When I looked back at the historical annotations for this section, I was especially struck by Stephanie’s interpretation of the ending. Firstly, she spoke about the themes of unity and incompletion contrasting with each other throughout the poem. From this, she claimed that the repetition of “O swallow swallow,” having only repeated twice, symbolized incompletion. Stephanie said: “I think that this incompleteness (such that we see in the story of Philomela) was intentionally left unresolved in contrast with the unity and inner peace that concludes the poem.” I disagree with her opinion about the story of Philomela on two accounts: one, that the story itself has a sort of incompleteness to it, and two, that the lack of a third repetition means that Eliot wanted there to be a sense of incompleteness. Philomela, so deeply wronged, does get a kind of closure at the end of her story. Though she is doomed to wander as a bird for what she does, her revenge against Tereus is fully carried out when she serves him his son (with the help of her sister) to eat. As for the number of repetitions— in a previous section of the poem, the nightingale’s call (“jug jug”) is only repeated twice. I don’t think that a lack of additional repetitions denotes a lack of closure.

When I took a look at the historical annotations for this section, I was intrigued by Ilene’s take on the mention of age. She pointed out that children are remarkably absent in much of the poem, and attributed this to Eliot making “the need for youth, for lightheartedness and innocence more pronounced in the poem.” I agree with her, but I believe that the absence of children may be attributed to more than that. A lack of children, though evidently connected to a lack of innocence (especially with Count Ugolino’s sons) connects back to the very title of the poem and its various interpretations. “Wasteland,” as we have discussed, has several potential implications, but the one I am most interested in in connection with a lack of children is infertile farmland. Land that has been overused, not cycled, or used with poor methods like slash-and-burn agriculture will develop poor soil and will become unusable for decades, turning into a wasteland. This land produces nothing, much like the relationships in the Waste Land. Even with some cycles being so prevalent (life and death/rebirth), the cycle of literal birth is not continued. This absence is peculiar to me, but admittedly not as surprising as it would have been had there not been consistent references to failed marriages (Albert and Lil and the departed nymphs).

As I went through the sources for today, I realized that there is a strong sense of “otherness” in the sources connecting to the poem, especially through Dracula. Right now, in my infectious disease class, we’re discussing tuberculosis, and how it was associated with vampires. Vampires were seen as the diseased, strange, malevolent other— and they were also heavily associated with immigrants and therefore change. Dracula was, perhaps obviously, unusual, but aside from his vampiric qualities, he was already unusual because of his being from another part of the world. When reading the section of Hesse and Dostoevsky, I saw this theme again in the “"New Ideal" by which the roots of the European spirit is being sapped.”(Hesse, 3). Once again, there is a threat against “regular” society, again from the east, but this time (even though it is still abstract) this threat, though still centered on a basis of xenophobia, is not mythical. In both Dracula and in Hesse’s look at The Brothers Karamazov, there is a kind of threat either ideological or mythical coming to menace the kind of society that the main audience of that literature was familiar with. This interests me especially because of how different it is from The Waste Land, where such a theme is not prevalent. There isn’t an equivalent or even similar undercurrent of fear of change based on xenophobia, even though Dracula is so directly referenced by Eliot.

The imagery of a deserted, rocky, dry landscape immediately reminded me of the landscape in which much of the Bible is set, and in connection to Psalm 63:1: “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is;” draws a connection between holiness, God, and water. The speaker addressing God is seeking Him in a “thirsty land” similar to the one being described by Eliot. However, the significance of this quote goes beyond setting. Water here is a direct metaphor for God. Those without water in this section of the reading are without God. Just like the readings from last night, where 1 Corinthians 10:2 states “and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea,” water is both God and a way to form a connection to Him. In this part of The Waste Land, outside of references to water, there are other references to biblical events. A few lines above this highlighted section, there is a reference to Jesus’ death: “After the agony in stony places/The shouting and the crying/…/He who was living is now dead.”(324-329). The agony is a reference to suffering on the cross, the stony places to the stone placed in front of the cave where Jesus’ body was laid, and of course, his actual death. However, rather than continue this narrative to include his rising from the dead, we are left only with his death and with a subsequently Godless landscape. This passage and its various connections to biblical events make me question whether there have been other direct references to the Bible in previous readings that I missed.

