These lines make me wonder if I have been a little unfair to Eliot. Throughout the poem, I have read his constant allusions as almost a way of blocking the door for others to understand, as though I need to know every language and every literary reference before I am allowed to understand what he is saying. However, the Upanishad behind “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata” offers another way to understand his borrowing, because the gods, humans, and demons all ask, “Teach us,” admitting that they still have something to learn. Even the gods do not know everything. This makes me consider whether Eliot’s movement between different traditions represents a thirst for knowledge, a search for something that the broken world of the poem cannot provide on its own. The commands to give, be compassionate, and exercise self-control also turn knowledge into something you have to practise, rather than something you possess to prove how intelligent you are. His references still make the poem difficult to enter, but perhaps I have mistaken some of his searching for showing off. He may be collecting these voices because he needs their guidance too, and the poem’s physical thirst becomes, in this reading, a thirst for understanding.

I find Hesse’s argument about the “Downfall of Europe” helpful for understanding Eliot’s “Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal,” because both suggest that a civilization can fall apart through the loss of the beliefs that once held it together, even before anything physically collapses. A tower is supposed to be something strong and lasting, standing above everything around it, so Eliot’s description of these towers as “Falling” undermines the sense of permanence that they are built to convey, almost making their height a reminder of how far they have to fall. By placing Jerusalem, Athens, and Alexandria alongside Vienna and London, Eliot brings the ancient world into the modern one, suggesting that the European cities his readers would recognize as centers of culture and power are no more protected from collapse than the civilizations they look back on. I also find the placement of “Unreal” particularly interesting, because after naming these actual places with entire histories behind them, Eliot seems to take away their solidity with a single word, as though everything they represent has become difficult to believe in. This connects to Hesse’s suggestion that Europe’s downfall might occur “only” in people’s souls, through “changing the meaning of worn-out symbols,” since the buildings could still be standing while the beliefs that gave them significance have already fallen apart. What complicates this connection, however, is that Hesse sees destruction as something that “will necessarily lead, like every death on earth, to a new birth,” making the downfall of Europe both frightening and potentially necessary for something else to emerge. Reading Eliot alongside this argument makes me wonder whether the falling towers could also create room for renewal, although the word “Unreal” leaves me much less confident that anything stable is waiting to replace them, or that the people living through this collapse would even know what to build.

I find the shift from “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala” to just “la la” interesting because it feels as though the song itself is becoming exhausted. Eliot repeats the full refrain twice, establishing a rhythm we recognize, but by the end of the Thames daughters’ passage, only two syllables remain. This shortening becomes especially significant after the speaker says, “I can connect / Nothing with nothing,” and describes people who “expect / Nothing.” The repeated “Nothing” seems to drain the song until there is barely anything left to sing. Although the longer refrain already consists of wordless sounds, it still has a musical fullness that “la la” lacks. Eliot makes us hear the fragmentation he describes: the song becomes a fragment of itself. There is also something unsettling about how cheerful “la la” usually sounds. Here, surrounded by emptiness, it feels almost automatic, as though the speaker keeps humming because she has run out of things to say or hope for. The song survives, but only barely.

The typist’s thought, “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over,” makes the encounter sound like a chore she has finally finished. I’m especially interested in “that.” She does not call what happened sex, love, or even an encounter; she reduces it to a vague thing she can put behind her. “Done” and “over” both emphasize its ending, as if getting through it was her only goal. This feels especially bleak beside Augustine’s “I loved not yet, yet I loved to love.” He repeats the word love because he is so drawn to the idea of it, while the typist cannot even bring herself to name what has happened. Augustine later says that he “defiled” the “spring of friendship” with lust, suggesting that desire can spoil something that might have become loving. The young man in Eliot’s scene “makes a welcome of indifference,” treating the typist’s lack of response as encouragement. augustine describes an inner “famine” that physical desire cannot satisfy, but the typist’s words make me wonder whether his account of wanting is enough to explain her experience. She does not seem hungry for this encounter at all. maybe she is simply glad it has ended.

I find it interesting that Eliot places “Elizabeth and Leicester / Beating oars” a section so concerned with desire. Elizabeth was celebrated as the Virgin Queen, yet in De Quadra’s account of their trip on the Thames, Leicester suggests that they could marry “if the queen pleased.” Elizabeth responds that perhaps De Quadra “did not understand sufficient English,” which lets her avoid answering him directly. I think Eliot captures this gap between Elizabeth’s public image and the possibility of private desire when he calls the boat “A gilded shell.” Its gold makes the scene look almost like a royal portrait, but a shell is only an outside surface; it cannot tell us what Elizabeth actually wants. and of course, The “Weialala leia” refrain makes the scene sound playful, even as the prospect of marriage carries enormous political and religious consequences. Her reported claim that “Her subjects would not let her marry Leicester” complicates the idea of the Virgin Queen further: was virginity entirely her choice, or was it also a role she had to perform to remain queen?

