This section details the crux of unalloyed thirst, and deals with the possibility of a rainfall that does not arrive—that, though signalled through the sound of thunder, ultimately fails to materialise and give nourishment to the arid land below. Whether the rain will come seems to depend crucially, in Eliot’s opinion, on “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract”. Water, once poured from the sky and absorbed into the earth, is not something that can be regained; if humanity is to be gifted this redemptive opportunity, it cannot be “retracted”. The line “By this, and this only, we have existed” is fruitfully ambiguous, encapsulating all the spiritual and personal degradations that have been described over the course of the poem—deceit, greed, indifference, etc. Though the speaker’s despair and unquenchable thirst (manifesting in his recourse to the hermit-thrush song, imagining the sound of water) can be interpreted quite cynically, distress and drought can also be quixotically motivating. In fact, this is embodied in Weston’s Grail story. By returning to this allusion in the poem’s conclusion, the narrative trajectory of The Waste Land ultimately reads quite circular, not only by ending and beginning in the same place, without prospect of the land’s revival, but by stimulating the conditions that precipitate a heroic journey. Moreover, by quoting the song "London Bridge is falling down", Eliot emphasises how destruction can be overcome and tragedy healed—that is, through commemoration.

By referencing John Webster’s The White Devil, Eliot invokes questions of betrayal and falsehood that are ironically juxtaposed with the Brahman principle of Buddhist philosophy. In chapter five of “Brihadaranyaka”, it says that “Falsehood is surrounded on both sides by truth, and becomes truth. Falsehood does not harm the one who knows this.” By donning a false pretence, falsehood becomes truth. The significance of this implication lies in the fact that something can transform into something else merely by pretending to be it. This idea connects with Eliot’s repeated allusions to women who behave deceitfully, often using their own sexual advantages to seduce men or manipulate them into compliance — much like the Vittoria of The White Devil, who assents to a triple suicide and reneges on her word when she thinks Flamineo is dead. However, in terms of the characters that Eliot invents, we see that it is often the opposite that is true: the man who assaults the typist, for example, exemplifies how casual violence is enacted upon women with impunity. Perhaps this discrepancy in mythologised literature and the common, everyday or domestic scenarios Eliot renders represent the consequence of a falsehood that has become truth. I also think that the title of the play has certain resonances with The Waste Land: three words, the article “the” followed by an adjective and noun. What might be structurally or thematically paralleled between the two works that merits such similar formulations? Something I thought about is how the title The White Devil spoils the suspense of the narrative, since you are alerted to Brachiano’s duplicity right from the start. This might lend itself to an anticipatory, rather than reflective reading of Eliot’s title.

According to Eliot’s footnote, his inquisition borrows from Shackleton’s account of his arctic expedition, during which “the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.” This third figure is unidentified in The Waste Land, though Eliot points to a few potential culprits. In Shackleton’s quotation, he explains that he was not alone in holding this suspicion. Thus, the fourth member must be something that is recognizable by the entire group collectively. It is an abstract and intangible entity, as demonstrated by Shackleton’s admonition of “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech”. The speaker and the subject of the speaker’s address (“there are only You and I together”) are united when the speaker conducts his count, but upon looking up ahead at the white road, the two are suddenly separated, and “There is always another one walking beside you”. The speaker himself does not share in this identification with the anonymous figure. Moreover, there is something about the speaker’s syntax that graphically conveys the custom of calculation—it is like he is counting the two persons “you and I” in the act of articulating these two monosyllabic nouns. The addition of the word “Together” is almost redundant—perhaps its inclusion has to do with the presence of the invisible entity in question? Another interesting thing to note is the evolution of the question “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” from the beginning of the stanza to “But who is that on the other side of you?” at the end of the stanza. In the first question, the figure is actively involved in an activity—he is given more definition by being described as something that “walks”. The second question is more ambiguous. The phrase “other side of you” does not necessarily denote a horizontal adjacence; perhaps the figure resides in a liminal space above or below the “you” subject? If this figure is on the “other side” of a distinct individual, it is possibly part of the “you” himself—a shadow, for example (or something more abstract). Essentially, Eliot complicates the differentiation of the third figure. The internal rhyme of “who” and “you” might suggest that these pronouns refer, in fact, to the same thing. Perhaps the “I” of this section has no real, physical companion, but is accompanied by some duality of human and nonhuman, whose mystical self can only be perceived under the guise of “constant delusion”.

