The inclusion of Prothalamion especially after the ending of A Chess Game, is a very conscious choice that Eliot made. The imagery of "the river's tent is broken: the last finger of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank" alludes to Ophelia's suicide due to her grief, as well as Hamlet's choice not to marry her but to keep her around. The Prothalamion is a marriage song, yet it is based on a story of sexual assault, with Jove luring Leda as a swan and then raping her. This continues the note that A Chess Game left - marriage/love being a woman's downfall, as well as it also being the only reason women exist.

The contrast between the beauty and melancholy of "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song" and the brutality of the origin of the song further emphasizes the cycle of beauty existing within death and carnage.

These are the last words that Ophelia says in the play Hamlet. She ends up going crazy due to her grief over her father, her lover, and the lack of autonomy that she once had. Ophelia, like all the women referenced thus far in the poem, goes insane/dies not on her own but to the detriment of the male figures in her life. Like Sibyl, she went insane because of her failure to manipulate Hamlet. Nobody could understand what she was saying. The repetition of "Hurry up please its time" in full caps shows that the female protagonist in this section of the poem is experiencing similar levels of distress.

A Game of Chess, unlike Burial of the Dead, has a focus on women. The common thread between all these secondary sources (Cleopatra and Anthony, Paradise Lost, Aeneid, Ovid and Baudelaire) is that love, whether forced or organic eventual leads to all the main female protagonists' demise. Ovid is a very clear example of this because, through her sister's husband, she loses her autonomy and expression and is subjugated to a concubine. However, she gets her revenge and kills Tereus's son as well as Tereus.

Eliot uses the tale of Philomel to flip the preface on its head. Where Sybil eventually lost the power of speech, Tereus turns into a nightingale, where only males have the power of speech. This is not oppression of women's voices; rather, it is the fact that women simply don't have to speak because of the atrocities committed by Tereus.

"Unreal City" is a direct reference to Charles Baudelaire which is translated to: "Swarming city, city full of dreams, where the specter accosts the passerby in broad daylight". Initially, I thought this was describing London in a positive sense; however, as it is followed up with Canto III from the Inferno, the "unreal city" of dreams is tainted with suffering. It directly contrasts Dante's "city of woe".

This juxtaposition is explored further in lines 61 - 65. The illusion of the unreal city (in the sense of romanticization) is quickly abandoned with the stark description of "brown fog". Additionally, the difference in "specter accosts the passerby in broad daylight" is apparent, as these lines are in the first person, no third person perspective. This adds to the fact that there is a lack of community, the only thing that is present is the "I", which is further commentary of how suffering can breed an individualistic mindset in the masses.

The direct translation of this from German to English is: "The wind blows fresh towards home; my Irish child, where do you live?" There are a couple of things that make this passage intriguing; firstly, Eliot made the conscious choice to continue these German excerpts. This continuous German connects to the past few stanzas that hint towards the archduke and his death as a catalyst for WWI. Additionally, this excerpt is a sailor song from the story of Tristan and Isolde, a story very similar to Romeo and Juliet in the sense that they die together as a result of their potion. The presence of the occult/witch alludes to Madame Sosostris, who appears later in the Burial of the Dead.

However, my main point of focus was how this excerpt connects with the hyacinths. Hyacinthia was loved by Apollo. This is the second (could be third) covert appearance of Apollo within the poem. He appears in the preface, as he is the one who punished Sibyl, and appears in the archduke section, as a prophecy that was told to Marie by a woman whose son died in the Starnbergersee lake. He appears in the myth of Hyacinthia, as he is the one who turned him into hyacinths. Despite that, the second version of the myth details Hyacinthia's death because Zephyrus (the god of the wind) envied the attention that Hyacinthia got from Apollo. Wind in this excerpt foreshadows the meaning of hyacinths as mourning flowers. This ultimately connects back to the death of Tristan and Isolde.

The archduke in question is Ludwig of Austria, whose assassination was the catalyst for WWII. Additionally, the connection between the tale of the archduke (Larisch's autobiography) and the preface in Greek and Latin is that the "Sibyllam quidem Cumis" was a prophetess to Apollo. Apollo is the god of prophecy, and there is a lady who is a widow who accurately predicts the death of the archduke. The location where the first stanza is set is in Starnberg, more specifically, at Starnberg Lake, where the widow is waiting for someone to die in his place.

This essentially sets the tone for the entire poem, as death is an ever-present entity. Given the fact that the duke's death triggered WWII, for Eliot it is an important place to set up the poem. Marie's story is intentional, as the one life the widow was looking for ended up impacting a variety of people.

Through the three separate but similar in content stories/aspects of stories, I would argue that there is also a fourth story that connects all of the tales together, and that is of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. I acknowledge that throughout Le Morte D'Arthur there are very clear signs of the Garden of Eden and references to King Solomon's children, Abel and Cain. I am still transfixed with the concept of the "Waste Land" in reference to Adam and Eve's banishment and the further idea of the fact that Eliot hinted at the fact that we could be living in a wasteland due to the wrongful crucifixion of Jesus. The crucifixion comes from the way in which Osiris was wrongly killed by his brother (parallels with Judas' betrayal of Jesus), and the mourners being women (parallels between Mary mourning Jesus and that being the reason he rose from the dead). This emphasizes the tale within a tale within another tale that Eliot is committed to executing. It also begs the question of whether conditions are a result of these different versions of wastelands, which change due to historical contexts.