Blake Fletcher
AP English
Summery
The Waste Land II. A Game of Chess
The second section of The Waste Land is about failed or failing relationships. The section opens to Cleopatra sitting on her throne. Of course Cleopatra’s husband Mark Anthony killed himself after hearing a rumor that Cleopatra had killed herself. That is clearly a failed relationship. Cupid peaks into the scene and hides his face. Could this be an anti-romance illusion? The fact that the speaker refers to the women’s perfume as drowning the person in perfume makes it seem like maybe she is trying to hard to find romance but not succeeding. Finally in the first stanza of this poem comes the song about rape referring to paradise lost the “Fall of man kind.”
The next section of the poem shows a couple. The nagging women seems to be upset because The man wont speak. He responds with dark and gloomy thoughts but does not say anything. He seems to either be waiting for either death or reincarnation. He is clearly unhappy and it doesn’t seem that this relationship is going to last much longer if the women clearly is upset that he doesn’t respond and he is despising the repetitive nature of their everyday life.
The final section is set in a bar just before closing time as we can tell by the bartenders constant reminders to the people remaining in the bar that it is closing time. Despite the fact that it is clearly late the speaker is deep into her story about her friends husband coming from war and how her friend needed to be ready to give him a good time or someone else would. This could be foreboding to an affair. She seems to be speaking looking down on her friend like I gave her advice and she should have taken it and look what happened because she didn’t. We don’t find out what actually happened to the couple but it is safe to assume that the relationship didn’t work out.
Blake - this is better!
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