TL;DR: Most interesting to me is the mirrored structure which exists both thematically and structurally within this section—and within all its references. At first glance I thought it might indicate a doubling or twinning of sorts; but I’ve now understood this “mirror” to be more of a replication (or regression).

Midway through the stanza comes the line “With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.” Upon my initial reading two significant features revealed themselves. First, there is numerical weight to the chosen number “nine.” In Baudelaire's poem the unnamed narrator watches seven old men, all identical in misery and form, tread somberly before him, before at last arriving at the terrible understanding that he himself is the “awful eighth.” And so of course the natural progression is to uncover a ninth member in this hellish parade; and obligingly Eliot supplies us with one. The ninth is, of course, himself, or perhaps the reader; either way the mention of the number “nine” suggests that this repetitive pattern has not yet ceased. In the original Les Fleurs Du Mal, Baudelaire plays with the notion of what I initially thought was doubling: there is the “spectre” of self which walks and speaks in our “city full of dreams,” the hypocritical Reader decried as Baudelaire’s “second self—[his] brother,” and, of course, the seven (or eight) old men, whose presence compels the narrator to double back and flee home. But at the very end there is a line which suggests that—as I’ve come to realize—that this doubling is more of a regression: “In vain my reason tried to cross the bar,/ The whirling strom but drove her back again”. And so in this way Baudelaire introduces another creation story for the ‘doubled’ men, in which they are not copies of one another but one and the same, forced back along the same path after having failed to “cross the bar”. So what is this “bar” which cannot be crossed? Eliot appears to suggest it is death itself. It seems to me that “a dead sound on the final stroke of nine” is operating as a threshold of sorts, or the “bar” in question: the line cleaves the stanza into two exact halves, each of which can be considered a “double” of the other. In this way it becomes clear that the “doubles” we are dealing with are the stanza’s halves, each of which depict an eerily similar motif. The first half of the stanza (lines 1-8) pays homage to Dante. The line “undone by death” comes from a section of the Inferno in which Dante meets the Uncommitted, a group of souls who reside neither in hell nor out of it. But interposed over this image of dead souls in limbo is the living, since Eliot roots this classical reference in a visual description of modern London. And so through this overlay Eliot melts any barrier between the living and the dead, perhaps suggesting that they are one and the same (a suggestion, it is worth noting, somewhat loosely put forth in De Nerval’s dream writings). The second half of the stanza is much the same. Eliot introduces the image of the deathly bloom, where the narrator expects mysterious flowers to erupt from planted corpses. This description seems to be most obviously an allegory for the afterlife: flowers growing from corpses are, after all, a continuation of life after death. But interestingly, the afterlife appears to be inaccessible. The lines “'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?/'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,/'Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!” suggest that small discrepancies are capable of disrupting our entire future (which, again, is the plot of De Nerval’s writings—he spends the entire excerpt ranting about how our lives are the sum product of infinitely small moments and knick-knacks); and the questions marks suggest that as a result of these discrepancies, the flowers’ ability to bloom, or our ability to access the afterlife, has been compromised. Looping back to Baudelaire’s model of duplication—in which doubles are produced by a ‘doubling back,’ or re-walking of the same path—we can see how the stanza’s halves inform our understanding of the poem as a whole. Both parts reference our inability to move into the afterlife: the first half speaks of life and death as another doubled pair, implying that the dead souls ‘double back’ onto the living (aka they hit a dead end, cannot move past into the afterlife, so turn around and go back into the realm of the living); and the second half’s tie to the continuation of life post-death has already been thoroughly explained. This understanding gives new resonance to “a dead sound on the final stroke of nine”. Yes, the line references death as a threshold; but importantly, it frames death as the “bar” we fail to cross. There exists “a dead sound,” suggesting a sudden impact or some unsuccessful attempt. I think what Eliot is trying to say is that nothing ever changes; having died, we fail over and over again to access the afterlife, instead ‘doubling back’ onto life. As a consequence all future generations become copies of the past; and we get this weird circularity that Eliot flirts with for the rest of the poem.