What stood out to me most in this reading was the theme of water and its relevance in religion. I take the sailor’s watery death as a form of perverse baptism— rather than being born anew through a purification rite, he is sentenced to eternity under the sea. It is also reminiscent of a rite from Judaism— upon waking up, some (especially Orthodox) Jewish people will wash their hands in a particular manner. This is, as I understand it, a way to wash off the state of death that one approaches so closely in the unconsciousness of sleep. Here, however, water does not lead to either baptism or cleansing rites. Rather, water is death and damnation. Dante follows a similar theme of damnation (though perhaps obvious) in The Inferno. Ulysses, the famous sea-farer, is sentenced to remain in hell for all time, and Virgil describes to Dante his fate: “Within this flame find torment Ulysses and Diomed. They are paired in God’s revenge as once they earned his wrath.”(55-57) Like the Phoenician sailor, Ulysses has committed acts against God and incurred His “wrath,” which leaves him forever damned to hell. His adventures on the water have doomed him to his fate, with the water as a vessel for his sinful acts. With the addition of these sources, the lines that directly reference certain Abrahamic religions (“Gentile or Jew,” 319) take on a new significance, as does 1 Corinthians 10:2: “and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Water and the sea are usually seen as pure or purifying in Judaism and Christianity, but here, those that spend their days on the water are damned or doomed because of it.

Throughout the most recent passages, I have found that the status of women has become a predominant theme. In addition to the many allusions to sexual relations between men and women, I believe the presence of Tiresias most strongly cements this theme as a central way for Eliot to speak about women, which relates deeply to the politics of Eliot’s time.
Early twentieth century London was a place full of social change and revolution, whether that was the destruction and difficulties brought by the first world war or the growing movement of the first wave of feminism, which hit its peak in England right around the same time that Eliot was writing The Waste Land. Though it may not have been an issue immediately personal to Eliot himself, it is still a major part of what was then considered contemporary society, just as other issues (such as the different interpretations of “waste land” as industrial waste and London after bombings) that made it into the poem were. 
With Tiresias, men retain supremacy both in his decision to side with Jove and subsequent reparations from Jove to counteract Juno’s punishment. This echoes the role of men in both modern society and the relationships held in the text, such as the uneven power dynamics between the white and black chess pieces from Middleton’s writing. Eliot says that with Tiresias, “all the rest” (of the personages in the poem) are united, as are “the two sexes.”(Footnote for 218) Tiresias is both a representation of unity (as Eliot encourages the reader to believe) and simultaneously representative of the inequality between men and women.

A common setting that I saw repeated in a few of the readings for this section of the poem was a river or riverbank. From Marvell’s to His Coy Mistress (“Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side/Shouldst rubies find”(1)) to Spenser’s Prothalamion (“Walked forth to ease my pain/Along the shore of silver streaming Thames/Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems/Was painted all with variable flowers”(1)) and others, rivers appear in myriad ways. Spenser uses a river as the main framework for his poem, which, in part, is about the progression of a relationship. The river (in this case, the Thames) is repeated at the end of each stanza, and provides a steady framework for the plot of the poem. Marvell mentions riverbanks more casually, only briefly mentioning the sacred river Ganges to provide a segue to his distance from his lover (he is back in England by the Humber.) Within Eliot’s Fire Sermon section, he turns to rivers twice. The first section, as highlighted for this annotation, connects to Spenser’s use of the river, but this time, the glorious, new springtime is past. The “nymphs” are gone. Eliot shows us a scene of an approaching, desolate winter. In Spenser’s poem, the lively brightness of the river is connected to a happy marriage, therefore the bleak scene in Eliot’s imitation most likely alludes to a broken, isolated, and failed relationship.

