While death and rebirth are common threads throughout the poem and in Baudelaire's works as well, Eliot doesn't depict how those left behind by the dead fare, from a personal perspective. All of his depictions of death come from the third person, as one watching the death unfold around them as he did, and not offering his own opinion on it. Like Eliot himself said, the authors own mind should remain seperate. Here in these lines he offers his first reading of a companion left behind in ruin, yet not a human companion, but a dog whose owner has died, and longs to be reuited with his master. Baudlaire on the other hand shows the way that seeing horror and cruelty can affect someone not even directly associated with the hurt. Eliot tries to distance human emotion from his poetry. and present an arbitrary depiction of loss, while Baudelaire embraces human suffering on a more personal level.

There are many undertones in this part of Eliot's narrative of the girl who recieves flowers from the man who is courting her. Read after the initial foreign text from a sailor seeking kind winds returning him home to his lover on a distant Irsish shore, the quotation marks around this phrase and the previous 'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;' could be a distant lover remembering fondly when he was last reunited with his girl uner positive terms. The quotation marks indicate that the words were said by someone else, or something that the speaker has heard before. Hyacinths have a deep purple color, and a sweet smell, and since Hyacinth himself was a close friend to Apolo, there is evidently deep affection beteween the speaker and the person they remember. However the second part from lines 36-39 take a dark turn, which is then foretold after the fact by the clairvoyante, who foretells "fear water" and there is a rememberence of wet hair, as if the person who went to collect flowers came back a changed person, not physically dead, but perhaps emotionally changed in an unalterable way.

After reading the story of the Countess Larisch and her ostracization after the scandal in the Austrian court there is a clear connection between the two. In terms of the voice and changing of narration within Eliot's poem, I disagree with the idea that a poem can be separated from the author that writes it simply by creating distance from a personal experience. If all of peotry was created simply by imagining and creating works of fiction with no connection to the creator's suffering, then the action and emotion portrayed within the poem would be unrealistic. Writing from within the bounds of a city under siege during the war, Eliot personally had a specific viewpoint on nature and the natural world being a freeing place.

The rest of Europe was also affected by the war, and this specific section could be interepreted as a child sent to the countryside in order to escape the violence of the city, like many rich parents across Europe did to protect their families. There is the initial feeling of fear at the height and total freedom atop the mountain, but also the sense of something being off with the rest of the world as well.

Eliot's original beginning of He Do the Police in Different Voices depicts the story of a party night around the town, where the narrator has many different stages of the night at a brothel, various clubs, and walking around the street. Both beginning sections tell narrative events, perhaps more so than the rest of the parts of the poem. The standout in the more recent version is the inclusion of German in the recent version. The lines translate to discuss Irish blood, and the blowing of the wind toward home, much like in the original when the narrator talks about the drunk people at the bar laughing and singing about being Irish. The poem was written at a very special time for Ireland, where the were fighting their war for independence, and forming a new country.

Additionally I am focusing on these lines about the hyacinth girl. In tonights reading, there is much more description of city life and living in the big city, whereas in these lines nature and flowers are more prominant as ways to woo women. In the brothel in the previous poem, women are shown as objects for men to enjoy while they are drunk and enjoying themselves, while here in this version there is more emphasis on wholesome relationships and courtship.

In human history we have continually come up with myths to explain natural cycles and to explain the meaning behind rituals we perform. In the various stories posed "The Golden Bough" each culture uses their myths to pose warnings to people, such as the Babylonian-Syrian myth of Tammuz and Ishtar in which every year Ishtar's death led to Tammuz having to venture into the underworld to revive him. In Tammuz's absence, the world fell into disarray and carnage, becoming a barren land where, "the passion of love ceased to <br /> operate: men and beasts alike forgot to reproduce <br /> their kinds: all life was threatened with extinction" (Frazer, 9). This barren loveless land is an early depiction of an unproductive wasteland, and is an explanation for times in human history when humans struggled to survive. Wastelands don't have to be literal, but rather can be metaphors and explanations for struggles throughout the history, when other explanations are outside of human understanding and comprehension. Eliot's wasteland can be perceived as the physical destruction left behind by World War I, but to me it is more than a physical description. Eliot uses the title to discuss a time in human history when the world as a whole was in a confusing freefall, every country having to regroup after the terror of the war. After such destruction, it takes time for literary and artistic practices to return to their full force, and in this time there is a barrenness of art and culture, as mourning and recovery takes precedent.