I think the notion of orientation is really important here. Addie suggests that the "Fishing" metaphor alludes to the Fisher King, positioned so that his back is facing hell. Her analysis sinks into a particularly relevant section from Weston's essay: ‘the Fish was sacred to those deities who were supposed to lead men back from the shadows of death to life,' and is brilliant enough that I was sufficiently convinced that the Fisher King does, indeed, face away from hell. Hurling ourselves back in time to the segment on Death by Water -- where the threshold of death is, thematically, embodied by water itself -- we can thus see that we find ourselves (as MacLeish scholars past have noted, shoutout Jeannie + Addie!) in the exact same position from which we began. We are at the edge of death. Water is before, us, and behind us is hell. And so what is the way forward? If the Waste Land is said to have a central conflict, it would be the struggle to escape the repetition of human life. Life flows into death flows back into the life; and in this way it appears that in Eliot's world, no souls have ever successfully reached the afterlife. And so at the end of the poem we find ourself faced with this exact same dilemma: we have effectively traversed through hell, and are standing before the Death: will we cross the bar into the afterlife? Or will we descend into the fated spiral once more?

Props to Quisha for drawing a connection between these lines and Bradley's Appearance and Reality. In her annotation she isolated a specific line from his essay: “In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it." I find this quote extremely revealing. In my past annotations I have loosely discussed how TS Eliot appears to be presenting the thematic motif of DOUBLING, and as such, has constructed two separate worlds: the world in reality and the world of perspective. The world in perspective collides resoundingly with the concepts of Tarot and orientation; that is, how our own internal worlds can shape our perception of the environments around us, and as such, potentially imprint upon them. The world in fact, however, is far bleaker - this is the waste land of which Eliot speaks, populated entirely by vast tracts of infertile land and a cacophony of disembodied voices. Upon reading Bradley’s essay, I was most struck by the notion of a soul truly “knowing” another - and the rarity of that occurrence. I think part of the Waste Land’s pessimism is birthed from the notion that while our perceptions can filter the external world in a way which infuses it with hope, our perceptions are exactly that: OURS. There is no guarantee that any one else will ever see into your soul, or has a soul similar to yours; and there is also no way to ensure that a communication is as accurate as you desire it to be. “The key”, then, is turned only when all these factors miraculously unite: when the world of perspective and reality are guaranteed to be identical.

Last year, Addie annotated this exact section and described how Eliot purposefully confuses the reader's sense of right-side-up and upside-down. In an especially insightful section of analysis she claims that if the reader were to orient herself with respect to Dracula (whom "crawled head downward down a blackened wall"), the tower down which he crawls becomes inverted - and the corresponding Tarot Card, the Dark Tower, is similarly flipped. Nested in this idea is a broader understanding: that in the chaos and turbulency of the modern world, the only form of agency we truly have is our perspective. When Dracula is flipped upside down, the world appears to him inverted; and though in fact it remains exactly the same as it always was, in his mind's eye all has been reoriented. That's precisely Eliot's point. Though the world itself may be a wasteland, there exists a copy of this world - a world of shadows, of impressions, of perspectives and opinions - which is completely up to interpretation. I think he invokes Tarot as a way of imbuing this doppelganger realm with purpose and value: Tarot is all about perspective. Your interpretation of the card, and what it tells you about your life in this theoretical duplicate of reality, informs the way you act in the real physical world - and so perhaps our agency, though constrained to our own perspectives, is more powerful than we think. The following two lines are relevant insofar as they condense several central thematic discussions: the voices, time, familiarity and remembrance, and water. All of these strands weave together a picture of reality IN FACT: that is, a world in which people are consigned to make the same mistakes over and over, a world where several voices overlap but never really hear one another, a world analogous to a dry rock. I think Eliot piles up all these images to drive home the fact that though our perspectives may change (though the Dark Tower may become inverted, or vice versa), objective reality is constant. In this way he DOES put a pessimistic constraint on the extent to which our conception of life can actually influence the events occuring around us; but nevertheless I do think there are some shards of positivity embedded in there.

To Olivia: I agree! I think that gender fluidity is a big thematic motif throughout this section. Expanding that a bit further, I think there's a way to rope in Donne into how Eliot plays with male-female binaries. In his Elegy XIX, Donne describes the male desire for possession of the female body, or more specifically, the female soul. Initially it seems that Donne is simply illustrating the basic desire for ownership inherently embedded within sexual relations; but there exists another reading too, in which sexual yearning is a product of Man's intense wanting to be Woman. The elegy begins; "Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy,/ Until I labor, I in labor lie." Of course there is the most obvious understanding of these lines as "Come to my bed, because I cannot rest until I can make love to you!" - but this is far too tame. I think there is an equally plausible interpretation in which Donne is saying he cannot rest until he not only makes love to Woman, but BECOMES a woman. "Labor" is here taken to mean work (sexual work, presumably), but one cannot help but think of its second meaning; that is, childbirth. In this way labor, being a biological capability that only woman possess, becomes a replacement for womanhood itself; and when Donne writes that he cannot rest until he lies "in labor," he is actually suggesting that he cannot rest before experiencing womanhood. This analysis colors the rest of the elegy in a different shade. The narrator's visceral descriptions of an undressing woman become not a product of sexual desire, but rather a deep-rooted envy of her femininity; and in this way Donne reframes love, lust, and hatred for the female figure as a function of Man's desire to be Woman.

