Throughout reading “The Waste Land”, I have been fascinated with the visual structures the line breaks and word spacings create. In “Death by water” the line breaks shape waves which drown the section as the characters written also drown. Between this stanza and its predecessor, an even bigger wave transports the constant “I” into its final speech. Following these patterns, the unique spacing of this final repetition of “shantih”, naturally excited me.

As Eliot explains in his note, the utterance of “shantih” is the traditional prayer ending to an Upanishad. However, in his note, instead of directly translating as “Peace, peace, peace”, he provides a Christian synonym from Philippilians 4.7: “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding”. It is not new for Eliot to provide a connection between major religious thought from both the East and West. He did so in the “Fire Sermon” with the Buddha and St. Augustine’s confessions, creating a blanket state for all humans, later enveloping “Gentile or Jew”. In this final play at connection, Eliot provides us with an unavoidable emphasis on the broadest human condition. We have all succumbed to industrialization and destruction, called out as a vague “you” throughout the poem. But in this unity we all join together in a final prayer, “Shantih shantih shantih”.

Notably, this final phrase lacks any sort of punctuation, following a traditional stanza rich with a question mark, m dash, and periods. Already, this suggests a continuation: punctuation exists to contain the structure of a sentence, a lack of any allows the sentence to continue. So the poem ending without any at all poses an interesting question: is it a continuation, or has time caught up (HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME), ending the work prematurely? I propose the first one, with a slight more complete analysis. The three “Shantih” actually are the punctuation, positioned visually to represent the three dots of an ellipse, the one piece of punctuation that allows continuation with no resolution (what I mean by this: a comma or semicolon both require following words to be complete sentences, but an ellipse can end anything with no expectation of further progression). The prayer for peace, contrasting all of the bad which the poem journeys to uncover, neither reconciles nor explains the entire poem or the issues it covers, but it gives the reader a place to begin. Rather than closing a rather pessimistic work of literature with an equally pessimistic period, there is a light of hope with the finishing prayer for peace, and the dot dot dot which does not demarcate an end.

By following the thunder's guiding principles rewritten directly above the final line, we can reach a state of peace. The outcome is tenuous, barred down upon by the weight of all the destruction written above, nor is it definite, merely implied by the vague ellipse, but it is hope within the Waste Land.

In a similar vein of Maadhavan, I would like to examine the implications of “damyata”, the third listed response to “Da” in "The Waste Land”. In the original text, chapter 2 of the Upanisads, “damyata” is how the gods interpret the single syllable from Prajāpati, which translates to self-control (although cited by Eliot as just “control”). In the poem, however, the understand-er of this word is a boat, synonymizing the vessel with the most powerful entity of the three: gods. Earlier references to “death by water” and “drowned sailors” immediately fills the mind with dread at the mere implication of the liquid, yet here the “sea was calm” and the hand is an “expert with sail and oar”. A sense of trust is established with the divine boat and its expert operator. However, the double sided word “gaily”, repeated twice, threatens this trust. Meaning happily, it originally posits an excited state for the impending journey across the ocean, but within it the word “gale” can be heard, foreshadowing a particularly strong blast of winds approaching. Even the distant thunder calling out “Da” threatens an approaching storm. At the end of this section the same wave shaped line break appears as in 'Death by Water’, but this time much larger, implying the oncoming storm has arrived and has begun to drown the rest of the line like Phlebas or Odysseus. Interestingly, the break pushes the “I” onto the shore of the following stanza, instead of being sucked into the undersea currents, picked at on the ocean floor. With the connection to Dante in the “Dayadhvam” section, it may not be a stretch to infer the boat, like the ferrier Charon in the Inferno, carries Tiresius (the “I”) across a body of water to the opposite shore, as the first line of the next stanza sits on the opposite side of the rest of the words.

Additionally, in the original Upanisads Damyata is actually the first of the three interpretations, but is flipped in the poem. The reversed order could be Eliot's final perversion of traditional cycles, a common theme throughout his interpretation of other sources thus far. Furthermore, by translating in his footnote the term as control, instead of self-control, he presents the virtue as a far more self-serving trait, leaving a slightly sour note at the end of this stanza, as opposed to the positive one given off by “giving”, which the original text ends with. Ultimately, however, the boat learning control succumbs to the power of the ocean.