Annie Xu’s annotation from two years ago explains how the hermit thrush embodies a multitude of contradictions, serving as “life and death, darkness and light, suffering and vitality simultaneously”. Building off of this idea, I think that the hermit thrush almost represents Eliot's conception of the ideal human attitude towards natural cycles of life and death, retreating during winter but predictably returning, in full rejuvenation, in the spring. The advantage of the hermit thrush’s paradoxical qualities is that it accepts fertility patterns without resistance. Humanity’s essential problem, as portrayed by Eliot in The Waste Land, is its struggle to relate to cycles of nature, hence why it perceives April as the “cruellest month” and is unable to see spring as the "harvest-time” that the hermit thrush does. This is exemplified by the proliferation of false prophets — such as Madame Sosostris — whose prophesying, often in the crude, sensationalist imagery of the tarot cards, has displaced ancient fertility rites as a means of telling the future. The repetition of “O fret not after knowledge” can also be read as a kind of indictment of the temerity of human fortune telling. The birds remind us: humans “have [no knowledge]”, and any seeming success of intelligibility and communication is owed to nature, which is the organising force of all human affairs: “And yet my song comes native with the warmth”. The song is “native” because of spring warmth. Annie highlights the contradiction implied in Keat’s line, “whose only book has been the light Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on Night after night when Phoebus was away”. In these words, the poem suggests that the hermit thrush is capable of nurturing himself and maintaining intellectual integrity when Phoebus, the mythological god of son, is absent. According to the habits of the hermit thrush, light can be found within the all-encompassing “supreme darkness” of winter. This line also reminded me of a quotation from the Book of John: [9] Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. [10] But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him. And later: [35] Then Jesus said unto them, Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. These quotations represent the relatively banal notion that humans contain a capacity to act both rationally and, in the absence of light, irrationally and immorally. Furthermore, John advances the notion of an innate connection between human behaviour and external factors, including cosmological phenomena. When a man “[walks] in the night”, he stumbles not only because of the lack of light provided by the sun, but because “there is no light in him”. Similarly, the aimlessness of man’s walk at night is because he internalises the darkness of his surroundings, which have “come upon” him in both a physical and spiritual sense. The thrush engages in a similar act of absorption in the way he consumes the book of “supreme darkness”, feeding on it.

Eliot’s reference to the hermit thrush songs also epitomises the spoof scholarship of many of his footnotes. There is something quite nonsensical about the way he describes the bird with its latin title and claims that the thrush’s “'water-dripping song' is justly celebrated.” If the thrush acts as a paradigm of how humans ought to relate to fertility cycles, what is the purpose of his sarcasm?

In last year’s annotations, Amelia suggested that the sailor’s drowning could represent a “perverse baptism” in which, “rather than being born anew through a purification rite, he is sentenced to eternity under the sea”. Amelia considers how the role of water in Phlebas’s plight inverts the symbolic function of water in one particular Jewish rite. According to the Netilat Yadayim ritual, people wash their hands after waking up in order to “wash off the state of death that one approaches so closely in the unconsciousness of sleep”, Amelia writes. In addition, I'd add that the practice of cleansing one’s hands after waking up also has to do with a fear of “tumah”, or spiritual impurity. Perhaps Amelia is right that the unconsciousness of slumber is reminiscent of death, which is why people feel the need to initiate some form of baptism or rebirth upon regaining full consciousness. It is also true that within Judaism, people believe they ascend to their highest spiritual state when they are sleeping, because that is when the soul travels to heaven. The separation of the soul from the body during sleep is what leaves the individual at risk of “tumah”, which is why he must cleanse himself soon after. If we take Amelia’s idea that water to Ulysses and Phlebas acts as a tool of damnation to be true, and Eliot is aware of the dual purpose of water in constructing Phlebas’s fate, we can see how the boundary between repentance and damnation has effectively collapsed—in fact, I disagree with Amelia’s suggestion that water in “Death by Water” is not a binary agent. Pheleas, after all, has achieved a purification. He has “[Forgotten] the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss”. Quite literally, his memory has been purified, erased of certain conceptual and physical perceptions. His purification, however, is not in preparation for life, as a baptism or Netilat Yadayim is for. Instead, he is purified at the moment he enters ultimate expiry. Unconsciousness is not what necessitates cleansing (as Amelia originally proposed). Unconsciousness is a religiously mystical experience—only the corporeal body suffers in this experience of transcendence. But if it is discarded in water (as in Phlebas’s drowning) contamination by "tumah" is precluded. As he enters the “whirlpool”, the motion of which imitates familiar cyclical patterns in nature, and passes the "stages of his age and youth", Phlebas’s damnation also enacts his redemption.

