After a continuous storyline of danger, strife, hardship, I absolutely love how Eliot finishes the entire poem with "Peace, peace, peace." Not only does he implement repitition—using his previously set notion of jazz, asyncronicity, and musical dynamics as a mode of storytelling—, but he also uses Hindi to emphasize the direct correlation between tranquility and religion, thus reminding the reader of the importance, in the enviornment of The Waste Land, of how the widespread apandonment of religion led to the demise of the population as a whole.

I loved how in this final stage of Eliot's Waste Land, we see a turn of events, a turn of perspectives of the motifs and models of hardship that he has set throughout the entirety of the poem. Just in some previous stanzas, we experience Eliot's usage of water and rocks as a terrain of inhibition: "Here is no water but only rock/Rock and no water and the sandy road/The road winding above among the mountains/Which are mountains of rock without water/If there were water we should stop and drink/Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think/Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand..." (V. What the Thunder Said, 331-336) "Here, he continues to standardize stress among water, rocks, and natural resources as a whole. But in the highlighted stanzas, he utilizes the symbolic presence of Hindu dieties, Gods, and Goddesses to reconfigure the idea of necessary materials of life as within their power to control, or "Damyata." "He spoke to them the syllable DA. ‘Did you understand?’ ‘We understood,’ they said. ‘You told us, “Be self-controlled (dāmyata).” ‘OṂ,’ he said. ‘You understood.’ Then the human beings said to him, ‘Teach us, father.’ He spoke to them the same syllable DA. ‘Did you understand?’ ‘We understood,’ they said. ‘You told us, “Give (datta).” ‘OṂ,’ he said. ‘You understood.’"

Simultaneously, he also restablishes the importance of religion and faith as pillars of life and stabalizers of uncertainty in the beiliever's life, allowing for a conclusion that implies a renewal of life and the "Unreal City" sometime in the new future.

I find it very interesting how Eliot interweaves religion as a theme of faith, and yet, denounces and rejects genuine followings of faith within The Waste Land. In doing this, he creates a compelling dichotomy of Christianity with Anti-Abhrahamism, which, especially in this excerpt, dimensionalizes the meaning of God and "spirits," who "walk always beside" people.

Here, Eliot interweaves mental illness in the form of schizophrenia in a literal analysis of the passage. In a metaphysical analysis that internalizes his method of storytelling throughout the rest of the poem, he also adds a religious layer that parallels the story of Jesus Christ's resurrection from the tomb. In the story, Christ walks along a road, hidden in plain sight by using commoner garb, or "wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded." Coming across two disciples of his own, he walks alongside them: "And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee..." (Luke 24: 3-6)

Thus, in both Luke and V. What the Thunder Said, the hooded figure represents renewal, rebirth, but most significantly, the haunting of one's own faith, ever-trailing the disbelieving "Christian." After the hooded figure moves on, we see a return to strife and hardship, as His presence dismissed all hardship that forged the story forward: "What is that sound high in the air/Murmur of maternal lamentation..." this, then, emphasizes Eliot's motif of abandonment of religion and its dismal effects of lifelong adversity.

As the final statement made to the reader, I found it quite interesting that Eliot decides to further dimensionalize his already well-formed metaphor of drowning and water. In it, he utilizes rock—which was firstly represented as a physical representation of struggle and strife, but not death—as a parent of water, as rock and minerals filter water. But now, without the presence of water, what is left is sediment and "[T]he road winding above among the mountains/Which are/mountains of rock without water/If there were water we should stop and drink/Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think..." In this, a mental image of difficulty and great pain is forced onto the reader, dramatizing death further than it once was, which Eliot adds to his commentary on humanity in a post-World War I world, demonstrating the final moments of humans that live according to impulse and without the stronghold of faith and spirituality within them.

In “What The Thrush Said. Lines From A Letter To John Hamilton Reynolds, ” by John Keats, he assures the reader that through faith in God and trust in His word, "the spring will be a harvest-time," and good fortune is imminent. Not only this but the afterlife in the heavens is promised, so long as the Christian remains faithful: "O thou, whose only book has been the light Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on Night after night when Phoebus was away, To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn."

