"What the Thunder Said," a barren, corrupt mountainous landscape, seems to be a land of human detritus. Not only is it physically barren, with "sterile thunder without rain" but seems volatile and plagued by human vice and aggression. Line 343 conveys this most explicitly: "There is not even solitude in the mountains/ But red sullen faces sneer and snarl/ From doors of mud-cracked houses." Opening lines 321 to 324 introduce Section V.'s landscape. The line, "After the torchlight red on sweaty faces," implies that the reader is temporally after a creation event and is reminiscent of mortal warfare. Firstly, consistent use of anaphora in the three lines, repeating "After," transforms the world into the product of a state of desolence. The natural world is what's left of a distant past. Secondly, the diction (red torch light and sweaty faces) connote a barbarity and archaism innate to the human. Further bolstering this observation, the line, "There is not even solitude in the mountains" suggests that even in a world of waste, there is intricacy in ‘the human’ to plant to the divine’ relationship.

part 2 (10/5/26)

While textual symbols relating to the hermit-thrush are sparse, and the provided source only describes the bird's behavior, its presence is significant. The Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America highlights the birds insular living habits and ability to modulate tone in voice. It's described to prefer dense shrubbery and forest rather than open space; Eliot's final section, "What the Thunder Said," conversely, is a barren vast plain (which, arguably, contains little to no vegetation). Thus, the hermit-thrush is a moment of antithesis and respite from the sections overall tone and setting; the bird is only mentioned in reference to a land with water. Eliot’s relation to the hermit-thrush, nevertheless, is obscure.

Post 1 (10/5/26)

Phlebas, the drowned sailor, loses his physical stature, beauty, and status as a man. In the third movement of "SECTION III—DREAM-FUGUE," the soldier is said to lament over men lost before sunrise: "I sat, and wept in secret the tears that men have ever given to the memory of those that died before the dawn, and by the treachery of earth, our mother." This excerpt follows the fated death of the girl in section III; unable to save her, the sailor watches "the treacherous sands gathering above her head..[soon enough] Already her person was buried; only the fair young head and the diadem of white roses around it were still visible to the pitying heavens; and last of all, was visible one white marble arm." Without consulting the sources, the image seems to establish a royal antiquity to the (similarly) drowned/suffocated girl. Wearing a crown of white rose, she is preserved in sand. The only lasting remitment of her body is a marble arm—an object that connotes traditional roman and greek drowned statues. The reference of "the drowned sailor" as a product of Madame Sosostris's fortune further develops the sailor and girl to doomed, irremediable figures.

Line 320's reference to the "wheel" continues a recurrent refrain and phrase: most references to the "wheel" have been in reference to time, its movement, and destiny. Its use in the pulled passage is no difference: the term "wheel" is an explicit connection to the sailor's non-linear movement through time. Not only does he continue to be plagued and haunted by his mortal, tortured body in death, but he passes "the stages of his age and youth/ Entering the whirlpool" as might a lost soul in the River Styx or the River Acheron.

Perhaps, like Pound's "spider," these described characters are bound to a ‘ritual of the sexes.’ Pound describes the "sacrifice of the male" as "absolutely necessary" in the performance of (1) masculinity and femininity, (2) an implicit power dynamic, and (3), an internal complexity of how one defines their own sex. (3) is the least developed in the excerpt; while it's suggested that completion of the formal rites are, again, "necessary" in "sexual rite," it's unclear how they relate to the individual (especially since a male spider is said to sacrifice itself in the name of its partner, and the chance to procreate).

(2) is very evident in TWL. Even reversed, the fraught dynamic between male and female seems evident in the selected passage: "Endeavours to engage her in caress/ Which still are unreproved, if desired./ Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;/ Exploring hands encounter no defence; ." In attempts to elicit some sexual response, or desire, the man (male) attacks the woman (female); even if assault is limited to emotional, or relational, the behavior is a form of abuse.

From this, (3) is made clearer. With Pound, the male replaces the traditional female. Following the same patterns innate to abuse in traditional male-female relations, the male's behavior is a response/depends upon its female. Thus, the maintenance of "sex" is contingent upon the satisfaction of sexual rite. Satisfaction, defined by these two sources, is a measure by the power-holding party. The male is male if and only if the female performs as such.

As a symbol of Wagner's Golden River, "sweat[ing]/ Oil and tar," Eliot's river becomes a comment on the moral nature of the human. Similar to (9/25/26)'s reading, a moving body of water is used to illustrate human waste. The "sweat," the "Oil and tar," similar to (9/25/26)'s reading, are used to illustrate the physical and moral waste of humanity. Both lines describe symbols of physical strain, possibly the river is tortured... and the second, the by-products and detritus within the water.

