The Fire Sermon

T.S. Elliot’s, The Wasteland, is composed of 5 different parts. Part three, The Fire Sermon, revolves around the idea of lust, instead of love. Love is a true emotion that lasts a lifetime and lust is something that can require no true feelings, which also plays into the idea that everything in this poem is “living dead.” The first three lines of this section are an ideal example of this:

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

A river is supposed to contain life and spirits and is often times a representation of the calm beauty of nature. However, in line three it states, the nymphs are departed, which means there are no more spirits within the river. Spirits are, at times, associated with nature and since there is a lack of spirits in the river there is also a lack of nature. There are no fish or wildlife living in the river and everything that falls into the river, the last fingers of leaf (dry and dead) Clutch and sink into the wet bank, is already dead. The use of the word brown is symbolic here as well and plays into the idea that the nature in this poem is dead. Generally there is grass and trees that grow in to soil but instead there is nothing but brown land. The fact that the wind crosses the brown land, unheard, implies the idea that it is really bad and most likely, rock hard soil. Generally when wind blows over dirt it blows some up off the ground, but here the wind doesn’t make a sound when passing over the dirt.

Not only is the river and the land dead, the people are walking dead as well. They really have no purpose in life therefore they really don’t care enough to love and quite possibly don’t contain the emotions and ability to love. Having emotion and purpose in the world is what makes life worth living, but since the people in this poem don’t contain this their lives consist of walking around like they have nothing to look forward to in life, as if they were dead.