Clear Light of Day

by

Anita Desai

T.S. Eliot Term Analysis

T.S. Eliot was a major British-American Modernist poet. Bim frequently quotes his poem The Waste Land (1922), and his Four Quartets (1943) likely inspired this novel’s four-part form and much of its symbolism.

T.S. Eliot Quotes in Clear Light of Day

The Clear Light of Day quotes below are all either spoken by T.S. Eliot or refer to T.S. Eliot. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Family, Love, and Forgiveness Theme Icon
).
Part 1 Quotes

“Old Delhi does not change. It only decays. My students tell me it is a great cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping graves. Now New Delhi, they say is different. That is where things happen. The way they describe it, it sounds like a nest of fleas. So much happens there, it must be a jumping place. I never go. Baba never goes. And here, here nothing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened lone ago—in the time of the Tughlaqs the Khiljis the Sultanate, the Moghuls—that lot.” She snapped her fingers in time to her words smartly. “And then the British built New Delhi and moved everything out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting duller and greyer I suppose. Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes away—to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They don’t come back.”

Related Characters: Bim (speaker), Tara, Baba, Bakul
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4 Quotes

With her inner eye she saw how her own house and its particular history linked and contained her as well as her whole family with all their separate histories and experiences—not binding them within some dead and airless cell but giving them the soil in which to send down their roots, and food to make them grow and spread, reach out to new experiences and new lives, but always drawing from the same soil, the same secret darkness. That soil contained all time, past and future, in it. It was dark with time, rich with time. It was where her deepest self lived, and the deepest selves of her sister and brothers and all those who shared that time with her.

Related Characters: Bim, Misra Brothers (Brij, Manu, and Mulk)
Related Symbols: The Das House
Page Number: 182
Explanation and Analysis:
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T.S. Eliot Term Timeline in Clear Light of Day

The timeline below shows where the term T.S. Eliot appears in Clear Light of Day. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1
Family, Love, and Forgiveness Theme Icon
Memory, Change, and Identity Theme Icon
Art and Social Divisions Theme Icon
...there after her death in the summer of 1947, and she quotes a verse from T. S. Eliot . Unbeknownst to Bim, Tara has spent her whole life “both admiring and resenting” Bim... (full context)
Part 2
Family, Love, and Forgiveness Theme Icon
Memory, Change, and Identity Theme Icon
Gender and Indian Culture Theme Icon
Art and Social Divisions Theme Icon
...which reminds her of a verse about “the third who walks always beside you” from T. S. Eliot ’s The Waste Land. (full context)
Part 4
Family, Love, and Forgiveness Theme Icon
Memory, Change, and Identity Theme Icon
Art and Social Divisions Theme Icon
...and frustration,” as though he were approaching death. Bim takes comfort in a line from T.S. Eliot : “Time the destroyer is time the preserver.” Since Mulk and his guru have learned... (full context)