Keats supports Eliot's idea of peace through religion, representing the other man's possibility of tranquility, despite hardships that may seem to prevail.

In my first three annotations, I wrote about Death By Water and its connection to 1 Corinthians 10, the stark difference in Eliot's structure of his fourth poem and his first three, and how as a result, it presents a new underlying idea of true religious ideals, that don't falter under the temptation of sexual sin. In this, Phlebas' role is of humanity as a whole, and how in death, physicality dematerializes and what is left is just the soul. Thus, if the soul is impure or lacking of faith or spirituality, Phlebas, or humanity, may not find salvation and peace in the afterlife.

Eluding to the described sensations of passionate human life and the overstimulation that is worldly attachments, Eliot references Buddha's "The Fire Sermon" in both this quote and the title of this poem. Utilizing Buddha's understanding of human life, Eliot's exclamation of burning and cry for the Lord's mercy synthesizes the tone of the poem and of Wasteland as a whole, making a final statement upon human life and its burdens and the crumbling society of Europe and London in a post-Great War world as a pessimistic realm of physical and spiritual agony in which the only escape is death.

In the eyes of Buddha, an escape from life constitutes a spiritual AHA, in which the subject releases all concerns of earthly attachments and "burnings." - "Whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence of impressions received by the eye, which is also on fire,"- Thus, the only way to be released from these hindering shackles is a spiritual awakening, he claims, rather than Eliot's pessimistic perspective on escapism by way of death.

Contextualizing this excerpt within the world of "A Game of Chess," I understood this to be an expansive perspective on the woman who anxiously awaited her lover. Defeated and disappointed, her dirtied state implies a mental freeing from worldly trivialities, leaning more towards a lack of caring for her own well-being and an indifference that works against her, she enters a limbo between the worlds of consciousness and body/mind separation as "the foe in sight" robs her of her womanhood and sexual liberty.

How, then, must she continue living? In Johne Donne's "ELEGY XIX. TO HIS MISTRESS GOING TO BED," the mistress finds solace in freeing the physical body— "Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use Are like Atlanta's balls, cast in men's views, That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem, His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them."— seizing her bodily autonomy in ways similar to the assaulted woman in the focal point at this moment of Eliot's "The Fire Sermon." As she watches her sexuality dwindle, her comfort lies within her control of the mind, indifference being wielded as her shield against the assaulter further running with both her bodily autonomy and control over her emotions.

A symbiotic commentary on the self-destruction of human trivial desires, both Eliot and John Day—in Parliament of the Bees—utilize the irony of pleasuring the self at the cost of the betterment of society to push their respective narratives. Stemming from a story about goddess Diana and Acteon, who is punished for seeing Diana in the nude while she bathes. Yet, Eliot reverses the narrative of female empowerment to immortalize the ever-haunting barbarism of London in a post-Great War world. Seeking momentary happiness that will result in long-term personal and societal harm, the main speaker attends a brothel to satisfy his shallow desires for sexual gratification. At the unfortunate cost of respect for the feminine body and sexuality as a whole, his physical act goes unpunished, but his psychological choice of attending a brothel is returned in the form of a forever dismal life, surrounded by what does not foretell a benevolent future.

From the perspective of Middleton "A Game at Chess" being an extension and therefore a literary device of Eliot's "A Game of Chess," this quote is reminiscent of Middleton's Second Act, in which the Jesuit Black Bishop's Pawn tries to seduce the Virgin White Queen's Pawn. As Albert milks his wife dry for every drop of sex she can give, she, in the process loses her sense of self and drowns in the pressure of maintaining her looks, for the benefit of Albert, and prioritizing her health and medical safety. The blame positioned on her, the shame of being a "bad wife," a "bad woman" carries the storyline in both poems, as the Black Bishop, similar to Albert and the societal pressures from the woman's friends, implies the Virgin White Queen's lack of womanhood in her refusal to his desperate advances. The dichotomy of these two passages from a holistic understanding poses very intriguing questions about the society that evolved to become the modern-day Western world, and how despite the centuries that passed since their respective creation, these themes of womanhood in a patriarchal society still ring true and are still a daily battle as the woman toes the line between "pure" and "slutty."