There are many things to unpack in just the title alone of this section of TWL. The phrase itself, "What the Thunder Said", directly mimics that of the 1818 poem "What the Thrush Said" by John Keats. On the other hand, the replacement of thrush with thunder obtains significance that can be uncovered when acknowledging the phenomenon's sacred nature in religion and mythology: Ancient Greece and Christianity, in particular. After I read Keat's poem, it was of no doubt that the poem intentionally encompasses some of the similar themes and ideas as in Keat's work. However, why was the word change made? How might that indicate something new or different in "What the Thunder Said", or even in The Waste Land as a whole? These where the questions that guided my reading and reflections along the way.

In Keat's poem "What The Thrush Said", he intends to unpack the question of wisdom and its place in the human experience. However, the reader comes to understand that Keats is not just referring to the knowledge of the intellect---in fact, this form of knowledge is overtly dismissed---but also natural, emotional wisdom.

The thrush, or more better recognized as the songbird, appears very early on in the poem. The songbird is the "thou" of the poem, and is heavily focused on for its beauty, with a "face hath felt the Winter's wind" and "eyes [that have] seen the snow-clouds hung in mist" (lines 1-2). Additionally, the realm of intellect and knowledge is unknown to the creature; it lives in simple joy of the natural experience, with its "only book [being] the light / Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on" (lines 5-6). While the songbird lacks human intellect, Keats reveres it precisely for that reason. Here, a key argument is made: in place of the cold, analytical rationalism of the intellect which has preoccupied humans for centuries, one should favor a more organic, life-affirming form of wisdom. For Keats, true understanding lies not in intellectual thought but in the emotional depth that reconnects humankind with its natural and creative essence. I believe that Eliot is also in support of this notion.

I will go on to the point of thunder and its religious/spiritual/mythological importance later, as well as explain why Eliot has a similar view on the question of natural/emotional wisdom vs. intellect. Stay tuned for a later annotation! :)

The 1920 poem "Mr. Apollinax" centers itself on a group of scholars and students attending a dinner party. The character of Mr. Apollinax himself is heavily inspired by Bertrand Russell, a mentor and friend to Eliot, who was also a famous logician, though his concepts at times were difficult for even well-versed philosophers and scholars to comprehend. In the poem, the descriptions of Mr. Apollinax and his behavior at the dinner party obtains direct parallels to "Death by Water" and the motif of the ocean itself.

1. "His laughter was submarine and profound / Like the old man of the sea’s" (lines 8-9). In these lines, there are two clear connections to water or the ocean: the description of Mr. Apollinax's laugh as being "submarine", and the equating of such laugh to "the old man of the sea's". Beyond his supreme intellect, Mr. Apollinax is portrayed as a man deriving a great amount of pleasure and fulfillment from the world, as conveyed by his "submarine and profound laugh", indicating that unlike the hollow and despairing voices of TWL, Mr. Apollinax acquires a humor rooted in a genuine "inner richness" and vitality.
2. "Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence, / Dropping from fingers of surf" (lines 11-12). These lines stood out to me as referencing the general human condition of the time: people are swept away by the chaotic tide of worldly forces (industrialization, war, pursuit of goods or wealth) that have risen in the rapidly changing times of the early 20th century. The world has become so complicated that it has become nearly impossible for the regular individual to properly navigate it, leading them to "drown". This metaphorical drowning could indicate several things: on a broader scale, the fall of humanity into sin and wrongdoing; on a similar vein, humanity becoming separate from the ideals of religion or spirituality; or the succumbing of mankind to the pursuit of worldly things such as wealth, fame, or material goods. In my mind, a good argument could be made for each of these possibilities.
3. "I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair / Or grinning over a screen / With seaweed in its hair" (lines 13-15). Now, this is an interesting detail. It is another example of decapitation (the first major instance being the headless corpse of a sex worker in Le Fleurs du Mal). The head, which literally represents reason and intellect, being separated from the body suggests a collapse of rational order and a breakdown of the mind itself. In the context of TWL, such a disjunction reflects the intellect’s estrangement from emotional or spiritual grounding. The description of the head “grinning over a screen” adds an absurd and grotesque dimension to the scene, transforming what might otherwise be horrific into a moment of unsettling fascination. Ultimately, the tension between humor and horror illuminates a key theme that runs through TWL: intellect, when isolated from the fuller spectrum of human experience (emotion, spiritual faith, and vitality) risks devolving into alienation or madness.

