The Waste Land series concludes with readings and analysis of the final two parts–“Death by Water” and “What the Thunder Said”–with special attention to the biblical and grail quest imagery, the Wheel of Fortune, and contrasting aquatic extremes.

– Thoughtful Analysis of Essential Literature
The Waste Land series concludes with readings and analysis of the final two parts–“Death by Water” and “What the Thunder Said”–with special attention to the biblical and grail quest imagery, the Wheel of Fortune, and contrasting aquatic extremes.
The panel continues with the second of a four-part series on The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, reading “A Game of Chess”, with special attention given to the idea of death and rebirth, and to the presence and significance of baptismal imagery.
The panel embarks upon a four-week study of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, beginning with a discussion of the allusive connexions and the imagistic and modernist effects of the poem’s opening epigram and its first section, “The Burial of the Dead”.
After a brief delay, the panel concludes its review of Eliot’s Four Quartets with a discussion of Little Gidding, focusing on its cyclicality, pentecostal imagery, connexions to Dante’s Commedia, and what the poem suggests about the communion of saints.
The panel examines ‘The Dry Salvages’ (rhymes with ‘assuages’), the third of Eliot’s Four Quartets, and ponders over the speaker’s shift away from temporal considerations and towards intercessory prayer and overtly Christian theological symbolism.
The panel examines ‘East Coker’, the second of Eliot’s Four Quartets, with particular attention to the poet’s developing understanding about the search for meaning in life, the connexion to ancestral history, and the necessity of identifying a telos.
The panel begins a four-week reading of T. S. Eilot’s ‘Four Quartets’, beginning with ‘Burnt Norton’, and with particular attention to the ways in which the poem develops the ideas of the Eternal Present and the human experience of the passage of time.