The Aeneid gives another example of love becoming very closely intertwined with death. Dido’s love for Aeneas starts as beautiful and overwhelming, but it is created through divine manipulation when Cupid causes her to fall in love with him. Once Aeneas leaves, that very same love becomes destructive enough that Dido kills herself using his sword and is surrounded by objects that remind her of him. Eliot creates a parallel contradiction in the hyacinth garden scene. The memory seems romantic, with flowers, wet hair, and the two characters returning to the garden together, yet the speaker responds by growing lifeless. In both works, love does not simply make someone feel more alive; an overwhelming experience of love actually brings them much closer to death. The parallel is that life and beauty are brought painfully close to death and loss.

Dante’s Inferno describes an enormous crowd of dead souls, and Eliot brings almost the same image into an ordinary moving morning in London. What makes the comparison particularly fascinating is that Eliot's crowd is technically alive; they are commuters walking through the city, yet he describes them using language meant originally for the dead. The people also seem to move together rather than as individuals, making London feel less like a living city and more like Dante's grim afterlife. I think that Eliot uses the reference to suggest a certain kind of spiritual death rather than literal physical death. After the general destruction that happened in WWI, people may have survived physically while still moving through a world that feels empty, repetitive, and disconnected. In Dante, death brings people into hell. In Eliot, modern life already begins to resemble it.

The story of Hyacinthus in Lempriere makes the flower a connection to both love and death. After Hyacinth dies, Apollo transforms his memory into the hyacinth, allowing something living to emerge from his death. This makes Eliot's later description of being neither living nor dead particularly fascinating. The hyacinth seems to exist between the two states: it grows due to the fact that Hyacinthus died, but it also allows his memory to continue living. Eliot might be drawing on this contradiction to make the hyacinth girl represent a cocktail of love, memory, life, loss, and grief,

Eliot's use of “son of man: connects this passage to Ezekiel, where God repeatedly addresses the prophet ezekie; as “son of man.” However, Eliot changes the situation with his “son of man”, who says that “you cannot say or guess” because all he knows is a heap of broken images. In Ezekiel, the prophet is able to understand a world ruined through divine revelation, while Eliot presents someone surrounded by fragments without the ability to make sense of them. I think that the heap of broken images could therefore be read as the condition of Europe after WWI. The old culture, religion, and societies still exist in pieces, but those pieces no longer clearly connect to one image.

The lines read, “I am not a russian woman at all; I come from Lithuania, absolutely German.” Rather than simply establishing where Marie comes from, the line shows how unstable national identity was in Europe around WWI. Lithuania had been part of the Russian Empire, but Germany’s culture had spread out to far beyond its political boundaries. Marie, therefore, is forced to explain herself through different national categories and identities, demonstrating how political borders fail to neatly align with personal identity.

The poem also contributes to the known modernist desire of impersonal poetry while all the same time, still telling a meaningful story. Eliot does not explain Marie’s historical circumstances, and instead forces the readers to create a story from the fraction that is given. Her insistence that she is “absolutely German” becomes especially meaningful in a postwar Europe obsessed with defining nationality.

In the Golden Borough, the article discusses the changing seasons and the death of vegetation. That is to say, the article speaks about how different cultures and religions have related concepts and ideas about their gods dying; when the god dies, the fertility and successful harvest go with them, meaning that the land that is left behind is barren and desolate; in other words, a wasteland.

Elliot ends this section with this quote, almost directly repeating Ophealis words in Hamlet. Ophelia says this after the death of her father has driven her into madness, forcing her speech to reflect her fragmented and disconnected state of mind. Eliot places the same words at the end of a section filled with broken conversations and troubled relationships. By connecting these women to Ophelia, Eliot is suggesting that their fragmented speech reflects a deeper emotional distress rather than simply meaningless and confused conversation.

The story of Parsifal presents sexual temptation as something that is an obstacle to be conquered in order to achieve or reach something sacred. Parsifal is specifically able to succeed because he resists the flower maidens and Kundry, while other knights are defeated by their own desires. This connects to Eliot’s description of the Thames as having lost the nymphs and theur lovers. In place of sexuality leading toward a greater spiritual significance, the relationships Eliot describes seem temporary and leave very little behind. By placing this kind of empty modern sexuality against stories like that of Parsifal, Eliot makes the modern world comparatively hollow spiritually. Desire still exists, but there is no sacred goal or achievement awaiting on the other side of it.

John Donne's writing also described a man sexually “exploring” a woman’s body, even asking permission to let his hands move across her. Eliot takes this idea and makes it much colder and more cynical. The young man’s “exploring hands” meet “no defence”, but the woman's lack of resistance is described as indifference as opposed to desire. Unlike Donne’s speaker, who sees and treats sex as an enthralling discovery, Eliot removes almost all of the intimacy from the encounter. The similarity between the two men's actions, nakedness, and the lack of emotion in Eliot’s scene makes all the more noticeable.

The repeated burning directly connects Eliot’s ending to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, which described the senses and mind as burning with passion, hatred, delusion, and suffering. This is especially significant after Eliot has spent the section describing a series of sexual encounters. Desire has not brought the characters fulfilment; instead, it has repeatedly left them disconnected or hurt. The sudden plea, “o lord, thou pluckest me out,” therefore sounds like a desire to escape this cycle. Eliot takes Buddha’s idea that freedom comes from detaching oneself from certain passions that may cause suffering and seeks it after examples of people who are unable to achieve that dream.

Connects to the resurrection imagery in John. In John, death can be overcome and even becomes necessary in order to grow new life, like the grain of the wheat that has to die before it can grow. Here, Eliot gives us a landscape that seems ready for that same movement from death into life, but it cannot happen due to the lack of water. The possibility of resurrection exists, but the waste land is still stuck before it.

In the Golden Borough, the article discusses the changing seasons and the death of vegetation. That is to say, the article speaks about how different cultures and religions have related concepts and ideas about their gods dying; when the god dies, the fertility and successful harvest go with them, meaning that the land that is left behind is barren and desolate; in other words, a wasteland.