• I had a similar inclination to Stephanie in that these lines act like a synecdoche for the rest of the poem. Eliot explicitly revisits the Fisher King here to complete the cycle (uniting with the title), addresses his own use of fragmented poetry to bring unity to himself, brings in the French, London, tricolons, water, religious references, etc. in a sort of firework finale. But even with the Fisher King declaring "the arid plain" (The Wasteland) behind him, he questions the order of the lands. Eliot has yet to offer clarity on his "why" until now. The references to three in both content and form collide in a too-perfect almost obvious harmony that feels superficial in comparison to the level of ambiguity portrayed through the rest of the poem - a burgeoning dissonance that ironically leaves the story in limbo. At the heart of this last stanza rests a deficiency of a true explanation, that casts a shadow over the poem and leaves the readers questioning Eliot's real intentions.

Here Flamineo, having “riseth,” chastises the cunning and ingratious wives, adding to the negative portrayal of women but also establishing a moral compass that sets an important backdrop for the aftermath of not just Flamineo’s story but truly Eliot’s. Following the reference to Jerusalem and Jesus’ resurrection, it’s not implausible to view a “moment’s surrender” as a sin which “an age of prudence,” or repentance , “can never retract,” or absolve one from responsibility. From here, Eliot paints a grim outlook where one’s legacy cannot be ensured (the spider not spinning one’s tale), possibly referencing Arachne and the way her legacy was truncated by her hubris. As we near the end of the poem, this hinting at legacy makes me wonder if these characters just suspended in a perpetual purgatory, defined by this one “moment’s surrender” or have some sort of afterlife/sequel Eliot envisioned (404).

These lines literally undermine the structure of the poem in two ways: the breaking down of the towers is shown structurally by emphasizing the "falling towers" and subsequent words with enjambment + shortening line length, in an attempt to mimic the way the towers fall. More relevant to the meaning, the towers falling down here also undermines the parallelism to Byron, where the suspense of emptiness is surrounding "What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?" as opposed to the chapel. What adds to the confusion is that Eliot is not consistent in his parallel/juxtaposition - if changing the aspect of the tower to a chapel was important to Eliot (perhaps to further Biblical connections e.g. "Dry bones can harm no one) than the change would make sense, but Eliot also disrupts the "Not see" and "Not hear" with the "faint moonlight" shining and "the grass singing" (387)

Though anaphora has prevalent throughout The Wasteland, Eliot draws specific attention to these lines as his first tricolon of the poem. While there is no anaphora in Keats’ first three lines, a thematic parallelism exists citing specific components of nature (and even direct mirroring with “freezing”) and the later mention of “ To thee Spring shall be a triple mourn” reinforces the significance of the number three (and the first line of the poem, as does The Rite of Thunders “Light came from an unexpected quarter”). Perhaps this emphasis of the number three is to give full recognition to the intensity of the rituals (I briefly checked to see if there were three rituals or three steps to the ritual, but did not find a numerical association).

I also found the connection between Eliot’s living and dying akin to Keats’ antithetical relationship between “the light,” “Phoebus” (aka Apollo) and “the supreme darkness,” “night after night”. This dichotomy also appears between drinking and drought, an abundance of sweat (322) and then a deficiency (337), thunder without rain. However, once again, Eliot weaves in some contradictions to the pattern of opposition (like how the faces appeared red in the first and last line, and how one can neither sand nor lie nor sit).

The omission in the typescript draft of The Wasteland following “The sailor,” where Eliot writes “The sailor, attentive to the chart and to the sheets / A concentrated will against the tempest and the tide,” greatly interests me because of its seamless connection to The Tempest both in name here and in its thematic relation (especially with the earlier line in Death by Water describing how the sea “Picked his bones in whispers” and the first mention of the drowned Phoenician Sailor, where the sea in The Tempest plays an active role in his decomposition: “Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look! (See my earlier note for more context).

Perhaps this level of seamlessness was not necessarily the sense Eliot wanted to convey in his writing - for example, his alliteration of “tempest” and “tide,” while insightful, really just reiterates the emphasis on storm and sea that the readers already know. It appears that with Pound’s advice not to omit Phlebas, Eliot has distinguished exactly where he wants to draw the line between ambiguity and clarity.

Are griefs too then loved? More of Eliot finding comfort and clarity in the total overhaul of how we define what to view as positive and what counts as substance.

,where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves." Augustine had moved to Carthage at age 16 to study rhetoric, particularly Cicero. He reflects how there he not only found great inspiration to seek philosophical truths but within a city of opportunity and abundance, he found sin. While Augustine's writings are religious in of themselves and connect with Buddhist philosophy as well, this line in particular evokes imagery of The Garden of Eve, where within a bountiful safe haven (how Augustine views a lively, philosophy-filled Carthage) a snake whispers and tempts him (his newfound Carthaginian friends and concubine expressed here as "a cauldron of unholy love")

Speaking of Tiresias, Ovid writes: “He knew love both as a woman and a man…for that, he had been changed — a thing of wonder — from man to woman.”

While Tiresias’ physical features may change, his core trait of loving remains the same, like a variation on a theme. This idea of a variation on a theme in of itself represents a theme of Eliot’s: how he makes references that connect or repeat many lines apart (i.e. lines 60-61, 207-8, 377) creating space both physically by distancing references (hyperbaton) and metaphorically for readers to draw connections between allusions like that of Sappho’s ‘longshore’ or ‘dory’ fisherman and the Phoenician sailor.

