Olivia's annotation from last year draws on the understanding that this phrase is a reference to the disciples and Christ walking alongside one another towards Emmaus. She argues that Eliot's use of this reference creates a larger implication about the relationship between humans and divinity: even though there may exist a "third" or divine presence, humans will not always possess the ability to recognize it. This relates back to my earlier argument about how Elito uses the phrase "dry sterile thunder" to indicate that there exists somewhat of a cycle of regeneration with salvation at the end, but it is not within reach and unclear whether or not it will ever arrive. Again, this feeds into the overarching understanding of divinity as a steady, continuous presence that is "always beside [you,]" but humans will never actually know for sure whether or not it is there, or whether or not it will make enough of a difference to bring salvation, fertility, and renewal. Through a close reading of these two quotes together, I feel that Eliot uses these references to things that are typically associated with growth, hope, and new beginnings to emphasize a feeling of hopelessness and desolation threaded throughout the poem.

I really like Jami's idea of "dry sterile thunder without rain" as Eliot's way of creating expectation and subsequent denial of renewal. This ties into a larger pattern throughout The Waste Land, where Eliot repeatedly uses symbols of regeneration such as water, fertility, and Grail logic to emphasize the instability and sterility in the cycle. Thunder also becomes a sign that Eliot uses to show that there is a hope for water but not the expected results: thunder can be heard, but the rain that would give the thunder any meaning never arrives. I also think Jami's point about thunder as divine communication is interesting, because she is implying that a society and its people can perceive a divine presence without necessarily experiencing the effects that come with it (sanctuary, an answer to their prayers, etc.). It's fascinating to interpret the passage as a sort of suspension where humans can hear their salvation approaching but cannot access it.

The description of "Pheblas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead," introduces a character who has been swept away, literally, by the waves of death. It appears that he met his end in the "deep sea swell" near the "cry of gulls." The transition from this language of nature contrasts that of "profit and loss," which is more sterile and commercial. Regardless, they both come together to suggest that death is a state in which sensory experiences and economic experiences that seemingly give meaning to life are erased. This connects back to William Morris' The Life and Death of Jason, where the sea also acts as an entity which separates characters from their former lives, or states of being. Hylas is lured towards the nymphs, and ultimately chooses to stay under the water with them, "Forgetting the rough world, and every care." He is neither "dead, nor living," existing instead in a suspension between the two. Both Hylas and Phlebas cross some kind of boundary because of the water that transitions them to ne states of being (whether that be a suspension or a death, respectively). Additionally, their experience makes their previous worldly concerns irrelevant ad even insignificant. While Hyla achieves some kind of "watery world" of escape, Phlebas has simply "forgot." Eliot does not say whether or not death is a improved state of existence than his life, but just that drowning has reduced everything that once had meaning in his life, such as nature, ambition, age, and youth, into the same completely meaninglessness things.

I agree with Shaye's annotation from last year about how Elizabeth and Leicester offers a new facet to the male-female relationships in The Waste Land. Shaye argues Eliot's depiction of male and female relationships often include one individual overpowering the other. I see this demonstrated in Eliot's earlier mention of the typist and the clerk, whose relationship is explicitly unequal with the clerk exerting physical force over the typist during a sexual encounter. However, Elizabeth and Leicester "beat oars" together, showing that they are moving in the same direction in partnership. Shaye also references the significance of the Thames and how it appears as an entity that Elizabeth and Leicester cannot escape. I believe that this connects to the larger idea of waste and death being a state of suspension between existence, especially because "beating" suggests effort but does not actually indicate any progress. The two characters are in a limbo between escape and entrapment as well as movement and stagnation. Perhaps this is the true "cycle" of life and death rather than one of arrival, change, and revival.

Eliot draws a parallel between the sexual encounter described here to Donne's "ELEGY XIX. TO HIS MISTRESS GOING TO BED." Donne's narrator insistently commands his mistress to undress, saying "Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime / Tells me from you that now it is bed time." Additionally, Eliot mimics Donne's line "License my roving hands, and let them go" with his own description of "Exploring hands encounter no defence." Eliot, however, uses this language to expose the disturbing invasion one experiences when there is a lack of mutual desire. By stating that "His vanity requires no response / And makes a welcome of indifference," Eliot draws a boundary between a lack of resistance and genuine consent. The clerk is so overwhelmed by his own vanity that he does not bother to acknowledge this boundary or wait for a "response," and instead chooses to interpret the typist's compliance as a confirmation. Donne, on the other hand, constructs an imagined seduction in his writing: the speaker knows that his mistress will participate even though his language is commanding and possessive. Donne may consider these kinds of sexual interactions to be romantic, especially considering the time period in which he wrote it - but Eliot is clear on his stance. He reduces the faultless, seemingly persuasive male lover to its ugly logic, which is that a woman does not need to be persuaded at all because her lover will convert her indifference into permission.

