What is the significance of the phrase “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” in TS Eliots The Wasteland?
At line 139 the scene changes to a pub, presumably in England after WWI. A woman customer is telling a friend of advice she had given to Lil. It is closing time and the publican needs to get his customers to leave so he calls to them loudly HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. Typical of customers, they don’t go immediately,and the story of Lil continues until it suddenly gets cut off by the publican reminding them again and again and progressively more urgently that he wants them to go! Once they on the way out they begin farewelling each other using first names.They know each other, so clearly the pub is the ‘local’, that is, the place where the same few go almost every night, mainly to socialise, whilst drinking a convivial glass. The final line of this section of the poem is spoken by the publican, now in a quieter voice, wishing the ladies good night. A clever touch here is that he uses the same words that Ophelia spoke in “Hamlet” after she had gone mad. Maybe he did it deliberately, just f