Upon reading these two stanzas, it appeared to me that they both might be spoken by the same narrator. Specifically, the same voice appeared to be maintained throughout the stanzas: the same clipped rhythm, and habit of geographically tracing the events of the person's life indicates to me that the lines recounted the events of a particular female individual in TWL. From there, I began to unpack the narrative the speaker was describing. Two moments stood out to me in particular.

1a) Eliot’s phrase "Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew / Undid me" mimics the lines spoken by the noblewoman La Pia in Dante's Purgatorio, in which she says: "'Siena made me, in Maremma I was undone" (Aligieri, line 134). She attributes her cause of death to her husband, saying “He knows how [I died], the one who, to marry me, / first gave the ring that held his stone’ (Aligieri, lines 135-6). Her “undoing” is the result of marital violence and betrayal, placing her among the many wronged women in The Waste Land—Philomela, Baudelaire’s unnamed sex worker, Ophelia—each undone by male lust, violence, or moral failure. However, in the waste land, the woman is undone not by violence in particular, but by the emotional futility of intimacy in the modern world.

1b) I discovered a painting by Dante Rossetti entitled “Pia de’Tolomei” while researching more on La Pia. In the painting, La Pia is captured as she fiddles with her wedding ring, surrounded by a lush scenery of ivy overgrowth and a fig tree, as well as a sundial, letters, a prayer book, and the rosary lying beside her. The religious objects no doubt serve as testaments to her devout faith, whereas the sundial likely indicates the passage of time, and perhaps in reference to the time passing during her suffocating and unfulfilling marriage with her husband. The surrounding botany also forms a striking contrast to the barrenness of Eliot’s waste land. As a fruit-bearing tree, the fig tree reflects the physical vigor and health of La Pia, as well as her fertility. By contrast, the ivy—often associated with climbing and clinging—suggests the confinement and isolation of her unhappy marriage.

2a) The speaker continues the same pattern of geographical mapping in the second stanza. It is here that the reader comes to most certainly understand that the voice belongs to a female speaker. She recalls an unfulfilling sexual encounter, dismissively calling it “the event,” followed by her partner’s promise of “a new start” (Eliot, lines 297–98). However, her partner only weeps afterwards. While La Pia is undone by betrayal and violence, the speaker is undone by the recurring disappointment in sex, and by the emotional sterility of her relationships. In both cases, women appear as passive victims of the shortcomings of intimacy and romantic relationships.

2b) The reference of “a new start” also echoes the poem’s larger preoccupation with fertility and regeneration, recalling the Fisher King myth. Yet the failure of this promise nods back to the spiritual barrenness of the modern world, in which intimacy is hollow, not sacred.

This line is extracted from Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield", referring to a young woman, Olivia, who was seduced by the wicked Squire Thornhill. Tricked into a fraudulent marriage by the notorious womanizer, she is left disgraced in the eyes of society, and the stigma of her seduction taints her family's reputation by extension. Olivia thus sings a ballad of her own lament: "When lovely woman stoops to folly, / And finds, too late, that men betray, / ... / The only art her guilt to cover, / To hide her shame from ev'ry eye / To give repentance to her lover, / And wring is bosom, is-- to die" (133-4). This line encapsulates the rigid moral standards to which women are held in society: purity and virtue are held above all, thus determining their absolute value as a person. However, although Olivia is framed as a victim of male seduction, she is simultaneously blamed for her own disgrace by "stooping to folly", with the entirety of punishment ultimately falling upon the woman. Furthermore, another important message is emphasized by Olivia: "the only art" left to woman who have lost their chastity is death. Dying emerges as the only feasible resolution to the issue; it acts not only as an expression of despair, but as a socially endorsed means of restoring dignity, banishing guilt, and even receiving remorse from others.

