“Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat?” she asks, surrounded by objects that don’t speak her language. Ariel’s voice is stolen so she can walk on land, and that is the question of Psalm 137: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Eliot asks the same thing, except there’s no sea witch to blame, only silence. The Ganga is sunken, the clouds are distant, and the thunder can barely form a word: DA. The syllable stammers toward meaning. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Give. Sympathize. Control. Commands that echo the psalm’s plea for song but return only fragments. The captives in Babylon hung their harps on the willows; Eliot’s speakers hang their words on static. The thunder speaks, but its language is splintered, a sacred tongue reduced to consonants. Both rivers are holy, both are broken. The Ganges without rain is as desolate as Babylon without Zion. In both, sound becomes the only remaining form of faith, the echo of what once was music. The psalmist threatens vengeance, but Eliot offers obedience; both are desperate to reclaim voice through rhythm. When the thunder says DA, it is the ghost of a hymn, a cracked psalm vibrating through dry air. The rain hesitates at the edge of speech. What’s left is a choir of lost voices, each trying to sing in a language it no longer believes in. Ariel traded her song for legs; Eliot traded his for survival. Neither ever gets it back.

“It’s a glitch in the Matrix.” That is what this moment feels like, the instant the world repeats itself and perception breaks. The voice counts two but sees three. The brown-mantled figure glides beside them, half real, half reflection. The road is bright enough to blind. This is not revelation but error, a tear in vision. The “third” is not a companion or a god. It is the self split open, awareness doubled until it can no longer tell which part is moving forward. The desert becomes circuitry, the white road a frozen current. The “hooded hordes” that follow are copied bodies, corrupted code replaying itself. Every pilgrim in the poem—Roland, Dracula, Eliot’s wanderer—exists in this duplication. The chapel, the tower, the city: all illusions rendered again and again. The thunder speaks in fragments because speech itself has been divided. Even rain feels artificial, a false reset. The “third” is what remains after too much seeing, the echo of thought that keeps walking when the body stops. It is both the error and the evidence, the ghost produced by perception’s glitch.

“Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty,” says Derek Zoolander, dead serious. Keats would agree. His world glistened—wine, nightingale, sleep, feeling itself was fluid. Eliot’s isn’t. In What the Thunder Said, language cracks open: “Here is no water but only rock.” The Romantic current congeals to dust. Keats seeps into forest; Eliot splinters in desert. The thunder stutters where the nightingale once sang. “If there were water”, the words twitch, dehydrated prayer. Keats drinks. Eliot chokes on sand.

“Why is the rum gone?” Jack Sparrow asks, staring out at an empty sea that feels both comic and mournful. That’s how Mr. Apollinax reads to me, a poem laughing at its own drowning. His laughter is submarine and profound, already half below the surface, intellect bubbling through the drawing room air like something that shouldn’t survive there. Beneath the teacups and lemon slices, coral and green silence are already rising. The scene is civil, but the tablecloth is soaked through. Years later, in The Waste Land, Eliot returns to that same sea, but the laughter has gone still. The descent is no longer metaphorical. What was once a philosopher’s joke about depth becomes Phlebas’s silence. The current that once worried the drowned now picks his bones clean. The wit has been replaced by ritual. In Mr. Apollinax, the drowning is intellectual—a mind so deep in abstraction it begins to suffocate itself. In The Waste Land, the body follows. Phlebas is the same figure, just further down. The philosopher’s laughter becomes a whisper, the thought turned to tide. Both poems trace the same descent. One plays with it, the other completes it. The drawing room and the sea are the same room, seen at two depths. The shift from irony to elegy, from chatter to current, is the sound of Eliot’s tone sinking. Phlebas is Apollinax returned to the water, his laughter dissolved into the sea that always waited beneath the surface.

