The entire poem culminates in the phrase “shantih shantih shantih,” meaning “the peace that passeth understanding.” This comes from biblical origin, specifically Phillippians 4:7 which says “and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds though Christ Jesus.” I was struck by past scholars thoughts on this line, especially those of Sonia Rashid ‘25. She wrote “this triplet of peace is both a culmination and an invitation, suggesting that true tranquility may lie not in resolution but in the ongoing quest for harmony.” In her interpretation, the ending of the poem is both a conclusion and a continuation. After the reader has made the long journey through the poem, they expect an end destination. However, Eliot presents the reader with an expansion out to an existential question: what is the true nature of tranquility and harmony? It does not, in TWL, come from a definite conclusion. The poem does not provide a clean tie-up to all of the loose strands led dangling along the way. Instead, it is left in a state of limbo, forcing the reader back to the beginning. Re-reading the poem is the only way to find more clarity, as it is not given through the ending. The reader must dig deeper and further into all of the sources at play, in an attempt to make some semblance of meaning out of them. Alternatively, Eliot offers the option of “the peace that passeth understanding,” allowing the reader to stop and bask in the peace of an ending that requires nothing, that allows, as Sonia puts it, “ending [that] lead to new beginnings.”

The first lines of the stanza stuck out to me, as a contrast from the final lines of the previous stanza where there is “a damp gust bringing rain.” Imagery of water abounds here, a break from the water/rock section found earlier, where the word “water” is hyper-present, but water itself is missing, creating a desert, or a waste land. In this passage the wind is “damp” and brings “rain,” water seeping into the imagery of the poem in reality. The imagery appears to continue in this passage, with the language of “sunken” and the mention of “Ganga,” another word for the river Ganges. However, upon closer inspection, the images here evoke the barren land of before, with rain clouds “distant,” leaves still “limp,” a landscape “waiting for rain.” The storm is on the horizon, anticipation plaguing the landscape, “the jungle crouched” waiting to pounce, to soak up the water that has not appeared yet, but is closer than ever. In her annotation on this section, specifically the line “bringing rain,” Jeannie argues “The irony of waiting (p)ages for something so abrupt simulates the imbalanced power dynamic between gods and men.” The gods, in her interpretation, are in control of the rain, refusing that the water be distributed in the hands of the men, until finally they break the dam and the rain flows. The gods toy with the humans to an even greater degree, explaining the discontinuous nature of the timeline. They give rain, then take it away, leaving a landscape “sunken” and “limp,” still in the state of anticipation. I find an interesting connection between this and the Anniversary Papers, where Kittredge writes “the Brahmans are never wear of inculcating the duty of free-handedness, and deem it more blessed to give than to receive.” In TWL, that attitude remains, the people and the land giving all they have, waiting to receive water. The gods don’t give rain, allowing the land to wait, anticipation building, blessing them, as they are giving and not receiving. This implies a double standard, where the land and the people must follow the rules of the gods, but the gods are not held to those same standards, a potential reflection of the elitism that destroyed the waste land as a public space.

The footnote for this line references Shackleton’s account of his journey, comparing the line to “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. . . I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Though Eliot keeps the idea of “another person” unseen, unidentifiable, he breaks from the Shackleton by having two people with a mysterious third, not three with a mysterious fourth. Another place where Eliot changes his reference from four to three is from The Marudanayagam, where the original characters ask the question “who is the fourth one?” They are three, and the fourth is the unknown, which drew me originally to a Biblical interpretation of the line, with the Holy Trinity of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit (the unidentifiable omnipresent third). The other reference with an unknown other is Luke, where Jesus exists as the third person, the presence that the others are unable to identify as his true self. In this case, similar to Eliot, there are two, and the extra person makes them three. Even though Eliot is referencing the Bible, he is centering a story that centers the wrong member of the Trinity, moving away from the seeming reference of the Holy Spirit. For Christinas, the “third who walks always beside you,” is the Holy Spirit, which always “walks” beside people along their journey, not Jesus, whose presence is different in nature. Eliot takes a further step to make an intentional choice not to reference the Holy Spirit in his footnote, by taking the trinity away from the conversation by discussing the “four” and “the fourth” in his reference. All of this does not remove the Holy Spirit’s presence within the poem, but instead makes it similar to its presence in real life: detectable but not visible.

