I am interested in the indentation of “I sat upon the shore” in a section that is otherwise left-justified. The visual effect of the standalone line in the left-aligned stanza mimics a cliff / shore situation where a fisher can lower their hook. The “shore” is not supported by any words in the line directly beneath it, just as the sand underneath the waves sift under compression, shapeshifting and fluid. Extending this literal interpretation, what we find on the other end of the line is the subterranean substance beneath the shore’s surface. Our last line, “Shantih shantih shantih” is also indented, although not as much as the first line is. This is a call and response that not only sandwiches the mixture of content (similar yet unidentical as the shifting sands) with visibly-identifiable structure but also clarifies the mission the narrator has set out to achieve: finding peace.

Nautical imagery is not limited to semantics, however. Beyond fishing on shores and London Bridge collapsing (into the River Thames), the spacing of closing line “Shantih shantih shantih” vaguely resembles the ebb and flow of waves departing shore. I am puzzled by the alignment of these last three words, and one justification (haha because it’s not left-justified) I concluded is that each “shanih” corresponds to a moment in time, with the subject “I” in the first line denoting the present. The first, capitalized “shantih” is for the past - a violent amalgamation of tragedies spanning centuries, mythologies, and even languages, yet the narrator still possesses the burgeoning hope to pray for peace. The second is for the present - a conflicted narrative between “Fishing”, present participle, and “have shored”, present perfect tense, an active search for reconciliation. And the last is for the future - nebulous with a promise of revenge, for “Hieronymo’s mad againe”. What strikes me aside from Eliot’s refusal to spell alluded character names correctly is the simultaneous looming and absence of destiny. A final prayer for peace suggests the future may need all the divine intervention it can get. The residual aggression from the Spanish Tragedy, which in TWL, is the universal tragedy, lingers in the falling infrastructure and human decay. Yet, the future is markedly absent throughout the stanza. The subject is positioned “with the arid plain behind me”. This direction acknowledges the past and deems it infertile. But what lies ahead? What of the future? It is unwritten, unpunctualized, and utterly neglected.

Combining the Tarot-reading interpretation of the poem’s end and my earlier theory of fishing (if you were to draw a line between the “e” of “shore” and the “h” of the last“shantih”, you see a fishing line attached to a hook. If you really squint), we realize Eliot propels the reader into The Waste Land, or rather, he brings the waste land to us. We are all on our own holy grail quests, fishing for peace.

After an unbearable dry period, the waste land finally receives water - this time in abundance. The call of the cockerel, “Co co rico co co rico” harbinges the downpour of rain, and nature cowers and grovels expectantly at the divine intervention. The rain - spurred by its tumultuous lead-up - is cathartic. The barren (but simultaneously human-ravaged) land is saved. “In a flash of lightning”, in a glimmer of truth, a sign from Brahman, a savior divine, the dry season comes to an end. The irony of waiting (p)ages for something so abrupt simulates the imbalanced power dynamic between gods and men. Mortals will be driven to the brink of delirium, until their “voices sing[...] out of empty cisters and exhausted wells”, and still they will wait for a god and his promise of rain. The line continues, “Then a damp gust / Bringing rain”. The line break after a “damp gust”, which in itself is full of water, so much so the air is wet, emphasizes the bringing of the rain. The concluding two words complete the cycle of desperation from the opening of TWL.

Marrying this observation with the preachings of the Great-Forest Upanishad, the dryness of the land may be a metaphor for the numbness of human hearts. Prajāpati deems compassion and giving the most important teachings for demons and humans respectively. While the previous sections of TWL are characterized by macabre descriptions and apathetic images, detailing the deaths of queens and corpses of sailors in an objective voice, the numbness finally wears off. Readers are exposed to vulnerable, sunken rivers, crouching jungles “humped in silence”, and “limp leaves” that “Waited for rain”. Life on the waste land bows to water, and finally, there is a tugging in our bloody, shaking hearts – at the wicked way of the world, the solemn tragedies of sailors and of “broken Coriolanus”. Having endured with a stone face the Burial of the Dead, having withstood the fire, water, and now, thunder, readers shed a tear. It is not just rain that the dry land / our numb hearts crave -- it is tears. The quest for the Holy Grail or the pleas for rain, The Waste Land is actually a journey for humans to feel human again.

