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.

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?

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.