shockingly (stocking-ly) intimate

"When shall I be like the swallow" - connection to Philomela's release, another allusion to sexual violence.

Towers present as a recurring motif throughout the poem - in the last section alone, there is a reference to Dante's damned Count Ugolino, starving in a tower, there are "towers / Tolling reminiscent bells", which is a potential reference to Dracula's imprisonment of Harker, and a description of "Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal". In a myriad of myth systems, towers are a an attempt by mortals to reach the divine (e.g. the Tower of Babel); thus, towers represent the hubris of humanity, the overreaching of modern society, and the dangerous power of industrialization. The Tower is also part of the Major Arcana in Tarot decks, and it can represent sudden, potentially destructive changes or realizations. This interpretation of the tower as a symbol is interesting when we consider its reoccurrence in the last section of TWL - is "What the Thunder said" meant to be disruptive to the rest of the poem, or to our worldviews? Does the combination of the symbols of thunder/lightning and the tower (imprisonment) create a certain sense of breaking free?

Another source that concerns the separation/symbiosis of the body and soul.

In the Visuddhi-Magga, a certain woman is perceived as impure, neither male nor female, and is referred to simply as "a set of bones". This description creates an important distinction - the person (ego, character, personality, conscious) is separate from the body (represented by the bones). The Visuddhi-Magga says that "people fail to recognize the essential repulsiveness of their bodies", until the physical parts become detached from the whole - that moment is the point where we can truly comprehend the repulsiveness. Thus, "dry bones" are ego-less, a body with no conscious, repulsive yet harmless. They also function as a reference to emasculation, the body without the male ego, a body that can "harm no one".

ambiguity of gender - recalls Tiresias, who, as an inhabitant of two different bodies and as a prophet, almost exists separate of the body or on a higher plane. Also, this phrase brings up the idea that sex is immaterial: in the Visuddhi-Magga, the idea of attraction is less a physical construction and more a byproduct of the ego or the spirit (as Rahul mentioned). Removing physical attraction is interesting because all that remains after is a power dynamic (as in the episode with the typist).

Interesting juxtaposition here - bats are wild creatures, babies are hapless innocents - reminds me of the way duality presents in single entities throughout the poem (good/evil, God/Satan, male/female)

Here is yet another allusion to sexual violence (Brachiano and Vittoria's debauched romance that results in many murders). Also the reference to the spider - male spiders basically trap/stalk sexually immature females to ensure that they are the first ones to mate with them, and then female spiders eat their partners after copulation. The mention of the spider is odd in conjunction with "beneficent" - in The White Devil, the spider is making a "thin curtain for your epitaphs". Is this a kindness? Is this positive?

This whole stanza emphasizes the lack of water and the rockiness of the land. The land depicted here is infertile, desolate: even the thunder is "sterile" and "without rain". Drought and infertility go hand in hand. The lack of water in this section contrasts completely with the previous section, which largely has to do with the ocean. However, the cyclical nature of beginning the poem with themes of infertility, and then highlighting it in this last section, reflects themes of life & death throughout the poem.

new money

There could be a connection between the idea of profit/loss and that of life/death here, especially in the context of water imagery (see Keeilah's annotation about water and rebirth). In Part 3, "The Fire Sermon", there are many allusions to wealth and economy: the "heirs of City directors", the "Smyrna merchant" who propositions the narrator, the "Bradford millionaire". Here, Eliot is continuing the theme, in an almost denigrating manner: Phlebas "forgot" the profit and loss. All of "The Fire Sermon" is very much rooted in everyday life, the small details of existence and human interaction. However, "Death by Water" transitions more into greater ideas of life and death. This shift from "The Fire Sermon" to "Death by Water," and the mentions of profit throughout serve almost to deride the concept of economic gain; wealth means nothing when we are dead.

The mention of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is important because their story relates to two themes that have arisen over and over throughout the poem. Part of the reason Elizabeth, a famed virgin, vowed never to marry was because of the way her father treated his wives: Katherine of Aragon was divorced and left to waste away, Anne Boleyn was vilified and beheaded, Jane died in childbed, Anne of Cleves was divorced, Catherine Howard, barely 19 when she married 50-year-old Henry VIII, was beheaded, and Catherine Parr, his last wife, only survived due to his death. Elizabeth's life was defined by this revolving door of queens; she witnessed the absolute power men wielded over women, especially in marriage. Her vow to stay unmarried is important in the context of allusions to other queens whose love led to their downfall (Dido, Cleopatra). However, at the same time, her refusal to marry Dudley, Earl Leicester results in his emasculation: they are rumored lovers, yet Elizabeth's refusal to make their relationship official renders him powerless. The Dudley reference relates to the silencing of a man's voice in "A Game of Chess", as well as the gender changes of Tiresias and Madame Sosostris.

Tiresias, who Eliot calls the most important figure of the poem, is interesting both for his potential unreliability and because he is yet another victim present within the poem. Thus far, we have encountered three explicitly named prophets: the Sibyl of Cumae, Madame Sosostris, and now Tiresias. As I mentioned in an earlier annotation, there is something untrustworthy about Madame Sosostris (she has a "bad cold", she "is known" to be wise, rather than that she is wise, she has a "wicked" pack of cards). Tiresias is similarly odd: he is blind, yet he can see the future, and he is an "old man with wrinkled female breasts", a very vivid and disturbing statement. Also, in both histories of Tiresias, he is portrayed as a victim of gods' whims, much like Rahul mentioned in an earlier annotation.