Lightning strikes. Tears fall. Empathy reigns again.

This line is lifted from a translation of the Visuddhi-Magga, where a woman adorned in accessories (such that she looks like a goddess) leaves her husband’s house to return home. On her way, she is met by an elder who bestows “saintship” upon her based on her teeth. Physical beauty is in indicator of divinity, but perhaps an erroneous one. He declares, "Was it a woman, or a man, /That passed this way? I cannot tell / But this I know, a set of bones / Is traveling on upon this road."

The ambiguity on gender suggests it is not feminity nor masculinity that constitutes this third creature, this mysterious other whose presence is alluded to but unknown. In the passage, it is a woman, dressed in accessories to look like a goddess, that walks the road. Yet to the elder, gender is irrelevant; all he sees is “a set of bones”. The human identity is thus defined by the physical structures that support us. The bones that prop, the skin that wraps, the muscles that hold – the human being is whittled down into strictly anatomy. The personification of “a set of bones” also evokes a sense of resurrection, where the skeleton - now a symbol of the core of a human being, not the death of one - travels directionlessly on the road. The use of demonstrative pronoun “this” reemphasizes the proximity of the skeleton - this divine -, correlating the road it travels on to the one the speaker (and us) are on.

The focus shifts later in the passage to the vulnerability of bodies in their indiviudal, amputated form. Hair, when detached from the scalp, flies loose and tangled in clumps in the drain or kots on a comb. Nails, clipped or fallen, become trash. Teeth, the most animalistic mechanism that chews and rips and tears, when fallen out, becomes useless and remains, if lucky enough, in a dusty wooden box. In this way all our bodily extensions are accessories – external decor to conceal the throbbing, vulnerable creature that resides within. Hair insulates the head and covers the neck, teeth flank our soft greedy mouths, and nails protect nerve bundles and, by extension, physical touch. What can be perceived outward is a disguise for what lies within, which I suppose must be the soul. While alive, a human’s exterior features can be come detached; joints can loosen, organs can fail, and skin can callous. And in death, organs liquify, hair decomposes, and muscles decay. Yet bones, in their stubborn white glory, remain. They are firmly rooted in the ground, a testament of a human’s existence, a mere indicator of the body it held, the life it contained.

Eliot references bones throughout TWL – they are lost in rats’ alley, they rattle by Sweet Thames, they are in the bottom of sunken ships. Of all the disguises a human wears, (the queens no different form the cadavers in “A Game of Chess”, the dead buried and regrown), at their core they are all bones. Perhaps that is where the truth lies – in that which cannot be decomposed.

I am interested in the function of the title in concluding the poem. The “Apocalypse of John” is the final book in the New Testament and the “only apocalyptic document in the New Testament canon”. Considering the entire poem as one entity with multiple books, “What the Thunder Said” is the “Apocalypse” of the TWL canon. Curiously, the Greek definition of apokálypsis is “unveiling” or finding out a secret. There isn’t any dystopian world-ending connotation. Rather, apocalypse is a revelation, an intellectual rite of passage from past ignorance to present learning. This section can be read as the aftermath of the preceding four – thunder is the dreadful noise after a lighting strike, the product of water and fire and light (and chess…), the consequence of human sin and God’s anger.

Adapting the Greek definition of “apocalypse”, we discover new meaning in the beginning of ends. We wrongly assume the world is ending and the waste land is doomed to remain barren, when in fact, it is growing back “with a little patience”. Keats, as in “What The Trush Said”, would argue that “spring will be a harvest-time” for those “whose face hath felt the Winter's wind”, and those who face adversity such as “the torchlight red on sweaty faces”, the “frosty silence in the gardens”, or the “agony in stony places” are spiritually resurrected (Eliot). After winter, the bodies buried in the garden have sprouted, and the Thunder says we must hold on.

Note: a breakfast buddy of mine (who is much more well-versed in biblical lore) astutely observed that in the Book of Revelations, a bunch of people die. Will they be buried? Will the cycle of TWL repeat, infinitely throbbing between life, death, and rebirth?

