5:28 PM
@Randal'Thor it's a good first attempt. The Waste Land is a very difficult poem. While it is very amenable to close reading, it also requires other techniques to answer well.
> While a shelterless dead tree isn't necessarily evocative of hanging, the word "dead" used in juxtaposition with the idea of a tree and of being unwelcoming, no help provided, could easily put that idea across. This links up with the "Hanged Man" from later on.
I don't really think you do a good job explaining why dead + tree = hanging. You generally want to be a little bit more certain.
> Also, the inviting red rock - and the speaker doing the inviting, who may be the same as the "hyacinth girl" mentioned a few lines later - could be related to the "Lady of the Rocks".
I mean, maybe, but the only evidence that you've given here is that they both share the word "rock". You generally want to find more lines of evidence than that, particularly in a poem like The Waste Land.
> This is arguably what a tarot card reader might do. If the cards come up indicating some gruesome fate, then despite being nothing but small scraps of paper which will soon turn to dust, they can strike fear into the hearts of those who believe in them. Another potential link.
"small scraps of paper which will soon turn to dust" ??? That's not enough to go from paper to dust. Are there any passages that describe paper turning to dust, for example? (I can't think of any). You want to base your observations on what is in the text.
> The entire chapter, from its title through every stanza, has a theme of death about it. The description of the barren landscape, with its "stony rubbish", "dead tree", and "dry stone", is particularly evocative of death - we might call this place a dead landscape, and bones or a skeleton would fit neatly with the scene described. And later, in the fourth stanza, there is talk of growing corpses as if they were plants:
Yes, death is a very promenant theme in the poem. Another prominent theme, that I think you may have overlooked, is sex and reproduction.
The "growing corpses as if they were plants" is at the center of the poem's message. Crucially, it combines the two ideas: death and sex. You can't separate both themes in your analysis of the poem, they can only be considered together.
> The desert scene so evocative of death could be the site of someone's grave; the "branches grow[ing o]ut of this stony rubbish" correspond to the sprouting of the corpse referenced later on.
Here you want to talk about the storm clouds above the desert, and how it how it thunders but (crucially) doesn't rain. (To give you a few bigger hints. (1) Consider the connection between the poem and a [now debunked, but very influential at the time] anthropological theory about a fertility rite. Eliot discusses that rite several times in relation to Waste Land. Consider the fact that if it doesn't rain, the corpses/seeds can't sprout.)
> The "heap of broken images", under this interpretation, would be images of the dead person's life. It's said that you see images of your life flashing before you just before you die; and once you're dead, those images are all that's left of what used to be your life.
What? I have no idea how you got here from anything you said elsewhere in your answer. It's a plausible interpretation, but not at all supported by what's said in the poem.
> The branches growing from the grave are probably something metaphysical, perhaps symbolising eternal life after death. The "[s]on of man" cannot say or guess anything about them, for we know only the mortal life, the "heap of broken images", and are blind to what comes after it. We, the mortal children of man, see only the barren desert scene and the remains of the dead person's life, not what is sprouting from their corpse in a different dimension.
Nope, not at all. Again, you can't separate the theme of death from the theme of reproduction when talking about The Waste Land, you have to consider them together.
The Waste Land might not have been a good choice for a first poem to try close reading on, just because of how complicated the poem is. But it's a good first attempt, and I'm very happy to see you trying close reading to see what you can do with it.
In general, you want to find multiple lines of evidence when doing a close reading. It's very easy to get a false positive-- two passages share the word "rock". In a poem like The Waste Land, where every word is deliberate, it means something. But you have to find multiple connections before you can begin to interpret what it means.
Siegfried Sassoon's poem "Atrocities" (full text here) describes the murder of German prisoners by British soldiers during WWI. According to Wikipedia:
The discovery in 2013 of an early draft of one of Sassoon's best-known anti-war poems ["Atrocities"] had biographers saying they would rewrit...
"HaTikvah," Israel's national anthem, was adopted from an earlier poem called "Tikvateinu," by Naftali Herz Imber. Here is the official text of the anthem (translation and transliteration can be found on the linked WP page):
כָּל עוֹד בַּלֵּבָב פְּנִימָה
נֶפֶשׁ יְהוּדִי הוֹמִיָּה,
וּלְפַ...