This fragmented nature of Eliot’s references combined with his modernist focus makes his allusion to Sappho, a woman who’s erotic poetry was largely lost and too avant-garde for disapproving Church fathers, much more interesting. It also brings into question whether or not his Sappho reference and Tiresias reference supposed to act connected - not just by LGBTQ+ themes underlying (to which Saphho is often diminished to), but the reference to the sailor also conjures images of Tiresias’s encounters with those men, most notably meeting Odysseus seeking the Theban prophet in the Underworld (in Book X and XI of The Odyssey)

https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/8p58pj753

In a sort of resolution from lines 174-177, the narrator describes seldom hearing signs of humanity, placing the reader in an industrial setting reminiscent of the anaphoric "I see the swarthy Vulcan-reeking towns [Vulcan, Greek = Hephaestus, god of fire and forge], the belching chimneys, the slums...I see huge warehouses of Manchester, the many-storied mills" found in Towards Democracy.

In regards to Sweeney and Mrs. Porter, this is where Parliament of Bees come in. The double-allusion to Parliament of Bees and Eliot's earlier poem "Sweeney among the Nightingales" interested me as another example of Eliot molding mythology and other texts to suit his poem's needs.

the imagery shown here is akin to how one might picture a wasteland, but here, these objects perform the duty of showing a scene devoid of life - its own kind of empty-spirited wasteland.

The cross-textual conflation of water and fire appears as a metaphor for forces that both oppose each other and feed into each other. In the Baudelaire, passion is portrayed as “Guilty joys and exotic revelries, / With infernal kisses” In this sense, “infernal” can act as the heat of the moment, but also foreshadows how every flame eventually burns out: “A headless cadaver pours out, like a river”

This imagery is mirrored in The Aeneid, where it is described to Areas that “Dido takes you to her bosom, embraces you and imprints sweet kisses, you may breathe into her a hidden fire and beguile her with your poison.” Within passion and desire, manipulation reigns. This truth carries forward into the Baudelaire. Similarly, upon the quasi-resolution/reward of death, both “river water” and “drink” are mentioned.

In a slightly different take, Eliot’s pervasive fiery imagery with “Doubled the flames” “prolonged candle-flames” “Flung their smoke,” but most importantly in how it leads the woman’s hair to “spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still” leaves the body enflamed, without resolution. Even in the presence of “sea-wood” and “dolphin,” she is “troubled, confused / And drowned”

This lack of parallelism in the Eliot could leave the reader begging for a sense of completion, especially as the relationship between fire and water, that usually has a strong degree of clarity, is thrown up in a of cyclone of incertitude. This amalgamation of analogies, allusions, and thematic juxtapositions contributes to the chaos that defines The Wasteland.

To me, Line 48 felt emphasized with the parentheses, and vaguely familiar, almost as an aside in the middle of the poetry. To my satisfaction, I found it is a direct quote from The Tempest, from which Eliot seems to draw a few references from. In Act I Scene II, Ariel uses imagery to describe the death of King Alonso to Ferdinand, who thereby presumes his father is dead. Unbeknownst to Ferdinand, Ariel is manipulating the situation like a puppeteer, not dissimilar from the way that Eliot shares and draws back to situate his readers with a very specific balance of ambiguity and clarity. Here, Eliot is using the imagery of transformation through Tarot to perhaps speak to both a physical and emotional transformation that will be taking place (grief, acceptance of death, moving forward), which is interesting to contextualize within the imagery of water as a revival mechanism (@Stephanie)

There was a brief mention of drowning in Tristan and Iseult, but I'm not sure about the extent to which that could have inspired this line. However, it is worth noting that the pearls are mentioned again in line 124, and the Phonecian is mentioned in the first line of IV. Death by Water...

Brooke's line "A cloud over the sun woke him to consciousness of his own thoughts," stuck with me and brought me here. First, the paradoxical nature of a cloud allowing the young man to 'see the light' (in a secular or religious sense) matched the sublime obscurity of "breeding / lilacs out of the dead land," and bleeds into the theme of memory in the next line. In grappling with what seasons or weather are perceived by Eliot as "good," or at least a necessary (comforting?) evil, the Brooke led me to believe that Eliot could interpret the winter, where we typically picture life decaying, as a sort of awakening. I thought the Ezekiel properly acknowledged the significant interwoven roles of both the clouds and the brightness fused together, representing the Lord (or a synecdoche for nature/our world as a whole): [28] As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake.

Eliot shows off his classical training by introducing both latin and greek (perhaps in an attempt to mimic what actually happened) in an obviously bleak epigraph. However, the devil also appears in the details: Sybil is “blessed” with what is essentially immortality, living one year fore each grain of sand she could hold in her hand.

The epigraph reminded me of this excerpt from Conrad: “I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, nothing around…If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be”

As Rahul mentions, hubris continuously impacts greek mythology to the point of where most stories can be defined by it. But hubris also underscores the idea that the greatest loss is not losing life, power, prophecy, artistic skill, etc. itself, but rather the impact that it has (i.e. Arachne is still granted to keep her weaving abilities to create beautiful tapestries, but in spider form, there’s no one there to stroke her ego or appreciate it). Essentially, this made me question if the wasteland can sometimes be found in the most fruitful of lands. You can have the best seeds, water access, sunlight, but if the ground is infertile and bare of nitrogen and phosphorous, nothing will sprout. Power with the inability to reap the benefits is arguably worse than no power at all.