Nistor Cristina

Nature in The Waste Land

Nature plays an important role throughout Eliot`s poem, The Waste Land. The unnoticed
witness of the war -nature- carries symbols related to the despair that people had felt during
those days.

The rebirth of nature is described as cruel (April is the cruelest month) because it follows its
cycle of life and death regardless of the tragedies that the war had caused. By keeping the
same rhythm year after year, spring brings the remembrance of the peaceful and happy days
before the war. After a season of oblivion (winter) that covered all the scars with forgetful
snow, spring comes and shatters the healing stillness of winter by bringing nature to life, and
the rebirth of nature automatically reactivates the hitherto numb pain. The lilacs that come out
of the dead land where the dead lay at peace beneath the snow during winter days are seen
as bringing memories of the dead to the surface, mixing memory and desire and stirring the
dull roots of the gloomy past. The yearning for forgetfulness pushes Marie, one of the
characters, to go in the mountains, where you feel free and where winter still dwells (I
read, much of the night, and go south in the winter).

Later on in this poem, nature loses gradually its charm and comes to be approached in a
grotesque manner. Nature is barren, does not offer shelter (the dead tree gives no shelter)
anymore. Rivers have run dry (the dry stone no sound of water) and in The fire sermon
the river is referred to as a dull canal. Water, which was a symbol of life, is now rendered as
generating death (Death by Water and the lack of water at the end of the poem).

Nature`s stillness and indifference to the pain of the bereaved is mocked by the author when
he approaches in a grotesque manner the imperturbable cycle of life and death that nature
follows regardless of people`s feelings. He points out the fact that death generates life and life
generates death: That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year?.

Although, after all this evidence, nature seems to have changed dramatically after the war,
there is the possibility that the real change occurred in people`s minds. As the philosopher
Edmund Husserl enounced, all that we observe around us is misleading, because we perceive
everything through our senses, so the change of nature might be the reflection of people`s
change caused by the war.

By mixing various voices and cultures throughout the text, the author tries to bring the entire
humanity to the same point for renewing a lost rapport with nature and find peace (Shantih,
shantih, shantih). According to Husserl, we need first to organize our mind and find out what
happens there, in order to understand what happens outside, for what happens outside depends
on the interpretation we give to it, having perceived it exclusively with our senses. The last
Nistor Cristina

line of the poem may suggest that peace of mind, once found, can render the whole world
recognizable again to those affected by the war.