Bodies buried at sea (creepy rising/falling)

The Hanged Man

Gallows Pole (related)

(aside: The Hermit)

Just thought I'd contribute

Nice mantel art

Himavat, father of Ganga

Let There Be Water

Sparrow song - twit twit twit Nightingale song - jug jug

Ritzy proposition

Goodnight Ladies

These dry summer mountains are so different from the sheltering winter mountains in the beginning of the poem. The mountain is dead, and still able to work destruction even with "teeth that cannot spit." We get away from death by water and leap into the jaws of death by thirst...escaping the misery is impossible.

Obviously on some level a warning about our helplessness in the face of death, but also reminds me of Marie talking about her childhood feeling free in the mountains. She was "free" and Phlebas was "handsome and tall," but the trajectory seems to point down for everyone in more ways than physical as they approach death (whether by old age or not).

A biblical allusion, though I guess this isn't a surprise, referencing the captive Israelites' mourning song at the rivers of Babylon. The intriguing thing here is the contrast between that reference and the word "leman," which is apparently an obscure term for lover, and the preceding references to sexual exploits. Eliot seems to be emphasizing the pollution of sexuality by using the polluted Thames and himself "polluting" a traditional story.

This picks up on the "death by water" theme, but more in keeping with this section's focus on femininity, putting a malevolent or predatory impulse behind objects seen as feminine. It's a sensual rather than literal drowning, and starts to lend a sexual tone to the drowning imagery.

After all this time talking about the comforts of winter, Marie says she goes south in the winter now -- presumably also staying away from the mountains that made her feel free as a child.

Pin makes sense, possibly, in terms of a bull (I'm remembering having Ferdinand the Bull read to me), but it came up earlier in conjunction with "ray." Also, "resting bull pin" making no tangible sense to me, I wonder if it's meant to be fused into "bullpen"? More a contrast to "resting."

Not lost/missed, or not missing someone/something?

I was expecting "twenty per cent" and now I'm completely confused - twenty Somethings for a cent? Suppose twenty...for number of cents?

So the horse is confused, wondering if this is supposed to be home somehow (which, being a smart horse, it knows would be a mistake). But the speaker is standing here on purpose, so it's not a mistake, it's intentional. Throwing in the horse's uncertainty makes me wonder for the first time why the speaker DID stop here. (Clearly it's cold, and the woods are dark, so I doubt there would be much to see.) The most likely explanation is that this person is deep in thought, with a lot on their mind -- things that might be dark and cold. I'm with horse.

This word is the crux of the poem for me. It's when you can see that this fraught decision between two roads is in fact a total toss-up. The speaker just started to describe the roads as if they're different, and then has to admit they're actually pretty similar. Then later, when he tells his story, the whole point will be the difference between them. I think the core of the poem is bound up in that tension between sameness/difference, and it starts here when suddenly it's not clear if we can rely on the speaker to tell a genuine story.

If mending the wall is just a game, it is essentially unreal, something that doesn't have a lasting effect on the real world. I guess that works in the immediate sense because they don't need a wall dividing their properties, and because it's constantly crumbling anyway. More broadly, the word can refer to the artificial walls we place between ourselves and our neighbors. I also see connections between "game" and the idea of elves, which bring to mind all those mischievous natural forces that take back what we build.

A reference to tired, trite language in poetry, and maybe by extension conventionality in life?

Love the ambiguity here. She can have lived "enough" in the contented sense, having nothing left to gain from a rich life, or she could have been fed up, having "had enough" in the negative sense of a life with more than its share of of toil and loss.

He talks to the jug like it's talking back - he's so caught up in the little bit he's performing to himself on the road, Mr. Flood actually proposes a toast to him. Probably not only loneliness, but a need to explain away every drink he takes.

Never really thought of the quandary emancipated Black Americans faced in trying to establish themselves quite this way. Du Bois is describing their hardship as simply a dilution/misdirecting of their power than a lack of it brought on by oppression -- I guess this still underlines that the "freedom" granted to them was an antifreedom (for lack of a word), so it's still what kept them down, but it didn't "weaken" them...just a roadblock.

Seems like sort of a weak reach toward giving a historical basis for specifically American prudishness? (The Puritans didn't really teach that. Extramarital sex, sure, but they were not the only ones.) The "she" might be unknown in America, but I don't think it's the first place where that happened, which is implied in saying sex was strength "in any previous age."

Getting a more tangible idea of what the "formula" and "force" throughout the piece have meant. Facts vs. Feelings.

"Force" here seems to be a new name for the "faith" he's going to venture to translate from "rays" earlier in the paragraph...he's ready to let similarly inaccessible objects of faith (the dead women of past religious faith and the "unborn" rays of future faith in science) have real power over his mind?

Sidenote..."the women were dead" is giving me "dead aunties" flashbacks from They Feed They Lion.

"Chaos" is strange to me here. We're told he's thinking about knowledge, and he's wondering essentially how much of it could fill the best-informed brain to capacity, and in the next sentence the word "chaos" stands in for that whole notion. How is his consideration of our knowledge threshold a consideration of chaos? I guess it could be simple, and just mean that the sheer volume of possible knowledge is a type of chaos, but I never would have chosen or expected that word.

The "furred ear" and "full jowl" seem characteristic of old age - so in trying to connect "purpose" to the Lion, I guess could be restlessness, developing over a life that only lets you fill your belly in your last days? Or the purpose is the "hung belly" itself, coming at too high a cost, and "they Lion grow" as people become disillusioned?

This is the only stanza that starts with action instead of a prepositional phrase, and a sudden switch to Earth as a subject after two stanzas of industrial images. It's been work-centric to this point and I see bitterness in the switch - the laborers aging and being swallowed up, right along with what they gave so much to build.

So near a fist, cave and thorax together make me think of a chest caving in?