To Lucas - I completely agree, but I also think there's an alternate meaning of the thrush in which the barren wasteland not only becomes hopeful, but grows un-wasted. You are definitely right to say that the thrush preaches a life of simplicity, and of thriving off of scant resources. If you've only ever lived off nothing, than something--even the smallest of crumbs--seems enormous to you. But there is another subtlety to Keats's poem as well: as he writes, "He who saddens/ At thought of idleness cannot be idle,/ And he's awake who thinks himself asleep." I think what he means here is that THINKING itself is something: having the thought of idleness inherently means that you are not idle, and the fact that you are thinking about being asleep proves that you are not, in fact, asleep. Similarly, thinking about the waste-land proves that the wasteland is not, in fact, wasted. Though there may be no water, nor soil, and perhaps just a rock, there nevertheless are THOUGHTS: and these thoughts are material growths in of themselves, proving that something in fact has grown out of this barren world. Thus, the wasteland cannot be wasted - it really just depends on the way you think about it. Perhaps this is Eliot's way of suggesting that all the spectres that he references - shadow selves, twins, the "sound" of water, thoughts - constitute something valuable? Something that, in a world of waste, has worth?

Death by Water represents the convergence of two central motifs: the twins and the voices. In the Inferno, Dante encounters two sinners who are being burned together in a double flame: that is, "who are twinned within a single fire." The identicality of their hellish fate stems from the fact that their sins were wrought together, or similarly; in this way the twins become a generalizable metaphor for the repetitive nature of the human race. Prone to the same errors, we live the same lives. Interestingly, one of these sinners (Ulysses) explains his final journey, in which he hit a underwater whirlwind and died via drowning. The convergence of these images - of fire after death, of water AS death, and of the whirlpool being life itself funneling towards death - mirror Phlebas's narrative structure exactly. How does this relate to Dante, you may ask? I am of the opinion that Eliot roots Phlebas's arc in the "twin" sinners as a way of indicating that Phlebas (much like Sybil with the voices) represents not one person, but many. Having been "a fortnight dead," he is presumably burning in hell; but if his Inferno counterparts are Ulysses and Diomedes, he must have twin counterparts too. Eliot helpfully introduces us to his double: the reader. The final line ("Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you") uses a visual comparison to directly frame the reader as Phlebas's twin. In this way it becomes clear what Eliot is really trying to get at: that we as humans are doomed to repeat the same sins over and over, and as a result, will burn together in a "twinned flame." What that flame is we do not yet know.

What interests me most here is the question of power. It seems to be the fundamental resource beneath all male-female relations: does man overpower woman, or vice versa? In this instance the answer seems to be neither; for the first time we see a productive partnership between Man and Woman - Elizabeth and Leicester - in which they are united against the court of public opinion. The following line ("beating oars") reveals another facet to this partnership. This reference is preceded by a section on the Thames, and so visually, we can imagine Elizabeth and Leicester trapped together on a tiny rowboat, working furiously to fight against - or even, perhaps, to escape - the dirty Thames. This metaphor fits neatly into historical records: Elizabeth and Leicester were partners in crime when it came to escaping public scolding, which in some sense can be viewed as a dirty contaminant (like the Thames) threatening to lay waste to their reputations. Importantly, both of them were unsuccessful in escaping the waste. Despite their "beating oars," they never did escape the Thames; the two were never married, and public speculation concerning their relationship--and the foul play which it may have catalyzed--never ceased. Perhaps a moral generalizable to the larger poem: that it is impossible to flee the waste.

