![]() And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was). Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. shot of a beautifully pure blue sky, which held only for a second before the. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. mood swings, no sentimental platitudes, no storks on the birth announcement. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. It is also paradoxical that he is a bisexual.The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech. It is paradoxical that Tiresias could see the future though he is blind. He was in the waste land of the Oedipus King, in the waste land of the Fisher King and he is now present in the modern waste land of post industrial war torn Europe. ![]() As the seer of the waste land, he transcends the space and time of the three waste lands which superimpose on one another. ![]() Therefore it also functions as a prelude to the entire poem brilliantly conceived as a sign board to semantic structure of the poem. Andrea Sacchi (15991661), Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645), oil, 147 x 117 cm, Musei di Strada Nuova, Genova, Italy. The first section moves from one kind of life to another, from one kind of death to another. Death in life depraved of spiritual and moral significance is contrasted with life in death enabling rebirth and renewal of life. Spiritually elevated higher life is contrasted with morally depraved lower life. Eliot has presented two kinds of life and two kinds of death in the poem through a projected contrast. Past and present are contrasted and jumbled in the narrative in a cyclic manner. Seasonal changes are also cyclically followed with winter giving way to spring followed by summer. The theme of death is contrasted with rebirth and it is cyclically followed from life through death to rebirth. The circular structure of TWL is followed in every section, linking the main themes of the poem. Mythologically it stands for the burial of the fertility gods in winter and their reclaim in spring. The full title is "The Order of the Burial of the Dead" which prescribes the words and actions followed in the burial service. The title is borrowed The Book of Common Prayer of Anglican Church. The theme of the first section is attractiveness of death or the difficulty in overcoming death in life which the waste landers live. The first section of The Waste Land provides the general abstract statement encountered by the protagonist Tiresias.
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