As scholar Richard Lu summarized last year, in Beauty is but Skin Deep, an elder man achieves sainthood by gazing upon the teeth of an overly decorated and ostentatious high class woman, causing him to realize all humans are constructed of the same evil parts, reducing the characterization of life to a “walking bag of bones” (as opposed to a stationary dead one). The call to this passage in “The Waste Land” can be found with the quote I have highlighted, where the androgyny and mystery of the third figure at its core relates to a shared evil human nature described in the Visuddhi-Magga. This connection illuminates an interesting interpretation of later line 391, where the “dry bones” perhaps allude to a dehydrated living person, as the third person walking originates from Shackleton’s hallucinations (commonly brought on by dehydration), and the passage is otherwise plagued by a lack of water.

Also, I find the focus on the teeth to attain enlightenment particularly fascinating in the context of the decay of a body. Teeth are one of the most enduring parts of the human composition, as the bacteria which causes dental decay cannot survive when the host has died (ABC Science). Teeth can also be used to identify the age, race, and sex of an unidentified corpse based on anatomy. Therefore the teeth become a direct and reliable link between the living and the dead, which is perhaps what allows the elder man to have his revelation in the first place. Through this analysis, the toothless and dead mountain of line 339 comes to mind: “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit.” The word “carious” exists entirely to describe the decay of just teeth and bone. However, as I mentioned earlier, teeth cannot decay after death, so curiously this “dead” mountain begins to seem not so dead anymore. And the implication of its inability to spit is the origin of the dehydration, which later causes the hallucinations of “dry bones”, a person not quite living or dead. As a whole, these connections confuse more than they explain, but their interconnection is still quite interesting.

Last year, scholar Sophie Perkel noted how the ambiguous “he”, who plagues this poem makes its final appearance in this line, “He who was living is now dead.” There is a finality of death, different from the amorphous cycle of life and rebirth that has plagued the poem thus far, as this “he” dies not only because Eliot wrote it so, but because “he” never appears again; the pronoun dies from the remaining stanzas. This finality is also emphasized by the following line, which follows a similar grammatical pattern, but differs in number of the subject (singular versus plural) and form of the final word (dead vs. dying). The two lines follow this grammatical structure: First person singular/plural - imperfect verb in relative clause - present verb - adjective/present participle. The imperfect verb is the most recent form of past tense, indicating a freshness to the living, and the present provides vividness for the current state of death. But death and dying have far more contrast: death is an adjective, used to directly describe and define “he”. There is no verby-ness in its form, instead more analogous to the noun death. Conversely, “we” are “dying”, a present participle, a verbal adjective meaning continuous action. In this moment of time we are still going through the process of dying, it is not yet complete. With this continuous form the first person pronoun continues to appear in alive use throughout the remainder. “We” might be dying, but we are not yet dead.

Between Tenison’s Ulyssess and Dante’s Inferno, a rather complete picture forms of Odysseus’ unquenchable thirst for adventure. The need to explore is so strong that it becomes integral to who he is, “And this gray spirit yearning in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” (Tennyson 2). The invocation of the spirit describes his nearly biological “desire[s]”, truly welding them to his identity. After being away for most of his child’s lifetime, he is fine with leaving Telemachus once more, placing his conquests over his own family (In some ways this quest to go beyond human thought coincides with the desire of major powers of the Great War to expand beyond their means in search of ultimate power). So, it is most fitting that Ulysses meets his end in a whirlpool at the end of what is known. He becomes encompassed with the ocean that transported him through his various conquests, his sense of identity, as “our stern reared up, / the prow went down—as pleased Another— / until the sea closed over us.” Death by water, “until the sea closed over” thus becomes a positive end, enveloped while doing what one loves. But it is also a cautionary tale, as Eliot uses the vocative “O you” to associate the reader with Phlebas and Odysseus’ fate. We all run the risk of being overcome by our passions, burning, burning, burning.

Unrelated observation: the gaps between the lines, the only like it in the poem, form two, wave-like shapes, enveloping the words like the water that “closed over” Ulysses.

Here Eliot divulges almost entirely into quoted sources from Buddha's Fire Sermon and St. Augustine's Confessions. The “collocation”, as Eliot puts it, of these two major representations of asceticism from Eastern and Western culture was entirely purposeful, most likely to ensure a blanket statement for the reader. Immediately after reading Eliot's footnote, I was reminded of my annotation from last reading where I asserted that Tiresias becomes synonymous with the reader. The “I” of this stanza is preceded by the detached Tiresias, allowing the reader to embody the pronoun, and inherit the major dogmas of self-discipline from either hemisphere.

