Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-95.149.5.49-20160729002848/@comment-25316824-20160927025645

SomeoneYouUsedToKnow wrote: Nikoli the rebel wrote:

1-Its importance is not to be understated and I highly reccomend it to anybody interested in poetry.

2-RWBY references it several times in my literary interpretation. 1-How come I've never heard it in more than 15 years then? Or even saw any off-hand mentions of it?

2-Does it? Where, when, how? 1. How much poetry have you heard of? How many off hand mentions? I don't want to assume you are un educated but I might be able to explain why you haven't heard of it if you explained to me how hard you have been listening. Additionally, if you are 15 years old that might explain it as well. Most people don't get into poetry properly until they have graduated highschool and then their interest fades as they settle down.

2. The poem is rather long (433 lines) and its references are pretty obscure but I will go over a few.

2a. The opening vignette depicts a memory of a now lonely german aristocrat girl looking back with nostaglia on her past and wishing for the good ole days. She famously states "April is the Cruelest Month" a play on words of the prologue of the Canterbury Tales which had an opposite view of the month. That aside, she says that "Winter kept us warm with its forgetful snow" and she appears to like the winter very much (in contrast to April which is the quintessential spring month). Additionally, Wiess Schnee is German for White Snow.

Wiess will likely be longing for those good ole days in volume four just like the german aristocrat girl longs for days gone by in the first vignette of "The Wasteland". Additionally, in the white trailer Wiess Schnee is specifically asking the mirror who is the loneliest of them all and the answer is Wiess. We don't have a lot of characterization of the girl/woman in The Waste Land or of Wiess up to this point but what we do have is strikingly similiar.

2b. The second vignette depicts a prophetic journey through an abandoned desert where everything is dead and overall very depressing. We see that the narrator is stopped by a man under a red stone which provides shelter and the man offers the narrator shelter but also "Fear in a handful of dust".

The narrator very much reminds me of a young, lost Blake trying to figure out what to do with her life after the change of power in the White fang or another emotionally challenging time. Adam reminds me of the threatening and yet comforting man who seeks to lure the passer by under his red stone which represents both continued survival and temptation.

Specifically, it likens itself to Jesus's temptation in the desert, after which he choose to become a rabbi (Hebrew for teacher). So we see that Blake has been tempted by Adam's ways and has rejected them to continue her journey. There are other ways in which Blake resembles Jesus, Moses, and Muhammed but those are for another day.

If you are still reading this literary analysis in the end then I applaud you for your incredibly tenacity. There are FAR more links between rwby and The Wasteland and I am sure a literature professor could write several novels just on those similiarities. But that is the amazing thing about The Waste Land. If you look hard enough you will always find more connections then you ever thought you could and links to both literature of the past and literature of the future.

TLDR:  There are a lot of connections.