These lines, in their attempt to show the hierarchical bodily destruction, deeply relate to and are reflected in the semiotics of Buddhism in Translations, Confessions, and Wagner's text. All three describe the descent of morality and resultant disconnection from God: descriptions of Buddhism seem to equate the use of human senses as sacrilege, describing sight, hearing, taste, etc. to exist in fire; Augustine's reflection on belief in a Manichean "dualistic" religion (Christianity...?) similarly equates the body to a tempest or living piece of hell...intimate experiences are said to be unholy; finally, the inanity and chaos within Wagner's "The Ring" communicate the human disorder, and human's innate capacity for destruction.

In the first three stanzas of "The Fire Sermon," placed aside naturalistic deterioration (symbolized by a river), human indulgence & behavior represents heresy (and removal from the divine world). By one reading, the lines 176-179 represent a luncheon or other ritual pleasantry as the source of the river's grime: "The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,/ Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends/ Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are / departed." Preceding these descriptions, the line "The nymphs are departed" is repeated. Their absence (1), representing the mortality and ultimate dissolution of the natural world, and (2) the ultimate/innate secularity of the human race. Similarly, this desolate, barren tone is reflected in line 172:" The rivers tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf/ Clutch and sink into the wet bank." The river, like the river void of human presence, is empty, wet, and "brown."

Lines 27-29 of the Marvell's "TO HIS COY MISTRESS" reflect yet counter this metaphor. As virgin, the "worms" exist without sex (both in male & female and reproduction without sex): "My echoing song; then worms shall try/ That long preserved virginity,/ And your quaint honour turn to dust." While preserved as virgin, the worms seem to exist in a barren secluded sepulcher, they "try" "virginity" while held within a "...grave’s a fine and private place." With humans absence, in "the vast deserts of eternity" beauty shall no more be found." The beauty of humanity, perhaps, is its ability to change and perhaps destroy the natural world; the wrote suggests that eternity, as something barren or "a desert," is desolate compared to human waste.

Pound, in The Game of Chess, imagines the traditional socialite class; read as a comment and construction of social patriarchy, the poem directly puts the male and female in competition. Lines 3-4 establish violence and tension between objects (the personified chess pieces): "Striking the board, falling in strong "1"s of color,/ Reaching and striking in angles,/ holding lines in one color./ This board is alive with light;/ these pieces are living in form, Their moves break and reform the pattern: ." 9-11, the final two lines, and the concluding stanza gender the poems subjects: "Clashing with "x"s of queens,/ looped with the knight-leaps./ [Stanza Break] "Y pawns, cleaving, embanking!" The nominal use of "x" and "y," one, can refer to the spatial position of the pieces within "The Game of Chess," but might also represent sex (xx & xy) . As the poem progresses, Chess pieces are increasingly humanized. In the final lines, with tone and manner of description growing abstract, the game becomes an allegory for human behavior (the male-female dynamic): "Whirl! Centripetal! Mate! Kind down in the vortex./ Clash, leaping of bands, straight stripe of hard color,/ Blocked light working in. Escapes. Renewing of contest." In this excerpt, the disjunct and illusory tone is apparent. The dramatic use of exclamation points and asyndeton (lack of conjunctions) make meaning tenuous—almost esoteric to the author. This said, the last two lines seem to contrast: while the first line illustrates humans behavior as cyclic, "centripetal," those following argue for its linear nature, a "straight stripe of hard color,/ Blocked light working in. Escapes." Then, again, the last word conflicts with its proceeding: "Renewing of contest," again, suggests a continuity in humanity and its patterns.

Within TWL, Lil and her friends depend upon subservience; within the luncheon (or dinner) party, all discuss Lil as a product of her marriage and husband. Judged to look "antique," Lil attempts to defend her physical appearance, stating "I can't help it." With Lil's reaction having such little consequence (not to say value), a power and monopoly is given to the action of 'judgment' and vocation of 'service.' As shown by the following lines, Lil is wholly defined by her offerings as a woman (wife): "You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,/ What you get married for if you don't want children? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME." Ultimately, Lil is without a personal identity.

In all, works discuss gender, engendered normative law, and its illogical (or more so...) unintuitive perpetuation by subjugated sects of society ("the female").