Crucial to understanding Tiresias and the reader as passive agents of the poem, one must turn to Confessions which the pronoun invokes, “thou pluckest me.” While describing the many things that lead to sin and a lower state of being, St. Augustine says, “Stage-plays also carried me away, full of images of my miseries, and of fuel to my fire. Why is it, that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness?” The success of a play, like most art, lies entirely in invoking the emotion of its viewer. This was the predominant goal of most modernist artists, across all mediums, so is entirely fitting embedded in Eliot’s crowning modernist achievement. The viewer in the poem is Tiresius (“I Tiresias / Perceived the scene”), or the reader if one believes my proof of this fact. In the context of a tragedy, the word “scene” becomes that of a play, and the following assault is of tragic proportions.

Before returning to the analogy of the Fire Sermon as a tragedy, I must first discuss a connection to the Aeneid. St. Augustine and Eliot alike say, “To Carthage then I came/ burning burning burning burning”. Aeneas travels to Carthage from the burning Troy, escaping from a doomed city and the wrath of the gods destroying it (when he is being urged by various divinities and ghosts to flee the “already destroyed” Troy, Aeneas continually gets distracted and tries to stay and defend his home. It is not until Venus lifts the mortal veil concealing his sight to reveal the city actively being destroyed by Olympic Gods, that he realizes he must save the Penates (the gods and essence of the city) and flee), surviving only because Neptune and Zeus intervene. Neptune literally plucks Aeneas’s ship out of a whirlpool, saving him from death. The language “pluckest” from St. Augustine resounds with similar undertones of this Aeneid passage. However, he wishes he would have died, because living with his city having been lost is worse. In many ways, the guilt of surviving and leaving his kingdom behind phantom burns him. So, the “burning” of the Buddha's fire sermon and St. Augustine’s Confessions become united through the Aeneid.

Returning to the tragedy connection of “The Waste Land”, when Aeneas and his men first arrive to the shores of Carthage, the beach that receives them is described as a scaena (146), or the set design of a Greek tragedy. Such a setting foreshadows the impending destruction of Dido, a mini tragedy embedded within the greater epic. Further relating these ideas, Dido also burns, like Aeneas, mankind (according to the Buddha), and the “I” of the Waste Land. When Cupid infects her with the love for Aenas that will be her undoing, she ardescitque tuendo (she burns by gazing), meaning as she looks at Aeneas she is entirely consumed by her passion for him. This flame inevitably consumes her, and she fittingly kills herself atop a massive pyre.

Essentially, the Fire Sermon becomes analogous with an epic tragedy: the scene is set, the audience is established, the character is introduced, tragically assaulted, and the curtains close, leaving the reader “burning” in the “miserable madness” of watching the story unfold. In the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, “while this exposition was being delivered, the minds of the thousand priests became free from attachment and delivered from depravities. Here Endeth the Fire-Sermon.” The Sermon ends vindicating the priests from earthly desires, but Eliot’s reader leaves the Sermon more enveloped in flame than they began.

The events which Tiresias foretells are some of the most clear and direct of the entire poem, an interesting contrast from typical oracle prophecies. According to wikipedia, based on nearly 200 surviving fragments of oracular statements from Delphi, “Several are ambiguously phrased, apparently in order to show the oracle in a good light regardless of the outcome” (wikipedia). Lines 222-257 (excluding some introduction and conclusion which may be read as more vague) are entirely dedicated to the narration of the typist’s assault. There are no strange line breaks, broken syllables, or onomatopoeias. The assaulters force is uncomfortably descriptive, not relying on the intertwined references to communicate the crime. In a footnote describing the purpose of Tiresias in the poem, Eliot writes,

"Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem."

Tiresias is like the reader, not a character, but a person who is influenced, and in turn influences the poem itself. The goal of the reader when engaging with any written work is to “see, in fact, is the substance of the poem”. Another aspect of Oracles is that they embody divinity when prophesying, and essentially inherit the future of the asker for a moment. My research into Modernism in visual art revealed the artist's focus shifting from the subject, instead to the emotions of the viewer, the object. Here Eliot seems to be employing the same techniques through the vessel of Tiresias. He, who is not a “character”, “too awaited the expected guest” as if he became the woman awaiting her lover. Perhaps his androgeny allows him to inhabit these different perspectives, and represents the reader, who could be anyone, of the Waste Land. Thus, Tiresias allows the reader to become an active participant in the poem, without being an actual “character”.

In Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion”, nature and divine spirits alike craft a peaceful scene meant to represent the sanctity, fertility, and prosperity of the upcoming nuptials. The nymphs, lower level divine spirits, collect flowers to celebrate and adorn the brides. Their actions in turn send blessings from divinity to the upcoming marriages. Similarly, the countless variations of blooming flowers along the bank create an image of fertility and growth, which will transfer to the brides-to-be. And despite the rape background, the white swans (birds who mate for life) seem to represent love and beauty for the long term relationship. In that same vein, the tranquil waters that “run softly” indicate the course the marriages will take, smooth and without issue.

In contrast, Eliot's river bank is almost entirely empty, the departure of nymphs and nature paint a bleak and fruitless present. For example, there is no more growth or fertility in the “brown land”, instead, “the last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank” (173-4). The fallen leaf, already disconnected from any potential for growth, here is the last remnant of nature fighting to stay present, ultimately sucked into the swamp-like bank. As Jami noted, the character of this stanza sits down and weeps, so the river is no longer a place of happiness and celebration, containing “[no] other testimonies of a summer night” (179). One of the most important contrasts comes from the line, “for I speak not loud or long” (184). Eliot quotes half of Spenser, only to warp the line to his own, more somber purposes. Instead of a smooth and tranquil future, he must beg the river to slow down its torrent for just one moment, time is passing too quickly, the future is crashing forward at a disorientating rate.

By directly setting his river against Spenser’s Eliot creates a mirrored opposite. Instead of needing to spend so many precious words describing the bleakness of the scene, he can contrast specific elements of “Prothalamion”, consequently perverting the entire message of the poem. The river of the Waste Land is an empty space, save for a rat and some bones. This, however, potentially leaves room for growth to take place.

The information contained within parentheses is perhaps the most honest and straightforward we receive in this section of devolving poetry. A Game of Chess begins in iambic pentameter, the chosen meter of Shakespeare and other prominent English playwrights, and mixes references to classical poetry which also depends on strict meter. As the section progresses, this meter devolves into jumbled lines and line breaks indicative of the psychosis all of the alluded women themselves devolve into (Dido, Cleopatra, Philomena, Ophelia, all defined by being "crazy"). Anchored amongst the chaos are these parenthetical statements, associated in my mind with being asides of truth, as the punctuation typically indicates. From these we gain three kernels of knowledge: Lil is 31, has 5 kids, and nearly died in childbirth. We are also told that her husband has been away at war for 4 years, so she must have had these 5 kids before the age of 27, meaning she most likely had the first one when she was about 20 or 21. Therefore, almost Lils entire adult life has been defined by motherhood, which has obviously aged her. Throughout most of history, women are defined by their ability to have children. In Ancient Greece, women were thought of as child-bearing vessels, holding little value beyond what their wombs could produce. So even as Lil time and time again proves her archaic value, at the cost of her own health, she ultimately fails in this job, succumbing to “madness” by taking abortion pills. As the meter devolves with the sanity of its female characters, Lils descent into craziness is marked by her long face, lack of beauty, and choice to abort her child. Her biggest failure is trying to avoid death.

This line recalls the language and setting of the room where Dido is infected by Cupid to love Aeneas, which inevitably leads to her demise. A moment marked by Dido losing her autonomy and unwillingly being transformed into a pawn, is described not by the woman herself, but the candles that surround her. As she becomes a passive agent, the inorganic flames become the subject, described with an active tense. Even they have autonomy as to where they fling their smoke, but as Dido “burns” with love sickness, she has no control over where her smoke goes.

This language depicts Dido as a chess piece in Venus’s cosmic plan, which she describes, “Wherefore I purpose to outwit the queen with guile and encircle her with love’s flame, that so no power may change her, but on my side she may be held fast in strong love for Aeneas” (Aeneid 1). The word “encircle” is indicative of predators circling around their prey before going in for the kill. Similarly, a powerful chess piece is typically killed by being surrounded, meaning no move will result in a safe square. Furthermore, “on my side” almost equates Dido as a tool in a belt, meant to be taken out when the user is ready.

Like in a game of chess, where the player is like a God, moving pieces around and sacrificing them for the safety of the King, in this same way Venus plays with Dido. This queen, once a pawn in her brother's quest for power, traveled across the ocean, across the chess board, to become a queen in a new land, like a pawn becoming a new queen. Yet in the end, her power, her ability to become a queen and then move anywhere across the board, is reduced once more as an agent for the player to use, protecting the King, Aeneas. When the game finishes, Dido is still the pawn she once came from.

