The presence of fire indicates the presence of the senses and one’s desire for pleasurable things, all of which the Buddha deemed as invalid and to be the causes of all sorts of suffering. I connect the symbolism of fire here to the burning of ground for fertilization, which is the slash-and-burn agricultural technique used by our ancestors. The process may seem counterintuitive, for it involves the decimation of all previous life forms in the land in order to create new lives, which sounds exactly the same as the cycle of vegetation and rituals. Death is necessary to give new life. Within the context of Buddhism then, in order to be reborn outside the cycle of reincarnation, one needs to cleanse oneself of all previous desires and sensations, which may seem detrimental to lots of people. The process of abstention is essential to rebirth.

There are many collections of threefolds in this poem: this phrase at the end of the poem, shantih, the third person walking alongside the narrator, asking three questions in a row in line 121-123, repetition of “Unreal City” for three times in total, and more. And eventually there is “O Swallow Swallow”, which is marked as incomplete by Stephanie from her annotation last year. The grouping of three similar ideas helps the readers visualize an ascending motion of understanding. According to Stephanie, the trio, men, gods, and devils, are the key to the grouping. In the section about the third mysterious figure, Eliot proposed their possible identities as human (man or woman), god (Christ), or devil (Dracula, hooded and casts fear). There should be an order in which we ascend as we finish the poem—from devil, to men, then to god. There are also a wide range of references to devils, from Dante’s writings, to men, from Holy Grail, Marie, and to gods, from Indian religions, rituals and rites, and eventually the Bible and Christ. The phrase “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” means “give, sympathize, and control”, and it is in an opposite order that represents the trio of men, gods and devils. Devils want to control, men want to sympathize, and gods give due to their limitless kindness, exactly as how Chinese Buddhism describes the Buddha (无量心), meaning that the Buddha, being all-knowing, treats all lives equally and give them equal opportunities in escaping the reincarnation cycle. The final repetition of three “shantih” gives an end to that ascending motion, but the cycle is not ending. We are only stopping in a momentary state within the cycle. Similar to the waste land itself, as I wrote in my very first annotation, which is a temporary stage within the cycle of life and death, the ascending motion described throughout the poem will be merely a phase. And after that there will come so much more.

Humans are social animals for a reason. It is due to others that we have a sense of ourselves. We compare ourselves to others, and by knowing the differences between us and others, we gradually gain a sense of identity. If we are just alone, without any comparison between ourselves and other people, we can never know the defining characteristics of ourselves. There will be no sun without shadows. And by forming a prison around ourselves, we create a sense of “otherness” that forms a wall between a body of our own and our surroundings. However, as the objective world holds unlimited amounts of truths for us to perceive, Bradley argued that there is fundamentally “no difference between the inner and the outer”. All humans have access to the same amount of information, but what makes us distinct is not “any difference of kind, but only of degree”. In other words, there is an extent to which we perceive the surrounding world. There may be overlaps between the perceptions of mine and that of others, but ultimately, it is the chain of every single person that makes up the whole world. Eliot may have mentioned Bradley’s argument about self-identity to further his opinion on the continued existence of the self after death. The world is made up of a chain of identities, where as one goes away, another one spawns and fills up the spot. There may be millions and millions of overlapping areas, but they are not necessarily the same due to tiny nuances. There is that sense of continuity that transcends bodily boundaries as well.

The idea of a third person unites sources from different cultures and origins, including the reference to Christ, the extra person in the Arctic expedition. The idea of the third identity is also prevalent in Asian cultures, such as Daoism, where Lao Zi famously said “道生一，一生二，而生三，三生万物”, which translates to “the way gives birth to one, one to two, two to three, and three to everything”. “The Way” can be considered as the natural state of being, the one is a general name for identifiable things in the world, the two is the binary structures (yin and yang, male and female, left and right), the three is adding slight differences within the binary structures, and the everything is the amalgamation of small differences. Nonetheless, the number three plays an important role in ancient scholars’ perception of the world, and it is hard to explain this weird infatuation with this specific number across universal applications.