The weak, tenuous scaffold of this glass structure—fruited vines"—represents tension and fragility in male-female relations (those present within the assigned texts). Within Paradise Lost, most explicitly is this dynamic evident; describing the fruit upon the "Tree of Life:" "...loaden with fairest Fruit,/ Blossoms and Fruits at once of golden hue/ ...of pure now purer aire/ Meets his approach, and to the heart inspire/ Vernal delight and joy, able to drive/ All sadness but despair: now gentle gales/ Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense/ Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole/ Those balmie spoils." Not only does use the "Tree of Life" act as the ultimate point of pressure and conflict between Adam (man) and Eve (woman), but a bodily dynamic. From the vegetation, inspired in the "heart...[is]/ Vernal delight and joy, able to drive / All sadness but despair... ." The words "Vernal delight" connote Spring and revival, perhaps fertility. With spring, "sadness" is dissolved yet "despair" remains. Now, in conversation with lines 215-225, (line 220-222), "despair" seems to mean or define the opposite of fertility, or of that which defines the loss of "sadness." Given lines 220-222 explain the growth of a "Tree of Knowledge," bringing about ill and Death, "despair" must be the continuation of sexual desire and lust in celibacy.

Witnessing sexual lust and violence in Mandelbaum's The Metamorpjoses of Ovid, and the ultimate destruction of one's humanity following 'rape,' this notion of male-female tension holds relevant. In the play's final scene, Philomela and her sister Procne dismember Itys feeding his body to Tereus. The sister's actions are unique; not only do the two remove Tereus's humanity via filicidal cannibalism, but ever sever his relationship with God. In lines 642-643, this is specifically referenced: Thrace describes himself as “the miserable tomb/ of his own son;” he is a desolate sepulcher, ever removed and dejected by God.

Overall, the poems act as explorations and attempts to disrupt male-centric power & domination; the female body, though fragile like the "fruited vines," defies male divinity in some sacrilegious act.

In all texts, man's body threatens his "soul" with eternal damnation; as referenced in De Nerval, only those whose "fraternal souls, delivered from their mortal bodies, [are] all the more free to denote themselves" to the regeneration of the universe," and by Dante, "those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites..." are trapped within hell. Similarly, in Dante's "Inferno" and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal, the soul is central to their descriptions of Godly procreation.

Lines 71 and 72 of The Waste Land most directly relate to these ideas: " 'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ 'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?/ 'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?.../ 'You hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'." Opening "Inferno III," Dante reads the text inscribed into the Gates of hell: "Divine power made me,/ Wisdom supreme, and primal love./ Before me nothing was but things eternal,/ and eternal, I endure./ Abandon all hope, you who enter here." While it may be a reference to the realm of hell as a physical entity, it may equally describe humanity—humanity was made with "wisdom supreme," but cursed with "...primal love." In eternal purgatory, hell cannot exist void of the human race; hell, Dante's illustration, reflects human vice and besets its inhabitants with mortal, worldly punishment. Thus, it is the human race that "before nothing was but things eternal, and eternal [they] endure." Returning to line 72, it then becomes evident that the planted "corpse" is destined to fail and decompose; if man is doomed to rest "eternally" in hell, rebirth and redemption are futile.

Baudelaire, in a similar manner, describes the mortality of God: in the poem's fifth stanza, the narrator discovers himself (analogous to humanity) to be the undying eighth part of God. Initially two unnaturally aged and failing old men, God is likened to "centenarian twins...spectres odd." Discovering the number of these entities, "monsters," the narrator interrogates his own humanity: "The seven old hideous monsters has the mien/ Of being immortal./ Then, I thought, must I,/ Undying, contemplate the awful eighth:/ Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double:/ Disgusting Phoenix, father of himself/ And his own son?" Given a body, God's immortality is morbid; rather than a pinnacle of beauty and perfection, the image from which man was born, he is a "Disgusting Phoenix," and his own father.

With this, God and the human race are abject, impure, and irrevocable. Finally, in line 73, Eliot's reference to "Frost" pulls upon Dante's ninth circle: Treachery and the frozen lake of Cocytus. Just as hell's souls, The Waste Land's corpse is submerged and frozen in a (its) bed.

Overall, these three lines relate to the given sources in their description of human suffering, innocence, and redeemability —and the same of God.

Lines 30-59 develop two parallel themes: Lance, and the Goblet or Cup as male and female "sex symbols of immemorial antiquity," and Tarot as a system of allotting mortals divine fortunes. Preceding page 8 in Weston's account of semiotics in the Holy Grail legend, descriptions of masculinity and femininity are tied closely to virility and fertility (respectively). Quoted, Weston states that "[as] symbols of immemorial antiquity and world-wide diffusion, the Lance, or Spear, representing the Male, the Cup, or Vase, the Female, reproductive." Weston further states that within the "Grail romances we possess...[is] the fragmentary record of the secret ritual of a Fertility cult."

In these statements Weston justifies analysis by asserting that it is backed by inter-mythological theory; Weston's definitions (of symbol) maintain continuity across various socio-cultural settings, specifically Celtic and Greek. The Cauldron of the Dagda Coire Arsic, known as a "legendary vessel of infinite bound & hospitality in Irish mythology" and the Greek Horn of Plenty.

