TS Eliot - The Wasteland

http://unit3englishlanguageaos2.wikispaces.com/file/detail/The+Waste+Land+What+the+Thunder+said.docx

The wasteland poem which is written by TS Eliot and is a formal written poem, with the purpose of informing the audience of shifts between satire and prophecy. The function of this poem is informative, the register in this poem is consultative due to the way the poem uses words such as "mud-cracked", readers will be attracted to this unique and different poem.

The lexical choice contributes to the level of formality in the text. In the poem there is a lot of repetition of verbs, there are examples of this is the first three lines following the opening of the word "the". An oxymoron is also taking place in the first few lines of the poem, "living is now dead". Onomatopoeia is present in the final paragraph of the first page, "drip drop drip drop". All of these factors contribute to the formality of this piece because they display clear English and standard English without any slang. There are high amounts of lexical repetition with lots of words such as "the", "and", "water", "rock", "a", "stop", "no", "of". This shows the text has a high amount of lexical repetition.

The context of the text contributes to the level of formality. The domain of the text is religion and education. The topic that is being discussed is people suffering. The audience would be any middle aged person who has an interest in reading poems or it could be VCE or University students because this is a famous poem studied many times. The context contributes to the poem's formality through the absence of slang. 

In terms of syntactic structure, parallelism is present in the text; "Stand nor lie nor sit", which occurs half way down the first page. As well as "Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded." The poem is dominated with a simple sentence structure as well as a few declaratives as they are single clause statements such as "A spring." 

TS Eliot combines the use of lexical choice, context and syntactic structure to create a cohesive and formal piece of poetry.