The line, “O you who turn the wheel and look to windward” is a direct reference to the insatiable Ulysses from Tennyson’s poem. Driven by his thirst for knowledge and refusal to be buried by old age, Ulysses heeds the siren call of his ship and departs on another adventure. His death by water is, to him, heroic. It is better than living what remains of his life as a sheltered retiree. For Ulysses, death by water is a reward. Eliot’s second person pronoun use here, namely, the incorporation of the reader so directly, reinforces the authoritative nature of the poem. Yet, the poem is not merely a cautionary tale. The last line of “Ulysses” is “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”; Tennyson is warning against possession, over land, knowledge, people, not adventure. Ulysses yearns for adventure, and on the wild waves, finally gets it. Eliot’s final stanza features a “you” who “turn the wheel”, who actively decides their own fate, and who “look to windward”, gazing off into the distance, at a farawary land, at the future. Yes, death by water deters the average humanist and punishes the Icarus stan, but the gentle and hopeful undertones of just one line in the final stanza suggest that death is not the end, but rather a journey. Ulysses urges his friends, “'T is not too late to seek a newer world”. Dante’s Inferno portrays a trip in the underworld. Eliot’s figure looks windward. None of these sources is concerned with the final destination (not Ithaka, as Tennyson would argue, but the long discovery of her), but rather the direction of it that death by water appoints.

Any reader who has ventured TWL knows death is not terminal. In fact, nothing really is. The fluidity of water, in the mobility of its waves, the omnipresence of its “deep sea swells”, the simultaneous pacificity and force, currents and whirlpools, means there is no rest for the dead (Eliot). Phlebas the Phoenician, referenced initially in the Tarot deck, is a fortnight dead and still rising and falling to the pulse of the sea. The cautioned reader sails animatedly towards inevitable death. So when Eliot tells us to “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you”, never fear. Hoist the anchors and raise your sails.

I am interested in the use of water and the Rhine in a passage predominantly about fire - the title, the destruction (or sparing) of Magnus Martyr (a phallic architectural statement in its own right), the “burning burning burning burning” confined to no particular subject at all. The river in the indented stanza is presented as a ruined one. The River Thames is polluted by human waste and industrial activity, and it is so exhausted that is “sweats / Oil and tar” and is dirtied by “Drifting logs” and “Red sails”. The ravaged river is analogous to the Rhine maidens in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung whose magical ring was stolen by a male lord who wishes to possess the ring and its powers completely. Beyond the Wagnerian realm, the interaction can be interpreted as a reference to rape where the male induces loss magically (the nymphs have departed the river bank), materially (the powerful ring is stolen), and emotionally (one can read Weialala leia is a wail). In this analogy, the river and its “wet bank” and “turning tides” represents the fallen woman – Once magical, even divine, now powerless and a waste. The downfall of the prophetic Rhine maidens echoes that of Dido (“To Carthage then I came”), of the unnamed woman in Moorgate, of every “humble” woman. I think it is unfair to characterize women solely as victims of sexual abuse in TWL, although that is a leitmotif. Indeed, water is the natural complement to fire; where one is destructive the other heals. Marrying the regenerative properties of water (along with its implications to vegetation, fertility, and life) with the feminine experience, it seems it is women who mark the magic of a place and men who ruin it.

Tiresias is a hermaphrodite, being an “Old man with wrinkled female breasts”, and later an “old man with wrinkled dugs”. Hermaphroditism stems from ancient Greek Hermaphroditus, the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, who was pursued by the water nymph Salmacis with whom he became ultimately entwined. Notably, it was the nymph’s prayer to be united with Hermaphroditus forever, against his will, and the tension between warring femininity and masculinity being forced into one body is suggested in the lines, “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, / Old man with wrinkled female breasts, ”. While Tiresias is androgynous, the contradiction between being an “old man” and having “wrinkled female breasts” is awkward. Particularly, “old man” is not defined at all (What defines a man? What defines old? Tiresias was said to be gifted 7 times the lifespan of the average mortal, is age not relative to his lifespan?) and “wrinkled female breasts” insinuates femininity but fails to dignify womanhood or femaleness in the declarative manner of “old man”. Instead, Tiresias’s femininity is testified by two aged, (old?) decaying body parts that are consistently exploited in the objectification of women. This rift demonstrates the tension between male and female identities, suggesting that Tiresias’s androgyny may be an unnatural one.