“Are we there yet?” Donkey whines in Shrek, somewhere between tedium and revelation. The question feels small, but it’s also about arrival—what it means to get somewhere, or never really arrive at all. Augustine writes, “To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves.” The line is clean and chronological, a simple confession of arrival. Eliot adds one word: then. “To Carthage then I came.” That small word changes everything. In Augustine, the journey is complete; in Eliot, it feels ongoing. Then marks not only sequence but recurrence, as if the speaker is caught in the act of remembering and re-experiencing at once.The addition of then places the line in the voice of Tiresias, who exists across genders, times, and stories. For Tiresias, to see is always to relive; his vision folds every moment into one. The then mirrors that condition. He cannot witness without returning, cannot perceive without repeating. Augustine’s journey to Carthage happens once in time; Tiresias’s happens perpetually, in vision. Eliot’s then transforms a historical confession into an eternal one. It turns Augustine’s movement through sin into Tiresias’s endless cycle of seeing. “To Carthage then I came” is no longer an arrival in place, but a return in consciousness—a moment that Tiresias, who can never stop seeing, must witness forever.

“Violet! You’re turning violet, Violet!” Wonka shouts as the girl swells into blue, her face and hands and body shading into purple—it’s almost a violent process. I am certain Eliot was not thinking of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as he wrote of this violet, just as he was not Tiresias, gifted with foresight. In Ovid, Tiresias is blinded after striking two snakes, only to regain vision through prophecy. To perceive the present, Tiresias must see the future in the past. In this story, past, present, and future exist as articulated, distinct definitions that blend into a single dissonant moment of perception, one where time collapses into color. In Eliot, as in Ovid, sight is never linear; to see is to blur. Tiresias’s vision moves backward and forward, a violet haze where beginnings and endings share the same hue. The present becomes residue, what has already happened and what is still to come– a constant turning, violet to violent, prophecy to memory. That blur extends beyond time into the human. The women of The Waste Land are not distinct but refracted images of one another. They fold into Tiresias’s field of vision until they become the same woman, seen again and again under different light. Each one repeats the same gestures: speaking into silence, waiting for a knock, cleaning up the fragments of her life. The plural dissolves into the singular, but not individuality; rather, a collective exhaustion. The private and public collapse too. The boudoir bleeds into the barroom, the domestic into the civic, until all speech feels communal—shared, overheard, half-remembered. The commons replaces the person; intimacy becomes collective. Tiresias watches as individuality gives way to type, as woman becomes women becomes one.

“RON: Once I make my move, the queen will take me. Then you’re free to check the king. HARRY: No. Ron, no! HERMIONE: He’s going to sacrifice himself. RON: Do you want to stop Snape from getting that stone or not? Harry, it’s you that has to go on. I know it. Not me. Not Hermione. You. Knight to H3.” The scene feels like the final game, the sacrifice, the victory THE GAME. Pound’s The Game of Chess works that way too. The definite article locks the world in structure: “Red knights, brown bishops, bright queens.” Everything burns with precision, every piece belongs to the pattern. “The” implies consequence. Each move means something, each color holds.<br /> But Eliot’s A Game of Chess loosens that grip. A, not the. Suddenly the game isn’t singular or grand but one of many, maybe endless. The definite becomes indefinite, the sacrifice hollow. “‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.’” The moves don’t land, “‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’” There’s no check, no king, just exhaustion masquerading as strategy. The board gleams under purpose; a board flickers under repetition. Pound’s definite article closes the frame; Eliot’s indefinite article opens it until it collapses. THE Game demands sacrifice. A Game doesn’t even notice one’s been made. You don’t know A game is over, until THE game starts, and it's time to say goodnight.

“Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” (Snow White), the evil queen utters, jealous of the pure perfect young girl. While Eliot does not write of a pristine princess (rather a queen), there is much regality in A Game of Chess, seeming to draw from Baudelaire’s opulent descriptions in A Martyred Woman. What fascinated me the most in both pieces is their olfactory descriptions, more specifically their representation of perfume, and its reflection or rather refraction. These two lines seem to reflect one another visually, both beginning with Un–; however, that is really the extent of their mirroring. “Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid, troubled, confused.” The prefix un- does more than repeat; it undoes. To unstopper a bottle is to release what was meant to remain contained, while unguent evokes the oily, ceremonial luxury of queens and corpses alike. The language itself opens and unravels, performing the act of unsealing that the scene describes. Yet what spills out is not clarity but confusion. The perfumes, once symbols of beauty and refinement, have become dense, chemical, and suffocating. In Baudelaire’s A Martyred Woman, perfume occupies the same paradox. The room is decadent yet dying, filled with “perfume flasks” and “bouquets exhaling their final breath.” The air is both intoxicating and fatal, heavy with sweetness that edges toward rot. Eliot refracts this atmosphere into the modern world; his perfumes are “synthetic,” their allure artificial. Where Baudelaire’s fragrance veils decay in beauty, Eliot’s amplifies decay through imitation. Perfume, then, becomes a mirrored contradiction, both attraction and repulsion, luxury and poison. Its scent seduces even as it suffocates. In both poets, the air itself becomes a reflection of moral and physical decay, a beautiful corruption, a sweetness turned stale, lingering long after life has left the room.

“The beginning of the end” is a term typically associated with gradual endings—the kind that are drawn out, painful, sometimes bittersweet. Think graduations, moving away from home, drifting from friends, or summer turning into a wall of autumn. But what does it mean to end at something’s beginning? The last few lines of The Burial of the Dead are borrowed directly from Baudelaire’s preface to Les Fleurs du Mal. A preface traditionally begins a work and offers the reader a lens through which to read what follows. Eliot’s decision to close his first section with another writer’s beginning is not accidental; it creates a deliberate tension between origin and conclusion. To end with a preface is to deny resolution, to suggest that endings are never final but cyclical, that one artist’s conclusion depends on another’s start. The moment that should signify closure instead opens outward, invoking a different text, a different time, and a different artistic vision. This reversal also reflects the poem’s modernist structure. The Waste Land builds itself out of fragments– pieces of prior works, cultures, and languages. By ending with Baudelaire’s opening, Eliot acknowledges his dependence on the past while reanimating it in a new context. It becomes an act of literary resurrection: the “burial” of the dead poets whose voices still speak through his own. What appears to be an ending is actually a beginning disguised as decay, echoing the poem’s central paradox of death and rebirth. In this way, Eliot transforms the very concept of closure. His ending refuses to end, it begins again, looping the reader back into the lineage of the poem, where every beginning is reminiscent of what came before and every ending is a begging in some sort of way.

“The cards, the cards, the cards will tell/ The past, the present, and the future as well/ The cards, the cards, just take three/ Take a little trip into your future with me” (Princess and The Frog). But can Tarot really tell the future? Or is it just a game? In Ritual and Romance Weston recounts the history of tarot cards, which are from unknown origin, and are believed to have started as a game– like a standard deck of cards. But how did they become vessels of clairvoyance? The transformation is what I believe Eliot is most interested in, as he writes “I do not find the hanged man.” Just as the man hangs between two states, the card exists in limbo, as both a game and a powerful tool of divination. The mystery surrounding the cards’ origin only further complicates this story of the hanged man, existing as the string that suspends and bridges game and prophecy. Without their muddled history, the cards would have a clear purpose as either a game or tool of deviation and they would not be suspended between both.

