Saturday, November 7, 2015

Thunder To The Lesser Gods





T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 418-423





418  The third DA: See also lines 401 and 411

  Apart from any meaning heard in what the thunder said, the da da da passage also evokes the concept of DADAISM, a pre-surrealist art movement that began in Switzerland in 1916 and was reaching its peak at the time of The Waste Land. The movement, which ranged from visual arts to literature and poetry to theater, spurned the bourgeoisie reasoning and hard logic that were at the roots of World War I and instead came to place a value on abstract nonsense. Compare this with the jazz movement (note 130), and see also note 433 (ostensible gibberish). Eliot commented on dadaism in his 1921 essay The Lesson of Baudelaire (see note 76): “Dadaism is a diagnosis of a disease of the French mind; whatever lesson we extract from it will not be directly applicable in London”; and again in his 1923 essay on James Joyce, Ulysses, Order and Myth, in which he criticized another critic for failing to see beyond a perceived chaos: “Mr. Aldington treated Mr. Joyce as a prophet of chaos; and wailed at the flood of Dadaism which his prescient eye saw bursting forth at the tap of the magician’s rod.” 

419 Damyata means “Control yourself,”  what lesser gods understood in hearing “Da.” See note 400.

420 Compare line 280 (Elizabeth and Leicester, on the Thames barge).

  The BEATING OARS motif is presented twice in the poem, here and at line 280, but there are also several indirect references, first through the adapted description of Cleopatra’s chambers (see note 77) and then in the allusion to Philomela’s abduction (see note 99).

421 Compare the calm sea with the calm and clear night after leaving the Chapel Perilous (see note 388) and the calm day setting of a wedding along the Thames (see note 176).

from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

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