Moreover, Tiresias is “throbbing between two lives”, which we assume to be his genders before and after striking the serpent and divine interference. “Throbbing” is carnal, both pleasure and pain, like Tiresias is pushed from one gender into the next in crashes of adrenaline and blood. “Throbbing” is also synonymous with rage, perhaps that of Tiresias at being lured into a pool, into losing autonomy over his body and being morphed into an intersexual deity, or perhaps that of the outsider who cannot, whether physically or by some other definition, conform. Perhaps Tiresias’s downfall was the product of coerced unification.

Of note, “throbbing” is used in the line above, in “when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting”. The inanimate taxi is “throbbing” with anticipation of being useful, of being used. Taking this expectant definition, Tiresias “throbbing between two lives” is a hopeful thing. Tiresias can feel the tug of both lives and know he may some day belong in one.

Material waste in The Fire Sermon illustrates an aspect of the relationship between humans and nature. Particularly, Eliot’s adaptation of Spenser’s Prothalamion, originally a tranquil, heavenly scene, features the absence of “empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends, / Or other testimony of summer nights”. The referenced hellenic scene does not include riverbanks littered with traces of consumption, but Eliot’s scene and the modern imagination renders the image as such. Empty bottles, sandwich papers, and cigarette ends are all residues of consumption (and addiction), while silk handkerchiefs contrasts with cardboard boxes as vessels of capitalist good and vanity. The silk handkerchief, in particular, is interesting because the riverbank in Prothalamion is described as a “rutty bank, the which his river hems,” that “Was painted all with variable flowers”. Spenser’s riverbank argues that nature is originally bland and dilapidated before it is beautified by flowers, maidens, and ephemeral vanities. Eliot’s wasteland is characterized, instead, by its dearth of silk handkerchiefs and human trash. “The nymphs are departed. / And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors; / Departed, have left no addresses.” Eliot’s riverbank is abandoned. Nymphs - personifications of the magical and divine - have deserted the forsaken land. So have the “loitering heirs”, whose modifier is phonetically similar to “littering”. Humans have polluted the land and let it run wild (as per Anthony’s OED point).

But what constitutes the difference between human trace and human trash?

Eliot proceeds to set the scene of a rat that “crept softly throught he vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly on the bank” where the rat may be a reference to “rats’ alley / where the dead men lost their bones”. The ruination of humankind, in our skeletons becoming fatteners for rats, is grotesque, but it is inevitable as the soft flow of the river Thames. Eliot draws a horrific connection between human waste and our natural environment, and the title “The Fire Sermon” aligns with this parallel. In Ādittapariyāya Sutta, Buddha preaches on liberation from suffering through detachment form earthly things. Deliverance from material goods may be modern humans’ only salvation.

The first few times I read this passage, I glossed over the spelling of “Goonight”. It wasn’t until the indented Ophelia soliloquy “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, / good night.” that I noticed that “Goonight” was missing a “d” and a space. I attributed this to the slurrish / slangy vernacular of the unnamed first person subject. The portmanteauing of the word evokes a sense of urgency, as if there isn’t enough time for the character to pronounce two full syllables separately and must combine the two into a breath. This aligns with the repeated phrases “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”, which as I am typing this, I realize is also missing punctuation “ ‘ “ that critically indicates that the word is a contraction. Again, a word is shortened, this time dropping even the apostrophe. “ITS” is also a particularly interesting case because “IT’S” represents contraction “IT IS”, which is grammatically correct and therefore what I assume the correct voice is, while just “ITS” is a possesive pronoun modifying who knows what. Whose time is it? Who does time belong to? Do we all belong to time?

The imperative “HURRY UP ITS TIME” is repeated four times in under 40 lines, first spaced out, and then condensing to repeat back to back 4 lines before the end of the poem. This increasingly urgent demand phonetically (and emotionally) elicits the pressures of living. As a third person / exterior overhead voice in the scene between Lil and the first person subject consoling/incriminating her of her domestic shortcomings as a mother and wife, the phrase is an objective pace keeper, separate from the cast of characters and their woes. Every time Lil is about to answer an emotionally wrought question, (“What you get married for if you don’t want children?”), the phrase in all-caps becomes her saving grace, interrupting the accusatory line of questioning between one character (a condescending wife or a oatrarchy-upholding man?) and her truth. Outside the scene, the phrase is a speed sign for us readers as we parse through the different voices. The insertion reads like Ophelia’s “sings” cues in Hamlet, where the theatrical cue physically separates delivered lines from those sung. Both interpretations embody the accelerando of life. Lil, her snobby friend, the various ambiguous pronouns, me, you, we are all of us running out of time, being pursued, pursued.

