Thunder Said Research Articles

T. S. Eliot and Eastern Spirituality

Eliot's lifestyle exemplifies his religion. The community that the book provides enables not just Eliot to gratify his own aspirations but also enables others to arrive at similar realizations and locate their place. The work is the culmination of Eliot's lengthy quest for structure and wonder in literature. In spite of Eliot's assertion that the letter in question is neither a manifesto nor a plea to society, its contents suggest otherwise. This work is a reflection of his quest to comprehend the inexplicable as well as his transition from Eastern philosophy, which he explored in The Waste Land and Four Quartets, to Western Christianity, which he adhered to until the very end of his life. The world we live in today is ethically bankrupt, and as a result, the physical takes precedence over the spiritual. The end outcome is a psychological imbalance, a crisis, and decadence. The contemporary surroundings of the waste landers and their unthinking dedication to want, which they believe will fill the gap in their psyches, are the root causes of the spiritual conflict that they face. The poet is looking for psychological coherence. The progression from "The Burial of the Dead" to "What the Thunder Said" alludes to the idea of an individual's eventual salvation from within. The ending of "The Waste Land" ushers in a new way of being in the world. Religion helps the contemporary man find transcendence, inner quiet, and coherence in a time when science, atheism, and sexual liberation are the prevailing worldviews. Religion has the power to ease the suffering of the person and unite his fragmented self into a unified and harmonious whole. Eliot looks to several religious practices for comfort. The idea of travel plays a significant role throughout Eliot's poem. When seen through the lens of an individual's pursuit of psychological and spiritual wholeness, the poem demonstrates forward movement.

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot as a modern epic

‘The Waste Land’, of course by T. S. Eliot has been treated as the magnum opus of T. S. Eliot on account of its big canvas, wide range of themes, saga of suffering, with epic grandeur. It concludes with an optimistic note- “ Shantih, Shantih, Shantih'' as well as “Da, Datta, Dayadhvam'' The mental journey from ‘The Burial of the Dead’ to ‘What the Thunder Said’ via ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’ and Death by Water’ undertaken by Tiresias symbolizes the journey of the Christiana in John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress. In Spite of this, the complexity of theme prompted a sensitive Hindi poet Nirala to remark- “ Kahan ka ianta kahan ka roda, T. S. Eliot ne kunwa joda'' The elegiac note of the opening part visualizes ‘a ray of hope’ when the poet refers to ‘the Holy river’ Ganga and the Himavant i.e. the snowbound mountains in Himalayan Ranges. Suddenly, the attention is shifted towards the famous fable of the ‘Brihadaranyaka Upanishad’ The three-fold offspring of the Creator, Prajapati, Gods, men and demons; these three approached Prajapati for instruction after completing their formal education. To each group, He uttered the single syllable ‘Da’. The message was sent to all three in the form of encoding but they interpreted or decoded in their own ways. The Gods decode it as ‘Damyata’ (Control Yourselves). The Gods decoded it as ‘Datta’ (give). The demons interpreted it as ‘Dayadhvam’ ( be compassionate). When these three meet Prajapati, aware of their interpretations, He responds with ‘OM’ signifying that they have fully understood. This concludes with the thrice repetition of thunder - Da. Da. Da. viz, control yourselves, give, be compassionate.This episode reminds us of T.S. Eliot’s focus on Charles Lanman, his Sanskrit teacher at Harvard University who gave Eliot a copy of ‘Vasudev Lakshman Shastri Phansikar’s Sanskrit edition of ‘The Twenty Eight Upanishads'. While interpreting ‘Dayadhvam”, Eliot refers to Dante’s Ínferno’Book 33, line 46 - “And below I heard the outlet of / The horrible tower locked up”. These words are uttered by Ugonio della Gherardesca, a 13th century Italian novelist as he recalls his imprisonment in a Tower with his two sons and two grandsons where they starved to death. This allusion communicates a sense of finality and suggests the terrifying consequences of imprisoning oneself within one’s own ego or consciousness. Eliot feels that only by confining to one’s own faith one is ought to transcend the boundaries of tradition. According to the European tradition or Christianity ‘Shantih ‘has been interpreted as ‘Peace Which passeth understanding ' . Indeed, It is a feeble translation of the inherent meaning of the world. Eliot anticipates something absolute and sublime as has been suggested by the Upanishadic Connotation. To conclude it can be said that this poem begins with pessimistic suffering but concludes with robust optimism.

