On Eliot's Poem "The Wasteland"

The main theme of the epic poem “The Waste Land”, very contemporary nowadays, is “the collapse of values and conviction in them”. [4, p.39] Speaking about poem in general, it is definitely very sad. Sense of “spiritual sterile dryness”, deadness and emptiness overwhelms one when looking at the land of no one. Once fertile soil had become the source of death. Once there were myths and legends about other people, who were incomparable to the modern ones. And then there were the patrons of that land – Gods. They were the idols. Among them were Shakespeare’s heroes, such as Ferdinand and Miranda, Egyptian pharaohs, Cleopatra among them, and of course those from mythology: Orsis and some others. Their virtuous impact on people in the past has been stressed by the poet.
Indeed, will there ever be any woman among us who would sacrifice herself for the purposes of love, like Cleopatra died for the sake of Antony? No answer is needed, because when reading further the chapter “A Game of Chess” one is able to distinguish between spiritual beauty of the past and sordidness of the present: is not it too low – not to love fully in the old comprehension of the word but to indulge in sex without any feelings. In other words, the other idea carried out in the poem was that the sacred ritual of love had been disgraced and lowered to lust: “sex had lost its life-giving, spiritualizing function and become merely lust”.…