that clutch" immediately evoke a feeling of desperation. Roots in the rocky soil Eliot describes are a base from which to grow; just as roots in plants gain nourishment from soil, these roots "clutch" infertile ground, desperately seeking something to gain from nothing. The question "what branches grow" suggests skepticism as to life's ability to survive in "stony rubbish," the waste that offers no forgiveness.

"You know only a heap of broken images" alludes to memory. Memory can be a composite of many smaller memories, creating discontinuity. "Broken images" are similar to the entire poem, which has a tendency to jump between snippets of different lives and desolate imagery of a desert waste. Eliot creates a memory lacking value for its indistinctness. Because only "broken images" exist, the memory itself becomes a waste. Just as life cannot grow in a barren land, people cannot be wh...