Tuesday

PART II: A Game of Chess

The key to Eliot is usually through his allusions. In this section there are allusions to Shakespeare: Anthony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and Hamlet.
The Aeneid - story of Dido,
Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, and Ovid. Most of these allusions are connected to women.
Example: Cleopatra - a suicide over love. Dido - a suicide over love. Paradise Lost - a seduction by the Devil (or snake). Dante - lustful lovers in Hell. Ovid - a rape of a woman by her brother in-law. Hamlet - Ophelia - a suicide over love.

This section can be read as a contrast of sex and love from the viewpoint of upper and lower classes. The 1st woman, the upper class, has been compared to a female Prufrock.

The title of this section comes from an obscure play that uses chess as a metaphor for stages in seduction. 
How does the title fit into the overarching theme of the section?  What do you make of WWI and trenches?  WWI appears twice in (section 2 and 3).  There is an allusion to Carthage in part 1.  What about all the wars seen/alluded to in this section: WWI, Punic Wars, Roman Civil War - The Battle of Actium, Troy, Norway-Denmark, Revenge in the Tempest.    

JUG - JUG TWIT TWIT

Allusions - Dante's Inferno, Philomela (Metamorphoses by Ovid), Tempest (sea storm), Aeneas (Dido), Hamlet, Anthony and Cleopatra, Carthage, Troy. 

Venus/Aphrodite. 

Who is in Circle Two of Hell (the Lustful) in the Inferno:
Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris, Tristan, Lancelot, Guinevere


Remember - Ophelia drowns herself.  Anthony loses a sea battle.  Tempest has a storm that sinks a ship.  Water is a traditional symbol of love.

FIRST PART OF "The Game of Chess" from https://tanzeelafaiz.medium.com/allusions-in-the-wasteland-by-t-c587c790bff4

The title of this part of the poem is from Middleton’s The Game of Chess and the main plot for this part of poem is taken from “Women Beware Women” of the same writer. Its main plot is about the seduction of a young wife by a gallant whose mother in law is enjoying the game of chess. To explain the chair she sat in, Eliot uses the reference from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and elaborates its grandeur marvelously. He also uses the reference of Queen Dido of Carthage’s ceiling at this point to explain the setting that is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid.

Afterwards Eliot refers to Milton’s Paradise Lost book IV and explains the entry of gallant in the setting as Milton explains the entry of Satan in the garden of Eden in “Sylvan Scene”. In the very next verse he symbolizes the expected tragedy of the wife with the tragedy of Philomela seduced by her brother in law King Trent in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. At the end of this part he refers to Shakespeare’s line from Hamlet where dying Ophelia bids farewell by saying “good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night”. He again uses Shakespeare’s line of The Tempest “those are pearls that were his eyes” for the seduced wife.

The phrases used by Eliot in this part to explain the crime and spiritually hollow attitude of modern man include English and French terms. He writes French phrase “Jug Jug” to represent the sexual intercourse. The word rat symbolizes the modern man who has entered in the vegetation to spoil it, the one eyed commerce man for the man selling the abortion pills, and dead bones for the man who is spiritually dead.

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Definition of LITANY

1 a prayer consisting of a series of invocations and supplications by the leader with alternate responses by the congregation
2 a : a resonant or repetitive chant
b : a usually lengthy recitation or enumeration: example litany of formal complaints

NOTE: The litany has been used by poets for Political Poems, Poems of Complaints, Poems of Empowerment. Remember the handout: "Song No. 2" - "i say. all you sisters waiting to live" (you can listen to this poem on NPR - here)

Here is a link to a litany by Billy Collins.

Blank Verse: Broadly defined, any unrhymed verse but usually referring to unrhymed iambic pentameter (NOTE: HAMLET is blank verse). Most critics agree that blank verse, as it is commonly defined, first appeared in English when the Earl of Surrey used it in his translation of books 2 and 4 of Virgil's THE AENEID. It appeared for the first time in Thomas Sackville and Thomas Northon's GORBODUC. Over the centuries, blank verse has become the most common English verse form, especially for extended poems, as it is considered the closest form to natural patterns of English speech. Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and especially John Milton (particularly in his epic PARADISE LOST) are generally credited with establishing blank verse as the preferred English verse form.

An example from Robert Frost's "Birches"

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter dark trees
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do....

Free Verse : Poetry that lacks a regular meter, does not rhyme, and uses irregular (and sometimes very short) line lengths. Writers of free verse disregard traditional poetic conventions of rhyme and meter, relying instead on parallelism, repetition, and the ordinary cadences and stresses of everyday discourse. In English the form was made important by Walt Whitman.

Example:


poetry readings

by Charles Bukowski

poetry readings have to be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can't find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.

I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.

if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:

a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant's fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke

anything
anything
but
these.

"poetry readings," by Charles Bukowski from Bone Palace Ballet © Ecco, 2002.

Two Litanies