In Angela’s annotation for this line, she interrogates the true nature of friendship, claiming that friendship in “The Waste Land” appears in relation to “indifference” and “superficiality” (Li). She cites Bradley as one of her sources, specifically, "a common understanding being admitted, how much does that imply? What is the minimum of sameness that we need suppose to be involved in it?" (Bradley, 6). The word “understanding” specifically caught my attention, as it is central to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. This line of “The Waste Land” is in reference to the part of the Upanishad that means “give”: “Then the human beings said to him, ‘Teach us, father.’ He spoke to them the same syllable DA. ‘Did you understand?’ ‘We understood,’ they said. ‘You told us, “Give (datta)”’” (Brihadaranyaka, Chapter 2). Yet, although the humans were instructed to give, Eliot appears to extend this scene, resuming it when the humans reflect upon the past, asking “what have we given?”

The deception and failure of friendship that Angela identifies as it relates to this line may also provide an answer to the shortcomings of the humans to “give.” Before the line Angela quotes, Bradley states, “what, however, we are convinced of, is briefly this, that we understand and, again, are ourselves understood” (Bradley, 6). Very clearly, Bradley accuses the human race of being under an illusion of understanding one another. If they are under the illusion of understanding, then the credibility of the humans in the Upanishad is completely undermined when they say that they “understand” what datta means. Possibly, they misunderstand what it means to “give,” or, Eliot may be making the claim that they misunderstood the meaning of datta itself as it exists in the universe of the poem. With this in mind, it makes sense that the humans are unable to point to what they’ve given in “The Waste Land.” They are left without direction, and, according to Bradley, they are condemned to failure in connecting, or “giving” themselves to one another. Even “my friend” implies an antithesis to “give”--possession. Eliot seems to agree with Bradley’s proposal that friendship, relationship, true exchange between one person and another is something beyond human understanding.

Here Eliot references the passage from Dracula when Dracula climbs down the side of the wall: “I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings” (Stoker, 2), and subsequently Byron’s Dark Tower: “Into that ominous tract which, all agree, // Hides the Dark Tower” (Byron, 14-15). To break this down, the “bats” in “The Waste Land” represent Dracula, a symbol of terror and psychological torment. Through Dracula’s perspective, Lord Byron’s Dark Tower has been inverted. The word “ominous” recalls Eliot’s fascination with Tarot cards and brings to mind the “Tower” tarot card, which, read upright, signifies impending doom and destruction. However, inverted, that unfavorable omen changes its meaning, commonly associated with the denial of the aforementioned doom and destruction. Because of his upside down perspective, Dracula has essentially controlled the inversion of this card. Potentially, this would translate as a voluntary dismissal or rejection of chaos and destruction by the human psyche, specifically, the part of the human psyche that drives fear and terror.

Additionally, a second read of these two lines reveals that the orientation of Dracula in the scene may not actually be as simple as it seems. Eliot uses a rather redundant “downward down,” which is aligned with “upside down” in the next line. Perhaps the double “down” simply serves to emphasize. But, alternatively, it might negate itself, thus the orientation of the bats is actually right-side-up, making the orientation of the towers upside down from a right-side-up perspective, truly hanging from the “air.” Likely, Eliot meant to disorient the reader by confusing the orientation of perspective. In the context of our tarot card, this means the prophecy flips in every permutation of upside down and right-side-up in these lines–an ever changing future. Furthermore, the idea of a turbulent prophecy is nested within the context of the meaning of the card itself–chaos. Thus, Eliot has managed to completely muddle the perspective of the reader, as well as any definition in the image of the future.

