In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, he combined Buddhist, English, Greek, and Jewish works in a way that portrayed many forms of death. Eliot also seemed somewhat interested about life after death and things neither alive or dead; he used things such as hyacinths and drowning to symbolize death and resurrection. Eliot showed death through writing about abortion, and he referred to someone by his birth and death place, saying, "Trams and dusty trees./ Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew/ Undid me" (Eliot 268). Eliot used all of these descriptions of death to point back to the first stanza of the poem, so that he could explain why April is the cruellest month on the mountain that he should feel so freely upon.
T. S. Eliot's uses experiences of life and death to show that something other than both of them could possibly exist. Eliot seems to show an understanding that death will happen and is inevitable. The time of death doesn't necessarily matter to him; he, rather, is more focused on what happens after death within an individual. He wrote, "Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,/ Your arms were full, and your hair wet, I could not// Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither/ Living nor dead, and I knew nothing," as well as, "Fear death by water" (Eliot 260-261). Both hyacinths and drowning are symbols of death leading to resurrection that Eliot uses in his poem. He doesn't explain what that resurrection is, but he argues within his poem that something other than life or death exists.
What does seduction have to do with death, resurrection, and modernism?