Reading T.S. Eliot in Our Ideological Age: Allusions to Christian Liturgy in The Waste Land

Critics have long engaged in an ideological debate regarding T.S. Eliot’s antisemitism, misogyny, and ethnocentrism. While his opponents attack him according to deconstructionist readings, his proponents remain unsure about how to defend his place in literary studies. Upon the centennial of The Waste Land, I argue that its opening and closing allusions to Christian liturgical practice in “The Burial of the Dead” and “What the Thunder Said” offer a poetic defense against deconstructionism’s literary nihilism, a defense that justifies its place in the next century. Through these allusions, Eliot fashions a poetic ritual that enacts the Biblical and liturgical journey from death into new life, a journey reflected in the poem’s images of a barren modernity and its resurrection of tradition.

The Abject in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, discusses hopelessness and desolation and shuns them at every turn. The speakers spurn it and despair at the desolate state of humankind and society. This paper aims to read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in light of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Jacques Lacan’s notion of jouissance. The main claim is that despite the apparent horror of desolation, the more the poem tries to repel desolation, the more it cannot help but repeatedly allude to it, as if unwillingly drawn to it, so that death and desolation are not the subject, nor are they the object, but rather the abject of the poem. The sections of the poem I feel are most relevant for such an analysis are “The Burial of the Dead” (lines 1-30) and “What the Thunder Said” (lines 322-375).

Cultural Translation and World Literature in Korea

Abstract The aesthetics and the ethics of cultural translation create the proper distancing as well as the free linguistic displacement based upon mutual respect and equivalence in every aspect. T. S. Eliot's fragments in the last section of The Waste Land, entitled “What the Thunder Said,” demonstrates such a case of cultural translation. The purpose of this case of cultural translation has been to provide a rationale for the context of the present Korean comparative literary studies. What cultural translation can do is to let the readers understand the foreign cultures and literatures that appear to be untranslatable, by engaging dynamically with the newness and the strangeness, as well as by encountering transcultural initiation beyond the monocultural closure, as Gayatri Spivak clarified in her discussion of “supplementing” in terms of figuring out “the exact shape of a place that is empty in what is to be supplemented, zooming out, but not in competition with zooming in.” From these double perspectives of “cultural translation” and “glocalization” as well as the dynamic interplay of comparative, world literature, and translation studies in a convergent way, world literature studies beyond comparative literature as a discipline in Korea has witnessed a drastic change for the last decade. The conference themes and articles in the journals of the associations in collectivity demonstrate the phenomenon of a new wave of comparative literature in the form of world literature.

Scarce Heard amid the Guns: An Inside Look at Canadian Peacekeeping, by John Conrad