Eliot describes the “fruited vines” supporting the subject’s weight. This biblical reference to the Garden of Eden where the Fruit of Knowledge, synonymous with Milton’s “ambrosial fruit”, is imbued with negative connotations about the Satanic nature of women. In fact, Baudelaire, in describing the corpse of a young woman, states, “The haunches slightly sharp, and the waist sinuous / As a snake poised to strike,” directly correlating the dead woman (girl?) with a slithering Satan (A Martyred Woman). Bauderlaire continues, “The air is dangerous, fatal, / Where bouquets dying in their glass coffins / Exhale their final breath”. Remembering that the poem belongs in the collection The Flowers of Evil, women, like bouquets, are displayed in glass cases, and if bouquets are evil, women must be too.

At first, I was drawn to (and rather overwhelmed by) the series of physical materials we encounter in the opening. “The Chair” is equated to a “burnished throne” - a more authoritative rendition signifying a polished metal substance - before seeming to glow “on the marble, where the glass / Held up by standards wrough with fruited vines”. The light (and the reader’s focus) is tossed between shiny marble surfaces and glass refractions and metallic chairs, not once landing on the subject of the opening lines who we infer is indeed a queen. Amidst the influx of visual descriptions, the queen - an allusion to the title chess piece as well as the sitter of “The Chair”, is belittled. She, referring to Dido, Cleopatra, or Queen Mary (WW1/contemporary reference), is overshadowed by the focus on materialistic goods such as the “glitter of her jewels” and the “rich profusion” that poured from “satin cases”. Eliot embellishes this “Game of Chess”’s first key female figure with a plethora of perfumes, jewels, and silks instead of addressing her as a subject. Very few verbs are even connected to her, from which all are passive such as “sat” and “lurked”, with the most dramatic being “cried” in line 102. The woman in the scene feels very much secondary to the ornamentation (plug for capitalism? A critique on mass consumption? On vanity?).

True, the faceless-de-individualization argument is not singular to women in The Waste Land. However, the allusions to rape of “Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forcced” as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of Dido canonically in the Aeneid, and even with the romanticized possibility with Baudelaire’s cadaver “with eyes as provocative as the pose, / Reveals an unwholesome love, / Guilty joys and exotic revelries” suggests there may be a sexual connotation of objectifying these once-powerful women. The reader intrudes upon a crime scene (a setting deeply romanticized but still the scene of rape, suicide, regicide…) and our eyes flicker to everything but the victim. We can only reconcile with glimmers of light, hovering “under the brush,” observing “her hair / Spread out in points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still” in the inhuman MO of a guilty perpetrator. Eliot’s readers are not only deeply uncomfortable with the prolonged gawking at unburied women (not deserving of the same solace or privacy soldiers or men do, but rather publicly displayed as a symbol of fleeting beauty) but also guilty of partaking in the crime that ruined them.

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) portrays seven identical men whose identities are defaced by Parisian industrialization. In “Les Sept vieillards (The Seven Old Men), Bauderlaire’s first person subject desecribes seeing a man and his “shadow”, “And back and eye and beard, all were the same; / Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable”. The loss of identity evident in many modernist poems is evident in Baudelaire’s work, but so are undertones of violence and sin. Suspicions that these cane tapping men were creatures from the underworld are confirmed by the narrator’s exclamation, “These seven old hideous monsters had the mien / Of beings immortal”. As the title suggests, the seven old men are defiled by evil forces if not embodying it themselves. Emphasis on “the same Hell” suggests that there are multiple layers to the afterlife, perhaps not unlike Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio. The description also displays the discomforting uniformity of the seven old men, where the addendum “indistinguishable” further erases the identities of each individual and groups them together as seven.

