In the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism, the Buddha is described as "the Fisherman who draws fish from the ocean of Samsara to the light of Salvation." In this line, the narrator is the one doing the fishing; further, "the arid plain" is "behind." Thus, Eliot may be conveying a sense of hope: the waste land is left in the past, with the hope of salvation lying in the future. Interestingly, because it is the narrator that is fishing, it could be Eliot that is acting as the savior; this would follow the idea of Eliot playing god through manipulating the sources and overseeing the waste land. Is Eliot enlightened, sharing his wisdom through the poem? Or is he simply commenting on the egotistical delusion of writers?

Eliot connects this image of being trapped to Dante, specifically to the section about Ugolino. This story of betrayal on two levels—Ugolino's political treachery and Ruggieri's imprisonment of him—ends with nailing shut the tower and the eventual starvation of Ugolino and his sons. It is interesting that here, Eliot associates Ugolino's history with "dayadhvam," which he defines as sympathize. It is almost as if he is commanding sympathy for traitors, or commenting on the nature of Ugolino's monologue—he never admits his wrongdoing, instead asking for the sympathy of the listener, and further condemning his enemy. However, it is nearly impossible to feel true sympathy for a man who is eternally gnawing on the head of another, a man who may or may not have eaten his own children. Is there a traitor in TWL? Is it Eliot himself, asking for the sympathy and forgiveness of the reader? Or is the poem, in its countless levels of contradictions, constantly betraying itself?

Here, Eliot seems to be reconciling the two previous geographical themes of the poem: land and water. Beginning with "The Burial of the Dead" and imagery of rock and land, Eliot then moves into a lengthy exploration of the sea, culminating with "Death by Water." But, it seems here that land and water cannot coexist; where there is land, there is drought, and where there is water, there is drowning. Yet again, as described in my previous annotation, Eliot oscillates between extremes. However, here there is a noted lack of water—all arid rock. Psalm 63 describes that "my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is." Perhaps, it is not water that the land is lacking, but spirituality; the vitality that the people are starved of comes from overwhelming faithlessness and the lack of hope following World War I. Does Eliot see a way out of this drought of faith, or is humanity resigned to the rocks?

While this section is the shortest yet, it is comprised of a series of dualisms: "profit and loss," "rose and fell," "age and youth," and "Gentile or Jew." These paired opposites, however, fall after Phlebas' death, no longer significant as his body decays beneath the sea. Beginning with profit and loss, Eliot appears to be commenting on the futility of accumulating wealth; Isabel approaches a similar idea in her annotation from last year, as economic trials seem insignificant after death. Eliot, who worked at a bank and, essentially, played the wealth game, may be reflecting on its pointlessness in the end. Next, rose and fell most literally approaches the waves in the water, which could be examining the human condition, concluding that we are doomed to perpetually bob between extremes, never finding that elusive happy medium. Moreover, age and youth seems to be a linear relationship, but alongside the theme of rebirth that reappears throughout the poem, aging appears much more cyclical. The final dualism of the section is that of gentile or jew, which returns to previous religious imagery in the poem. At death, is religion revealed to be nothing more than a trivial ploy at comforting oneself? At the least, religious distinctions seem to be blurred upon death, showing its inherent sameness and dissolving yet another dichotomy that had begun to form earlier in the poem. Eliot is almost undoing the themes he has constructed in this section; at death, they are all pointless anyway. Perhaps, this is why this section is so brief, edited down to only the death scene from the original lengthy exploration of life and death. Through skipping straight to death, Eliot is able to neglect one key dichotomy—life and death. Here, there is no life, leaving death unbalanced, and with this undoing of life's central dualism, all of the others can also fade away.

Imagery of fire is conveyed through the lens of two different religions in this section: Christianity and Buddhism. In the christian (and western) tradition, fire is associated with Hell, suffering, and punishment for sins. On the other hand, the Buddha's "Fire Sermon" uses fire as a tool to show the path to enlightenment; the fire of passion, infatuation, and hatred burns through all of our senses and judgments, and the discerning are able to use this image to learn to move away from their own consciousness. In the end, the goal of Buddhism is to annihilate the perceived (but false) self, and imagining it burning constantly in one's mind eases the process of forgetting it. It is as if Eliot is solving the Buddhist strategy of a mind on fire by asking the Christian god to save him from the flames.

Further, the intertwining of the two religions is complicated by Eliot's repeated allusions to Dante's Inferno, where the deepest, most severe punishment is not fire but ice. The frozen base of Hell contradicts with the flames that one expects from it. Looking at this alongside the Buddhist ideas suggests that the imagined fires of desire and aversion oppose the iciness of death. Eliot could be commenting on the flaws of asceticism, as when mental fires are put out, the spirit that makes us human may be lost to—a mind frozen in ice is worse than a mind on fire. Perhaps, this is why the next section is titled "Death by Water," as the same water that quenches a fire also extinguishes the human spirit. This follows the fear of drowning which has been emphasized throughout the poem ("the drowned Phoenician Sailor," "fear death by water"). Is the waste land a space in the mind, extinguished and waterlogged?

