Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

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In the final stanza, the narrator reminisces about the effect of the journey on his life and how when he returned to his home land, he no longer felt at ease as he observed the birth of a new era and religion different to the pagan ones he has experienced. The poem makes comment that change is both birth and death, as change is a new beginning but it also means a death of the old ways, traditions, and values. In this sense, the poem is one of Eliot’s more optimistic poems because the characters are somewhat at ease in the new modernist era. The piece was written at a time where Eliot had significant changes in his own life, where he had gone through the hard questionings of his realities that allowed him to change from his Unitarian religion to the Church of England, as he too had suffered the death of his old beliefs and the rebirth of new ideals. The poem can be viewed as “Eliot’s fictionalised account of his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism” (Harris, 1980, p. 837) Throughout the poem, the modernist literary technique of free-verse poetic genre is used to express Eliot’s condemnation of modernism in the creation of a persona of a multifaceted, traditionalist ‘wise man’ that is confronted by a new emergent landscape that rejects spirituality and faith. The wise man represents the position of Eliot who is attempting to come to grips with modernism’s rejection of traditional values. Eliot’s choice of using this paradoxical technique of conveying traditional ideas through modern literary techniques places dramatic emphasis on the effects of modernity, as these new literary techniques are now accepted as the norm, even when a traditionalist wishes to convey their traditional ideas. Eliot’s literary choices reflect his journey of coming to terms with the emerging landscape.