To the Indians who died in South Africa - T.S. Eliot.pdf

The more one tries to say about T.S. Eliot, the more one fumbles for adjectives to describe the prodigious genius. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965) was born in America (St. Louis) to a family where tradition was in commerce and academic studies. Eliot, educated at Harvard and settling in England in 1915 and acquiring citizenship in 1927, became the editor of the imagist periodical The Egoist and the critical journal The Criterion. Through these periodicals, he molded public opinion according to his ideas about art, classics, their meanings, and their importance in our society. Equally prolific is his poetic career, where he wrote poems like The Wasteland, Hollow Men, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, etc. Besides, the poems he also wrote a number of plays like Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, etc.

1. To the Indians who
died in South Africa -
T.S. Eliot

This poem is by T.S Eliot. The poem is about feelings
of a soldier who is survived in war. In the end poet
remembers Indian soldiers who died in south Africa
in war and states that they are buried there so now
that is their homeland.
Wherever a man may be, there is one place he yearns
to be and the place is his home, his native place. He
longs for his home and hearth, for the food cooked by
his wife. He wishes to sit at his door peacefully
enjoying the sunset and watch his grandchildren
playing in the dust with the grandchildren of his
neighbour. These feelings are of a soldier after the
war is over.
The soldier at the end of his career has luckily
survived the war in spite of receiving many scars on
the battlefield. He has memories of the war and of the
foreign soldiers he met during the war who were like
his fighting away from their homeland. These
memories come to him when conversing with people.