This section contains an interesting dichotomy between urban pollution and the natural world–and what each one might represent in terms of life and death. Eliot starts by placing the reader firmly in an urban city, with brown fog and large crowds of people who are described as being undone by death. The pollution of the atmosphere and repetition of the phrase “so many” makes the scene feel crowded, blurring the focus on life and death. It is not one person in an open plane of land pondering the death of a loved one, but the intersection of large scale life and the presumably constant presence of death. After line 70, this narrative shifts. Now Eliot has created an intimate scene between a small group of characters in which they are able to directly discuss the life cycle of a plant, which interestingly enough doesn’t go from life to death, rather from death to life. Eliot also refers to a plant sprouting, which doesn’t often happen in the Winter months of line 60, further separating the two scenes.

Lines 43-59 explore the theme of prophecy and tarot, but I find it interesting that rather than use the name of a real “fortune-teller,” Eliot refers to Madame Sosostris, a “famous clairvoyant” from Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow. Chrome Yellow is a satirical commentary on the “fads and fashions of the time”. Through his use of Madame Sosostris, who is also referred to as Mr. Scrogan, as a figure representative of prophecy, Eliot acknowledges the tensions between those who do and don’t believe in the truth of fortune telling. At the end of From Ritual to Romance, the author describes how Tarot may have been designed to predict the fertility of the land. The commentary on Mme. Sosostris’ readings could suggest that tarot has lost its original purpose, tainted by human greed for their own futures, or that the fertility of the land is in some way connected to human life. On line 55, Eliot wrote, “Fear death by water,” connecting the human life cycle with the natural life cycle (since tarot could have once been used to tell if there would be an excess of rain that negatively affected the fertility of the land).

I’m interested in the connection between this passage and the excerpt from the text by Countess Marie Larisch. Marie’s fear described here can be tied back to a fear of wartime and death (since she is staying at the house of Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination triggered WWI), similar to that described in Rupert Brooke’s letters. Her cousin says, “in the mountains, there you feel free,” yet the mountains are where she discovered the woman who awaits the return of her dead son. This signifies that death is inescapable.

I was also struck by the tone of Rupert Brooke’s letter. In the beginning, the narrator recounts his immense fear about the death that will be caused by the war that had just started. At the end of the poem, however, he says, “He thought often and heavily of Germany. Of England, all the time. He didn't know whether he was glad or sad. It was a new feeling.” The narrator’s view on the war has shifted away from the devastation of mass death to a “gladness” that could be triggered by acceptance or an understanding of the greater purpose of what was to come.

The title of The Burial of the Dead suggests that this chapter describes a ritualistic connection between life and death, man and god. These lines especially take on a narrative voice rather than the structure of a prayer and convey a similar message that death is intertwined with life, leading to both fright and freedom.

I was struck by the volume of changes between the opening of The Waste Land and the unpublished “He Who Do the Police in Different Voices.” Whereas The Waste Land immediately connects the poem to themes of decay, isolation, and the death of a landscape, the original title, taken from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, signals a focus on humanity. The line by Dickens from which Eliot takes inspiration, reads, “You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.” Sloppy, who was abandoned without a name as a child, is made out to be an awkward yet innocent foundling of Mrs. Higden. Although Mrs. Higden refers to Sloppy as a gentle soul, his upbringing and name refer to an unsanitized picture of society. Sloppy is derived from the noun slop, which translates to “mudhole” and “household liquid waste”. While Mrs. Higden uses slang, saying “He do the police,” Eliot corrects the grammar of the sentence, identifying Sloppy, or people like Sloppy, as the subject of the title. Not as different from the published, “The Waste Land” title as it may seem, “He Who Do the Police in Different Voices” identifies its subject as the waste people (for lack of a better term) rather than the waste land. The change in emphasis can also be observed in the contents of the first section of the draft versus the first section of the published edition. While the published version starts with, “April is the cruelest month” and goes on to describe the natural landscape, the first section of “He Who Do the Police in Different Voices” is written as a narrative, telling the story of a group of people going out for an evening. The focus of these sections has been shifted away from the human experience towards the natural world.

In my reading of the title and the three articles we were given, I found that each article addressed the connection between the death of the natural world and the loss of human life. Although all three articles reference the ties between the two different forms of life, The Golden Bough is most explicit in its description of the connection between human and nature-based prosperity, reading, “To them the principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was one and indivisible.” The Golden Bough continues by explaining that through rituals humans expressed their belief in the power of human lives and deities over the cycles of the natural world. In Le Morte D’Arthur, however, the death of King Labor triggered the degradation of two kingdoms. Just as in The Golden Bough human actions act as a catalyst for the events of the natural world, but here principles of death govern the interaction rather than life. The idea that the interconnectedness of human life cycle and the life cycle of the natural world are innate suggests that the title of “The Waste Land” alludes to the decay of man as well as the environment.