Parth’s annotation on this line introduces an interesting interpretation of its origins in Antony and Cleopatra. He identifies that “this line is an imitation of a line we see early on in Antony and Cleopatra—with one change: the word "barge" is changed to a capitalized "Chair" here…Chair might not be referring to a literal chair, which isn't a proper noun—but an organizational position. A "Chair" in a company is an executive position; likewise, a metaphorical Chair in a kingdom may refer to one's supreme status” (Jain). I’d like to expand the scope of the Antony and Cleopatra reference beyond specific lines that Eliot incorporated into “The Waste Land,” now through Parth’s lens of Cleopatra’s status and power within the play, her “Chair” within Antony and Cleopatra, and therefore “The Waste Land” as well. When reading Antony and Cleopatra, I couldn’t help but take note of the many ways in which Cleopatra both adopts the role of the queen in a literal game of chess. In a very broad sense, Cleopatra’s decision to fake her own suicide, to temp Antony with her death, is quite analogous to the physical and strategic features of the queen on a chess board. For example, while Cleopatra plots to win the attention of Antony, she says, “I have nothing Of woman in me: now from head to foot // I am marble-constant” (Shakespeare, V.II). In portraying herself as hard as marble, she renders herself part of a chess set, as they are often made of marble. The image of a chess board is then transferred to the marble as it appears here in “The Waste Land,” further convincing me that Cleopatra is the queen of Eliot’s chess set as it is understood in “A Game of Chess.” Additionally, Cleopatra embodies the characteristics of a chess piece as a powerful strategic asset when used correctly. She even says, “come hither, come! come, come, and take a queen worth many babes and beggars” (Shakespeare, V.II). “Take” is the terminology in a game of chess for the capture of a piece. I believe it’s possible that both Shakespeare and Eliot recognized the parallels between Cleopatra’s actions and the act of sacrificing a piece in the game of chess. However, Cleopatra’s move was in vain, and ultimately, when she sacrifices her life, amounts to nothing. In other words, the power she possessed through her “Chair” is only valuable insofar as it is spent to win the Game of Chess. Meanwhile, the woman in “The Waste Land” also sits dead on her throne, her status reduced, presumably having met a similarly wasteful fate.

I would like to elaborate on Quisha’s point in her annotation for this section. She investigates the similarities between the original epigraph from Heart of Darkness, and the one from Ovid in the final draft, stating that the Sybil “deems her body as if it is a piece of waste. Kurtz is similar – he is ill; his health in a wasted state. The moment before his death he, too, is filled with superfluous knowledge; yet he cannot make use of it for death soon transcends him. The two epigraphs do resemble each other in many ways, and I'm curious about the exact reason as to why Eliot chose the one of Sybil over Kurtz” (Lee). I think she does something really interesting here by connecting the title of the poem to the epigraph, which is further supported by Weston’s way of connecting the physical condition of a person to the state of the land itself. This suggests that Eliot intended for Kurtz, and later the Sybil, to embody the Waste Land, the poem itself. That said, I believe the Sybil epigraph actually accomplishes this in a more complete way, which is why Eliot chose it.

To begin, Eliot’s original title for “The Waste Land” was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. We see here the origins of the polyphony of different voices throughout the poem–in the final draft, the multitude of voices essentially constitutes the poem itself. When Eliot swapped this title for something that didn’t directly relate to the “Different Voices,” He likely sought to compensate using the epigraph. Like the Sybil, Kurtz wishes to die. He says, “I am lying here in the dark waiting for death” (Conrad, 3). However, unlike the Sybil, when he is on the brink of death, he actually loses his voice: “he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a whisper” (Conrad, 3). Considering the time Eliot spends alluding to various hellscapes and states of death throughout the poem, it simply does not suit the form of the poem if the establishing character were to lose their voice in death, or, as Quisa pointed out, when their body becomes a waste land.

The Sybil, on the other hand, serves Eliot’s purpose beautifully. She, too, wishes for death, perpetually suffering as she wastes away in this in-between state. However, significantly she retains her voice. As she leans closer and closer to true death, more and more of her physical being deteriorates. Not only is her voice one of her defining characteristics, but if her body is “The Waste Land,” is Eliot’s poem itself, then it too assumes an perpetually shrinking quality. Her physical form grows smaller and smaller, approaching a state of nothingness, but (for the purposes of this investigation) never reaching it. Mathematically, an infinitely diminishing quantity is considered to approach zero. Zero is a very difficult number to define in the realm of reality. It is nothing, yet it is nothing in a pluralistic sense–it is “not any,” but that is not the same as “not one” or “not 10.” If the Sybil and her voice, and therefore “The Waste Land” and its voice, can be defined as zero, we see that The Sybil successfully represents the indefinite cacophony of the voices of the poem, as well as its tendency towards a state of nothingness.