Last year, Margo wrote in her annotations that there is a distinction drawn between ambiguity and clarity, where Eliot wrote in a certain way so that his readers could pick up thematic correlations seamlessly. It also connects to how the natural environment are almost all-knowing of the life and death of the beings in them. As the waves “picked his bones in whispers”, the sea seemed to accept the fact that the sailor almost had to die by fate, as if it was predetermined. This is reinforced by the inclusion of lots of characters with fortune-telling abilities, such as Tiresias, who was physically blind but spiritually and mentally clear-sighted.

Harrison argued in the section “The Rite of the Thunders” that the symbolism of thunder is inherently religious by invoking a sense of fear. As a natural phenomenon, thunder has formed an inseparable link to Zeus, the head of the Gods in Greek mythology, as Harrison wrote that thunderbolts are “weapons shot down by the sky-god”. People tend to want to explain phenomenons with divinity and supernatural reasoning. As a result, thunder represents fear felt altogether by the community, by some sort of “social sanction”, which is proposed by gods or divine power in this case. It is also important to note that the fear invoked by thunder is inherently related to awe, which contains an element of wonder as well as fear. Furthermore, “awe is on the way to be reverence, and reverence is essentially religious”. Immediately, this section of the poem recalls the nature of the rites and rituals performed in the first section “The Burial of the Dead” and reinforces the memories related to vegetation, growth, and eventually decay. Harrison also argued that thunder “caused the rain to fall and everything to grow up new”, which initiates the entire cyclical process taking place in the waste land, with water nourishing vegetation, plants feeding animals, and animals decomposing to fertilize the earth. Thunder is the initiator of the cycle, as it represents divine power and intervention that all creatures in the waste land should admire and respect. As The Waste Land gradually comes to an end, “What the Thunder Said” coins the end of the beginning by helping the readers visualize and understand a message sent from above, as a funeral, a remembrance, a ritual for the things that come to an end in the waste land. New things will start to form immediately afterwards, as the next beginning is near.

There is that theme of duality here again, which manifests itself in the story of Tiresias, who has experienced “love both as a woman and man”. Even as a person of femininity, he still favored Jupiter instead of Juno (man instead of woman), and Jupiter granted him the gift of prophecy while Juno blinded him. The embodiment of both the male and female sex also appeared in the first section of the poem about the “hyacinth girl” in line 46. The original story is about a boy whom Apollo loved and was turned into hyacinths by the god after he died. His sex is changed in The Waste Land, suggesting that it is not the female sex but femininity which can be present in both men and women that is a curse. Another line that mentioned the intersectionality between men and women is “Old men with wrinkled female breasts” in line 219. Furthermore, the mixture, or the freeful switching between the two sexes in Tiresias suggests a sense of fluidity and flexibility, in which he can easily switch out of a position of powerlessness and overturn the situation by his will.

This line is a direct reference to Edmund Spenser’s poem “Prothalamion”, which is a marriage song praising the flow of the Thames, the natural landscape, and the forms of life residing near the celebration. Similarly, Edward Carpenter, an animal rights activist, wrote about spiritual democracy, which ties closely to the praising of the massive land on which people dwell. Both pieces discuss the myriad forms of life, such as “streams of pale lilac and saffron-tinted fire”, “meadow”, “flock of nymphs”, and so forth. They also refer to the forms of human life that interact with nature, such as the celebration of marriage from Spencer’s poem, the “huge warehouses of Manchester, the many-storied mills, the machinery, the great bale-laden drays, the magnificent horses” from Carpenter’s writing. The humans form peaceful relationships with their surroundings, though Carpenter’s piece suggests industrialization and manipulation of landscape into manufacturing sites. However, Eliot’s poem still focuses on the apparent “waste” in the land and its dissolution. There are broken river tent, “last finger of leaf clutch and sink into the wet bank”, and “nymphs departing”. The rat destroys the vegetation by “dragging its slimy belly on the bank”. There is no more harmony amongst the natural world and the extensions added by humans.