In yet another reference by Eliot to the Grail stories, Verlaine's Parsifal is successful in retrieving one of the Holy objects because he is young and pure. However, he finds it difficult: "Parsifal has conquered the girls, their sweet / Chatter, amusing lust--and his inclination". He is tempted by the children and their song. The youth of the seductive maidens is important to note especially in the context of the "nymphs" mentioned earlier in "The Fire Sermon". Nymphs are young, semi-divine, attractive, and very common in Greek mythology: their departure may represent the decline of the natural world as industrialism takes over. Also, however, because the concept of these youthful nymphs are reflected in a very sexual manner in the story of Parsifal, we need to question their presence by the Thames--are they seductresses? Prostitutes?

This line, taken directly from Shakespeare's Hamlet, is spoken by Ophelia in the scene before she commits suicide; yet again, Eliot is alluding to a woman who takes her own life out of despair. The women present in "A Game of Chess" are all passive objects, but death remains to them as the only avenue through which they can assume any form of agency. In this scene, an unnamed friend converses with the working-class character Lil about how she needs to make herself more attractive to keep her husband Albert's attention, to which Lil responds that it was an abortion that is ravaging her body. She is powerless to her own fertility and her own sexuality; in that, she is similar to the woman in the first part of "A Game of Chess". With this episode, Eliot is again providing commentary on fertility, but instead perhaps that excess fecundity is promoting cultural decline.

The woman in this stanza is complicated: she is suspect, much like Madame Sosostris, with her "strange synthetic perfumes," and, oddly, her ornate surroundings include a depiction of extreme sexual violence and depravity. The setting of this episode is very similar to that of Baudelaire's poem "A Martyred Woman", which also concerns sexual violence: "Did he use your inert, complacent flesh to fill / The immensity of his lust?". However, this woman is not completely a victim--"Had her exasperated soul... Thrown open their gates to the thirsty pack / Of lost and wandering desires?" In any case, this stanza is full of curious conflicts: between the lavish decor and the reprehensible scenes depicted within, and between the beauty of the woman and her potential culpability (or lack of agency).

All three sources cited by Eliot in this stanza--Antony and Cleopatra, The Aeneid, and the story of Philomela all depict death as a release, and something quite positive.

The Unreal City, or "Fourmillante cité", as Baudelaire originally wrote, is an inexact, but possibly quite intentional, translation. In french, fourmillante means teeming, swarming, or infested, rather than unreal, which begs the question of why Eliot decided against borrowing Baudelaire's words exactly (especially because he still chose to cite the lines). He could be commenting on the futility of dreams--the next part of the line in "Les septs viellards" is "city full of dreams"--and replacing swarming with unreal changes the meaning of the line entirely. As Stephanie says in her annotation on "I had not thought death had undone so many," Eliot is much concerned with these tortured, faceless souls for whom life is the ultimate suffering: as residents of this "Unreal City," industrialization has rendered their lives not worth living. It is a haunting place, where ghosts walk and speak in the gloomy daylight--maybe the suffering people themselves are the ghosts who populate this spectral city.

This line, "Empty and desolate as the sea," is, as Eliot notes, from Wagner's operatic retelling of the story of Tristan and Isolde. Along with the sailor's song from lines 31-34, it bookends an interlude about a hyacinth girl. Interestingly, the same actor sings the two parts, as a sailor first and then as a shepherd. At this point in the story, Tristan has allowed a knight of King Mark's to mortally wound him, and Isolde's famed healing powers are his last hope. A shepherd sings this line while looking out into the ocean with no sign of Isolde's ship in sight. As the last line of the Tristan and Isolde interlude, it echoes hopelessly: Isolde will not come in time to save her lover. The sea is as desolate as this reference. Sexual sin is also theme here, as Tristan is being punished for his adultery, just as the Fisher King's kingdom is punished for his impotence.

The former title of TWL was "He Do the Police in Different Voices," which is a phrase from Charles Dickens' 1865 novel Our Mutual Friend. The boy referenced in the title is the character Sloppy, who is the ward of a Mrs. Higden, from whom the Boffins are trying to adopt an orphan. Mrs. Higden explains that when Sloppy reads her the newspaper, he acts out the voices of various policemen. This former title reflects the fragmented voices and narrators throughout The Waste Land; Eliot has revealed that he is not the one speaking: rather, he is almost functioning as a prophet through which figures of myth speak. There may be a connection between this prophet-like role of the poet and the epigraph, which concerns the Sibyl of Cumae, a prophetess. Also, Sloppy, who was raised in a poor-house, is an example of the failure of society to provide for its most helpless members, which is connected to the idea of the encroachment of communal waste land in 17th/18th century England.

The "Waste Land" is a motif that recurs in Celtic mythology as well as Grail story romances; Chrétien de Troyes first described the Grail in his unfinished 12th century novel Perceval, le conte du Graal. The Waste Land is barren and desolate, a cursed place that must be saved by a hero. In de Troyes' telling, the Fisher King of Arthurian legend is wounded and his land suffers with him. The virility of the King is intimately tied to the fertility of his land; Jessie Weston writes in From Ritual to Romance that the diminishing energy of the King is apparent foremost in his failure to pleasure his many wives. Because of how crucial the fecundity of the King is to the health of the land, and because the King's infertility is what causes the creation of the Waste Land, we can assume that infertility will recur, as a theme or as imagery, throughout the poem.