This line is a modified version of Psalm 137: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." The general plot of Psalm 137 revolves around the Babylonian exiles, who have been sent away from Zion (their home) and made to live, against their will, in a foreign land. The captors demand of them a happy song from Zion, and describing this demand, the captives write: "they that wasted us required of us mirth." In the Eliot-Psalm parallel, the Thames supplants Zion. This replacement is peculiar, since the Thames is neither traditionally "sweet" nor a homeland to be longed after, as Zion is for the exiles. Perhaps Eliot means this tongue-in-check reference to be a nod to the industrialization of the modern world: those who "wasted" society--that is, big business, factories, etc.--expect the public to sing mirthfully of the disgusting Thames, polluted and chemical-filled as it is. Interestingly, Eliot obliges: over the course of the next two lines it is revealed that he does in fact sing his song. In Psalm 137, the exiles refuse to sing a song of mirth out of principle: "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" The fact that Eliot has no such hesitations, and sings willfully, suggests that perhaps this land is not so strange - he feels perfectly at home in this foreign land (and no sorrow at his home having been "wasted") simply because he comes from a wasteland also. And so perhaps the true optimism in the poem does not come from broad generalizations of "beauty in the waste" or promises that "we're all in this together"...rather, Eliot seems to take the most comfort in the understanding that we are all at home, always. No matter how bad the world gets or how wasted we become, we can still sing our songs of mirth - for after all, we come from the wasteland.

I suspect the "Goonight" is a nod back to one of Eliot's previous subtextual motifs; that is, the idea that life and death exist in an endless loop of repetition. Sofia theorized (in a fantastic annotation of her own) that Eliot believed small changes---aka waste (the tiny objects or moments which comprise our entire lives)---to be the reason behind massive changes in our destinies; in one of my own earlier annotations, I spoke very briefly about how these small changes are responsible for the cyclical nature of life and death (in which dead souls are repurposed into new ones, thus condemning the human race to an eternity of the same lives lived over and over again). Zooming into this section specifically, the dropping of the "d" in "Goodnight" represents one of these many "small changes." Perhaps Eliot means to parody the decay of great literature by directly contrasting the "Goonight" with the Shakespearian original below; but either way such a decay represents only one of the many ways in which human society signs its own death sentence.

What struck me most as I was reading through Baudelaire's rather grotesque image of "A Martyred Woman" was the way in which the physical image of the woman blends seamlessly into the environment. It makes me think all the way back to De Nerval's dream essays, where he ponders the "eternal distinction between good and evil. Is my soul this indestructible molecule, this tiny bubble of breath which plays its part in nature none the less? Or is it instead merely this void, this image of nothingness receding into infinite space?" If we take his understanding- that to be good is to be active, to have a part in society, to play one's part in nature; and that to be bad is to be nothing, to blend into the void of life itself - then is there no clearer distinction between good and evil than man and woman as presented by Eliot? Baudelaire begins the trend. His woman, who, being dead, is quite literally "an image of nothingness," recedes quietly into the background of the poem; in fact, the linen literally "drinks up" her blood. Stylistically, there is no distinction between his extravagant descriptions of furniture (the external world) and his reverential (and objectifying) analysis of her body. This blurring of a woman and her environment extends to Eliot's poem, too, where this section on Woman is cloaked in references to sensory experience and classical literature; she is a function of the world, not the other way around. In this way it becomes clear which of the two camps Woman falls into: "this image of nothingness receding into infinite space," or, as Baudelaire calls it, evil. And yet to Eliot, Man is the "indestructible molecule"; throughout the entire poem, men are the actors, the changers, the doers. They form the very fibers of life, and as such, meet Baudelaire's criteria for "good" - and Eliot's criteria to be represented explicitly.

I confessedly have no clue how tarot works, but my limited knowledge suggests that the reader must pick three cards; one for the past, one for the present, and one for the future. I'm not really sure whether other configurations exist, but either way I think the cards Eliot chooses have some sort of numerical weight. If you isolate these three lines ("here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,/ And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,/ Which is blank"), you get a specific reading in which the "three staves", Wheel, and blank card correspond to the past, present, and future respectively. Eliot "arbitrarily" links the three staves with the Fisher King, framing the Arthurian legend as a thing of the past; according to Google AI, the Wheel supposedly represents a change in position, station, or fortune (such as the poor becoming rich and vice versa), which strongly echoes our conversation about the Wasteland being an inversion of sorts of the traditional literary hierarchy (in which narratives of the poor are voiced by the wealthy), along with the broader historical context of the term "Wasteland". Eliot, who presently is writing the Wasteland, intends to invert the narrative; and it remains uncertain whether he will succeed (the future is "blank"). But there are other "cards," too. Neither the Phoenician Sailor nor the Lady of the Rocks exist in a conventional tarot set, but it is implied that both have been "chosen" by Madame Sosostris for the nameless narrator. In this way it appears that Eliot has a five card spread, two of which he has supplied himself. I’d argue that this construction fits snugly into Eliot’s conception of fate - the later lines (“I see” “I bring the horoscope myself”) cast the narrator as the clairvoyant, which perhaps suggests that we possess some autonomy over our own fates (hence the provision of the two extra, personalized cards). Alternatively, the five card spread might serve to challenge our understanding of time as linear; maybe Eliot is arguing that our existence cannot easily be binned into a past, present, and future. No matter the case there is an irrefutable tension between Eliot, the passive observer of fate, and Eliot, the writer + shaper of worlds (and fates).

