An essay on the first stanza of 'A game of chess'

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An essay on the first stanza of ‘A game of chess’

Through calling this poem ‘A game of chess’, Eliot continues with the theme he starts in ‘The burial of the dead’ of people who are trapped in a wasteland and making no effort to escape it, so are therefore stuck like a those in a check-mate during a real game of chess.

The title is also a reference to ‘Women beware women’ by Middletone, a story in which a mother-in-law is playing chess, unaware that each move she makes on the chess board is matched by a move in the seduction of her daughter-in-law by the duke in the story. The reference to Middleton’s ‘Women beware women’ gives a depiction of passion and lust which Eliot uses as a contrast in the poem.

In the first stanza, Eliot describes a room that is elaborately decorated and filled with beautiful items such as,

                “Sevenbranched candelabra”

and

                “Vials of ivory and coloured glass.”

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Even though the room is decorated expensively, through listing the expensive items, he devalues them using bathos and parodying the woman’s efforts to create a room that is full of amazing items and ending up devaluing them. He compares the lady’s room to Imogen’s bedroom in ‘Cymbeline,’ through the mention of cupids, symbols of love. To stress the fact that although the woman has them, they are not full of life like the ones in Imogen’s bedroom.

The woman in the room, a metaphor for people in the wasteland, is completely artificial and Eliot shows us that he disapproves of ...

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