These lines combine two very different interpretations of water. "By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept" echoes Psalm 137, where the Israelites sit by the rivers of Babylon and weep following their exile and as they remember Zion. In this scene, water is an entity associated with grief, anger, and longing. These emotions are triggered by an inherent loss and displacement, tying the reference back to Eliot's demonstration of renewal and how it is not a certainty. The second part of this phrase, where Eliot says "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song," he references Spenser's "PROTHALAMION." The contrast however, is that Spenser uses the Thames as a part of an abundant and beautiful natural landscape. He includes descriptions of a "shore of silver," "variable flowers," and "dainty gems." Eliot chooses to remove all of this beauty and images of fertility in Spenser's poem and instead only preserve the image of water and the Thames.

It is interesting to note that the title of this section is almost exactly the same as that of Ezra Pound's poem. In this particular line, speaker tells Lil to "make herself a bit smart" because "Albert is coming back," reminding me of a line in Pound's poem "The Game of Chess" where pieces must "hold lines" and "reform the pattern." The chessboard is not only a battlefield but also a place for strategic competition, which Eliot introduces into a seemingly ordinary working-class marriage. Albert's return triggers Lil to "make herself a bit smart," implying that his actions require her to respond and make a move by improving her appearance. Later on, her friend also suggests that Albert will be unhappy if Lil cannot satisfy him and his needs, demonstrating how marriage is little more than a struggle to maintain one's position, and in Pound's words, "break and reform the pattern" as well as "renew the contest." The repeated interruption of "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME" also lends more intensity to this relationship that is being equated to a game of chess. Lil is given limited time to act, in the same way a real chess player only has limited time to make their move. Pound's language "Whirl! Centripetal! Mate! King down in the vortex, / Clash, leaping of bands" makes chess, or in this context, marriage, feel impersonal, urgent, and even violent. At the end of the day, I feel like Lil is more of a piece than a player. She is just one of the many pawns on the chessboard who must use her inherent qualities (such as her decision-making, value as an individual and also as a woman) to fight for her place.

The word "other" indicates to me a different version of the same type of object, which in this case is a story. The other "stumps of time" are fragments of earlier stories that have survived into the present, but they are "withered" and simply "stumps," implying that they are not complete or retold with pride but rather allowed to remain damaged and decaying. When read alongside the stories of Dido and the woman in Baudelaire's A Martyred Woman, Dido's initially luxurious romance with Aeneas eventually ends with her death on a couch associated with their relationship, symbolizing abandonment and the inevitability of an end. Baudelaire draws a parallel by placing a woman against a backdrop of "perfume flasks, of sequined fabrics / And voluptuous furniture, / Of marble statues, pictures, and perfumed dresses." However, he describes the woman herself with language such as "inert, complacent flesh," "ghastly head," and "cold teeth," creating a disturbing contrast between material beauty and bodily destruction. Eliot's use of the word "withered" references all of these things: early stories and traditions are but decorations mounted on the walls that appear beautiful at first glance but have no real cohesiveness or hope for restoration/change.

The narrator's description of his encounter with Stetson draws parallels to Dante's Inferno. Dante moves through a crowd of people in Canto III, observing that "after I recognized a few of these, / I saw and knew the shade of him." This "him" refers to a specific individual who sticks out to him in this indistinguishable mass. Similarly, the narrator in The Waste Land also has this unusual moment of recognition where he suddenly identifies someone familiar after having been moving through a passive, anonymous crowd. Contemporary London begins to resemble Dante's Hell, especially with previous references to "death had undone so many" and "a dead sound on the final stroke of nine." Living Londoners take after the dead souls in Inferno, and time loses its meaning when the narrator exclaims that his acquaintance was someone who he had fought with in the ancient battle of Mylae, several millennia before the contemporary setting of the London Bridge. In this sense, the living and the dead, past and the present collapse into each other, leaving readers with the impression that generations of people ultimately end up experiencing the same terrors of warfare and cyclical trauma. The same patterns of pain and suffering will manifest in different forms of history.