Eliot’s interest in death by suicide (as we see in the Sybil epigraph) is brought to life here in an overlap of Shakesphere references. Of course, the first line here is an echo of the Tempest reference in Burial of the Dead. Notably, it is a reference to Alonso, who tried to drown himself upon hearing false news of his son’s death. Then, the second line is quite feasibly a reworking of the famous, “To be, or not to be,” given that they are syntactically analogous with the placement of commas. Actually, they are structurally inverted, with the Hamlet comma placed in between the second and third syllable (x x, x x x x), while Eliot’s comma is placed in between the fourth and fifth syllable (x x x x, x x). Hamlet’s line is most popularly interpreted as a contemplation of suicide. Together, these two references seem to point to Ophelia’s death, and suggest Eliot decides that hers was a death by suicide as well.

The way Eliot inverts the structure of Hamlet’s line brings to mind the concept of a reflection, such as the “glassy stream” in which Ophelia drowns, as if the Eliot line floats on the surface of a body of water. If we were to indulge that imagery, it certainly would reaffirm the ideas of death and corpses, seeing as corpses float in water. This calls to mind the line “fear death by water” from Burial of the Dead in the tarot section. Perhaps Eliot means to prophesize suicidal drowning, which adds an interesting wrinkle to the grave motif that we’ve seen so often up to this point: does Eliot’s focus shift from the ground as a resting place to that of a water-submerged grave in A Game of Chess?

I'm interested here in the way Eliot has chosen to structure these two stanzas. It appears that he shifts perspectives from the clerk to the typist, but in such a way that the stanzas appear as the continuation of one another, grammatically sound save for the change in pronouns. However, we can easily justify this change in pronouns due to the nature of Tiresius, the narrator, who assumes both male and female forms, and whose perspective is fluid and omnipotent, belonging to all of Eliot’s characters at once.

Why Eliot decides to shift Tiresius’ perspective here likely has to do with Aiken’s “Jig of Forslin.” Specifically, we might find answers in Aiken’s use of ellipses. “Symphony” in “Jig of Forslin” plunges the reader into obscurity with frequent uses of ellipses, including “into the quiet darkness at last it falls. . .” and “Time. . . Time. . . Time. . .” (Aiken, 96-97). Ellipses can assume a variety of different purposes, including the omission of information, or a way of indicating an incomplete thought. But “The Waste Land” is full of incomplete thoughts and omissions. Why would Eliot format this one differently? The answer may lie in the fact that “Symphony” is intended to embody its title–it’s musical. By this logic, the ellipses may occupy a sort of interlude, a way of structuring the poem rhythmically, or even controlling the tempo of the poem. The idea of controlling time and meter within the world of the Waste Land is very interesting, especially with our knowledge of Tiresius as an all-knowing prophet. In many ways, Tiresius himself embodies the continuum of time. I think what we may be witnessing here in the poem is Tiresius bending the time of the poem, rewinding the same event from the line before, but from the perspective of the typist.

That may have been obvious–that the reader sees this moment from two different perspectives. However, what is more important is that Tiresius leaves us for a moment in the ellipses, existing in the same darkness and invisibility of Aiken’s ellipses—essentially, Eliot omits him. In the larger context of the poem, this gives Tiresius a power we’ve not yet noticed before: rather than stitching these fragments together, Tiresius manipulates them as they exist within “Time” as it appears in Aiken’s poem, while Tiresius disappears into the ellipses in between the “Time,” into darkness and obscurity.

It does not take more than one read to identify the starkly obvious allusion to the Fisher King here. In fact, it appears that the narrator has taked on the role of the Fisher King himself. He sits on a shore, a place of indistinct borders, an in-between space. This feels apt if we assume that the general omnipotent narrator is Tiresius, as Eliot intended. Tiresius, embodies the state of in-between, at once assuming both and neither gender. If Tiresius is the Fisher King here, we are confronted with simultaneous ideas of infertility, disability and prophecy, suggesting a bleak future for the landscape on which the Fisher King is set in this stanza.