“April Showers bring May flowers” is a popular saying, encouraging us to push through the cruelest month (ie. April), to enjoy the flowers of May. It gives us hope that the rain will end and that blooms will grow, a reason to hate April just a little less. TWL begins, “April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain” (TWL, 1–4), an opening that does not reflect, but refracts the opening to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “When April with its sweet-smelling showers/ Has pierced the drought of March to the root,/ And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid/ By which power the flower is created.” Hollow reminiscences of Chaucer’s structure and content appear in TWL, but where did the hope go? Or rather, where was it in the Canterbury Tales? And where is it not in The Waste Land? In Chaucer, water carries the cleansing power of spring; April’s showers wash away the dryness of March and stir new life, a natural image that resonates with baptism and spiritual renewal, setting pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. In Eliot, however, water loses this redemptive quality. Rain does not cleanse but unsettles, dragging up memory and desire rather than washing them away– creating sin, not absolving them. The “spring rain” becomes a burden, a reminder of the impossibility of purification in a modern world which in Eliot's time was plagued by war and spiritual desolation. Where Chaucer’s showers signify the promise of divine grace and renewal, Eliot’s water is cruel as it exposes an inability of renewal and regrowth. Has the human race gone too far to go back and live in hope?

“Please sir, I want some more” (Oliver Twist), said a poor orphan begging for more porridge, begging to not starve, begging to not die. Unlike Oliver Twist, T.S. Eliot was fascinated by begging for death so much so that he changed the ending of his epigraph (and the rest of it) of what would become the wasteland from Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!” to Sybil’s “I want to die.” Even the first part of the epic changed from the first draft to the final (also more centered around death)– it's almost completely a different poem. I’m most interested in why death? Why circumscribe this concept of destruction, death, and finality. First we must compare the opening lines of the TWL and He Do The Police in Different Voices. The latter, which preceded the former, begins “First we had a couple of feelers down at/Tom's place.” The former, which came after the latter, begins “April is the cruellest month, breeding/ lucas out of the dead land, mixing/ memory and desire, stirring/ dull roots with spring rain.” Why death, why endings, why the birth of a death obsession?

“It’s just a flesh wound” (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) says the Black Knight as his dismembered limbs lie on the ground next to him. Lucky for him he was not struck by the Sword of the Ship. In Le Morte D’Arthur, the sword delivers much more than a wound; it functions as a vessel of destruction and infertility, cursing not only the body it strikes but the land under the blow. In Book XVII, Chapter III, the gentlewoman recounts the tale of the Dolorous Stroke: “And when King Hurlame saw King Labor he dressed this sword, 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. And it was in the realm of Logris; and so befell great pestilence and great harm to both realms. 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, for that dolorous stroke.” In The Waste Land, Eliot positions himself as the sword: a cursed destroyer whose stroke leaves the modern world fragmented, barren, and nearly speechless. Just as the sword’s blow leaves both the king and his land wounded, Eliot’s poem creates a Waste Land that is not only destroyed but also destructive. Malory makes clear that destruction does not remain contained within the body of the king. The Dolorous Stroke radiates outward, making the land itself sterile and dangerous. Jessie Weston underscores this paradox, insisting, “the condition of the King is sympathetically reflected on the land, the loss of virility in one brings about a suspension of the reproductive processes of Nature on the other.” What is destroyed becomes the destroyer. The king’s wound causes agricultural collapse, famine, and sterility. James Frazer situated this paradox within the broader mythic cycle of dying gods such as Tammuz or Adonis: “During her absence the passion of love ceased to operate: men and beasts alike forgot to reproduce their kinds: all life was threatened with extinction.” In each case, destruction does not stop with the figure who receives the wound; the wound itself spreads, making the world an active force of devastation. Eliot translates this ritual pattern into modernism. By casting himself as the sword, he is not the Grail-bearer offering renewal but the weapon that fractures language and tradition. His Waste Land is the blasted cultural landscape after the stroke, both destroyed by war and disillusionment and destructive in its ongoing sterility and fragmentation. The poem wounds and bears wounds simultaneously. Like the Sword of the Ship, The Waste Land is a cursed vessel of destruction. It strikes, it scars, and it leaves behind a world that continues to unravel under the weight of its blow. The poem is destroying poetic precedent, and in the process, destroying itself.