This is a direct quote from the beginning of Wagner's opera, Tristan und Isolde: a sailor's song, singing about the wind blowing fresh towards home and asking an Irish girl where she was lingering. This song is performed at the beginning of the story, before the fateful encounter of Tristan and Isolde, the couple's passionate and consuming love affair. Eliot places the quote right after the memory of the hyacinth garden which follows. It's a scene full of romance and eroticism and, interestingly enough, one which ends not in consummation but in the speaker's utter silence and paralysis ("I knew nothing... the silence"). The Wagner quotation sets up an expectation of grand romantic union that the poem's own scene refuses to deliver. It's the same technique as the "Shakespeherian Rag" moment later; high art quoted directly, then undercut by what actually happens around it. Here the gap isn't ironic so much as devastating: real operatic passion promised, and then only emptiness delivered in its place.

In the case of “The Waste Land”, the title refers to a place that is empty, barren and unable to support life. This is used by Eliot as an analogy in order to symbolize the desolation of modern times in relation to the spiritual and emotional aspects of life. In addition to this, the title also makes references to the legend of Fisher King in which an ailing king causes his kingdom to become barren and infertile. The only way of restoring fertility of the land lies in curing the king by using the Holy Grail as a means of spiritual redemption. It shows that the modern world is analogous to the kingdom of Fisher King in the sense that it is isolated, destroyed, and lacks spirituality but still holds possibilities of renewal.