Here, Eliot alludes to the popular conspiracy regarding Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester. Eliot plays into the sensationalism of the public, imagining a scene of riverside escapade with opulent descriptions of a “gilded shell” and sails of “red and gold”. The Rhine Daughters’ singing, however, which concludes their dark prophesying in Wagner's opera, alerts us to the limits of this erotic fantasy. I was struck by a line from Froude’s Elizabeth that reminded me of Eliot’s phoenician sailor tarot. The figure Cecil, who I believe refers to the English statesman William Cecil, chief adviser of Queen Elizabeth I, was in danger of losing his position to Leicester. The words of Cecil, who recognised this fact, is reported within De Quadra’s correspondence: “It was time for a prudent sailor to make for port when he saw a storm coming; and for himself he perceived the most manifest ruin impending over the queen through her intimacy with Lord Robert.” In this metaphor, Cecil regards himself as the “prudent sailor” who perceives a danger threatening the success of his voyage. The storm will affect not only himself but his most valuable passenger — that is, the queen. As Cecil believes, there is thus an element of self sabotage in the Queen’s behaviour. Because the “manifest ruin” is interpreted as a “storm” in the given context of the metaphor, the resultant ruin would most likely take the form of some sort of drowning, or “death by water”. The intimacy between Elizabeth and Leicester is scandalous because of his romantic history and the cult of virginity that surrounded the queen. This raises the idea that drowning — an act of immersing oneself in water which, in this case, terminates an illicit intimacy — can serve as a kind of purification and form of repentance.

We meet Tiresias almost exactly halfway through The Waste Land. This blind, prophetic androgyne is the central consciousness of the poem. Eliot’s footnote here is particularly interesting, as he explicitly identifies the figure of Tiresias as the poem’s organising force. Perhaps, Eliot as a poet also experiences an identification with Tiresias, who claims to have “Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest”. His sight is all-encompassing, involving the historical, cultural, and literary fragments that have been compiled throughout the poem. In other words, the poem is Tiresias’s prophecy, its collage-like structure a means of communicating humanity’s declining spiritual condition. And yet, for all his powers of perception, Tiresias is an idle prophet who witnesses the assault of the typist without intervention. Though he understands and anticipates the man’s attack — significantly, he is described as perceiving the scene rather than merely seeing it (maybe it is important that Eliot describes what Tiresisas “sees” (rather than perceives) as the “substance of the poem”? — he narrates the events indifferently. Moreover, it is as the figure of the convergence of sexes that Tiresisas’s witness to the event is a vicarious experience in itself. His impotence and defenselessness is, by extension, self-deprecating.

As others have noted, many of the sources Eliot draws from in “The Fire Sermon” are related to seduction in some way or another. Eliot’s allusion to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” further continues this trend. The voice of the poem champions amorous living in the face of the inevitable advancement of time. Eliot’s reference to “But at my back I always hear” continues in the poem with the lines “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.” In his plea, the speaker argues that “coyness” is inapposite for their mere mortality; time will not only steal his lover's “beauty”, but will also prevent his song from “echoing” in her “marble vault”. Significantly, his song — or poetry, more aptly — will not cease to echo, and will outlast her beauty. The poem’s implication here takes on a more cynical tone that compliments the prevailing air of violence in The Waste Land. Indeed, the speaker anticipates the death of his lover, but not his own; this humorous poem about love and passion suddenly seems threatening, as the speaker uses these arguments to essentially manipulate his mistress to sleep with him. Much like the rape of Leda in Spenser’s Prothalamion, or in Parsifal’s conquering of the “sweet chatter, amusing lust” of the trickster women, Eliot shows how female beauty or sensuality is implictly demonised, and is often met with cruel and brutal ends.