On the other hand, Eliot echoes a similar notion of female disgrace "The Fire Sermon". The typist, passive and disengaged during her forced sexual encounter with the clerk, offers no resistance but equally no desire to his intimate advancements. As a result, her moral reputability is irrevocably tarnished; while she was once "lovely", she is now reduced to a hollow emblem of sexual exploitation and impurity. Additionally, she condemns herself to emotional isolation, "pac[ing] about her room again, alone" (line 253). In this moment, Eliot not only depicts the moral disrepute of this singular woman in the modern wasteland, but gestures towards the broader commentary on the tainted condition of womanhood, stripped of its agency and dignity.

These two lines stick out to me as references to spiritual redemption and innocence. First, the washing of feet in soda water draws a remarkable parallel to the biblical scene of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. In addition to demonstrating humility and selfless compassion towards others, washing involves the cleansing of dirt from the skin, which could also, by extension, mean the cleansing of sin or guilt from the soul. However, in "The Waste Land", Mrs. Porter and her daughter "wash their feet in soda water"- a fragment which, I discovered upon further research, originates from a vulgar soldier's WWI song (line 199). The vulgarity of the song, the change to "soda water", and the grotesque scenery of the waste land indicate that this act of foot washing is not indicative of any act of spiritual cleansing or redemption at all: humanity has fallen, but ignores the path towards good.

In the next part of the highlighted text, "et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!", most nearly translates to "And, O those children’s voices singing in the dome!" (line 202). The excerpt, taken from Paul Verlaine's poem “Parsifal”, emphasizes the good and innocence inherent in the tale's protagonist, which leads to his ability to receive the Holy Grail and heal the wounded king. This further adds to the notion of spiritual redemption and innocence as appearing as parodic versions of themselves, thus expanding upon Eliot's larger theme of the loss of spirituality in TWL.

A Game of Chess" gives interesting insight into the place of women, marriage, and sex in Eliot's The Waste Land. In a conversation between a group of women, the narrator (keep in mind, this narrator is a different one from the first section of The Waste Land), says to her friend, "and think of poor Albert, / He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time, / And if you don't give it him, there's others will" (lines 147-9). In the waste land, marriage has become hollow and superficial; rather than being a bondage rooted in love and mutual respect, it acts chiefly to 1) fulfill the husband's sexual needs, and 2) to produce children. Additionally, sex has become an emotionally sterile act, devoid of any intimacy or tenderness: it is a service to be completed by the wife to her husband, lest she hopes to lose her husband’s loyalty.

Drawing back to an earlier text, Baudelaire’s poem “A Martyred Woman” takes the changed nature of sexual intimacy to an entirely new extreme: violence. The subject, a decapitated body of a young woman surrounded by perfumes and luxury possessions, becomes an object of fetishization to the narrator. He first admires the “secret splendor and fatal beauty” of her nude body, only to conclude that she is a sex worker who gave away her “inert, complacent flesh to fill / The immensity of his lust” (lines 23 and 48-9). While both texts depict women’s body and sexuality being denied their own agency, there is something all the more violent in the Baudelaire poem: the act of sex is not purely emotionally sterile and transactional, but grotesquely commodified, reduced to an object of lust even after death. The deceased woman is violated twice, first by her killer, and then the narrator, who aestheticizes her lifeless body.

Voice continues to be a significant motif in "The Waste Land" and the myths that it draws from. In Ovid's story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela, Tereus cuts off Philomela's tongue so she is unable to speak the crime of her rape to others. Even though Philomela is eventually able to reveal the truth by weaving purple letters into cloth, she cannot explain herself to her sister, for "she has no voice--just gestures" (13). However, once she is turned into a nightingale, her voice returns to her, as described in TWL: "yet there the nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable voice / And still she cried, and still the world pursues, / 'Jug Jug' to dirty ears" (lines 100-4). Here, Philomena is able to voice her suffering and lament; however, her speech is distorted to a bird's cry, stripping her message of its clarity and language. This circles back to a broader theme in The Waste Land: the struggle of communication. While communication is attempted by some, it is rarely successful. Voices merge, overlap, vanish, or are taken over, but they never seem to establish mutual recognition or continuity; they speak, but never converse with one another. In this way, Philomela's loss and succeeding transformation of voice also represents the disappearance of communication in the modern world, leaving people to suffer alone and in silence.

