Part 2: Summary: A Game of Chess

     Check mate. A game of chess is a power struggle over who can capture their opponents King first. Like in chess, this section is about the struggle of relationships. In the first stanza alone, there are three failed relationships. From the line “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, glowed on the marble” – “From satin cases poured in rich profusion” we start with the first one that the speaker narrates. A woman is sitting in her Chair, which is capitalized – possibly meaning that she is royalty? The man with her hides ‘his eyes behind his wing’ so she drinks wine or ‘fruited vines’ to ease her pain of being rich and alone.      The second failed relationship goes from “Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes” – “stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.” Unguent, used in the text is a soothing preparation spread on wounds, burns, rashes, abrasions, or other topical injuries. Synthetic means fake, and so her ‘fake’ and strange perfumes that are in the air, and are ‘fattening’ the candles that are lit means that the perfume is dangerous, flammable, and probably not perfume. The smoke goes into the ceiling tiles, meaning that the candles are probably high up – torches! This alludes to the banquet given by Dido, queen of Carthage, for Aeneas, with whom she fell in love. However, the love between Dido and Aeneaus was definitely a failure. When Aeneas is fooled by a man who he believes to be a God, he leaves Dido to create a new Troy on Latin soil. Dido is shocked that he disappeared, and when he returns, she makes rejects him because he had actually thought of leaving her. After Aeneas leaves, she says that “Death must come when he is gone.” Their relationship fails.
     The third failed relationship isn’t necessarily a failed relationship, but a stolen one. Starting from the line, “Huge sea-wood filled with copper” to “and other withered stumps of time,” we are able to understand the happenings of what a ‘barbarous king’ does to a woman. We can feel the tone of the poem by using things like “sad light.” The “sylvan scene” is an allusion to a scene from an epic poem, Paradise Lost, where we are given a description of Eden through the eyes of the Devil. “The change of Philomel,” is an allusion to another poem by Elliot, Sweeney Among the Nightingales, that focused on a brutish modern man named Sweeney, that was in the company of disreputable women (nightingales) in a café and perhaps a brothel at night. Between the tone of the lines, the allusions and what they allude to, and the line “so rudely forced, yet there the nightingale filled all the desert with inviolable voice and still she cried,” makes it obvious that she was raped.  Elliot, using ‘nightingale,’ like he would have in his older poem, would have made it seem like having sex with woman was perhaps something easy – because they were disreputable and worked in brothels. However, in this instance, it wasn’t okay, so the ‘nightingale’ cried for help, when the people living in the ‘desert’ or wasteland didn’t care and ‘the world pursued.’
     The second part of this section is kind of dull. The man doesn’t seem interested in the woman or what’s going on at all. Their lack of communication backs up the idea of the lack of their relationship. The woman is asking the man to stay with her, she says her ‘nerves are bad’ – she’s nervous. “Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think.” The woman is asking the man to speak of what he’s feeling, and when he responds he avoids the question in a way that he starts to ask what the wind is doing, or what is going on outside. The man continues to ramble on, and in the end says that ‘we shall play a game of chess," the game that would continue to be their relationship struggle.
     The third and final part of section two is about an underclass woman struggling while her husband is away and when he returns from war. Demobbed was a term used for when someone got discharged from the army after the First World War.  A man named Albert was one that get demobbed after four years. His girl spent her time at the bar, “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” is a sign that the bar is closing – a sign that she’s there late. The woman’s friend, is telling her to smarten up and get herself together. Albert gave (his wife?) money to get new teeth, and while he was away she still hadn’t done so. She has a bad personal appearance that he ‘couldn’t bear to look at.’ Her friend, trying to convince her to get new teeth start to try to worry her – “he wants a good time, and if you don’t give it to him, there’s other will.” A good time meaning sex obviously, but if he thinks she’s hideous and is gross without teeth, than she’ll be left on her own. The woman however isn’t bothered by this and almost seems as if she’d be glad if someone else took him off her hands. She thinks to herself, that she’s only 31, has had 5 kids, and took pills to get rid of the last one. The ‘chemist’ or druggist told her it’d be alright, but she was never the same after. It seems as if she became bitter. When Albert returned home, they ate ham, which was a big thing because during WWI and the times after, it was hard to get and very expensive to buy – especially for underclass people.  The woman says goodnight to everyone she knows, and then kills herself due to her failed relationship.
     All of section two is about a lack of relationships or failed relationships. Most of the people in this section that end up having failed relations have a tragic end. Living in a wasteland, you’d need the people around you to survive. People without anyone felt that ending their lives were the easiest thing to do. Ironically, the couples and people throughout this section played minor chess games with each other, but in the end, they didn’t really want to play at all.