Nature in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: A Critical Ecolinguistic Study

Critical & Analytical Essays
Nature in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: A Critical Ecolinguistic Study

Dr. Susanta Kumar Bardhan¹

¹ Associate Professor, Dept of English, Suri Vidyasagar College, Suri, Birbhum, West Bengal

Abstract:

Ecolinguistics, a relatively new sub-discipline of linguistics, is mainly based on the Sapir-Whorfian ideology of linguistic determinism which claims that the way we use language shapes our interactions with the environment. It is the study of “the life-sustaining relationships of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment, with a normative orientation towards protecting the systems that humans and other forms of life depend on for their well-being and survival” (Alexander and Stibbe 105). The relations of humans with other species and the physical environment are of great importance, since the continuation of all life depends on these ecological relationships. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is a frantic sincere expression of an agonized poetic soul to find out the means of getting rid of the mechanized stony cruelty-ridden modern life. The poem begins with a shocking sentential expression ‘April is the cruelest month breeding,’ but ends with the three-time asyndetic repetition of noun ‘shantih’ which a human being desires most. The present paper is a preliminary attempt to analyze and explore the poem from the perspective of ecolinguistics and to exhibit how poetic expression takes turns in depicting the integral relationship between all the constituents of environment affected by the ‘cruelest’ materialism and repaired by the peace-giving spiritualism.

Key Words: Nature, linguistics, ecolinguistics, language, ecology, modernism,

Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language. Language as a means of creative means of communication used by human beings has the structural, socio-cultural, psychological and geographical aspects or factors affecting its use and function. The linguistic system of any language is the outcome of the evolution in close association with both its native users and society or Nature or area where it existed, exists and will exist. It is evident that Nature and society jointly contribute in the health of the language i.e., its constituents. Hence language study has given birth to the several branches of linguistics like structural linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, ecolinguistics, etc. Among these, ecolinguistics is a relatively new sub-discipline of linguistics which got concrete shape in the last decade of the twentieth century. It is mainly based on the Sapir-Whorfian ideology of linguistic determinism which claims that the way we use language shapes our interactions with the environment. In 1972 Einar Haugen strongly argued and projected the need for ecological study of language and linguistic study of ecology and consequently showed the symbiosis and synthesis between ecology and language. The following quote from Haugen (1972/2001) substantiates his clear-cut views on the environment of languages:

The true environment of a language is the society that uses it as one of its codes. Language exists only in the minds of its users, and it only functions in relating these users to one another and to nature, i.e., their social and natural environment. Part of its ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with other languages in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers. Another part of its ecology is sociological: its interaction with the society in which it functions as a medium of communication. The ecology of a language is determined primarily by the people who learn it, use it, and transmit to others. (57)

Haugen’s ecology-centric linguistic perspectives i.e., language-ecology interractions made a scope for the study of language in relation to ecology giving birth to ecolinguistics as a sub-discipline of linguistics. Ecolinguistics can therefore be claimed to be the study of “the life-sustaining relationships of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment, with a normative orientation towards protecting the systems that humans and other forms of life depend on for their well-being and survival” (Alexander and Stibbe 105). The relations of humans with other species and the physical environment are of great importance both locally and globally, since the continuation of all lives immensely depends on these deeply integrated ecological relationships. Steffensen and Fill (2014) in their insightful article ‘Ecolinguistics: state of the art and future horizons’ have argued in favour of the coordinated intense relation between all components of ecological world including humans and the importance of language in sustaining this already existing relation for the benefit of all concerned. Here let us quote the relevant portion from Steffensen and Fill (2014) to drive home the idea:

. . .the extended ecology hypothesis links realms that have hitherto been separated: the domain of human agents enacting small-scale cognitive events through which our lives, projects and aspirations flow, and that of large-scale societal arenas structuring the sociocultural and technological resources at our disposal. It thus offers an explanatory framework for understanding, not just sociocultural resources (be they lexico-grammatical structures, discourses, communicative technologies, media, etc.) but, just as crucially, how such structures are integrated in what human agents do in their lived environments, the extended ecology. Thus, the extended ecology model sets out to overcome the ‘paradox of aboutness’ (i.e. the view that language is about nature, but not of nature) because it transcends the structuralist and post-structuralist appeal to self-sufficient languages and discourses sui generis. Finally, a naturalised language view may actually be better equipped for an ecological linguistics that contributes to critical studies. (157)

Steffensen and Fill (2014) also further argue unambiguously that the critical stance of ecolinguistics studies “how human practices impact on ecosystems” (21) and the Extended Ecology Hypothesis – or a similar approach – might be useful in coming to terms with how second order phenomena (discourses, grammar, wording) impact on our ecosystemic existence (21).

It is evident that a nature-centric view on language use at different levels and situations provides us with a solid basis for the critical study of language use and functions in nature and society. Further, it is generally assumed that there are no local truths, and so Steffensen and Fill (2014) claim that “truth about what language is and does cannot be separated from the truth about how we are living creatures on a blue planet in a dark and light universe” (21). Language devices exercise influence on the world giving space to different individuals in different contexts. The in-depth investigation of productions of language devices can be the litmus test of the ‘truth’ working behind the ecological enterprise of linguistics (see Fettes 2003). In Handbook of Ecolinguistics Fill and Penz (2015) have listed the three fundamental levels on which the future of ecolinguistics must be seen:

(1) The level of language diversity and all related topics, including minority languages, language endangerment and language death. The link between the loss of languages and the loss of species will provide further insights into language diversity and environmental diversity. Language diversity will also be looked at in areas of the Earth which have not yet been in the center of linguistic research.

(2) The level of language, discourse and the environment, where the role of language and discourse in describing, creating, aggravating, but more importantly helping to solve environmental problems will have to be discussed in more detail. On the level of discourse, both negative and positive aspects should be considered, and future investigations should increasingly consider different media (images, film, social media) and how they are combined with language in the traditional sense. In addition, the focus should lie on analyzing and enabling participatory discourses which allow the affected public to contribute their perspectives to those of science and politics.

(3) Ecolinguistics as a transdisciplinary science (or a dialectical philosophy) which transcends traditional linguistics and creates an awareness of the interdependency of all things and ideas (cf. Finke, 2014). Ecolinguistics, on this level, will be seen by many scholars as a philosophy of interaction and harmony. In this context, the development of ecolinguistics in China will deserve particular attention as there appear to be rapid developments in this country. (441-442)

From the above discussion we can safely state that one of the objectives of ecolinguistic analysis is to show how linguistic features or devices come together to form the particular worldviews or cultural codes, the sets of “shared values, norms, ethos and social beliefs” which reflect the community’s common sense (Gavriely-Nuri 80). Stibbe explains that ecolinguistics analyzes language with a view to revealing the stories we live by, “the mental models that influence behavior and lie at the heart of ecological challenges” (2). These are the cognitive, mental structures denoting “the secret reservoir of values” (un)consciously in the minds of multiple individuals in a particular socio-cultural context. The ecolinguistics as a scientific enterprise or discipline is thus concerned with the insights from the naturalized and realist philosophy of science and thereby with the various ecological dimensions projected in this state of the art. It attempts to look into the properties of language and to raise reflective consciousness about the existence of the interrelatedness and interdependence between discursive practices and ecological devastation. The famous linguist Michael Halliday’s keynote paper “New Ways of Meaning: the Challenge to Applied Linguistics”, delivered at the 9^th World Conference of Applied Linguistics in 1990, is considered to be a crucially critical turn for Ecolinguistics. In this paper, Halliday arguably claims that “classism, growthism, destruction of species, pollution and the like [...] are not just problems for the biologists and physicists. They are problems for the applied linguistic community as well” (199). In this way Michael Halliday had unfolded up the channel for linguistics to care about the environment in which language occurred and immensely contributed to the emergence of Ecolinguistics by raising a few but very relevant questions: “Do linguistic patterns, literally, affect the survival and wellbeing of the human species as well as other species on Earth?” (qtd. in Stibbe: 8).