I would like to call attention to the positionality in this moment. The narrator is described to have their back to this “arid plain.” In Dante’s Purgatorio, thirst is an essential element of the environment he creates: “‘O you who go along behind the others, // not from sloth but, it may be, with reverence, // answer me, since I burn with thirst and fire. // ‘It is not I alone who crave your answer. // All these others thirst for it more than the Indian // or Ethiopian who craves cold water” (Dante, 26.16-21). Not only are the shades literally thirsty in their fiery prison, but their desire that Dante speaks to them is likened to thirst as well. With this in mind, elements of the others sources certainly suggest that the “arid plane” behind the narrator is in fact Dante’s puragtorio, or some kind of hellscape.

We can justify this with the Book of Isiah, wherein salvation is explicitly described as when God “hast cast all my sins behind thy back” (Isiah 38.17). (Maybe Eliot even drew from “cast” here, as in casting a fishing line). Then, in Weston’s chapter about the Fisher King, this idea of the back turned toward hell is further reinforced with, “the writer of the article in The Open Court asserts that ‘the Fish was sacred to those deities who were supposed to lead men back from the shadows of death to life.’ If this be really the case we can understand the connection of the symbol first with Orpheus, later with Christ, as Eisler remarks: ‘Orpheus is connected with nearly all the mystery, and a great many of the ordinary chthonic, cults in Greece and Italy. Christianity took its first tentative steps into the reluctant world of Graeco-Roman Paganism under the benevolent patronage of Orpheus’” (Weston, 7). Both Orpheus and Dante make similar journeys out of hell, which further corroborates the theory that the “arid plain” behind the narrator in “The Waste Land” is Dante’s creation in Purgatorio. Clearly, the correlations here between fish/The Fisher King and the positioning of hell behind the back in the context of the “The Waste Land” are impossible to deny. The Fisher King looks away from hell, perhaps spinning the end of “The Waste Land” in a hopeful tone, although he continues to sit, fishing fruitlessly, awaiting the arrival of the Grail. In many ways, we have ended the poem exactly where we started it.

The heading and first three lines of this section are an intricate reworking of the scene of the death of Jesus Christ in the Bible. In order to understand this collage of biblical material, the reader must first allow the title of the section to become the first line of the poem, which is grammatically sound as an antecedent before the list of prepositions in the following three lines beginning with “after.” With this in mind, we can turn to “thunder” as it appears in the heading for this section, where Eliot seems to render it its own character in the poem. We can identify the “thunder” as some sort of divine being. After Jesus’s death in the Book of John, it is written that “The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered” (John 12:29). Presumably, the thunder occurred by the hand of God, or represents the voice of God. In fact, Eliot’s God might represent more than just the Christian God. In Themis’s essay, she claims that “the thunderbolt was to the primitive Greek not the symbol or attribute of the god, but itself the divine thing, the embodiment and vehicle of the god” (Themis, 62). Given both religions justify the thunderbolt as a celestial voice of sorts, we continue to the following lines, which appear to take the form of the chronology of the death of Jesus as it appears in the book of John. First, the “torchlight” in “The Waste Land” surely references the Pharisees who Jesus himself describes as holding “torches” (John 18:3). In the second line, the “frosty silence in the gardens” is reflected in the biblical text when Jesus takes his “disciples over the brook Cedron, where was a garden” (John 18:1), the garden which is described as “cold” (John 18:18). “Silence” may refer to Peter when he “smote the high priest's servant, and cut off his right ear” (18:10). Then, “stone agony” likely nods to the flogging of Jesus in John 19:1. Given the grammatical mechanics of these lines, it appears that the setting of “What the Thunder Said” is Jerusalem, when the thunder sounded right after Jesus died. In other words, perhaps the text that follows is through the voice of God, an interesting lens through which to approach the section.