Upon reading an excerpt from the selected writings of Gerard De Nerval, I saw a connection between the description of the uncanny perception of time and reality in Nerval's writings and line 68 of "The Waste Land" ("With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine"). In Eliot's notes, he describes this sound as "a phenomenon which I have often noticed," where the stroke of the clock appears heavier, more "dead", than the others, indicating some kind of distortion or irregularity in reality. Similarly, Nerval also describes a similar feeling of a destabilization of the world order: "I ascribed a mysterious significance to the conversations of the guards and my companions. It seemed to me they represented all the races of the earth and that our task was to replot the course of the planets... As I saw it, an error had crept into the overall combination of numbers and this was the root of all the ills of humanity." Both Eliot and Nerval suggest that beneath ordinary mechanisms and everyday occurrences lies an uncanny discordance, a subtle change leaves the observer unsettled, and with the distorted order of reality exposed. Additionally, I find a small but interesting parallel to Munch's notebooks on symbolist art. Rather than describing the stroke of a clock being deep or loud in purely objective terms, Eliot assigns a more subjective quality to the sound of the clock's chime: "dead". This follows Munch's ideas of profound, meaningful art needing to follow subjective perception rather than objective observation: "You must paint things “such as it must be” (as it looked when the motif touched you) rather than “exactly how you [hear[ it.” Furthermore, he asserts, “the way in which you see is also dependent on your state of mind.” Taking this statement into account, could this mean that the discordance in reality and time does not really exist in the external phenomena poem, but only in the mind's changing and unstable perception of them? If this is true, perhaps Eliot is pointing to some sort of mental disturbance in the observer's consciousness, where the boundaries between perception and external reality have disintegrated.

The German text quoted in “The Waste Land” draws from Richard Wagner’s operatic retelling of the Tristan and Iseult myth. The lines, uttered by a young sailor, “Frisch weht der Wind / Der Heimat zu / Mein Irisch Kind, / Wo weilest du?” most closely translates to “Fresh the wind blows / towards home: / my Irish Child, / where are you now?” (Act 1, scene 1). In Wagner’s opera, the sing-songey rhyme scene, which is abandoned after this moment (with exception of the lines’ brief repetition) produces a mocking tone towards Iseult. This further underlines Iseult’s painful separation from her homeland and marks her as an outsider in the foreign land to which she is being brought. In using this line, Eliot illustrates the alienation and isolation latent in “The Waste Land”, specifically in the absence of cultural belonging, community, and spiritual connection to a particular “home”.

More broadly, the myth shares some interesting parallels with the story of the Holy Grail and other motifs apparent in “The Waste Land”. One of the most significant similarities is in the fate of Tristan, a once heroic knight that succumbs to his own desire and sin, who becomes severely wounded—like the Maimed King—and eventually dies. This further supports the notion of a damaged, suffering world connected to its people and their cultural, physical, and moral weaknesses.

Additionally, Iseult is described as a sorceress, whose incredible powers are both capable of restoring life and health, but also causing immense harm and destruction (“this somnolent sea, / … / let her smash this insolent ship / and gorge on her shattered wreckage!”) (Act 1, scene 1). This serves as connection to a later line, “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante”, a character who appears in Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow as a faux prophetess (line 43). While both characters claim to wield supernatural ability, Madame Sostris’s lack of actual mystical power further illustrates the lack of true prophetic vision, healing, and resurrection in “The Waste Land”: yet another nod to spiritual decay. While the world once had sacred traditions that often brought guidance, stability, and health to humanity, Eliot’s Wasteland is rendered with hollow imitations where mystical healing, prophecy, and magic have become perversions of their former capabilities.

Along with shadows, dust emerges as a central motif in both "The Waste Land" and Christian scripture. It all begins with God's creation of the first man, Adam, shaping him from the dust of the Earth, and in death, it is to dust that all moral creatures return. Ecclesiates 12 reiterates this notion when describing how, in death, "the dust return[s[ to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it" (1). In dust, we see the truth of human fragility and physical temporality, but also the futility of all worldly pleasures and aims: if it is dust that we eventually become and our spirit that ascends to the next mortal plane, we must detach ourselves from the pursuit of temporary things (wealth, worldly possessions, beauty/vanity, etc.) because "all things are more fleeting than a shadow, all things are more illusive than dreams; one moment, and all of these things are succeeded by Death," as described in The Service for the Burial of the Dead in the Orthodox Greek Church (19).