The line is referring to the bartender’s hurrying to his customers, who are low class residents in comparison to the language Eliot used to describe the woman on the throne and her man. The man and the woman in the first part of “A Game of Chess” are apparently of high social status, due to the descriptions of the “burnished throne”, the “glitter of her jewels”, and the “synthetic perfumes”, all of which are of quality and expensive nature. In contrast, the conversations described in the bar are written in common speech, which reveals the characters’ mediocre nature and the flow of conversation. The passage of time should be noted in Eliot’s writings, for it is often ignored, just as what happened here. The bartender keeps asking them to leave by saying “hurry up please it’s time”, yet none of them actually listened. Similar to the previous conversation between the wealthy woman and the man, where the woman asks the man questions such as “why do you never speak?” and “what is that noise”. The man doesn’t answer in quotation marks, and instead he answers directly to the audience by saying without quotation marks that “I think we are in rats’ alley” and “the wind under the door”. This negligence towards people’s askings indicates the unique structure of power dynamics. The bartender is of lower status than his customers while the woman, savagely asking questions, cannot guarantee a response from the man. Perhaps the passage of time should also be mentioned, such as the cycle between death and rebirth in the previous section, where time moves not in chronological order, but in fragments. Eliot picks out a piece in time and starts talking about it. There is no sense of passage of time, which is similar to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, where the book prolongs the extension of time with objects such as the Big Ben (according to Yuki Zhang). Maybe Eliot is doing a similar thing here, but we might need to read more.

Something that my Latin class talked about when reading Aeneid by Virgil is that Troy has to fall in order for Rome to rise in the future. Aeneid, as both a Trojan and a Roman soldier, has double identities, with his Trojan identity being shown when Juno first sunk his ships when sailing across the Tyrrhenian sea. Aeneid was depressed over the fact that he didn’t die glorious in battle but ended his life at sea, for he wanted to show his piety towards Troy in front of the gods and his parents. Speaking from a Roman perspective, Aeneid needed not to be this sad over the fall of Troy for this event spurred the further rising of Rome, which was another era of glory. Another parallel would be the fall of humanity since the moment Adam and Eve committed the original sin. This part of the story was often viewed as tragic and negative; however, eating the apple symbolized mankind’s awareness of both the good and the bad, which gave rise to Christianity and eventually the entire history revolving around this religion. From the perspective of the overarching human history, something inherently tragic has to happen for there to be further actions. The opening of the section “A Game of Chess” predicts the uncanny atmosphere, where “troubled, confused, and drowned the sense in odours” while the woman cried “dirty tears” and her hair “spread out in fiery points, glowed into words”. Something inherently violent has happened, and it connects to the feminine rage which causes destruction and eventually death as depicted in the love stories of Antony/Cleopatra and Aeneid/Dido. Naturally the reader wants to characterize future events or sections of the poem as even more evil, yet due to the argument above, I would urge people to actually expect something good out of it. Maybe events like these happen so that more can be spawned. This idea is similar to the metaphor of the waste land, where death is necessary for there to be life, as the corpses decay and nourish the vegetation yet to arise.

All the readings suggest a feedback loop between information shared, where the beginning of the end is the end of the beginning, similar to the idea of cycling between life and death mentioned in the epilogue. Nerval wrote that “the very room in which we are born, the various ceremonies and rituals which usher us into the world—all this establishes the series of fortunate or unfortunate circumstances on which our future entirely depends”. He also suggested that “an atom can destroy it all, an atom can save it all”, which is the same mindset proposed in the theory regarding the cyclical nature of things in the waste land. Death is necessary, for it nourishes the newborn vegetation, expanding to the idea of continuity and transcendence of souls between life and death. Eliot asked the question of whether the “corpse you planted last year in your garden” has begun to sprout, feeding into the growth of other life forms. Shakespeare’s Tempest also connotes someone who stands in the middle between two opposing parties. Ferdinand fell in love with his father’s enemy’s daughter, whom Prospero eventually agreed to join them in marriage. Sharing his feeling of being trapped in the middle, literally in between the boundaries and hatred created by generations above him, Ferdinand said that “space enough have I in such a prison”. He is still influenced by the generational affairs even though he himself is not involved with them. His presence is similar to those spirits who are expelled by heaven and not received by hell either, who just wander around with no sense of purpose. In the poem, the lines “a crowd overflowed…” best describe the “long file of people that I could not believe death had undone so many” from Hell. The mass faces that the narrator of the poem encounters represent lost identities and the beings that are trapped in between the continuities of life and death. They do not transcend, which makes them outliers of the feedback loop suggested by my ideas from the very beginning. Maybe Eliot intentionally included this contradiction to show that the waste land brews different possibilities.