The poem also contains references to vegetation. However, these references merely reinforce the incongruity of nature within the industrial world. The speaker writes that “My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow”, but ultimately argues that slow cultivation of affection is not worthwhile. Perhaps Eliot has something to say about how the refusal of these patterns of growth creates manipulation and deceptiveness in human behaviour.

In this section of “A Game of Chess”, the poem demonstrates its most idiosyncratic features. Continuing our discussion from class on the role of women in Eliot’s poem, the female voice in these erratic stanzas is particularly distinct. The dialogue in quotation marks (“my nerves are bad to-night…”) is spoken by a woman in the T.S. Eliot reading of The Waste Land. The scene that is imagined in these fragmented accounts of conversation describes a kind of nervous breakdown, in which a woman, characterised as quite feeble and paranoid, badgers her passive husband, whose voice is, at the very least omitted, from the text. In fact, the male voice is most likely accounted for by the lines without quotation marks: for example, “I think we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones”, which seems to allude to a scene of battle. Thus, though as the reader we are privy to the man’s internal ruminations, within the rhetorical fiction of the text, the woman cannot hear his responses. Further, his nonresponse perhaps speaks to the emotional paralysis suffered by former soldiers. However, quite crucially, the man has not, like Philomela, been silenced: rather, he has been made unintelligible to the material receptions of the world. The woman’s inquiry, “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?”, does not indict the man’s supposed thoughtlessness. Contrary to the woman’s assumption that he “knows nothing, sees nothing, remembers nothing”, the man possesses reminiscences. He just simply does not extend the privilege of sharing them with the questioner.

Eliot’s water motif is also gendered. Water is connected to death, which is often evoked in the context of drowning (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) or other eschatological associations (thunder, for instance). For men, water is integral to a loftier pursuit of spiritual purification, while women are related to water in a narrower, domestic sense (“The hot water at ten”).

“A Game of Chess” begins with an allusion to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The abundance of imagery relating to glass, marble, and reflective surfaces unites the various romantic narratives Eliot alludes to while simultaneously introducing themes of deception and allusion. The “flames of sevenbranched candelabra” is one of the glass’s targets of manipulation, these flames having intensified in their reflection upon the table. If we take the flames to represent a personification of intense human passion — whether in the form of love or vice (indeed, the duality of fire is explicit in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which “the flame of love had taken Tereus, as if one had set afire ripe grain, dry leaves, or a haystack”; evidently, the language of fire both dramatises Tereus's attraction to Philomela and prefigures their mutual destruction — we can see how such passions have a tendency to multiply accidentally, often on the basis of artificial conceits: in Tristan and Isolde, the accidental ingestion of a love potion causes two people to begin a clandestine affair; in Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra’s efforts to secure Antony, which involve her faking her own death, result in both of their deaths. In both cases, love and deception are inextricably intertwined.

Something else I noticed about Metamorphoses is its prophesying tone of narration. On the one hand, the speaker of the verse knows the fate of Philomela before he recounts his narrative; in this sense, it is retrospective rather than foretelling, which is the most obvious function of the practitioner of Tarot divination that Eliot has elsewhere alluded to. And yet, several poetic asides — when he narrates Philomela’s parting from her father, describing how “she winds her arms around her father’s neck, entreating him to let her make the trip; she says that it will do her good to go and visit her sister” but adding in parenthesis that “(it will do the opposite)” — produce the impression of a predetermined and immutable narrative trajectory, one which the omniscient speaker is aware of but, despite his sympathy, is helpless to improve. Perhaps Eliot intends for The Waste Land to operate as a kind of Tarot card reading. As the poem’s creator, he is merely the vehicle through which destiny is pronounced, but is powerless to prescribe a means of evasion.