In the line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", Eliot intensifies this biblical resonance and incorporates a modern uncertainty as to what lies beyond death. As humans are forced to confront their own mortality at some point or other during their lives, the assurance of spiritual continuity are clouded by anxiety and doubt. Not only does the "handful of dust" serve as a reminder of one's own mortality, it becomes a symbol of spiritual decay where faith, a once unifying and stabilizing force in human society, has been disrupted.

Beyond the differences between the working and final title of “The Wasteland,” I found the change the epigraph used noteworthy. In most circumstances, an epigraph suggests the general theme or tone of a certain piece– second to the title, it is the first impression a reader has when encountering a work of writing. This implies that the change in the epigraph likely reflected a significant shift in Eliot’s perception of his poem and the message he hoped it to convey.

The working epigraph draws from Heart of Darkness, an 1899 novella by Joseph Conrad. In the moment of this excerpt, the narrator, Charles Marlow, stumbled upon Kurtz, a successful former station chief, on the brink of death. Just as Marlow encounters Kurtz “lying on his back with closed eyes,” Marlow hears him mumble: “‘Live rightly, die, die’” (3). In his nearly unconscious state, Kurtz reveals a newfound clarity in the purpose of one’s life: to live virtuously (likely following Christian values), so that he may die peacefully and move weightlessly into the next realm of existence. However, just before Kurtz passes, and just before he exclaims “‘The horror! the horror!”, Marlow notes a significant turn of expression on the dying man’s face: an “expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror– of an intense and hopeless despair” (4). This moment illustrates a the process of realization undergone by Kurtz in his final moments: first, his satisfaction in his life’s achievements; then, a surge of power and authority in remembering his esteemed working position; and terror in realizing that his life and choices have not been so righteous as he formerly believed them to be. This leads to his final statement: “‘the horror, the horror!’” (4). While the new version of the epigraph suggests a kind of longing for death after enduring the consequences of a youthless immortality, the old epigraph expresses a different kind of anguish: the despair and horror when one comes to the realization of living a wasted, and in some ways dishonest, life.

In each of the iterations of the quest for the Holy Grail, the vigor and fertility of the King is intrinsically tied to the health of the natural world. In a belief system that has appeared in countless cultures and traditions worldwide, the theme of human and natural codependence manifests itself into the image of a “Wasteland” and the Grail legend– a string of narratives surrounding the quest for a Christian relic (often described as the chalice used by Jesus at the Last Supper and by Saint Joseph of Arimathea to gather Jesus’s blood at his crucifixion) thought to bestow youth, healing, and/or divine grace upon those chosen to drink from it. In Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the story ensues with the description of two warring kings, wherein the King Labor—father to the Maimed King—was struck by King Hurlame using a sword of great power and sanctity. In doing so, “the waste land” is created, reaping harm and disease for both sides; at the stroke of the sword and the fall of King Labor, the land is left without vegetation and fish. It is only when the Maimed King (King Pelles/the Fisher King) is asked a certain question that he is brought back to health and the land is restored.

The tale of the Holy Grail is woven in accordance with a formula familiar to many Biblical stories. At the first stage, humanity condemns itself to ruin, often in the execution of some extraordinary sin or betrayal: in the Le Morte D’Arthur, it is when “King Hurlame saw King Labor… and smote him upon the helm so hard that he clave him and his horse to the earth with the first stroke of his sword” (4); in the New Testament of the Bible, the comparable event is the Judas’s betrayal of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion. The following stage further elaborates on the current condition of the world: the struggle and despair of humanity, and the ruin of the Earth (“for sithen increased neither corn, nor grass, nor well-nigh no fruit, nor in the water was no fish; wherefore men call it the lands of the two marches, the waste land”) (4). The third and final stage comes in the redemption of the humanity, or in the Holy Grail, and fulfillment of the quest, for when the quest is completed, its paladins have thus completed their life’s purpose and willingly ascend into Heaven: Galahad dies not long after his completion of his god-appointed task, with Sir Percivale following a year and two months after (19, 21). However, Eliot’s The Wasteland reaches no such conclusion, however, the absence of a conclusion does not renounce any opportunity for a better future. Rather, humanity must, and will, take upon itself the task of its redemption, and the world shall be restored once more.