John Conrad Scarce Heard amid Guns: An Inside Look at Canadian Peacekeeping Toronto: Dundurn, 2011. 327 pp. $26.99 (paper) ISBN 978-1-55488-981-5Reviewed by: Alistair D. Edgar, Wilfrid Laurier UniversityLieutenant-Colonel John Conrad's second book with Dundurn Press follows up his earlier memoir, What Thunder Said, an account of his operational experiences in 2006 as Canadian logistics battalion commander supporting Task Force Orion in Kandahar, Afghanistan. As day-to-day war diary, What Thunder Said was stirring and insightful personal account of at times desperate Canadian logistics effort. It should be read alongside Task Force Orion Regional Command South commander Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Flope's excellent Dancing with Dushman (Canadian Defence Academy Press, 2006). Conrad's latest effort, informed by his own service as peacekeeper in Cambodia and in Bosnia, takes different turn, and an especially interesting one when read and understood against this background knowledge of his recent service in Afghanistan. Scarce Heard amid Guns offers significant Canadian history, written and presented in popular and personal rather than academic language.The motivating force behind Conrad's current venture is his frustration that the Canadian legacy has recently been maligned by soldiers seeking to ensure that sustained combat nature of Kandahar is noticed, and by political leaders who want to show that they 'get' proper use of Canadian (21). As Conrad observes with passion that his work well expresses, For heaven's sake, this country once had much broader philosophy (21).In place of this wider vision, a proposal to return to UN would be scoffed at, shouted down in dialogue, seen as real step backwards by those smart people whom Conrad believes are intoxicated perhaps by institutional groupthink, and whose prejudice is based on a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of history of Canadian participation with UN and true nature of peacekeeping (22).As Conrad argues in part I of Scarce Heard, there is popular mythology about that does not serve it well: first, that Canadian Armed Forces are, or should be, primarily force; second, that is about conducting unarmed, humanitarian missions for altruistic purposes; and third, that has been and remains heavily invested in peacekeeping. None of these assumptions and beliefs is true. Canada is not nation of peacekeepers, rather, it is nation capable of generating peacekeepers from finest military cloth (55), asserts Conrad; only combat-capable forces can be truly good peacekeepers. This is what makes Canadians good at it-world-class, competent soldiers, not just DNA (64).To support his case, author offers chronological tour of Canadian engagement in UN missions. He notes Canadian military participation in earliest operations, including UN Truce Supervision Organization in Middle East (UNTSO) and UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), with first Canadian fatality in UN mission being Brigadier-General Harry Angle, who died in 1950 when his plane crashed in Himalayas. Conrad takes us through three historical phases of operations. He labels first phase classic operations of 1956-1973, which included atypical UN Congo operation (ONUC), in latter stages of which Canadian BrigadierGeneral Jacques Mad Jimmy Dextraze served as chief of staff. The second is golden age of 1973-1988, latter year also marking beginning of Canadian involvement in Afghanistan with five officers who participated in UN Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan (UNGOMAP). …

Pessimism in T.S. Eliot's Poem “The Waste – Land”

This study aims to reflect the Pessimism in the poet: Thomas Steearns Eliot's poem “The Waste Land” in which he represented both an assessment of the World situation in the time of World War I as he felt it to be, and a creative transformation of the world that is observed in the final section of the Poem. The Poem “The Waste Land’’ is divided into five sections under the title of: (I) The Burial of the Dead. (II) A Game of Chess. (III) The fire Sermon. (IV) Death by water and (V) What the Thunder Said. Each section is discussed and analyzed and then the researcher draws a conclusion that Eliot is: Not always pessimist. Eliot's poem shows the society during the World War 1.

What the Thunder Said: A Portrait of the Artist as a Trans-Secular Event

According to the dominant critical consensus, James Joyce's writings are secular, marking the absence or irrelevance of religion in modern life. This article challenges that position by arguing that Joyce's use of epiphany reworked Catholic concepts of transcendence and immanence, amid the contentious theological debates of the early 20th century, to craft a modernist religious experience, one directed at achieving spiritual meaning. I then show how the Joycean epiphany's way of shaping being and time remarkably anticipates Alain Badiou's and Slavoj Žižek's contemporary turn to religious forms of fashioning meaning in the idea of the Event. This article thus not only reframes Joyce's relationship to art's spiritual value, but also shows how the persistent recourse to religion for literary and political ends further complicates the idea of a secular modernity.

From “What the Thunder Said” to “Hebrew Lessons” and Other Jewish Poems

From “What the Thunder Said” to “Hebrew Lessons” and Other Jewish Poems

Bruce Barton, Natalie Corbett, Birgit Schreyer Duarte, and Keren Zaiontz, eds. New Canadian Drama: Volume 9: Canadian Devised Theatre: Reluctant Texts from Exuberant Performance

