I sat upon the shore
We now hear the voice of the Fisher King.
Eliot's Notes refer us to Jessie L Weston's From Ritual to Romance, in which she claims the Fisher King symbolises the intimate relation at one time held to exist between the ruler and his land; a relation mainly dependent upon the identification of the King with the Divine principle of Life and Fertility.
In other words, the health of the King corresponds to the health of the land: and our Fisher King, like his arid plain, the Waste Land, is dying. As the poem comes to its end, we are returned to the beginning: will he have a painful rebirth in the following springtime, like the lilacs out of the dead land? Or is the Waste Land beyond resuscitation?
Like a prudent person, he considers tidying up his affairs before it is too late: but these turn out to be random allusions to images from earlier in the poem: fragments I have shored against my ruin.
Eliot's Notes refer us to Jessie L Weston's From Ritual to Romance, in which she claims the Fisher King symbolises the intimate relation at one time held to exist between the ruler and his land; a relation mainly dependent upon the identification of the King with the Divine principle of Life and Fertility.
In other words, the health of the King corresponds to the health of the land: and our Fisher King, like his arid plain, the Waste Land, is dying. As the poem comes to its end, we are returned to the beginning: will he have a painful rebirth in the following springtime, like the lilacs out of the dead land? Or is the Waste Land beyond resuscitation?
Like a prudent person, he considers tidying up his affairs before it is too late: but these turn out to be random allusions to images from earlier in the poem: fragments I have shored against my ruin.
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| Apocalypse Now: Kurtz's reading material Back to poem |
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