Eliot also seems captivated by deindividualization as a result of industrialization. While Baudelaire’s poems featured dilapidation of devilish characters and the impenetrable Parisian smog, Eliot uses passive voice and plural pronouns to avoid endowing a character a face or a name. Eliot’s subject notes, “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”. Readers are overwhelmed by the volume of subjects but confused by the lack of clarity on anything other than setting. Repetition of “so many” as a modification of “a crowd” further bewilders the reader, grasping at spare eyes and feet (“And each man fixed his eyes before his feet”) for a subject, much less a concrete image. In fact, Eliot goes so far as to remove the subject from the line completely, as in, “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,” where the passive voice is jarring because it is grammatically and rhythmically awkward. Instead, the absence of a subject forces the reader to imagine walls of gasping mouths, breaths mingling from hundreds into one, not tethered to any block of concrete under the London Bridge but fluid, omnipresent.

These poems are more than laments on disembodiment, however. Eliot’s “crowd” is “undone” by death, a simple but human sentiment that the pessimistic subject deems a surprise, but the masses congregate about a symbol of British industrialization to pay tribute to human sacrifice, to sympathize with one another, to breathe (or cry) as one. The ambiguous pronouns diminish personal identity but simultaneously function to include “so many” and encompass “each man”. Suddenly the faceless crowd becomes one pounding human heart. Even the Baudelaire has glimmers of unity. The seven men are introduced first as “an aged man”, then as “centeranian twins”, before becoming an assemble of seven sinister men. Seven days of creation, seven churches, seven bowls – together, the old men become a biblically accurate whole.

I was interested in the gender dynamics surrounding TWL’s tarot reading passage in light of Mina Loy’s poem “At the Door of the House” and Weston’s tarot analysis from “From Rituals to Romance”. Eliot’s Tarot scene is anchored by Madame Sosostris, a famous clarivoyant “with a wicked pack of cards.” The description of the tarot cards as “wicked” indicates the narrator (subject of the “you” and “your” in this passage) experiences misfortune and is disdainful about it. That it is the cards that are wicked, these paper, painted, tangible objects, and not life itself, this untethered thing, is incredibly humanist. The narration of Madame Sosostris declaring, “Here, said she, / Is your card” portrays the fortune teller in the light of a god, capable of creation and judgment, blessed with omniscience. Indeed, Madame Sosostris is “known to be the wisest woman in Europe” simply because she can supposedly indicate a person’s lifeline. Yet, these supernatural powers do not go unchecked. “Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: / One must be so careful these days” indicates distrust about Madame Sosostris’s paraphernalia while revealing the subject’s need for control. That the horoscope - an astrological chart that maps in dubious scientific methods the alignment of stars, moons, and suns - must be the subject’s own reveals the irony in fate mapping. Here, Eliot stresses the need to be in possession of one’s own fate and frowns upon it.

Mina Loy’s repetition of title phrase “at the door of the house” and its subsequent modification to “for there he is at the door of the house” evokes a sense of urgency in her poem. A man’s intrusion “at the door of the house” (a symbol of virginity, of holiness because every home is a temple, of a rite of passage onto womanhood) is inevitable and untimely, Loy laments. The transformation of the phrase “You are going to make a journey / At evening about love” to “He will make a journey at evening” denotes the shifting power from the girl to the faceless suitor. Specifically, the patronizing voice decrees that this “He”, the subject is the master of his own fate. And he is, by matrimony, the master of “yours”. Fate is imbued with gender, and control over fate is a masculine ideal that women have no right to.

The role of rain in The Waste Land and in The Canterbury Tales is both injurious and invigorating, but perhaps the latter outweighs the former as both poems progress. The Canterbury Tales describes a pilgrimage undertaken in the Middle Ages to Saint Thomas Becket’s tomb in the namesake location. The poem’s opening lines “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” depicts rain as a violent “pierced … to the root” albeit aromatic “sweet-smelling showers” presence. (There is already conflict between scent and sentiment, between perception and truth). Upon closer examination, the piercing from the rain - a liquid vs a solid root - is cleansing the drought of March in a protagonistic way. The rain is rejuvenating the ground (restoring the Fisher King?) by purging the drought that April’s precursor, March, plagued the land with.