BRUCE BARTON, NATALIE CORBETT, BIRGIT SCHREYER DUARTE, and KEREN ZAIONTZ, eds. New Canadian Drama: Volume 9: Canadian Devised Theatre: Reluctant Texts from Exuberant Performance Ottawa: Borealis, 2008. 295 pp. In 1993 when I began my apprenticeship as a performer, information in English on how the creative artists at the forefront of theatrical production actually worked was scarce. The few books authored by leading practitioners purposefully steered away from the nitty-gritty of procedures. Works by Barba, Brook, Chaikin, Grotowski, and Schechner mentioned the techniques of performance creation only obliquely. While leading composers of the same generation took pains to share their tools and conceptual approaches--consider the detailed writings of Cage, Feldman, Stockhausen, and Xenakis--the theatre makers kept their cards close to their chests. For those of us lucky enough to read French, Les Voies de la creation theatrale provided some respite, offering such wonders as the translated text of Kantor's The Dead Class, details of Barba's Kaspariana or an exhaustive analysis of Grotowski's Constant Prince. Today everything is different; videos of the major productions of the late twentieth century are widely available, practitioners author increasingly accessible manuals about their own work, and scholars situate contemporary practice in its local and international ecologies. The recent opus by John Nobbs of Australia's Frank Theatre, A Devil Pokes the Actor, provides an excellent example of the former, while Delgado and Rebellato's Contemporary European Theatre Directors offers the latter. To this party comes Canadian Devised Theatre: Reluctant Texts from Exuberant Performance, the kind of book I would have committed any number of sins to get my hands on twenty years ago, if only it had existed back then! Volume 9 of the New Canadian Drama series (Borealis) edited by Bruce Barton, Reluctant Texts presents the scripts of four performances: What the Thunder Said by Bluemouth Inc. Presents, Boca del Lupo's The Perfectionist, The Confessions of Punch and Judy by Bobgan, Kowalchuk and Wells, and Robert Plowman's collaboration with Zuppa Circus Theatre Radium City. Reluctant Texts traces the theatre of original creation, currently referred to as 'devised theatre,' in a manner that aims to be both accessible and thorough. The scripts of each of the plays are supplemented by introductory scholarly essays, thorough descriptions of staging, textual commentaries, storyboards, diagrams, musical scores, photographs, and extended artists' statements. At the heart of this book is the relationship each editor draws between the material traces of the productions and the intentions, aspirations, and pragmatism revealed by the voices of the artists themselves. Keren Zaiontz's presentation of Bluemouth's What the Thunder Said is a skillful layering of accounts: what was said, how it was said, what was done, where it was done, and how the artists involved in creating it felt about it. The scripts and staging notes of two different productions of What the Thunder Said are placed side by side with artists' commentaries diverting and enriching the reader's progress. The subdivided and variegated pages of the account are a joy to navigate, revealing a new detail or a new path between details with each reading. Boca del Lupo's The Perfectionist as described by Birgit Schreyer Duarte continues this compelling presentation, which results, at least for me, in a fascinating suspension of temporal sequencing. While as a reader I know that the performance lies in the past, the inclusion of source materials, of sketches and comments from the gestation and creation of the piece leave me happily unconcerned that I have missed it and rather give me the sense the work is continuing somewhere in some fortuitous 'fourth time' beyond the past, present, and future. I have not seen either What the Thunder Said or The Perfectionist but I attended Bobgan, Kowalchuk and Wells's Confessions of Punch and Judy and a staged reading of Plowman and Zuppa Circus's Radium City, to which these chapters certainly do justice, at the Catskill International Festival of New Theatre produced by NaCl Theatre in Highland Lake, New York. …