To sum up, ecolinguistics assumes that the environment can be affected by the very use of language items such as vocabulary, sentences, text and discourse. It can lead to forest-desertification or desert-aforestation, killing or saving of living species, etc. Ecolinguistics strongly believes that people’s approach to languages, culture and (non-)biological surroundings is shaped by the stories or discourses they encounter in their day-to-day lives and language used helps them tell and retell these and influence the beliefs. It explores with scientific insights the crucial role of language in the causes and solution of the ecological problems. Ecolinguists are in favour of positive discourse analysis and critical of anti-ecology language. It denounces or discards those anti-ecology linguistic discourses that ignite anthropocentrism and grant humans the legitimacy to dominate or destroy other non-human species. Thus, ecolinguistics supports efforts for sustainable development and straightway denounces those moves leading to climate change, language endangerment, disappearance of species, imbalance in biodiversity, endangerment of nature-dependent cultures and heritage and in all, the death of ecosystems.

Now let us proceed to analyze T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922) from the theoretical perspectives of ecolinguistics, discussed so far. The Waste Land is a frantic sincere expression of an agonized poetic soul to find out the means of getting rid of the thoroughly mechanized stony cruelty-ridden modern life as developed during and after the World War I (1914-1919). The poem begins with a shocking sentential expression ‘April is the cruelest month breeding,’ but ends with the three-time asyndetic repetition of noun ’shantih’ which a human being desires most. Here as claimed above, we venture a preliminary attempt to analyze and explore the poem from the perspective of ecolinguistics and to exhibit how poetic expression takes turns in depicting the integral relationship between all the constituents of environment affected by the ‘cruelest’ materialism and repaired by the peace-giving spiritualism. Russell Elliott Murphy in the paper titled “The Waste Land and the Pedagogy of Tolerance” argues that the poem The Waste Land composed of plurality of voices upholds consistently one central point above all others and:

That point is the paradoxical and thereby ennobling commonality of human experience in the midst of each person’s sense of individual emotion and moral uniqueness to his or her own experiences. All human experiences are, to some degree, the same, particularly when we seek to categorize them into what Eliot calls art emotions or into moral imperatives. But no one has ever thought of his own most degrading or exalting experiences as run of the mill, and there hangs the tale of all tales. (111)

The Waste Land is, according to Murphy, “a memento vitae of everyday experience” (112) which has developed with a series of broken images in the five inherently and ideationally connected sections: ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’ and ‘What the Thunder Said’. The Waste landers are grappling with the inhuman, cruel hostile situations created and nourished by their own acts on Nature and society as traced in every bit of expression beginning with “April is the cruelest month breeding…”. Consequently, they have lost their ability to say or guess as their experiences of deep spiritual emptiness are centred in and round the “heap of broken images”. The second section ‘A Game of Chess’ the title of which has been taken from Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)’s play of the same name dealing with the seduction of a young girl in the background of the stage projecting the progress of a game of chess suggests that the relationships of men and women wearing masks in all spheres of modern urban mechanized life are nothing but the moves and countermoves in a game of chess, each of the parties trying to win over the other.

