Comparing Waste Land with Other Myths :: Comparison Compare Contrast Essays

The Waste belt d own  Parallels with Other Myths        The Waste Land summarizes the grail legend, not precisely in the usual order, but retaining the adept incidents and adapting them to a modern setting. Eliots indebtedness both to Sir James Frazer and to Jessie L. Westons From Ritual to comminute (in which take hold he failed to cut pages 138-39 and 142-43 of his copy) is acknowledged in his notes. Jessie L. Westons thesis is that the Grail legend was the surviving record of an universe ritual. Later writers have reaffirmed the mental validity of the link between such ritual, phallic religion, and the spiritual contented of the Greek Mysteries. Identification of the Grail story with the common myth of the adept assailing a devil-dragon underground or in the depths of the sea completes the unifying belief behind The Waste Land. The Grail legend corresponds to the great hero epics, it dramatizes initiation into maturity, and it bespeaks a quest for sexual, cultural, and spiritual healing. Through all these attributed functions, it influenced Eliots symbolism. Parallels with yet early(a) myths and with literary treatments of the quest theme reinforce Eliots pattern of death and rebirth. though The Tempest, one of Eliots minor sources, scarcely depicts an initiation mystery, Colin Still, in a book of which Eliot has since written favorably (Shakespeares Mystery Play), had already advanced the theory in 1921 that it implies such a subject. And Tiresias is not simply the Grail knight and the fisherman King but Ferdinand and Prospero, as well as Tristan and Mark, Siegfried and Wotan. In his maidenlike role he is not simply the Grail-maiden and the wise Kundry but the sibyl, Dido, Miranda, Brnnhilde. Each of these represents one of the three main characters in the Grail legend and in the mystery cults--the wounded god, the sage woman (transformed in or so versions of the Grail legend into a beautiful maiden), and the resurrected god, successful quester, or initiate. Counterparts to them designing elsewhere Eliot must have been conscious that the Ancient Mariner and Childe Roland had analogues to his own symbolism. In adopting fertility symbolism, Eliot was probably influenced by Stravinskys ballet Le Sacre du printemps. The summertime before writing The Waste Land he saw the capital of the United Kingdom production, and on reviewing it in September he criticized the disparity between Massines choreography and the music. He might almost have been sketching his own plans for a written report applying a primitive idea to contemporary life