In Death By Drowning, Eliot draws from Tennyson’s Ulysses and the book of Corintheans, which have some prominent parallels that Eliot seems to bring together in his own writing. Corinthians emphasizes the idea of unity through the Eucharist: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” (Corintheans, 13-14). In Eliot’s original draft of Death By Water, the bread on the boat is rotten and ridden with worms, so the sailors don’t share it: “‘For when you got through digging out the weevils // From every biscuit, there 's no time to eat.’” (Eliot, 34-35). By the logic of Corinthians, the men are not in fact “one body.” Even the sailors on Tennyson’s boat in Ulysses (presumably the inspiration for the sailing metaphor in “The Waste Land”) are described as “one equal temper of heroic hearts,” yet the sailor in “The Waste Land” is completely solitary, isolated from the shipmates that appear in Eliot’s original draft. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the “heart” of the Phonecian sailor has ceased to beat at all in this passage. Additionally, in the original draft, the beginning of the final section (which made it into the final draft) marks a shift from first person to second person. Interestingly, Corinthians is written in the second person, making this section of the poem feel like a haunted echo of the book in the Bible, deprived of its spirit of unity, making it feel more like a warning than a sermon.

This stanza, which, at surface level, seems to describe a sexual scene (the "event"), is reminiscent of a baptism. Based on the fact that we have been following the narrator along the river Thames here, it appears Eliot draws from biblical references of Jesus' baptism in the River Jordan in Matt.3. As he is dipped in the water, Jesus' heart would have literally been "under his feet," and the idea of "a new start" is certainly relevant to baptism--the first step towards salvation and repentance in the Christian religion. Further, one of the few times the word "wept" appears in the Bible is in John.11, directly before Jesus resurrects Lazarus. It therefore follows that Eliot has likened resurrection to baptism/christening, and perhaps most interestingly, to the "event" of a sexual encounter.

It seems rather paradoxical that Eliot should make something as taboo as sex analogous to the absolution of sins. We may reconcile (pun intended) this paradox with Augustine's Confessions. In Confessions, Augustine, describing the mutation of friendship into lust, writes, "wherefore runs it into that torrent of pitch bubbling forth those monstrous tides of foul lustfulness" (Augustine 3.2.3). Augustine's objective in Confessions is, of course, repentance. With this in mind, when the reader find's themselves in a "torrent," or river, with "tides of lustfulness," the parallels Eliot's stanza are impossible to ignore. However, framing this lustful river "event" within the baptism device makes it seem as though Eliot wasn't aiming to absolve the sinfulness of lust, but instead to pervert (or unpervert?) it into a method of salvation, essentially turning the premise of Confessions on its head.

Here Eliot references the passage from Dracula when Dracula climbs down the side of the wall: “I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings” (Stoker, 2), and subsequently Byron’s Dark Tower: “Into that ominous tract which, all agree, // Hides the Dark Tower” (Byron, 14-15). To break this down, the “bats” in “The Waste Land” represent Dracula, a symbol of terror and psychological torment. Through Dracula’s perspective, Lord Byron’s Dark Tower has been inverted. The word “ominous” recalls Eliot’s fascination with Tarot cards and brings to mind the “Tower” tarot card, which, read upright, signifies impending doom and destruction. However, inverted, that unfavorable omen changes its meaning, commonly associated with the denial of the aforementioned doom and destruction. Because of his upside down perspective, Dracula has essentially controlled the inversion of this card. Potentially, this would translate as a voluntary dismissal or rejection of chaos and destruction by the human psyche, specifically, the part of the human psyche that drives fear and terror. Additionally, a second read of these two lines reveals that the orientation of Dracula in the scene may not actually be as simple as it seems. Eliot uses a rather redundant “downward down,” which is aligned with “upside down” in the next line. Perhaps the double “down” simply serves to emphasize. But, alternatively, it might negate itself, thus the orientation of the bats is actually right-side-up, making the orientation of the towers upside down from a right-side-up perspective, truly hanging from the “air.” Likely, Eliot meant to disorient the reader by confusing the orientation of perspective. In the context of our tarot card, this means the prophecy flips in every permutation of upside down and right-side-up in these lines–an ever changing future. Furthermore, the idea of a turbulent prophecy is nested within the context of the meaning of the card itself–chaos. Thus, Eliot has managed to completely muddle the perspective of the reader, as well as any definition in the image of the future.