The women of A Game of Chess are all similar pawns, victims of the use of divine power to serve a more powerful figure's needs. This pattern appears in all of the referenced women: Philomela becomes an object of lust for the King Tereus, and when she breaks from her role in the game, she is turned into a bird, doomed to sing her song of sorrow with a mute voice. The head being chopped off the cadaver woman brings a queen back down to the size of a pawn, and Madame Sosostris uses his “divine” powers to force women into his plan.

And it is in this repetition that these women lose even more of their individuality; they join a long list of examples, an array of chess boards with the same goal. Unless the game itself is rewritten, their fate remains final.

From our previous readings of the original epigraph, the line “heart of light” directly contrasts the title “heart of darkness”. Calling to mind this novel, one can understandably transition to another important quote, “That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal” (6). The echo is his lasting impact on the living world embodied in those who once knew him; the echo will fade when the living pass into their own echos. Similarly, when Tristan dies in Tristan und Isolde, Isolde, bent and grieving over his body, says, “Do I alone hear / this melody / so wondrously / and gently / sounding from within him, / in bliss lamenting, / all-expressing, / gently reconciling, / piercing me, / soaring aloft, / its sweet echoes / resounding about me?” (26). This repeated motif of the living hearing the echoes of the recently departed builds a baseline for Eliot. And so, if the heart of darkness represents death, then the heart of light must represent life, but instead of beating, it is silent, implying human importance is only measured and appreciated in death.

Last year, Nate Sidenstein and Naima Johnson both noticed the water motif intrinsic in the verb “flowed”, connecting it to the river Acheron, which Dante and Virgil must cross in order to enter hell. I see, however, one more layer to be peeled back. In The Inferno, like in Greek and Roman mythology, souls must cross the river separating the realm of the living from the realm of the dead via Charon’s ferry. In Ancient tradition, if a soul did not have a coin to afford passage, they became stuck in a liminal space neither dead nor alive. In Dante, these entrapped souls shift to become those who were neither good nor evil, instead more focused with themselves. All this is to track the various interpretations of souls trapped on the banks of a river. Now one must determine what river motif actually represents the border between living and dead: is it the river implied to run beneath the London Bridge? Or is it the river implied by the language of the crowd crossing the bridge? It is important to note that the word “river” is never used by Eliot, making it difficult to discern what he intended the answer to be. If it is the former, the souls cross into the afterlife, the city of London, and head towards Saint Mary Woolnoth, a church on the London side of the bridge. This church could represent salvation, or, in the context of Dante and The Underworld, judgment. It is marked by “a dead sound on the final stroke of nine” (68), which Eliot remarks in his notes as “A phenomenon which I have often noticed.” Does this mean the souls are actually returning to a world of living, their corpses sprouting new life? Is Eliot saying that all living in London are actually dead, including himself? And if so dead because of industrialization or dead because we must all die eventually?

If it is the latter, the souls become a river and are therefore unable to cross it themselves, trapping them between the world of life and death and, as Nate pointed out, insignificant and not individualized. This flow of people must be a torrent, for Eliot comments, “I had not thought death had undone so many” (63). River force is typically measured in cubic feet per second (cfs), the volume of water that passes through any given point in one second. A cubic foot is approximately one frozen turkey, but a similar value can be attributed to the flow of bodies passing through (adjusting for scale). Essentially, these souls lose meaning in an arbitrary flow of so many others like themselves. This explanation is bolstered when considered in the context of an earlier line, “I was neither living nor dead” (39-40).

Regardless of which interpretation one takes, the bridge and river dynamic always creates a cross, a visual representation of contradiction. These contradictions culminate in a paradox indicative of the liminal space Dante, and seemingly the Wasteland, inhabit, not just at the river. For Dante is a living man experiencing the world of the dead, the earlier Sybil is a dying woman trapped in the world of the living, and a dead soul buries a corpse which may or may not give life to new plants. Here, the line between life and death blurs further.

This line is most freshly reminiscent of the Sybil's request for near immortality brought to light in the preceding epithet. But, as is becoming custom in Eliot, one must examine the multiple references present in every line. In Genesis, the biblical explanation of creation, “the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2.7). Adam's name literally means “ground” to remind mankind of their origin, and the awful power of God to turn mere dust into complex life. By the cyclical patterns established in earlier references to the death and rebirth of vegetation gods in the Waste Land, Ecclesiastes (which is directly referenced in a footnote to line 23) fits as the end/new beginning of the creation cycle: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12.7). The cycle is brought to life in the Burial of the Dead, essentially a guide book for how to discuss death in the proper Christian way, when the speaker announces, “All is dust, all is ashes, a shadow” (BOTD 21), immediately then claiming, “I am dust and ashes; and again I meditate among the tombs, and I see the bare bones lie” (BOTD 21). The zoom in from “all” to “I” synonymizes the priest, the dead person, and the greater world; while lying with the “bare bones” the speaker becomes equivalent to another skeleton, meaning death returns a human to the universal dust we all came from, and to God “who gave it” (Ecclesiastes). Thus, we are created from dust and return to it once more after death.

