Cycles

Isaiah includes an oracle in the wastelands. Destruction is overtaking the nations "from the desert, from a land of horror" (21).

The repetition of this kind of imagery makes me think of this:




 I may be reaching, but I think there's a parallel between the literary Modernists - who wrote in an attempt to make sense of a world destroyed by WWI - and the prophets, preaching God's wrath and the fall of Jerusalem.

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
out of this stony rubbish? Son of man," [that's Ezekiel]
"you cannot say, or guess, for you know only
a heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
and the dry stone no sound of water" [lines 19-24].

Eliot's fragmented ruins represent a breakdown in style, a rebellion against the way words have been traditionally strung together. But it's a rebellion which echoes a state of reality: war on a scale the modern world had never seen, which affected a whole generation. We talked about the cyclical nature of history. Isaiah's "harsh vision" is of an apocalypse in the ancient world: the fall of Israel and Judah, but of other nations as well. Later in the Waste Land, a succession of world powers -
 "Falling towers.
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London -
Unreal."

And the end result is a wilderness where nothing can grow. I wonder if each era-ending cycle of war produces writing like this: disillusioned, desperate, but poetic. Eliot was writing a warning, too, in a way; I wonder if you could argue that Eliot's a prophet.