T. S. Eliot’s use of symbols in his poetry

T. S. Eliot is one of the most influential poets of the modern age. Blessed with a terrible mind, he has become a proverbial name in the realm of modern poetry for his use of symbols and images in his poetry.

It is a well-known fact that Eliot was much influenced by the French Symbolists, especially by Laforgue, Mallarme and Gautier. Eliot praised Donne for the reason that drew him to the French Symbolists. It is symbols that enable him to express the mysterious, the obscure, the complex and the new. To quench the thirst of spiritual attainment, he has to depict and interpret the abstract and the mystical by means of symbols alone.

As a traditionalist, Eliot adopts certain conventional symbols and images in his poetry. Thus, he chooses the cross for Christianity; deserts, dust and the wasteland for infertility in spiritual terms; water especially as rain or flood for spiritual revival or awakening; the rose for love; the fog, the evening and night for the lost soul wandering in a twinkling twilight world. 

In ‘Four Quartets’, there is a distinct group of images and symbols of special significance. This group centres on gardens, and includes such associated details as flowers, fountains, yew-trees, birds, children the apple, etc. The gardens symbolize the place where significant things happen, experiences of special meaning to the people concerned, towards fulfillment or loss. The garden in ‘Ash Wednesday’ signifies the spirit’s longing to turn away from the beauteous world and it becomes the rose garden in the ‘Four Quartets’, especially in ‘Burnt Norton’ where it stands for a place of release from the bondage of earth and time. Here it symbolizes the spiritual experience.

In ‘Four Quartets’, Eliot uses a few recurring symbols such as the river, the sea, the rose, the rock. Mark here Eliot makes use of these two symbols in ‘Four Quartets’:

I dot know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god…….’

And thereafter:

‘The river is within us, the sea is all about us.’

‘The Waste Land’ deals with a symbolic theme. The Waste Land of the poem is a symbol of a desolate and sterile country ruled by a powerless king. This pervasive sterility is soon identified as the sterility of the Puritan temperament.

Eliot derives from the conventional ironic, rather from the serious-aesthetic, tradition of symbolism. He tries to ‘transmit an objective view of society using an impersonal symbolism’. He has sustained better the correspondence between symbol and reality.