The Relevance of Jessie Weston's from Ritual to Romance and T. S. Elliot's The Waste Land

Introduction

Similarities in literature between the works of two different authors are not a new phenomenon in English literature. In fact, many authors of English literature may take inspirations from the work of others. Similarly, literary analysts had widely argued that T. S. Elliot wrote his masterpiece The Waste Land after getting inspiration from Ritual to Romance of Jessie Weston. Despite the inspiration Elliot assumed from the Jessie L. Weston's work, many analysts argue that similarity can also be observed in the structure. This study in this connection will present, after thorough observation of the work of Weston and Elliot, any similarity in their work.

Discussion and Analysis

There are two main sources of the poem The West Land. Eliot in his notes written after the poem acknowledges his debt for two main books - Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance. The title of the poem has been taken from Ms Weston's book From Rituals to Romance (Elliot, 14-48). The land in her book is blighted by the curse of impotence. These corpses do not grow, animals can't reproduce and the king of the land has been rendered impotent (Cuddy and David, 65-132). The curse may be eliminated only by the appearance of a knight who would ask the meaning of three symbols and if the three questions are replied well, the land would get rid of the curse of impotence and infertility. The poem The West Land has been divided into the five parts. The first section of the poem is titled “The Burial of the Dead”. The second section is titled “The Game of Chess”, the third section, “The Fire Sermon”, the fourth section is titled, and “Death by Water” and the title of the last section is “What the Thunder Said” (Elliot, 14-48).

Equally celebrated by now are the opening seven lines of The Waste Land, which describe April as the "cruelest month" because the spring rain breeds "lilacs out of the dead land" and stirs with a quickening liveliness "dull roots" that would otherwise apparently be content to remain sluggishly embedded in their wintry torpor (Weston, 25-58). To this mix of the conflict between an awakening natural universe and what, in Chaucer's time, would have been called acedias, a tragic slothfulness of the spirit resulting in a disengagement from the processes of life, Eliot also adds how April mixes "memory and desire," the longing for a past contentment, perhaps, contending with that same promise of new life, new activities, springing into being (Lagomarsino and David, 14-63). The point seems to be that, for the speaker or observer of the event, that promise is clearly not necessarily a welcome one, since its aim is to rouse the sleeper out of the cocoon of acedias. The idea being promoted with little fanfare or argument as the poem begins, then, is essentially one that the spirit, much like the body or ...