With the word "softly," this line contains echos of the previous "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song," which is a reference to the refrain from Spencer's "Prothalamion," a marriage song. However, the imagery of the creeping rat casts a tone of death and rotting over the existing motif of the running river. Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" may offer some insight into what this means. In that poem, there is a pair of lines that read, "My vegetable love should grow // Vaster than empires and more slow;" (Marvell, 11-12). If we are to apply the coexisting metaphors of empire and love to "vegetation" in "The Waste Land," this line takes on the meaning of at once a decaying love and a decaying empire. If love, then it is perverted by the "rat," just as the "worms shall try" the "long-preserved virginity" of the corpse of the lover in the Marvell. If empire, then we are once more confronted with the implications of the title "The Waste Land," and what it means for land to be valuable and/or go to waste. These two ideas present an interesting relationship between the established idea of a corpse, and the land within which it lies. From the Spencer, we are presented with the idea of fresh and hurried love. Here, we see that love in decay. And yet, we are not to ignore the paradox of life and fertility that is present here with the idea of vegetation. Perhaps Eliot meant to illustrate the dead love not in a state of ruin but in a state of everlasting. growth.

Here we see a conflation of a number of seemingly different references that amount to a nuanced interpretation of the Inferno through Eliot's perspective.

First, the event of the narrator recognizing a member of the procession of the dead is a direct parallel to the line in the Canto III of the Inferno: "After I recognized a few of these // I saw and knew the shade of him // who, through cowardice, made the great refusal" (Dante, 3.58-60). Supposedly, the “great refusal” is in reference to the abdication of Pope Celestine V, who refused the papacy after he was elected, shirking his duty to the church. He is likened to Eliot’s Stetson, who appears to be some sort of comrade of the narrator. However, although the narrator encounters Stetson on the streets of modern London, he refers to their shared experience at the naval Battle of Mylae in 260 BCE.

To make sense of these curious connections, we turn to De Nerval’s description of his dreams. He postulates the idea that there is a fixed amount of “stuff” in the universe, and that time yields different permutations of the same “stuff:” “Or perhaps it is simply that ill-fated particle, destined to go through endless transformations at the vengeful mercy of powerful beings? All this led me to take account of my life and even of my previous existences” (De Nerval, 12). This suggests that in conflating Steteson (perhaps one of Eliot’s comrades in World War I), the Pope, and the Romans, Eliot is making a point about the cycle of conflict and reliability of cowardice in humans throughout all of history. Further, examining this in the De Nerval context of a dream-state is intriguing–in the context of Burial of the Dead, it continues to elaborate on the idea of consciousness after death, or perhaps a proximity to death even in life. If this is true then it corroborates Marlow’s proposal that confrontation with death brings “ultimate wisdom” (Conrad, 5), as De Nerval seems to have encountered such knowledge in the records of his dreams. So, Eliot digs further into the revelations brought about by a state in between life and death, perhaps this time sparking a consciousness of life beyond death or a continuity of the same life in many different forms.

Supposedly, The Lady of the Rocks refers to the “Queen of Cups” tarot card. Eliot’s curious description of it draws from a number of allusions that put the Queen in the context of the Waste Land. To begin, as far as Eliot is concerned, the suit of cups represents “the Female, reproductive energy” (Weston, 7). The card itself is associated with intuition, emotion and, most notably, fertility–a rather positive omen. Further, Weston even proposes “if the connection with the Egyptian and Chinese monuments, referred to above, is genuine, the original use of the 'Tarot' would seem to have been, not to foretell the Future in general, but to predict the rise and fall of the waters which brought fertility to the land.” Therefore, just as Weston mentions in chapter I of “From Ritual to Romance” when she discusses the Fisher King, the human condition reflects that of the land, and the Queen of Cups comes to represent the fertility of the land as opposed to just human fertility.

Twisting these allusions to fertility is the word “belladonna,” which means “beautiful lady” in Italian, as well as the alternate term for the deadly nightshade plant, which was used during the Renaissance as a cosmetic practice to dilate the pupils of women. In referring to the Queen of Cups as “Belladonna,” Eliot boldly casts a shadow of sensuality and death over the one described above of fertility and femininity, making his reading of the Queen of Cups a corrupted one, boding tidings that have a negative connotation in the tarot card’s authority as a prophetic device.

