This wasn’t the first time Eliot had made reference to fragments, or, for that matter, the preserving or collecting of fragments in order to shore something up from utter disaster.
In other words, the speaker is attempting to offset his own ruin by supporting the ‘fragments’ that remain, preserving them against further decay. ‘I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying,’ as he later confided.Īnd it is towards the end of this final part of The Waste Land – indeed, just three lines before the poem’s very last line – that we encounter the line, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ The meaning of the line, in itself, is fairly straightforward: the verb ‘shored’ here is used in the sense of supporting something that would otherwise decline. He had previously gone to stay in the seaside town of Margate (where, The Waste Land tells us, the speaker cannot connect anything to anything else: more fragmentation), but it was on the shores of Lake Geneva that Eliot wrote the final part of the poem. However, all that begins to fall apart in the final, largely unpunctuated section ‘What the Thunder Said’, which Eliot wrote in a sort of trance while convalescing at Lausanne in Switzerland following a nervous breakdown. It remains, however, like Eliot’s poetry as a whole, haunted by the ‘ghost’ of that most quintessentially English metre (‘ghost’ is a word I have borrowed from Eliot’s essay, ‘ Reflections on Vers Libre’), the iambic pentameter verse line. Much of the poem is written in iambic pentameter, although with multiple departures from this. As Eliot’s poem repeatedly shows, relationships and marriages have become fragmented, with men and women failing to understand each other.Īll this is true, and yet it would be easy to overstate the extent to which The Waste Land is all that stylistically fragmented. Although the man ostensibly seems to be responding to the woman’s questions, there is a sense of dislocation between them, an inability to hear or speak to each other.
#See the fragments meaning full#
The first half ‘A Game of Chess’, the second section of The Waste Land, captures this through the conversation between the upper-class woman (‘My nerves are bad tonight’) and her husband or lover, whose mind is still inhabiting ‘rats’ alley’ full of the bones of ‘dead men’: almost certainly an allusion to the trenches of northern France.
National borders were changing, and citizens’ nerves were shot to bits – both those of the recently returned soldiers, suffering from shell-shock or PTSD, and, in many cases, their wives and sweethearts who had had to keep the home fires burning, raising the children and working to make ends meet, in the men’s absence. The fragmentary nature of certain passages from Eliot’s 434-line poem mirrors the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation of Europe after the First World War. Fragmentation is both a theme and a formal feature of The Waste Land.
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