Here, the “brown fog of a winter dawn” relates directly to the fog of Baudelaire’s city, which is described as “a mist, unclean and yellow, inundated space - a scene that would have pleased an actor’s soul.” Evidently, the mist appeases the actor because it conceals reality as it exists, allowing individuals to traverse and assume various identities without revealing the person underneath the costume. Eliot’s reference to the fog admits his own complicity in the practice of artifice, for he too has taken up different masks and voices over the course of the “Burial of the Dead”. He confirms his awareness of this hypocrisy in another allusion to Baudelaire - a quotation of the preface to the Flowers of Evil. In a mocking tone of endearment, Baudelaire contends that humans are innately self-interested and hypocritical. Eliot makes no movement towards a defence.

“Those are pearls that were his eyes” draws on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The fate of the Phoencian sailor, depicted in Tarot mythology, is what Ariel professes King Alonso’s fate to have been. As Margo noticed, in The Waste Land, Eliot operates as the puppeteer and scarcely divulges the purpose of his ambiguity. Margo contends that the Tarot acts as an agent of transformation, the allusion to which prefigures a larger physical and emotional transformation that Eliot is concerned with. I’d like to elaborate on Margo’s point on transformation: in describing the features that assure Ferdinand of King Alonso’s death, Ariel focuses on his eyes as the most distinctive qualities of a corpse. It is the eyes that have undergone a process of transformation. Once again, Eliot returns to the motif of vision. Losing the ability to see is implied to be an indication of death; perhaps, ‘pearls for eyes’ alludes to the nation’s glorified conception of war that prioritises victory and martyrdom at any price, suggesting a kind of moral death. Alternatively, Ariel’s metaphor suggests that in place of an instrument of sight, King Alonso’s eyes are “pearls” because he is a man blinded by his greed, willing to succumb to moral depravity to increase his power and wealth. Eliot continues to develop his vision of the corrupt and misguided morals of the urban world in his description of the “Unreal City”.

According to Lemprière, the hyacinth flower came into being after the death of Hyacinthus. The flower, stamped by Grecian notes of grief, was created by Apollo as a way to honour the memory of his eponymous friend. By commemorating Hyacinthus in the form of a flower, Apollo could ensure that the spirit of Hyacinthus would endure beyond his physical decease. However, the illusion to the hyacinth myth is not merely affirmative. The gathering of hyacinth flowers is concomitant with a loss of sensory faculties: the speaker can no longer “speak”, nor can he see. When they return from the hyacinth garden, the illusion of knowledge is dispelled. Death is inexorable within nature’s cycles of growth and rebirth. The line “I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence” is also related to the story of Isolde and Tristan, and reminded me particularly of Isolde’s exclamation, “Unite us both, extinguish the light of life!” Light, as demonstrated by the Wagner quotation, is traditionally associated with knowledge and sentience; however, this association is inverted by Eliot’s speaker. Even at the closest temporal approximation to divine presence, the speaker fails to retain knowledge.

The allusion to the hyacinth is bookended by German quotations from Isolde and Tristan, and could almost read as if part of Wagner’s dialogue. Like Marie and Rudolph, the romance of Isolde and Tristan is an illicit one. Whatever pleasure and virtue can be derived from their relationship is inextricable from what Eliot believes is its inevitable expiry. If Isolde’s return is inconspicuous, and the sailor’s vision is “Empty and desolate as the sea”, we might consider how the condition of blindness is represented by Eliot. In Huxley’s Crome Yellow, Mr. Scogan advises his customers against inquiring after their fate; as he explains, “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” His tarot cards allow individuals to foresee their future, but do not necessarily offer a means to avoid whatever dismal end awaits them. The futility of knowledge is also apparent in Isolde and Tristan. Though the sailor purports no sight ahead, we know for a fact that Isolde’s return is impending, and that her supposed abandonment is propagandised by Tristan’s wife. His seeing nothing — which, in practice, is equivalent to a lack of sight — is entirely false and meaningless. “I knew nothing”, thus, takes on a different modality. It is not a grievance, but merely a statement frankly announcing the insincerity and superficiality of human epistemology.