Eliot's back-to-back description of the tarot cards makes Madame Sosostris' fortune-telling fast-paced and difficult to follow. Through her abilities, he presents fragments of experience but does not show readers the connecting thread or significance of these cards when read together. His narration draws parallels to Mina Loy's "At the Door of the House," where the narrator takes seemingly unrelated objects such as "wheels," "goblets," and "skeletons," and uses them to make a somewhat coherent prediction about someone's future. In both works, scattered symbols ultimately come together to create a certainty, even if it takes a while to interpret the underlying significance because of the disjointed nature of the predictions. In Crome Yellow Huxley describes this encounter with spiritualism in an almost comic manner. Mr. Scogan imagines absurd "predictions" that he invests his "quiet confidence" in. Ironically, his customers become genuinely frightened by his words because they want to believe that something will happen to them based on the signs they re seeing.

Eliot also adds a nuance to this experience with spirituality with usage of Jessie Weston's discussion of Tarot. Weston connects the origins of Tarot to the Lance (hearts), Lance (diamonds), Sword (spades), and Dish (clubs) tradition. These were originally symbols of human life and fertility. Eliot takes these symbols that were once a part of a meaningful belief system and presents them as mysterious fragments (the same way he does with his biblical references, etc.).

Eliot's image of "a handful of dust" draws parallels to Ecclesiastes 12:7: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” In Ecclesiastes, dust serves as a symbol for the inevitable nature of death and the inherent mortality of humans, because regardless of accomplishments in life, the physical body will always return to what it was originally. In Eliot's sentence, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," he associates dust with the feeling of being afraid of death. While a handful of dust may appear to be physically insignificant, it can also slip through your fingers at any time, mirroring how everything, even life, is impermanent. However, Eliot's sentence leaves out Ecclesiastes' reassurance: "the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Readers get the dust, but no promise of peace for spiritual resolution. This reflects Eliot's larger pattern of including religious references but separating them from their original emotional resonance included in their original belief systems.

This particular quotation stood out to me because of its implications when read alongside The Service for the Burial of the Dead According to the Use of the Orthodox Greek Church. According to this book, death is a passage from one state of existence into another instead of an absence or destruction of life. To reflect this, the burial service becomes a ritual. However, the Sibyl in Eliot's chosen quote (taken from Petronius’s Satyricon) experiences the complete opposite of this condition of "death." She has lived for an unnaturally long period of time, and she is suffering to the point where she feels trapped by her own existence and wishes to die. Contrary to the assumption that death is what brings suffering, Sibyl's anguish stems from her inability to reach closure or transition into a new state of being. This reflection upon the purpose of death lends insight into Eliot's deliberate choice of this epigraph over a quote from A Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The passage Eliot wanted to select focused on the antagonist Kurtz's death. It appears that Eliot originally wanted to choose something that encapsulated the final moments of death and the meaning concentrated in them, but eventually pivoted and decided to publish something that was the complete opposite. This sets the tone for the rest of the poem. In The Waste Land, death is not final but more so a suspension between states of existence. This condition of suspension is what distinguishes Eliot's understanding of death from that of an Orthodox burial. The latter encourages movement and resolution, but The Waste Land constantly raises fragments of experiences without allowing them to settle, dragging them along as the poem progresses. By using Sibyl to introduce this idea, Eliot introduces a more disturbing understanding of death. It is a state without ending, or in this case, a world without teh ability to change or begin again.

The title The Waste Land is strung on a thread of connection first to Weston's analysis of the Grail tradition and then to Frazer's The Golden Bough. In Weston's words, the physically barren nature of The Waste Land reflects the weakened and unstable condition of the Fisher King. It proves to be more than merely an empty or ruined landscape, but something possessing an almost-sentience. Weston describes the tightly intertwined relationship between the land and the king: when the ruler is wounded sick, or suffering from age, the land becomes infertile. When the hero finds success in his quest, the land becomes fertile once more. Weston references the latest edition of Frazer's The Golden Bough, tracing this nature-human connection back to an older ritual logic in which one singular life force affects humans, animals, and vegetable fertility. Frazer's influence on Weston's analysis is especially significant because the aforementioned ritual logic follows a distinct pattern of death and eventual rebirth through the symbol of a "Vegetation Deity" who dies and is revived. By titling his work The Waste Land, Eliot implies that the modern world is not dissimilar to the mythic Waste Land; both share spiritual and emotional qualities that leave the impression of emotional sterility. Eliot, however, departs from older ritual logic by moving away from a predictable, certain regeneration, introducing the question of whether or not a damaged civilization can ever reach the point of no return.