These words are a direct quotation from what is essentially Ophelia’s suicide note in Hamlet. What I found remarkable about Eliot’s connection to Hamlet, however, outside of the themes we have discussed about women, is the symbolism of flowers. In previous lines of The Waste Land, we have seen both lilacs and hyacinths used as markers of rebirth and death. The lilacs spring out of the “dead land” each April, bringing with them a physical manifestation of reincarnation and rebirth from death (Eliot, 2). The hyacinths are a reference back to the myth of Apollo and Hyacinthus, who was killed and is memorialized with hyacinths. In the tale of Ophelia, flowers serve as a death knell once again. In her last lines when Ophelia goes into a wild tangent in front of the court, she starts recalling different flowers and their meanings. She brings up “...rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies. that's for thoughts.”(Shakespeare, 5) While the court watches her descend into madness and remarks upon it, she continues speaking about other plants like fennel and daisies, which “withered all when my father died.”(Shakespeare, 6). She exits the scene, and a few scenes later, it is revealed that she has drowned. When Queen Gertrude recounts the scene of Ophelia’s death, she describes the woman as having gone to the creek with “fantastic garlands”[of greenery/flowers] about her person (Shakespeare, 9). Her death is forecasted by the flowers despite their usual cheery connotations. With Ophelia, Eliot once again repeats the motif of flowers-as-death, though this time no rebirth or memorialization is implied in the text.

A theme I saw most prominently in tonight’s readings was that of some form of sexual violence and a woman facing some terrible violence as consequence, whether that be the sexual violence itself or death. In both Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Baudelaire’s A Martyred Woman, women are faced with some kind of sexual assault followed with more physical violence. Baudelaire’s imagery is echoed in the first few lines of “A Game of Chess”, with Eliot employing similarly floral and embellished language to describe a sumptuous setting. A few lines later, he makes a direct reference to Ovid by naming Philomela. The major difference between the two sources (Ovid and Baudelaire) is that in Metamorphoses, Philomela, together with her sister Procne, exact revenge upon Tereus. When they kill Procne and Tereus’ son and serve him to Tereus, they do get some form of repayment, avenging what wrong was done to Philomela. Even though Philomela was brutally silenced in life, with her revenge she regains a voice by becoming a singing bird. In Baudelaire’s poem, the murdered woman gets no such chance for vengeance. She is left dead with no chance for further action, only that of the observance of some “immortal spirit” that she becomes. I’m not sure why Eliot chose to use this section to focus on women’s death and sacrifice, especially in terms of sexual violence (or why he included sources with such different outcomes), though I am interested in how this theme may further develop as have previous themes of rebirth.

The scene when the narrator recognizes a friend or old acquaintance in the masses of the dead in the “Unreal City” (“There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson!

'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!” Lines 69-70) reminded me, on my initial read-through, of the scene in the Inferno where Dante sees someone he knows burning in hellfire as punishment. In Canto fifteen, while still traveling through the circles of Hell with Virgil, Dante comes across Brunetto Latini, who is burning for what most scholars assume is implied to be a sexual crime against God. “But I remember'd him; and towards his face My hand inclining, answer'd: "Sir! Brunetto!” Though this occurs much later than the events described in Canto 3, I believe this canto may provide even more of a direct connection to Eliot’s work. The man directly mentioned in the Wasteland is more than likely dead, as is evidenced by line 63 (“I had not thought death had undone so many.”) which references a crowd that “Stetson” is a part of. He is interacted with by an admittedly more removed narrator than Dante, but he is still connected to the narrator through some personal past experience. Finding someone you are familiar with amongst masses of thronging dead is an evident parallel between the two, and I’d venture to say that Eliot included this reference back to Dante’s Inferno in order to further anchor the theme of death, afterlife, and rebirth that we’ve seen presented in previous readings in the Wasteland.