I was interested in Awa’s interpretation of Eliot’s reference to the “Burial of the Dead”. In Basevi’s anthropological article, he expounds his argument that burial proceedings and funeral rites originated out of a desire to preserve the memory of those who had passed away. Hence, “‘graves were not receptacles for the dead, but refuges for the living.’” The graves offered solace to those who are forced to endure the burden of life amidst their grief. Meanwhile, the ground stores deteriorating corpses and, by extension, the memories of human lives associated with them. As Awa notes, Eliot suggests that reviving the memory of those buried underneath the ground is a kind of “cruelty”. Alternatively, perhaps revival is what threatens the pristine and affectionate memories protected by a layer of soil. This explains his contempt for April, a month defined by regeneration and rebirth. “Forgetful snow” could indeed suggest that Eliot wishes for such memories to be buried and forgotten; April is a “cruel” month because it threatens to uproot this sacred indifference—it offers no pretence, but makes bare the sterility of the land.

In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the arrival of spring earns welcome and celebration. Spring assures the return to warmth and fertility. Chaucer’s reference to “Aries” suggests the importance of cosmological cycles. The renewal of nature is also linked to the activities of the pilgrims he describes, who are also seeking a personal rebirth or salvation in their pilgrimage to the tomb of the martyr Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. In The Waste Land, however, the reference to the adulterous Marie, who goes sleighing in the wintertime, suggests that spiritual renewal is a romantic aspiration undermined by the sexual immorality of the present age. Only the winter allows her to indulge in a vision of freedom; April reveals that a “fresh start” is not possible.

The original title of The Waste Land borrows from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: “He do the police in different voices.” Mrs. Betty Higden praises the orphan Sloppy’s talent for acting out the voices of the policemen mentioned in the newspaper. Throughout The Waste Land, Eliot himself enacts different voices. Ultimately, however, Eliot is the author of each individual and differentiated voice, much like Sloppy himself, suggesting that there is an underlying unity to all these “characters”. Moreover, Mrs. Higden’s compliment applauds Sloppy’s ability to use his voice as a mask—to disguise himself beneath the public facade he assumes. The original title of The Waste Land was possibly a way for Eliot to gesture towards the fictive nature of the voices of the poem, thus allowing him to hold these fragmented identities at an ironic distance.

Implicit in Mrs. Higden’s statement is the belief that Sloppy’s habit also enlivens the otherwise deadening stories relayed in the newspaper. His alacrity is, to a certain extent, inappropriate given the seriousness of the announcements of the newspaper. The ease with which he appropriates and imitates the policemen hints at the question of identity confusion (interestingly enough, Sloppy remains anonymous, and is solely referred to as the “orphan” when we are first introduced to him through Mrs. Boffin’s perspective). Nevertheless, given Mrs. Higden’s admittedly limited literacy, Sloppy's “voices” are what enable Mrs. Higden to receive and comprehend the information contained within the newspaper. Thus, another advantage of Sloppy’s playful theatrics is that they act as a tool of democratisation, much like Eliot’s poem uses a literary appeal to alert his audience to the reality of their wasting political and natural environment.

According to From Ritual to Romance, in the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, the hero does not inquire about what the Grail is, but rather about whom it serves. This seems significant in several regards: for one, the utility of the Grail is introduced. The hero’s question implicitly suggests that the Grail is not merely an object to be enshrined, but can be used to some practical effect. Moreover, the hero’s latter question acknowledges a presence beyond himself. This enlarged awareness of what lies beyond the individual is striking in the context of the second alteration to Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval—the fact that the desolation of the land is “directly attributable to the Quester himself”. These changes have illuminating implications on the character of the quester in Chrétien de Troyes’s narrative; he is perhaps altruistic, wishing to use the Grail to serve a greater purpose, whilst simultaneously more implicated in the destruction of his environment. This is possibly how Eliot envisioned the struggle of humanity—well-meaning and self-defeating, locked in the contest of life's ceaseless brutality.

Another thought that struck me: Frazer in The Golden Bough describes how men would perform in magical rites to service divine activity, “for it is a familiar tenet of magic that you can produce any desired effect by merely imitating it”. Perhaps Eliot viewed his poetic enterprise as its own kind of ceremony that functions as a dramatic representation of the reality he wishes to actualise.