The rain is this hero that “bathed every veyne in switch liquor / Of which verto engendred is the flour”. April showers become a life force that “bathed” - a soothing, maternal, omnipresent nautical scene - and “created” - a personified Godliness, the strength fo vegetation and flourish - plants and flowers. (Perhaps the real martyrs are the raindrops we witnessed along the way.) The transition of rain from hard to soft, piercing (destruction) to engendering (creation), is representative of water’s transformative nature. Water’s fluidity is exemplified in Eliot’s opening poem The Burial of the Dead where “April (spelt “Aprill” in The Canterbury Tales and 14th century England) is the cruellest month… stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” Here, April showers are the harbinger of spring, but they are also reminders of the past, of “Memory and desire” if considering “stirring” in the phrasal sense. The rain, by existing in the present and sustaining / initiating life, is simultaneously a wake-up call and a nostalgia inducer - a tug between past and present (and the hope of a future). This hopefulness blooms throughout Eliot’s passage, and through the trickles of water, the seeds of a new life take root.

Whereas Marlow describes Krutz’s postmortem as “the next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole” in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Eliot titles the first section “The Burial of the Dead”. By specifying this amorphous “something” and titling it “the Dead”, Eliot seems to be honoring the souls (beyond the allusion to Krutz) marred by colonial / industrial greed. (Except he isn’t, and the first 10 lines of the poem pointedly do not regard humans at all).

(Regarding Eliot's initial epigraph from Heart of Darkness)

I was particularly drawn to contrasting uses of light in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and how they establish religious parallels that clarify “The horror!” in Eliot’s original epigraph. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow describes the dying Mr. Kurtz as possessing “an impenetrable darkness” that one perceives like one “peer[s] down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.” Mr. Kurtz, driven by greed and backboned by booming British imperialism, is exiled to a ravine not even God’s light can reach. Indeed, it is Marlow’s candle light that finally illuminates Kurtz’s ivory face and reveals it to be contorted to a look of “sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair”. Kurtz has arrived at, seen, and conquered what the world has to offer, and he dies for it. His “intense and hopeless despair” is the look of a mere mortal strayed to far from the sun, a sheep too far from the shepherd, an angel cast down from heaven for his knowledge but principally for his hunger.

The description, “There was a lamp in there—light, don’t you know—and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark” contrasts the pagan darkness - or is it natural wilderness? A waste land of its own? - with the lamp light of the “mess-room”. This scene takes place after the manager boy announces “Mistah Kurtz–he dead”, and the lighting of the two settings - before and after being enlightened with the knowledge of Mr. Kurtz’s death - hints at a Luciferan presence that lurks in the shadows of death. Taking Mr. Kurtz to be the devil, as Marlow intended, then “the horrors” of Mr. Kurtz were not just human horrors - colonization, exploitation of natural resources, famine, war - but godly ones. This image, this vision, this “supreme moment of complete knowledge” is Satanic, only the hellish scene belongs not in the underworld but on this earth, in this heart of darkness.

The “Waste Land” in Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the Story of the Grail mirrors the disability of the Fisher King while underscoring the need for femininity. The King’s “wound that will not heal” corresponds to the sterility of the kingdom, a wounded land marred by war, and, in many Holy Grail retellings, tainted by loss of faith. In this inverse Virgin Mary, the land which should birth plants and sustain animals fails to, and the wasted land becomes a mother who cannot bear children.

Indeed, the unexpecting mother is a recurring theme in religious canon. In The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, Adonis is born from a myrrh tree that had once been his mother. A mortal (and product of father-daughter incest), Adonis became the Greek god of fertility and vegetation after Zeus resurrected him upon Aphrodite’s behest. Ironically, the boy without a mother stands beside Persephone as a bringer of life, the herald of spring. Similarly, Attis, the son of a virgin, becomes the god of fertility in servitude of the Magna Mater despite having been conceived by almonds and pomegranates. Arthurian legend, combined with Eliot’s other literary muses, decrees it is the absence of these gods that the land turns to waste. This can be read as a subversion of femininity, where male figures in Western and Asiatic mythology embody biologically feminine roles, and where the consequence of a Fisher King, or an Austro-Hungarian monarch, upheaves the livelihoods of all.