There's this notion of orientation which manifests itself in the Burial of the Dead ("the land of the dead was often conceived as situated in the direction from which the people had been believed to have come into their present seats"). Eliot seems to be rejecting the sources' interpretation of death as a route homewards; instead, he casts THE LIVING as the orienter, not death or whatever comes before. The shadow (death) strides BEHIND the living being, and again, the shadow rises to MEET you. In both cases it is you, the physical entity, doing the leading; and in this way it seems as if Eliot is rejecting the notion of Death as a return to some original place. Neither death nor the liminal space of "before-existence" gives "relief" or "shelter"; rather, it is the here, the now, the wasteland as it exists in the present realm of experience and life, that really matters.

Σιβυλλα can be translated in the singular vocative case (from someone speaking directly, and only, to Sibyll: "Sibyl, what do you want?") but I'm like 99% sure that it can also be translated in the dual (aka the dual vocative, as opposed to the singular vocative). The dual is best understood to reference two things that are "conceived of as a single, distinct unit or pair" (Addressing many things/people who can be condensed into ONE Sibyll: "Sibyll, what do you want?") But this concept--that Sibyl represents the merging of several independent things into one fused unit--makes us wonder what exactly is being merged.

Here, Eliot's original opening is instructive. The reference to Our Mutual Friend invokes a similar image of multiple things collapsing into one, an effect which is a twin to the dual. Interestingly, the things condensing are VOICES: "He do the police in different voices" implies that these "different voices" are part of a singular unit, that is, the police. The importance of these "voices" manifests itself even in Eliot's own writing; the old introduction is composed of several indistinct names, all of which merge together in almost a clump of discordant unison. In this way it becomes clear from what unit the dual Sibyll is comprised: voices.

This analysis becomes relevant when we zoom out to view Sibyll's, along with Kurtz's (and Sloppy's), physical state. All of them are quite literally "wasting" away; their bodies are failing them, or, in the case of Sloppy, they are in state of exaggerated isolation. But if Sibyll is supposed to represent all our different voices, then her diminished state becomes a painful omen; because when she cries out, "I want to die!," so too is the entire world.

Immediately "the" plunges us deep into the assumption that we are talking about a specific "Waste Land" here--and it is easy to, and important to, engage in determining which "Waste Land" that is. But if our readings suggested anything, it is that the central question is not one of reference; Eliot seems to quite explicitly invoke the thematic shadow of the Holy Grail, whose purpose---as posited in From Ritual To Romance---was to save the Fisher King, along with the land, from waste. But this analysis chisels a new facet from which to view the "Waste Land"; that is, as a function of BLAME. Whose fault is it that the land, and the people, have grown barren (I say "people" because The Golden Bough discussed extensively the value of these rituals, of which the Holy Grail is included, in replenishing the supply of food and children.)? Even when the references are agreed upon and the scope of our debate is narrowed to the Grail exclusively, there still remain competing interpretations. In certain cases it is the king's fault, since failure to restore him to health casts a neglectful drought across the land; in others it is the heroine's, since an unsuccessful quest leads DIRECTLY (that is, not by means of a third party, like the King) to waste.

The Golden Bough thrusts our confusion into clearer lighting. Man, says the article, has long failed to envision the complexities of his relationship to nature. He has either tried to control it---through means of ritual---or to influence those with the power to control it (gods).

And so what is the meaning of "The Waste Land"? To me, it seems as though Eliot is manipulating, and almost satirizing, our question of blame. "THE WASTE LAND" commands our attention in name and in formatting, and the boldness with which it does so renders all other questions irrelevant. Eliot is not asking WHO wasted the land, nor who rescued the Grail; he is merely asserting that, no matter the cause, we are here and we are here to stay. In fact, in almost a comedic twist of events, he appears to be assigning HIMSELF the blame: Eliot, as the author of this cleverly titled poem, is the true creator of "The Waste Land."