these lines echoe Sappho’s Fragment 149, where Hesperus brings home the sheep, the goat, and a child to its mother. In both poems, evening gathers those who were scattered during the day. Sappho’s list ends with a reunion between a mother and child, giving “home” a feeling of safety and affection. Eliot replaces that child with a typist who returns to an empty room, where she clears away her breakfast before the clerk arrives. The repetition of “home” makes us expect the comfort of Sappho’s scene, but the encounter that follows makes that expectation painful. Eliot even says the evening “strives” homeward, as though bringing someone home no longer guarantees that they will feel safe there.

I read “The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same” as the woman describing the effects of abortion pills. That makes the reply, “You are a proper fool,” especially harsh: instead of listening to what happened to her, the speaker blames her. “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” assumes that marriage means she must have children, regardless of what she wants or what her body has been through. This is such a sharp contrast with Spenser’s Prothalamion, where the wish for “fruitful issue” sounds like a happy blessing for the brides. In Eliot, that same expectation becomes a source of pressure.

“HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” is literally the call to leave the pub, but its repetition also makes time feel like another voice pressuring the woman. It reminds me of “To His Coy Mistress,” where the speaker argues that time is running out, so the woman should have sex with him now. He calls her reluctance “coyness” without asking what she actually wants. Eliot’s speaker similarly decides what a married woman should want instead of listening to her. The refrain also makes me think of the repeated “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” in Prothalamion: Spenser asks time to slow down for a wedding, while Eliot’s voice keeps announcing that time is up. In Laforgue’s “Complaint of a Certain Sunday,” “The humdrum life’ll serve my turn” is also repeated like in eliots but gradually becomes “Attempt to live the humdrum turn.” That changing refrain makes ordinary life sound harder to bear each time it returns; Eliot’s repeated command feels increasingly hard to ignore.

I’m also stuck on “fool.” Here it is an insult, and Laforgue dismisses the “fools whose heels in the casino stamp the leather.” But Parsifal is a “pure fool,” and his innocence gives him the ability to resist the flower-maidens and recover the spear. Is being a fool good or bad? The title “A Game of Chess” even makes me think of fool’s mate, where the “fool” is the player who loses in two rounds (in defintion . Is Eliot’s woman being called foolish because she has made a bad choice, or because she refuses to play the part marriage has assigned her??

In Hamlet, Laertes hears Ophelia’s confused speech and says, “This nothing’s more than matter.” He understands that even words that seem to mean nothing can reveal something important about how she feels. Eliot’s couple seems to argue over that possibility. After the man’s thought, “Nothing again nothing,” the woman presses him: “Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?” She treats his silence as an absence of thought or feeling, while the echo of Laertes suggests that his “nothing” might contain more than he can say. The repeated word becomes the thing they cannot agree on: whether silence can communicate anything at all.

I am particularly interested in Eliot’s “From satin cases poured in rich profusion; In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,” In Baudelaire, perfume is not elegant or pleasant, but suffocating the “hot-house” air feels almost dangerous. The girl died from fatal beauty. She was described as artifial, posed like a doll, and used. Eliot does something similar to this artificalness of perfume: “synthetic” and "drowned the sense of odors" emphasizes that the perfume is artificial. Both poets connect wealth and luxury with suffocation. Almost being lost by temptation, human desire, like in Paradise Lost, the “native perfumes” of Eden seem natural and good, although their sweetness could also suggest temptation! The line in Eliots goes right into "vials of ivory and coloured glass" connects to buadelairs image of bouquets dying in glass coffins, like the girl in the poem.

The capitalization of Unreal City makes it seem like a name.

In Baudelaire’s poem, the speaker sees seven old men who appear so similar that, instead of imagining each of them as a separate person with his own life, he turns them into repeated versions of the same frightening figure. Eliot does something similar when he looks at the workers crossing London Bridge and describes them as one anonymous, ghostlike crowd rather than as individual people, each going somewhere for a different reason. Because of this, “Unreal City” may criticize more than the emptiness of modern city life; it may also criticize the detached speaker who looks down at the crowd and decides that everyone within it is spiritually dead. The city becomes unreal partly because his own fear and alienation prevent him from seeing the humanity that is still there. This also makes Eliot’s quotation from Baudelaire“hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother”more important, because Eliot implicates himself and the reader in the problem. Modern society may dehumanize people, but we also participate in that dehumanization whenever we look at a crowd and see only a faceless mass instead of hundreds of separate lives.

this annotation is a bit of a stretch. The word "Man" appears 8 times throughout TWL. Baudelaire fears that after the seven old men, he will encounter an “awful eighth”. In Eliot, however, those eight uses do not clearly represent eight versions of one man, so the numerical connection is probably coincidental.

