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The Water Motif —Both Positive and Negative — in Eliot's "The Waste Land"
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The Water Motif -Both Positive and Negative - in Eliot's "The Waste Land" Anya Pavlov-Shapiro For International Baccalaureate English 1998 In his poem "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern (1920s modern) man is in a waste land, and must be reborn. In the first section, "Burial of the Dead," water (or the lack thereof) has a primarily negative meaning. It is first mentioned in lines four and nine, in reference to April, which the narrator calls "The cruellest month." Later, the narrator describes an arid scene, in which the "Dry stone [gives] no sound of water" (24). Next, the narrator describes "The hyacinth girl" (36) (who may or not be the narrator himself): "Your arms full, and...
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