Power of Word Music:
Eliot was endowed with an exceptional power of word music. The Waste Land is a symbolic invocation of London, past and present, or a stricken Europe, of the human situation. Music creeps by upon the waters. There are different kinds of music: the song of the Thames daughter; the water dropping song of the hermit thrush; the music that is heard in the pulsating life of London day by day, where the dead sound of a Church clock mingles with the pleasant whining of a mandoline. One of the most music passages in the poem is the following:
“This music crept by me upon the waters’
And along the strand, up Queen Victoria Street,
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishermen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of lonian white and gold.”
Good Sense of Knitting the Rhythm and Music:
The musical passage given above demonstrates how closely the rhythm and the music of poetry are linked with the sense, and how numerous are the interlocking elements which are moulded into unity by the metrical power of the poet. The opening two lines remind us of The Tempest of the enchanted island where music out of thin air stole upon the sense. The gentle, sliding rhythm of the first line changes into the flat banality of the fourth, which in its turn, gives way to the onomatopoeic description of the noises coming from the public house.
Moving with Spacious Majesty:
After the irregular movement of the preceding lines, the spacious majesty with which the last line solemnly moves, clinches to the whole passage and shapes the total melody. The contrasting ‘i’ and ‘o’ sounds which alternate in these lines, may be taken to correspond with the white and gold which adorn the walls of Magnus Martyr, a vowel contrast repeated in the words, “inexplicable splendour”.
His Bare, Austere Music:
The musical pattern that Eliot has woven in The Waste Land is not always elaborate; he can create word music even in a passage of a stark, bare and rocky directness of statement.
Unfailing Distinction in Phrasing:
For him a word is no fixed counter. It brings with it varying colours from all its previous usages, its connotation is extended or shifted according to its relation to the moving procession of other words which precede and come after.
Musical Structure:
The structure of The Waste Land as well as the Quarters is similar to that of a classical symphony. The five ‘movements’ each with its own inner structure suggesting a musical analogy, the repetitions of words, ideas and tones - all these are evocative of rich musical effect. The Burial of the Dead contains far more than two statements but formally it is a series of contrasts of feeling towards persons and experiences, which are related by a common note of fear. The Game of Chess opens with the elaborate, highly poetic description of the lady at her dressing table, a passage like a set - piece of description in a late Elizabethan play.
Power of Auditory Imagination:
One of the most characteristic examples in Eliot's poetry of the power of his auditory imagination, both for beauty of sound and richness of connotation, is the opening passage of The Game of Chess. The allusion to Shakespeare's Cleopatra produces the impression of Renaissance, splendour and luxuriance. Little by little all the senses are bathed in rich profusion.
Hesitation between Regularity and Irregularity:
He was attracted by the constant evasion and recognition of regularity which characterised the seventeenth century poets. But at the same time, the clamour for free verse which was rising from some of the imagists found its most penetrating critic in Eliot. For he has believed from the start that there is no freedom in art , yet he was indebted to the theorists of free verse for they helped to carry Eliot forward in his perception that rhyme removed, much ethereal music leaps up from the word.
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