In reference to Mina Loy’s “At the Door of the House,” the beginning of “A Game of Chess” presents a woman in a seemingly powerful position. “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne” makes Eliot’s woman appear wealthy and queenlike, but the word “like” suggests that this power is only an appearance. Despite possessing everything that should be desirable, she becomes increasingly anxious and insecure. Similarly, Loy’s “thousand women’s eyes” are “riveted to the unrealisable” as they look to a fortune-teller for the love and futures they desire but cannot genuinely attain. In both poems, women appear surrounded by fantasies of fulfillment, yet remain uncertain and dependent upon absent or idealized men. This also parallels Electra waiting at the doorway for Orestes: each woman waits for a male figure at the door (Orestes, the “Man of the Heart,” or, later in Eliot’s poem, Albert) to arrive and change her situation. Therefore, the doorway and the throne both represent forms of suspended power: the women seem important or hopeful, but their lives remain controlled by expectations that may never become real.

The relationship between the title “The Burial of the Dead” and “April is the cruellest month” became clearer to me after reading The Canterbury Tales and “Burial of the Dead.” One line I originally did not understand in The Canterbury Tales describes the sun as having “half run its course in Aries.” After researching it, I learned that the sun is halfway through the zodiac sign Aries, placing the poem around the middle of April, approximately April 11–17. This date stood out to me because “Burial of the Dead” takes place on Armistice Day, November 11. In the story, people gather to commemorate the casket of an unknown soldier. The casket is treated with great respect, making death seem peaceful, honorable, and worthy of remembrance.

November 11 and approximately April 11 are exactly five months apart. November marks the beginning of winter, while April marks the real beginning of spring. In “Burial of the Dead,” death and winter allow the unknown soldier to be respectfully buried and remembered. April’s sunlight, however, brings everything back to life and disturbs what has been buried. This helps explain why Eliot calls April “the cruellest month”: death can offer rest, dignity, and remembrance, while returning to life means returning to painful memories and struggles.

There may also be a connection between Aries and Ares. Although Aries is a zodiac sign and Ares is the Greek god of war, their similar names strengthen the contrast. April represents life returning, but life also means struggle and conflict. In that sense, life can be more like war, while death in “Burial of the Dead” is presented as peaceful, respectful, and even good.

he Sibyl would rather stay numb than be forced to keep living, just like the people in the poem prefer the forgetfulness of winter. April’s renewal is cruel because it brings back memories and desires for people who no longer know how to fulfill them.

Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: London’s piles of rubbish seem useless and dead, but they still produce wealth and drive the whole plot. Like Eliot’s lilacs grow out of “dead land.” Both show that something new and valuable can come from what has been thrown away or left for dead.

“He Do the Police in Different Voices”: draft starts with “First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,” throwing us into the middlle of some random person’s story. Eliot changes this to “April is the cruellest month,” but keeps that sudden feeling, like we are overhearing a voice without knowing who is speking. It introduces the poem as a bunch of voices and pieces that we have to put together.

Countess Marie Larisch’s story: The old woman waiting for her dead son shows how spring can bring painful memories and desires back, almost like flowers coming out of the ground. Eliot’s lilacs grow from “dead land,” so new life comes from something that has died. Birth is not just good; it also requires loss. April brings grief back to the surface, while winter’s numbness might actually feel kinder. April makes people hope, lose hope and remember.

Putting myself in T. S. Eliot’s shoes, The Waste Land seems like a fitting title for his pessimistic view of the modern world. The title comes from the medieval story La Mort d’Arthur, in which the land becomes barren after King Hurlame strikes King Labor, a faithful Christian king. Because King Labor represents Christian authority, the blow violates the religious order holding society together. This directly parallels Eliot’s concern about the rise of atheism: just as Hurlame’s rejection of a Christian king causes the medieval kingdom to become physically barren, Europe’s movement away from Christianity leaves Eliot’s modern world spiritually barren. This connection makes me wonder whether Eliot wished society had remained Christian, or at least believed that Christianity had once provided a shared moral structure that modern society could not replace/ shared purpose.

World War I deepened this crisis, as supposedly Christian nations destroyed one another. Eliot’s waste land is therefore both a ruined Europe and a spiritually empty society. People continue working and forming relationships, but without the shared faith that once gave those actions meaning.

The title also suggests a drought-stricken landscape, almost like Mad Max: Fury Road. :) In From Ritual to Romance, Jessie Weston explains that rain restores the barren land and symbolizes rebirth. Eliot uses the same symbolism more pessimistically. His world desperately needs rain, but renewal would force it to confront what it has become. In Weston, rain promises rebirth; in Eliot, even rebirth feels uncertain and painful.