Tiresias is another prophet-like figure, following the Sibyl and Madame Sosostris. The role of gender in the gift of sight is interesting, as Madame Sosostris comes from Huxley's character Sesotris in Crome Yellow, which is a man cross-dressing as a woman. Further, Eliot emphasizes Tiresias' fluidity of gender as he describes that he is an "old man with wrinkled female breasts." Tiresias' gift, moreover, was "infallible" to Greece, especially accurate perhaps due to the worldliness stemming from his gender shifting. The Sibyl—the third oracle/prophet—is not clearly linked to a gender subversion, but rather is trapped in her femininity (hanging inside of a bottle). Thus, there appears to be a link between gender and vision; either one's world is expanded by the spectrum of gender or reduced by being trapped into one side of it.

The image of “white bodies naked” on the shores of the Thames, amid rats, bones, and trash, recalls the idea of purity and vulnerability. While the nymphs—who, according to Isabel’s annotation last year, are often sexualized as seductresses—have departed, leaving the shores of the lake and taking their youthful beauty with them, these bodies remain on the shores. Could they be corpses, imagined to line the shores to show the significance of industrialism and its effects on human life? They could also reflect Eliot’s past female characters in the story, their purity taken in the same way of Eve, Ophelia, etc. The "white bodies" are naked and vulnerable, in their own respective "waste land" on the river's shore. Have they been drowned, as is the fate of so many literary women? This connects to Spenser’s Prothalamion, in which he alludes to the story of Jove and Leda; Jove turns into a swan to court Leda, yet then steals her purity through rape. While the swan is typically the epitome of purity and grace, its image is marred by the descriptions in the poem.

The blurring of love and violence is evident here, just as the section shows nature and city, sun and moon, and fire and water coming together. Women and seduction become a means to convey these opposite merging together, perhaps suggesting Eliot's frustration with his sex life. Women become the physical manifestation of these essential confusions, often described as dying or dead in the poem. Are the lines between absolutes becoming so blurred that they are dying (disappearing)?

This line, along with the previous one, relates to previous lines in the poem. "Those are pearls that were his eyes" is a reference to The Tempest in line 48, while "are you alive, or not" is very similar to lines 38-41. It is interesting that rather than making an entirely new allusion here, Eliot alludes to his own work. This creates a sense of cyclic repetition, returning the reader earlier in the poem. Further, the idea that Eliot returns to is that of an empty mind, and the perpetual trap between life and death that humanity faces. This hopelessness and lifelessness contrasts with the game of chess; in Pound's poem, he describes that the "board is alive with light." The contrast between an inanimate object bursting with life while humans are filled with nothing is striking—but, what is chess without the players? The board may have potential, but its energy comes from when "their [the players?] moves break and reform the pattern." Thus, life comes from breaking the perpetual patterns and cycles of life.

These cycles, seen throughout the poem—the seasons, rebirth, repetition, etc—must be broken to truly be alive. This fits in with Eliot's favoring of winter in the first stanza, as it seems almost like a welcome break in the cycle, a chance to reform the patterns. Or, maybe death is the ultimate giver of life, and in the game of chess that is not only the title of the section but also a potential metaphor for love/life, death is the only way to be escape the trap of the empty-headedness of patterns and habits.

While "The Burial of the Dead" ends with imagery of sight (Madame's Sosostris' vision, the pearl eyes, etc), this section segues into the sense of smell. The brief exploration of the imagined space of the waste land continues through the description of "strange synthetic perfumes" permeating the air and "drown[ing] the sense in odours." Here, Eliot literally moves from water (drowning) to smell (odors). While perfume typically has a good aroma, "odour" connotes something pungent, as if the unknown "she" that is acting in this stanza is concocting something that releases powerful scents. Eliot seems to be alluding to Baudelaire's "A Martyred Woman," where he sets the stage "in the midst of perfume flasks." The poem centers on descriptions of death, and in particular, a dead woman. Thus, the scent that Eliot is constructing could be the smell of death; what more could be expected from a waste land than a terrible stench?