Musicology after Identity—: Four Fragments

Musicology after Identity—Four Fragments James Robert Currie (bio) And so, one must accept that the hyperbolic could well end up as a grain of sand. This is, of course, the fate of all actions. Since thought is also an action, since it is not in opposition to action, it must undergo the same fate. Jacques Derrida, "Politics and Friendship" Redeem After the torchlight red on sweaty facesAfter the frosty silence in the gardensAfter the agony in stony placesThe shouting and the cryingPrison and palace and reverberationOf thunder of spring over distant mountainsHe who was living is now deadWe who were living are now dyingWith a little patience. T. S. Eliot, "What the Thunder Said," The Waste Land Eventually, Cindy Sheehan left the highly visible ongoing protest she had established outside of President Bush's Crawford holiday estate in Texas. She had received death threats, been systematically ignored by both the Republicans and the Democrats, and been lampooned by the media, so finally she concluded that the toll on her health, resources, and family had become too much—business as usual for a political activist. What, however, was shocking was the admittance of despair in her resignation. Her son Casey's death, she concluded, had indeed been for nothing and not simply because the reason he had found himself in the place where he would die was founded on lies regarding the Iraq war's justification. Rather, there could be no redemption because no force other than the almost completely corporatized American government could be invoked to revenge her son's ghost. In effect, she proclaimed [End Page 87] that there is no America through alignment to which his death could be dignified, nothing that could be distinguished from the very America that condemned him in the first place, no outside to those forces that are turning the United States, in her words, into a "fascist corporate wasteland." (One wonders, awfully, if she may in fact see Casey as part of her very object of criticism, i.e., as someone complicit with the very thing that killed him.) "Casey died," she states, "for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."1 Hypnotized by the ghosts on TV that we will never be, we ourselves have become ghosts, and the tangibility of those who die because of our intangibility is barely opaque enough to even register in the space covered by our gaze as it haunts its way from us to the media, where it dreams us into the only solid thing we know: a fetish (an American Idol). We should remind ourselves, a fetish in psychoanalysis is that which stands in place so as to disavow an absence someplace else; it is the worst form of a ghost, a solid one, and so incapable of even spooking us into acknowledgment of what we have lost and of the revenge that we must enact for others as much as ourselves. This is what is terrifying about Sheehan's proclamation: in a world of ghosts there can be no retribution, for that can only be done by the living. And so the political question that our present catastrophic context raises is once more the oldest one of philosophy: How, therefore, must we live? Live Unreal City,Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many. T. S. Eliot, "The Burial of the Dead," The Waste Land Concerns that we might not be alive and of the impotency inherent in becoming ghost have haunted modernity at least since Herder and the counter-Enlightenment debates of the eighteenth century. Today we are made ghost by our immersion within, in Guy Debord's famous phrase, a society of the spectacle.2 For Herder, the cause was Enlightenment reason, since reason is itself ghostly. Since, hypothetically, we are all in possession of it, reason is both always within us, here and now as part of...

What the Thunder Said: Anglo-Saxon Brontologies and the Problem of Sources

What the Thunder Said: Anglo-Saxon Brontologies and the Problem of Sources

The Grin of Tiresias: Humor in The Waste Land

He who was living is now dead We who are living are now dying With a little patience (lines 321-30) These lines introduce What the Thunder Said, the climactic last section of The Waste Land, the one Eliot regarded as the best part of the poem, and the only possible justification of the whole. The descent they orchestrate-from apocalyptic heights to sardonic mockery in a mere nine lines-is entirely characteristic of the poem's modus operandi, and sounds a recurrent note of large importance to the poem's total effect. The Waste Land has long seemed a somber poem, and of course it largely is, but the somberness has perhaps been overstressed in the history of the poem's critical reception. In the succes de scandale following its publication in 1922, the poem's detractors dismissed it as a joke or a hoax or an obscure satire, and its defenders, in consequence, were obliged to emphasize its seriousness. Yet from the beginning the jokiness of many moments in the poem-Mrs. Porter and her daughter washing their feet in soda water, for example, or that Shakespeherian rag-has been evident. Such effects have generally been characterized in terms of irony, but I want in this essay to consider them rather under the rubric of humour-a term Eliot himself uses most suggestively in the period

What the Thunder Said: James's Hawthorne and the American Anxiety of Influence: A Centennial Essay

What the Thunder Said: James's Hawthorne and the American Anxiety of Influence: A Centennial Essay

Shakespeare's Tempest and Eliot's Waste Land: “What the Thunder Said”

An exploration of the theme of art in Shakespeare's Tempest casts light on Eliot's use of the play in The Waste Land. Art has powers of redemption because it involves qualities of restraint, balance, timing ‐ of “government” in the broadest sense ‐ which are analogous to those required in the control of a life, a state, or a destiny. A further analogy is suggested between receptivity to the harmonious and healing effects of art and a character's capacity for compassion. the qualities of control and compassion involved in the creation of and response to art are those necessary to attaining a “clear life”: art is a means of redemption because it teaches us to “give, sympathize, and control.” the key to releasing the curse on the modern Waste Land, the means to the feeling and remembrance that might revitalize it, are precisely those actions and attitudes which Shakespeare's last play affirms as central. Correspondences exist between the play and poem of which Eliot was no doubt aware, as he wove allusions to the play throughout his work: “What the Thunder Says” is, in the deepest sense, what The Tempest says ‐ “give, sympathize, control.”

T. S. Eliot and “What the Thunder Said”

Journal Article T. S. Eliot and “What the Thunder Said” Get access Robert Bluck Robert Bluck Leeds. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 24, Issue 5, October 1977, Pages 450–451, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/24.5.450 Published: 01 October 1977