The nature of Tarot cards is not objective at all—the human interpretation feeds it. It is like language, a social construct, where no one is able to communicate with another perfectly or convey the exact information in their head. Language is merely a tool with which we use to approximate the realities within our mind. Similar to language, Tarot reading can be viewed as a tool with which humans try to approximate their futures, when in reality, the future will always remain the future—unexperienced. No matter how much we predict it, the future will always remain unseen, because it is the future. The human interpretation is what powers the reading, no matter how objective the cards may seem. This might be true to the idea of the waste land as well. The land is a medium through which human aspects of reality can be expressed or reflected. In the holy grail legend, the king's physical illness reflects in the desolation of his land. The interpretation of the land can be altered to best suit the intentions of the person who has a relationship to the land. Perhaps the waste land cannot be objective at all, because the person who “interprets” the waste land cannot communicate their psychology entirely, so they need the land to serve as a medium of communication.

There is an assumption made about death that is common in the context of pre-Christian burial, Christian burial and the story of the countess Marie Larisch, that is the continuity of the deceased after the actual death, which involves a burial that marks the transcendental spirit from the upper world to the lower world. In Basevi’s writings, the “corpses were oriented in the grave” according to the “direction from which the people had been believed to have come into their present seats,” suggesting an inseparable connection between a person’s orientation before and after birth. Furthermore, when mentioning that the “dead are buried because they lived underground in holes or caverns,” the word “lived” was emphasized, which shows that the dead are not actually dead, they are merely continuities of the living in another dimension or context. This is linked to the conception that mankind in primitive days “emerged from the depths of the earth”. In a Chirstian context, the quote “all mortal things are vanity, since after death they are not” points out that there is value to beings after death. In a modern context we would think that things lose their values because they have ended, because they no longer “exist”. If we add such transcendental characteristics to beings, we look past that simple threshold of death and think in a continuous way. This can also be applied to the resurrection of Christ, which breaks the preconceived boundary between life and death and validates the possibility of bringing back someone from the place where no one has ever been to. In Larisch’s story, the old woman whom Marie and Mary encountered reveals that she has a son “lying in the lake for seven years” and still waits for his return—in fact, she is certain that he will return. There is a sense of continuity of the physical body implied here, and even more possibly a continuity in the spirit and mind, which is in stark contrast to some of the Eastern religions. Even though Buddhism supports the idea of reincarnation, which is literally the cycle between life and death, the physical body and the spirit are not continuous throughout the generations. There is still continuity in the form of the being, however in my understanding, the mind and the physical body are not passed on, it is only the idea of that being that’s continuous. When Jesus was resurrected, his spirit and physical body came back together, which is similar to what the old woman is waiting for—the rebirth of his son’s old body and mind. Eliot’s poem title and the section title both suggest discontinuity, or at least highlights the tragic beauty of being human—the impossibility of immortality and the inevitability of death. Perhaps it is because there is an end, a waste land for everything that is lost, that we can cherish the time living. Even though previous lives are dead and gone, there are still memories passed on through written works or things created by us that remain in the world. Those relics that make up the waste land compose our human identity.

The title of the poem alludes to the final state of the cycle between life and death, the state where rituals to revive the vegetations are needed to restore life and prosperity. In “From Ritual to Roman”, Weston wrote that the quest for the holy grail was a means to restore “health and vigour of a King suffering from infirmity caused by wounds, sickness, or old age” while “the condition of the King is sympathetically reflected on the land”. There is an established and interconnected relationship between the man and the land he rules, with health and prosperity reflected simultaneously and correlation determined. The “Golden Bough” also speaks about the importance of using rituals to bring back the vegetation necessary for growth and life. The cycle becomes clear here, as the seasons revolve, the vegetation prosper and wither, where the end of life is death, and end of death being life again. Osiris’ death is not concluded, for he rose again to eternal, which adds to the unceasing repetition of birth and dissolution. Eliot referred to vegetation and water countless times in the poem, where the fourth chapter of the poem stands out the most with its going back and forth between rock and water, which comes from the circle-like imagery suggested in “The Golden Bough”. I would argue that Eliot’s poem title refers to the temporary stage within the cycle—the waste land, where lives have just ended but waiting to be restored. This era is suspended in time and space, similar to postwar England, freshly emerged from the cruelty of the Great War, waiting to be industrialized and materialized.