When I first read this section on hyacinths, having not yet read the other material, I was reminded of the language of flowers that was common a few decades before the Wasteland was written, gaining most relevance during the Victorian era. Purple hyacinths, in particular, symbolized regret. The rest of the passage suggests some kind of love or fascination, and I took the inclusion of these flowers to be a reference to some regret in that relationship. However, with the addition of a reference back to the myth of Apollo and Hyacinthus, I now take the flowers as another reference back to mythology and the cycle of death and rebirth as seen through spring that we saw in earlier lines. Whereas earlier Eliot brings this theme of death and rebirth up with lilacs, here he repeats it with another flower, though this one has more of a double significance with its mythological connections. The myth ties back to the influence of the Golden Bough on the title, where with Osiris, Attis, and Adonis, death and rebirth also had great significance. Interestingly, when Adonis was killed, it is said that red anemones grew where his blood fell, creating another floral link to death. From the lilacs of rebirth, Eliot returns back to referencing death with the hyacinths.

This line confused me, as it translates roughly to “Not Russian, [rather] from Lithuania, real German.” I understand that the rest of this passage is a reference to Countess Marie Louise Larisch von Mönnich. She is not Lithuanian— at the beginning of the Larisch reading, she makes it clear to the reader that she is Bavarian and was born at “Augsburg near Munich.”(3, Larisch) So who or what is Lithuanian? The very eastern edge of former Prussia is part of Lithuania, but I’m not sure if that’s what is being referred to. Aside from this confusion, I found the parallel between Eliot’s retelling of the countess’s days as a child and Rupert Brooke’s Letters From America interesting. The “young man” in this text spends a good amount of time dwelling in his past experiences in Germany and relationship with the country just as the countess does, albeit in a different context. He recalls that “he saw quite clearly an April morning on a lake south of Berlin… And he remembered a night in Munich spent with a students' Kneipe. From eight to one they had continually emptied immense jugs of beer, and smoked, and sung English and German songs in profound chorus.”(2, Brooke) Then, while sitting and thinking about the implications of England being at war with Germany, he thinks about how he feels that he ought to remember such times in a bad light. However, even though his relationship with that country is now and will remain forever changed, like the countess and her idyllic though prophetic friendship, he can still almost enjoy an initial remembrance of better times past.

The main theme of the earlier version of the title seems to be much more focused on the idea of voice– from the imitation of voices in the Dickens tale to a man’s last words in The Heart of Darkness. The final version, as we discussed in class, has many layers to its analysis, but is, in my opinion, centered around industrialization and lands being wasted and laid to waste by factories and bombings. The beginning lines of the final version speak about nature springing from a “dead land,” firmly planting the scene and mood in a specific environment– that of a ruined land ready for a cycle of rebirth. The original version, however, provides a very stark contrast. From a strong focus on voice in the title and starting quote, Eliot quickly drives into a description of drunken revelry that seems to have no obvious connection to the depth of the title. Some character “Joe” sings about being proud of his Irish heritage. A few lines later, a “Mr. Fay” sings “the Maid of the Mill,” which I presume to be a folk tune of some sort. Beyond that, characters, including the narrator, exchange brief words with each other. The theme of voice may not seem so evident here, but I posit that Eliot is referring rather to the narrative voice, as the whole beginning is relayed in first person. At first, I was confused as to how this could possibly be connected to the final version. However, the dedication to Ezra Pound at the beginning of that version (il miglior fabbro, which translates to “the better blacksmith” or “the better creator”) provides that connection. As voice and narrative voice are so important in the original version, Eliot honors the narrator and creator of narrative when he dedicates this poem to Pound. For what is a creator or narrator if not a voice?

When I was reading the Golden Bough, I found a striking theme of death and rebirth to be featured throughout the text. Aside from the vegetable rites that the author focuses on towards the beginning of the article, there were mentions of deities being killed and sometimes reborn in some fashion, even if only through their spirits being preserved in the rites and rituals of their worshippers and priests. In particular, the section about Osiris struck me as especially relevant to a certain other religion. At the very end of the article, in reference to Osiris’ rebirth through the faith of his wife, the author says “so all men hoped to arise like him from death to life eternal.” Had I not known who this was meant to reference, I would have thought it was a reference to Christianity and the concept of salvation that is so prominent in Christian ideology. This made me curious as to TS Eliot’s own religion, and with some minor searching I found that he was a devout Anglo-Catholic, which makes me wonder as to how prevalent Christian themes might be in the Wasteland that I had previously not noticed.