By understanding the Biblical background of dust as a symbol of life and the Sybil’s curse of continued life equivalent to a pile of dust, this Eliot line promises the fear of life, as opposed to death. As our class discussion noted today, death seems to be a sought after state in the epigraph and earlier versions; it offers peace and solace from the turmoil of a war stricken world. April, a season of rebirth and growth – a celebration of life– is “is the cruellest month.” Therefore, life is positioned throughout the opening stanza as more of a curse than a blessing. Perhaps the Waste Land really is a positive state, one absent of life, instead a celebration of death.

While it is most likely a coincidence, it is interesting that both of the aforementioned biblical quotes are from verse 7 of their respective book and chapter, notably the final day of creation.

As Eliot shifts through different titles, openings, and epigraphs, one concept remains constant: voice. “The Waste Land” is notable in its repeated shift between first, second, and third person narration, whirling through each in a disorienting manner. This choice positions the narrator as an observer, the subject, and in dialogue with the reader, at all times, effectively overpowering traditional grammatical norms and encompassing everyone in the wasteland setting. It also calls back to the original title of the poem, “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. Although Eliot spins through a rolodex of different characters' voices to embody, the narration remains first person in the original version, which fails to ensnare the same breadth of audience that the latter version does. Despite their differences, there is an emphasis on the perspective and emotion that can be conveyed from an original voice. It forces the reader to question what they can trust the most: is it the first person narration, supposedly telling the truth from a personal view? But that leaves room for an unreliable narrator. Is it the second person, speaking directly to the reader? But the intentions of the speaker are unclear. Or is it the third person, stating things as detached fact? These questions are reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s, The Heart of Darkness and the original epigraph. As Marlow thinks of Kurtz postmortem, he says, “when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal” (6). The reader is left only with the echoes of what truth may have once been and in charge of determining what the original tone of the message may have been from the scattered pieces of its echo. In this way the Sybil’s epigraph is very fitting. When speaking to Aeneas she describes the pain of her immortality, “I will go as far as having to suffer transformation, and I will be viewed as non-existent, but still known as a voice: the fates will bequeath me a voice.” And it is her voice that permeates her immortality all the way to the epigraph of Eliot’s modernist achievement. Except, it is not her actual words, instead the written version of a drunken dinner table conversation that Trimalchio reports hearing, but we are unsure if it is just a boastful ruse. Thus, in her permanence, the Sybil is only the echo of her voice, and sets up the following voices in the poem as potential echoes as well.

In Sir James Fraziers' The Golden Bough, the cyclical ebb and flow of seasons and growth, traced through ancient religions, is directly connected to the health and death of a powerful deity: "They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay of vegetation, the birth and death of living creatures, as effects of the waxing or waning strength of divine beings, of gods and goddesses, who were born and died, who married and begot children, on the pattern of human life (3). One such deity, Osiris, was killed by his own nefarious brother, a fellow god. Another god, Adonis, dies each year, bringing with him the attention of his lover, Ishtar, embodiment of reproductive energies. It is known that Eliot saw a parallel between Frazier’s work and the myth of the Holy Grail because of his accreditation to Jessie Weston’s essay, From Ritual to Romance. One myth surrounding the literary world of the Holy Grail describes the slaying of King Labor by King Hurlame, who died by the sword he killed with. The aftermath of such a conflict left it, “so befell great pestilence and great harm to both realms. For sithen increased neither corn, nor grass, nor well-nigh no fruit, nor in the water was no fish; wherefore men call it the lands of the two marches, the waste land, for that dolorous stroke” (4). Set as a response to World War I, Eliot’s invocation of these conflicts between higher powers (kings and gods) brings to the light the suffering of the common people at the behest of those in control. It is no coincidence that the “land of the two marches” is synonymous with a “wasteland”, created by the unprecedented violence and destruction of two warring kingdoms. The unfettered power of the sword used to kill both kings falls in line with the technological advancements of warfare demonstrated to the extreme during World War I. Thus, The Waste Land connects ancient understanding of the effect of war on those not responsible for its creation.