Additionally, the implication of the Queen of Cups becomes more complicated with the description “lady of situations.” The Oxford English Dictionary offers several archaic definitions of the word (which I would argue have authority because the network of Eliot’s allusions are equally archaic). One such definition is “the action of placing an injured part or parts of the body in a position which favors healing,” which immediately brings to mind the Fisher King, further bolstered by fish imagery in the Queen of Cups card itself. With this in mind, the Queen of Cups potentially has the healing capabilities of the grail (the “cup”), reinstating fertility to the Fisher King and the land. Alternatively, “situations” might refer to “the action of settling a place; settlement, occupation,” which contains glaring references to the title of the poem, and serves to further corroborate theory (derived from Weston above) that the Queen represents both the land and the people settled on it.

I'm interested in these lines as their structure creates a sense of ambiguity in regards to the different ways the commas and grammatical structure might operate, which in turn prompt different interpretations of the section in light of Eliot's references.

For example, if we read "for you know only" as "because your knowledge is limited to," this part reads as if the Son of man, which is how God refers to the prophet Ezekiel in the Book Ezekiel, cannot "say, or guess" because they know only idols ("your images shall be broken" Ezekiel 6.6) and the terrestrial world ("where the sun beats"). Eliot was interested in graves, particularly graves as being receptacles of living people in archaic times, supposedly due to the fact that "legends in various parts of the world of mankind having in primitive days emerged from the depths of the earth" (Basevi, 55). With this in mind, this reading of these lines seems to discredit the prophet, mistaken in worshiping a god that lives above the ground, an idol, while the true divine power resides in the subterranean.

Alternatively, if we read "for you know only" as "because you are the only person who knows," the "broken images" and "where the sun beats" becomes a secret that the prophet "cannot say." Therefore, the question in the previous line becomes an interrogation addressed to the prophet, which he cannot answer. This interpretation incorporates the idea that humans belong to the subterranean and the earth, seeing as they originated from it: “condemn him to return again to the earth whence he had been taken, and to have need of rest” (Pepler, 23). If indeed Eliot’s subject of worship is located in the ground rather than the heavens, then the heavens might extend to the terrestrial realm, suggesting that humans don’t know or understand “where the sun beats” because they don’t really belong there. The role of the prophet, of course, is proximate to God in a figurative sense; he serves as a liaison between God and humans. For this reason, he might possess God's information as this interpretation suggests. However, for whatever reason, humans aren’t permitted to know it.

Understood as meaning a decline of the body as well as uncultivated land, the word “waste” as it appears in “The Waste Land” reconciles these two definitions in the context of the evolution of Nature Cult stories to legends concerning the Holy Grail. In “From Ritual to Romance,” Weston highlights Frazer’s claim that these legends and rituals stem from the belief that “the principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was one and indivisible,” and how that reflects in many different societies, which link the physical health of their leader with the general condition of the land. In the version of the Grail story in Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the Grail hero, Galahad, possesses the power to mend the sword that rendered Logris desolate, qualifying him to access the Grail, which has healing capabilities. Interestingly, this grants Galahad rather paradoxical powers, which mirror those of the Egyptian god Osiris, who Frazer positions in the evolution of Nature Cult stories. Osiris, in addition to bringing order and agriculture to the world (healing it), “presided as judge at the trial of souls of the departed,” and is capable of both condemning and bestowing life after death. For this reason, we can associate human character and morality with the concept of the health of the land, as Galahad’s theoretical ability to provide both life and destruction to the earth is analogous to Osiris’s power to give both eternal life and eternal condemnation to human souls based on an evaluation of their sins (and, based on Weston’s essay, the former is derivative of the latter). With this in mind, “The Waste Land” takes on a tension between opposite outcomes, both for the life of the world and for the life (soul) of a person. Because the two “lives” are intertwined, as referenced above from Frazer’s essay, perhaps titling the poem “The Waste Land” indicates that Eliot observes the moral atrophy of human beings as causative of literal desolation in the turbulent world he lived in.