Figures of Speech in the Waste Land

Some types of speech in the wasteland Figures of speech comprise two main categories. One household twists the meaning of run-in to wrest a new non-literal meaning from devises that, when phrased together, have a very different literal meaning, as in the idiomatic strain of speech, He died from laughter. Literally, this means a gentlemans gentleman met his death due to laughter. Figuratively (i. e. , non-literally), this means he laughed with vigor for a pine time. Figures of speech that twist meaning argon classified astropes.The new(prenominal) category enhances meaning by arranging and rearranging words and word enounce to dramatize, emphasize or more elegantly express the point at hand. For example, an affinity may be more dramatically made by using achiasmusthat inverts parallelism in a typical abba luck arrangement. For example, consider the inverted parallelism of this The day a but shines b, but glows b the wickedness a. Figures of speech that enhance through wor ds, sounds, letters, word order and syntax are classified as word schemes, or justschemes.It is clear from this brief invoice of figures of speech thatThe permissive waste, with a figure of speech as its very title, go out be replete with figures of speech of both casts,tropes and schemes. In this format, I shtup identify a few prominent ones, the first being the title. The Wastelandis the overarching figure of speech (trope/metaphor) that shapes this entire poetic treatise on the state of the earthly concern in Eliots day. The title of break up I, The Burial of the Dead, is itself a significant figure of speech, also a metaphor, that establishes the central idea of the work.For Eliot, following World state of war I (1914-1918), Earth itself was ravaged, torn and late(prenominal), Lilacs out of the departed land . This figure of speech signifies that death resulting from WWI encompasses the dead who died in battle and the dead who console breath though dead inside from h orror and from the loss of dead Earth A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, 62 I had not thought death had undone so many. intelligence of man is another important figure of speech, an allusion and metaphor, as this is to whom portions of Part I are addressed Son of man, 20You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, Another important figure of speech (trope/analogy and symbol) found in Part III, The Fire Sermon, is Tiresias, the blind old man who sees At the violet instant I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing surrounded by two lives, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives 220 Homeward, This figure of speech is important because it represents Eliots point and belief that the living dead cannot see, can no longer perceive, what is around them, what is true.This is also an allusion to the Biblical doctrine that those who see are blind, that is, cannot see spiritual truth. Figures of speech of theschemekind are also present, though seemingly less prominent and apply for elegance and compression rather than for significance. An example is found in Part III the young man carbuncular. Here the word order is changed so that the adjectival modifier carbuncular follows the head noun (man) of the noun phrase. Standard word order would be the carbuncular young man. This sort of rearrangement of word order, with the adjective coming after the noun, is called ananastrophe