The third section ‘The Fire Sermon’ proceeds with the same vein of describing the aridity and inhumanity of contemporary urban life. The title ‘Fire Sermon’ borrowed from the Buddhist philosophy indicates the burning of lust and desire affecting natural life and this section attempts to give us some clear sermon-like allusions, much needed to overcome the mechanized life. The short section ‘Death by Water’ mainly upholds the contrast between the fire symbol with water one. The drowning Phoenician sailor recalls the fertility cult god. This hints at the hope of the spiritual rebirth through the burning of lust-and-sterility of the body and soothing by life-giving water. In the last section ‘What the Thunder said’ three themes such as the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous and the present decay of Eastern Europe which remain unresolved in this discourse. The poem ends with the Upanishadic expressions ‘Datta (to give) Dayadhvam (to surrender) Damyata (to control)’ which can bring ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ to this human world. And make it liveable and loveable. It is worthy to note here that Eliot with his intellectual, artistic intuition has made an extensive use of scriptural writings including the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and the Buddha's Fire Sermon, and of anthropological, cultural  studies such as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. In addition, Eliot has deftly quoted from or alluded to the works of great authors belonging to several languages like Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, Ovid, St. Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Kyd, Shakespeare, Donne, Middleton, Webster, Milton, Marvell, de Nerval, Tennyson, Wagner, Whitman, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Conrad, Hesse, Huxley and Shackleton. This undoubtedly substantiates the poet’s vast range of scholarship and a rare capability to handle such vast range of materials and to give a creatively rich shape of poetic unity to the poem of epical height.

In the sterility-dominated world there is as yet no room for faith, reason and conscience much needed for beatitude or the rituals of salvation. Eliot’s subject, as we see, is suffering in all spheres of life. By describing the modern arid world through the language and associations of a past time rich in spiritual insight, Eliot has tried to show his technique of analyzing the present Waste Land through contact with tradition which was governed by the fertility cults of ancient cultures, the rituals of the vegetation cults, closeness to Nature, love for all living beings, and the sense of cooperation, empathy, spirituality. The change from eco-centric past life on the Earth, a state closer to Paradiso, to the present Hellish urban life devoid of traditional values has been foregrounded by the skilful use of materials and ideas of both past and present.

In the Epigraph of the poem Cumaean Sybil’s expression of wish to die as sets the tone of the poem dealing with the barren waste land and is inhabitants cultivating greed, hypocrisy and cruelty. The idea of the man-made waste land has been projected in the poetic discourse with the language, myths, allusions and other devices. Hence Murphy argues:

The situations of the Sibyl and Marie, like those to come, of Lil and Albert or of the typist and the house agent’s clerk, or of Elizabeth and Leicester or of Ferdinand and Miranda, tell a commonplace story in particularized details that may change it with a certain sort of dramatic energy but cannot remove the tale from the universal and commonplace once that dramatic energy dissipated. The Sibyl is just another personality worn down by life; Marie is just another peer-pressured young person dropping names amid hints of high, perhaps even seamy, adventure. (111)

Again, in the poem the physical landscapes as depicted with help of names of places (like Holfgarten), streets (like King William Street), locations (like the Church of St. Mary Woolnoth), and more specifically, the Old Testament desert of ll. 19-36, the river banks of ll. 173-196, the mountainous or rocky space of ll. 331-394 and their atmosphere as a whole symbolically and ironically represent the modern world as arid desert full of ‘cactus’ as well as its stage of emotional and spiritual bankruptcy. Michael Thorpe in his article “Reading Spatially: The Waste Land and Spatial Form” aptly argues, “The reader must think ironically, aware of the great contradictions: between faith and illusion, ideal and reality, hope and despair, between the claims of western civilization and its failure: ‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal’—not, we may note, New York or Washington” (122). Such poetic representation is undoubtedly the outcome of the poet’s deep ecological consciousness which has evidently governed his comprehensive, allusive and indirect language use in exposing the disintegration, dislocation and complexity of urban imperialistic civilization and time marked by faithlessness, loneliness, envy, anarchy, hypocrisy, death of innocence, commercialized life, loss of creativity, etc. This is markedly evident in the projection of the pub culture development in a city like London. Here the relationships, be it conjugal, friendly, or some other social, are governed not by traditional human values but by wealth, status, external beauty and the like. In this context we can refer to a very poignant illustration made by Michael Thorpe in his article ‘Reading Spatially: The Waste Land and “Spatial Form”:

A running motif (leitmotif) in The Waste Land is that of time: time past, time present, the meaning and uses of time. At the close of the only passage that explicitly refers to the Great War, at the end of part 2, following the conversation in the pub about homecoming Albert, who’s ‘been in the army four years’ (148), the publican (or bartender) calls, HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME! While this is the common call at closing time in an English pub, it resonates strikingly against the previous passage where a middle class couple, not communicating, live in separate bondage in a time they cannot kill (which will kill them). The male, whose interior consciousness we register (an interior monologue) thinks ‘we are in rats’ alley/ Where the dead men lost their bones’ (116). Eliot’s note points us forward to another allusive layer of meaning (Pt. 3, 195), we may also think of the trenches in the recent war’s battle fields, which the troops christened with the names of streets or alleys, and where the very ramparts were buttressed with the corpses of the dead, whose flesh the swarming rats gnawed clean. ‘We’ are enveloped by that experience, and we too shall die—but how shall we meanwhile resume life and make it meaningful? (122)

The whole representation of the poetic discourse of The Waste Land reflects the undercurrent of thought and language in the deeper level of the poet’s mind where ideas or thoughts are given linguistic shapes. Here Eliot having been conversant with the knowledge of both past and present situations due to his wide range of reading and experience and having been endowed with the highly insightful pragmatic poetic soul has easily reached his desired goal in representing the present situation in contrast with the past. Due to the space limitation some illustrations are being given for substantiating our claim. One glaring instance is the first four lines which describe the month April as ‘cruelest’:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain. (ll. 1-4)

in contrast with first four lines of Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales which project soothing and productive April:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, 

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, 

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur 

Of which vertú engendred is the flour; (ll. 1-4)

The city space does not provide freedom to the narrator and so he expresses:

And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. (ll. 16-18)

The present death-in-life situation of modern urban man has been upheld by the language which underlyingly suggests the opposite i.e., the positive joyful life of love in the lap of Nature.

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer. (ll. 38-42)

In the ancient time the life, be it urban or rural, was nor ‘unreal’ as well as claustrophobic s perceived the modern man as shown below:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many. (ll. 60-63)

As the narrator journeys down the memory lane, he can easily identify the development of hypocrisy (in place innocence and simplicity) among his contemporaries including the reader as conveyed by the use of a line from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Flower of Evils’:

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” (l. 76)

The hypocrisy practiced by the urban people takes a vicious shape in the form of deception, vulgarity, seduction and spiritual emptiness as portrayed in the second section ‘The Game of Chess’. The references to the mythical story relating Philomela and other are the markers of the existence of the closeness between the man and Nature from the time immemorial and but now man has distanced from the mother Nature in many ways as discussed above.

Buddhism, as we know, is out and out eco-centric or ecosophical religion and Natural resources remain at the centre of human existence. The pleasant landscape dominated by river and its constituents and folktales relating to this (suggested by ‘nymphs’) has been replaced by cityscape dominated by river polluted by the factory-wastes (e.g., ‘oil and tar’), dry rocks, stony rubbish, brown land, and other waste materials of industries and cities. This has been foregrounded by putting the opening line of Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’: “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.” in the midst of the following lines:

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.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors; (ll. 173-180)

That the disappearance of human life in and around Nature has caused the imbalance in the physical, mental, psychological and spiritual aspects of life evidently haunts the poet. In the love poem “To His Coy Mistress” Andrew Marvell, the 17^th century poet, conveys the value and swiftness of Time, as captured in the following quote:

 But at my back I always hear 

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; (ll. 21-22)

while Eliot, the 20^th century poet, along with other urban people including Mrs. Porter hears the sounds of factory sirens and machines:

But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. (ll. 196-198)

The factory-based urban life and life-style divorced from the bliss of Nature exercise a telling effect on the individual’s mind, as evidenced by the following lines:

My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. (ll. 296-297)

and hence he/she admits his/her miserable inability to do something constructive for the Earth which is ‘Burning, burning, burning, burning’ (l. 308) at large:

On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Nothing.’ (300-306)

The burning individual here frantically prays for ‘water’ which can only transform the waste land into livable one in close association with Nature. ‘Water’, as we know, is the one of most vital natural resources for life on Earth and so symbolizes life, life-force, purity, purifying agent, simplicity and innocence, and peace which were very much present in the ancient agrarian society but now absent in the present industrialized and commercialized city called waste land where

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience (II. 328-330)

In order to overcome this crisis of modern urban civilization, the poet having deep eco-consciousness is seen exploring several alternative means to have water and thereby to reestablish Paradise-like ancient world congenial for all free from stony rubbish and full of fresh healthy air and water. The repeated use of subjunctive mood starting with “If there water - - -“ indicates the poet’s sincere hope and wish to have water so that Nature can again occupy its old role on Earth and ecological balance is reestablished with fuller strength. It is to be noted that the city life marked by decay, stones, rocks, cracks, fragments, dryness, faithlessness, alienation, boredom, death-in-life state has been projected as ‘unreal’ time and again. Eliot being a modern progressive thinker believes that the present state of the city life is not the original or fundamental or real one but one imposed by mechanized urban society. Hence Eliot with his sound command over both Eastern and Western knowledge systems seeks the means or ways of bringing back the ‘real’ and ultimately finds that in the Upanishadic dictum: ‘Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata’. If humans rigorously follow this universal bio-centric principle replacing narrow anthropocentric capitalist principles, our Earth is sure to become again an abode of heavenly bliss i.e., ‘Shantih’ in integral association and collaboration of Nature which is, William Wordsworth in his poem “Tintern Abbey” (1798) says:

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused (II. 94-96)

Nature possesses immense power to shape the moral, psychological and spiritual consciousness of man generated ad nurtured by Nature itself. In his sonnet ’Sobhyotar Proti’ composed in 1896, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) also rejects iron-wood-stone-built civilization and craves for getting back life-in-Nature: “Give us back the sylvan past, take away today’s cities.”

We wish to conclude the present ecolinguistics study by making a very brief observation on the number of occurrence of seven crucial words arranged in ascending order used in The Waste Land representing so called urban civilization and Nature. Here is the data given below in the form of table:

Notice that the first five words ‘stony’, ‘unreal’, ‘city’, ‘dead’ and ‘rock’ used in this poetic discourse in various contexts both denotatively and connotatively represent the urban existence detached from Nature and Nature-centric life of all living beings. Significantly enough, the two words ‘air’ and ‘water’ which, as the above table shows, occur fourteen (14) and eighteen (18) times in this poem constitute the most fundamental components for all the healthy and spirituality-rich lives on the Earth. The linguistic data suggest that fresh ‘air’ and ‘water’ ONLY can bring back past glorious life, mainly governed by bio-centricity and ecospirituality in place of sterile ‘Unreal city’ life mainly governed by artificiality, wealth, pollution, faithlessness and inhumanity.

To be precise, the present study shows that this very much modernist writing with linear narrative and varying time, place and setting helps us see connections and get a sense of a larger whole, if not final definition. Following Wordsworth we can say in the conclusion that there is no other alternative left before us but to ecology-governed civilization and embrace Nature as

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being. (Tintern Abbey II. 109-111)

Otherwise, we cannot but remain engulfed in mechanized ‘unreal’ and ‘dead’ urbanity represented by Eliotesque noun phrases like ‘A heap of broken images’, ‘The sound of horns and motors’, etc. The present ecolinguistic exploration of poetic uses of language dominated by Nature and its soothing effect has foregrounded the suggestion that the poem The Waste Land is an ecospiritual journey from an ‘Unreal city’ to a world in the lap of Nature endowed with all pervading ‘Shantih’ i.e., PEACE, symbolically represented by ‘water’.

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