Here, Eliot describes an image of a large crowd overwhelming the London Bridge, an allusion to Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal." In this poem, Baudelaire describes a "swarming city," underlining the image of consuming overcrowding. In Eliot's time characterized by fast-paced industrialization and a central focus on urbanism, it is not unexpected to refer to the hubbub of a city; however, he then adds that "I had not thought death had undone so many." This is a near-direct quote pulled from the third canto of Dante's Inferno. In canto III, Dante has just entered the gates of Hell, seeing crowds of souls stuck in a perpetual in-between, good enough to not be in hell but bad enough to be in heaven. On seeing the throngs of miserable souls, Dante remarks that he "could not believe death had undone so many." Moreover, Dante's hell itself is portrayed as a city of sorts; it has formal gates and the city of Dis further toward the center. Thus, Eliot seems to be constructing a parallel between London and Hell: the crowds on the bridge are souls in purgatory, as life is simply the neutral in-between before death.

The cityscape devolving into a hellscape could reflect Eliot's hatred of industrialization, or it could simply be a commentary on the carelessness and lack of creativity of city residents. Could the hellish landscape of a city be an unproductive and hopeless waste land? In some ways, is everyone already dead?

Following Eliot's description of tarot cards, he asserts "fear death by water," implying that perhaps his life has been predicted, fated to end with water. While water is typically a giver of life, or even rebirth in the baptismal sense, here it is seen as a fearful agent of death. The seascape and water itself are a central theme to the plot of Tristan and Isolde, which includes many voyages across the sea yet concludes with Tristan waiting to be healed, searching for a boat on the horizon. In one telling, Isolde tricks him through putting up black sails instead of white, leading to Tristan's hopeless suicide. Thus, while indirectly, his death is inextricably linked to water. Further, water is often tied to suicide in particular, through images such as Hamlet's Ophelia finding mental peace through drowning herself.

The dual nature of water—which both gives life and takes it—is representative of the contradicting themes of rebirth and death throughout TWL. These ideas are portrayed through the allusion to both Christianity and paganism, and Eliot seems to be questioning the difference between the two. Does death inherently include rebirth, or is it the true end? How does one escape the fate of death, or conversely, the hopeless fate of rebirth? Perhaps, "death by water" is so terrifying because it simultaneously connotes a rebirth, and in Eliot's eyes—going back to lines 1-10—the solemn death of winter is far more comforting than spring's "cruel" rebirth.

This line, which Eliot connects to Ezekiel in its corresponding note, suggests the image of the physical space of the waste land; "stony rubbish" connotes infertile, unproductive land. This death surrounding land itself is paralleled in Ezekiel 37, in which the narrator is placed "in the midst of the valley which was full of bones." In this case, the "waste" is human corpses, which are reanimated and breathed life into by a merciful god. Thus, while the image of a desolate waste land is perpetuated here, so is the theme of rebirth; perhaps, the waste land is not a permanent condition, but rather a purgatory of sorts before salvation. It is also significant that this salvation would take the form of a rebirth—it suggests that death is not permanent, and in some sense, one can be saved from the fate of mortality. In this sense, Eliot could be using the poem to play God, reanimating forgotten texts left in a valley of bones.

In The Metamorphoses, Sibyl of Cumae has her wish of living for centuries granted, yet without requesting eternal youth. She will live for as many years as the dust that was gathered before her, though she continues aging until her only wish is, as the epigraph of TWL says, to die. This relation between dust and life is reflected in the Bible: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 13:16). Thus, the image of dust can be linked to the cyclic nature of life; while the Sibyl's dust is the embodiment of her life, it also foreshadows where she will return. While Christian and Greek mythologies describe afterlifes, dust feels completely lifeless, leading to the idea that perhaps these afterlifes are, in Eliot’s eyes, simply invented for peace-of-mind.

However, Eliot also seems to welcome the nothingness following death, accepting the dust that awaits him. Through his description of April as “cruel” in the revised beginning of the poem, he implies that winter—the season of death—is the most pleasant; Eliot doesn’t fear death, he finds solace in it.

In the seemingly desolate post WWI landscape that Eliot began writing, titling it “The Waste Land” reflected the apocalyptic circumstances of that time; however, this allusion is rooted in more than just Eliot’s time period. In fact, the examination of Christian legends in Weston’s From Ritual to Romance reveals that the “Waste Land” is a repeated encounter for the heroes who seek to restore it to its former fecundity. However, this endless quest for a restoration of fertility culminates with the Fisher King, whose old age and impotency are reflected in the arid earth. If his virility is restored, the land can become fruitful once more. Eliot’s reference to this legend and its influence on his "incidental symbolism" suggests undertones of infertility as a theme throughout the poem. More specifically, it could appear through the idea of the futility of restoring the waste land to its former glory; if the fruitfulness of this “land” is deeply intertwined with the happiness and strength of its leaders or people, then while seasons may go past, the land will remain barren. This could be Eliot’s bleak commentary on the overall depression of the human experience, and how the “waste land” is not a physical space but an invented one—a reflection of one's own emotions.