This is a vital passage, relating T.S. Eliot's understanding of poetry as dramatic human condition(s). I will discuss these lines in my conclusion, however, they (like much of this text) exist in duality: "roots" in reference to a sanctified humanity, and the anarchist nature of natural (mortal) life.

First, I refer to Rupert Brooke's AN UNUSUAL YOUNG MAN. In response to the tragedy of warfare, the man (titled 'friend') summits a "hill of gorse" and sits alone "looking at the sea. His mind... full of confused images, and the sense of strain." Explicitly outlined, the man is pensive, in reflection and torture. His ascension to the top of a "Gorse hill," a yellow-petaled flower with a prickly body, mirrors a rite or religious ritual; willingly, almost obligatorily, he subjects himself to the prickles to contemplate while overlooking a vast and supreme ocean. (Two parallel symbols of human waste and the consummate eternal (ocean).) While this image alone holds weight, when applied to Eliot's theory of impersonality, however, the man aids in developing a recurrent motif of war.

In the excerpt's following lines, the man's mental decrepitude (figurative)—illustrated by his irrational change in nationality & pledge to European nations—turns him into a symbol and actor in Eliot's theory of the Impersonal poem.

Outlined as the condition of "Impersonality," a poem must elicit its designed visceral, bodily response separate from its creator. That is, a poem must largely function autonomously (this is at least one interpretation). As Eliot articulates, "the more perfect the artist [of the poem], the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material (Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"). Extended to Rupert Brooke's An Unusual Young Man, This character of poetry seems manifest in the protagonist. The man is the mind upon which war, as a poem, acts. With this analogy, war becomes a perfectly self-sustaining entity; war is the poem and the artist, and by their effect, the man ('friend') will "transmute the passions which are its [wars, not his own] material."

With this, it's possible to equate the lines, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,” as man’s (humankind’s) roots that so tenuously clutch out “stony rubbish” body and mind and creator. Under the spell of war, man must transmute its passions—those of our own; those passions that drive humanity (in all its sectors, from barbarity to sophistication)—into something greater than its parts. Though, this is a puzzle the poem and excerpt do not willingly reveal: in deep thought, the man (‘friend’) concludes, “Something was growing in his heart, and he couldn't tell what.”

"When the boys said to her: 'Sibly, what do you want?' She answered: 'I want to die.' In relation to My Past, by Countess Marie Louise, the English rendering of The Service for the Burial of the Dead...of the Orthodox Greek Church in London, Sibly's plea for bodily liberation transforms the body into a physical vessel that confines the human soul—the soul being the human's godly half (or fragment of god). Throughout all texts, the soul seems to exist attached to rather than held within the human: lines 25-29 of "The Burial of the Dead" state that, "There is shadow under this red rock/ (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),/ And I will show you something different from either/ Your shadow at morning striding behind you/ Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you..." 'Shadow,' is referred to as a definite object; rather than the product of one's body, 'shadow' is a place for the body to take refuge within.

Further, Tone 2 of the "The Service for the Burial of the Dead..." illustrates a soul departing from its body: "Alas! what strife hath the soul in parting from the body. Alas! what tears, and there is none to pity her; towards angels her helpless eyes are turned in supplication...let us plead with Christ for rest for him who has passed away, and for our souls the great mercy." As the soul is described separate from the body, the female pronoun "her" is attached. She, "turned in supplication," asks for the great mercy (assumed to be entrance to heaven, or a similar plane). The female soul, possibly a symbol of virgin rebirth, awaits return to God, and return to sanctity.

Overall, as suggested in the final lines in the Book of Ezekiel, all texts suggest that the human body is a subaltern vessel, and that the soul is the only kin of God (or the child or product of God).

The Waste Land, (as a title) seems in explicit condemnation of human behavior, morality, and faculty. The narrative itself—in it's three disjunct poems—is an account, or portrait, of humanity's cycles. The first poem, "The Burial of the Dead," and final, "What the Thunder Said," comment on a human's predispositions. In the first, it's asked "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say.."; can the human justify its innate "roots," and its blood of Adam and Eve? This question is evident in many following and preceding stanzas. In the final poem, man is placed upon a desolate image:"What is that...Murmur of maternal lamentation/ Who are those hooded hordes swarming/ Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth...Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal." The stanza is a brutalist depiction of man's vice, and in the final lines Eliot seems to extend this barbarity to the hubs of human 'intellect' and capacity. These themes, also found within The Golden Bough, are just one understanding of "The Waste Land"'s syncretic title.