![]() In other words, problems are known as ‘karmic traps’ of the mind that make life a prison for people. The prison is the problems people have in their minds. Your perspective, and how you view the rest of the poem, should influence where you go from there. some external reason that varies depending on your reading of the poem. Either way, the passage certainly is on the topic of self-imprisonment and self-centeredness: that once we fall into that well ("Turn in the door once."), you can no longer get out of it - not because you're incapable, but because of. These are just a couple possible interpretations. We get caught in our own webs of thinking, and stop listening to what's going on around us. Interestingly, this point isn't necessarily contradictory with the notion that our prisons are ones of selfishness. We are instructed perhaps in its interior decoration, but not encouraged to seek escape.If each in his cell believes himself locked up forever, the last thing he wants to hear from a neighboring cell is the noise of scratching, poundings, screamings for the jailer. But consider how much of our literature, our high literature especially, and most especially our high poetry, confirms the prison. "We think of the key, each in his prison, / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison," wrote Eliot a half-century back, on the way to his conversion to Christianity. Steven Colbrun, in Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale (somewhat oddly) writes on this point: After a little digging, I found a good reference. We each hear the key, in our own prisons, without giving thought to the others who are also trapped in the same.īut it's also a commentary on the way poetry and literature as a whole locks itself into a cage of introspection. The prison could be one of the mind: we're each trapped within our own prisons, and in thinking of the key, we confirm that we are trapped in it. ![]() The key line here is actually the last one: Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison. ![]() Much of The Waste Land is a tirade on selfishness, portraying the harm it does to oneself. Elliot is trying to communicate a very subtle point, in something of a reverse order, and there are a couple possible interpretations of this. ![]()
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