This line appears to be an inversion of the story of Lazarus, mirroring much of the language used to describe Lazarus’s revival. However, rather than going from dead to living, The Waste Land inverts the story, taking what was once alive and making it die, the opposite of the Lazarus story. Jesus says in John, “he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” (John 11:25). In direct contradiction to this language, Eliot writes, “he who was living is now dead / we who were living are now dying.” Eliot twists the biblical language, making this section of the poem stand out when contrasted with John. However, the idea of the living dying is not a shocking one, generally understood as a natural development in the lives of human beings. The radical message is actually the one coming out of the bible, that the dead can live again, as exemplified through Lazarus, and then Jesus. The second line in Eliot takes both the first line and the biblical reference and shapes them into a new thought, one that directly addresses a collective “we,” claiming not that the living are “now dead” but instead that they are “now dying.” The use of the word “now” suggests that the poem is describing the moment when the living went from living to dying. This is odd, given the fact that every moment of life is a step closer to death, and in that sense, the living are always dying. Eliot could be, through his inversion and twisting of the language of the resurrection, suggesting a sort of apocalypse, the end of the world as we know it. His emphasis on the dying nature of life could also be referencing the circumstances of industrialization and World War I, of great change that seems to invert the practices and realities that previously seemed so reliable.

I was struck by the biblical reference that occurs with the line “Gentile or Jew.” This line is referencing 1 Corinthians 12: “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but many.” (1 Corinthians 12: 13-14) The first thing that jumped out to me was the transition from “Greeks” in the translation of the bible given as our source to “Gentile” in The Waste Land. While in the context of the Bible they mean effectively the same thing (non-Jewish people in the early stages of Christianity), Eliot’s choice to use “Gentiles” seems contradictory to the rest of the imagery in the passage. The other sources referenced and “Phlebas the Phoenician” are explicit references to Greek mythology and figures, so Eliot’s choice in using “Gentile” rather than Greek is clearly an intentional one. This choice expands the view of the passage beyond just the Greek myths, which is reflected in the rest of the passage from 1 Corinthians. In the context of “Death by Water,” the language of “baptized” and “drink” in 1 Corinthians has an intentional impact, connecting the Gentiles and Jews to water, and connecting the process of baptism with the drowning of the sailor in The Waste Land. The insertion of “Gentile or Jew” directly after “entering the whirlpool” connects the drowned man to the process of baptism, connecting him to a process of new Christian life in his death. In this context, “Gentile or Jew” serves to unify him with all others, taking his individual story and blurring it together with multiple. The other sources that are blended into this passage fit that pattern, with multiple examples of death by water meshed together in this passage. In a similar sense, the distillation of the previously long “Death by Water” into such a short passage reflects this, combining detailed stories into one small, cryptic moment of the poem.

The annotation associated with this line references the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, and is where the line itself, and the idea of burning, is drawn from. Within the Fire Sermon, The Blessed One says, “All things are on fire. With the fire of passion, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.” Fire and burning, within the sermon, are associated with feeling and sensation. “All things,” claims Buddha, “are on fire,” meaning all things, which are listed extensively throughout the sermon, are full of sensations and feelings. The passage claims further that “the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion” for all sensation, and that said disciple must separate themselves, detach themselves, from sensation. Within the context of The Waste Land, the line “Burning, burning, burning, burning” comes at a point where the form of the poem is breaking down, and where references are becoming so intertwined it's difficult to know where you are. In that sense, sensations are everywhere yet nowhere. The sensations of the poem, which are so potent earlier in the section, become mixed up and muddled so that the reader, like the disciples of the Fire Sermon, have an aversion to those very same sensations. The Fire Sermon portion of The Waste Land follows the pattern of The Fire Sermon: attachment to sensation and sensation in everything, transformed into an extreme aversion to sensation. The chapter ends with the word “burning” sitting alone, uncapitalized. The single word ties back to the title, bookending the chapter with the teaching of the Buddha as the poem detaches from sensation.

This line read to me as a representation of the increasing automation and lack of autonomy that is a central theme throughout The Waste Land. This woman, who has just engaged sexually with a man, is performing an “automatic” act by smoothing her hair. Sex, for this character, has become a necessity for her survival, financially, and therefore an automatic act devoid of the human feeling with which it is typically associated. This line appeared to me in conversation with The Jig of Forslin, specifically the line “women by mirrors combing out their hair,” which is positioned in a section about “thousands of secret lives” that have been revealed and laid “bare.” This idea of automation of everyday life, the transition from unique to monotony, brought me back to our discussions of industrialization, and how the overall sentiment of the poem’s moment was one where autonomy was being lost to automation. The character of the sex worker in the Fire Sermon does not suffer the terrible fate of most other women in the poem, but instead is forced to live a life where acts that should carry joy and wonder become tired and repetitive.

I was struck by Eliot’s choice of repetition of this line, especially due to its repetitive nature in the source work. Every stanza of Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion ends with the same line. What stuck out to me in Prothalamion were the lines that came before the repetitions, which undergo subtle but noticeable transitions from stanza to stanza. It begins as “Against the bridal day, which is not long,” then changes the “is” to a “was,” then the “the” into a “their,” and then the “against” to an “even as.” These subtle changes affect the meaning of “sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” every time that it is used in the source material. Within the Waste Land, the refrain is preceded in both its cases by references to other works. The first time it is mentioned follows the line “the nymphs are departed,” which is similarly drawn from Spenser (“a flock of nymphs I chanced to espy.”) The second time, when used as a pair, follows “by the waters of Leman I sat down and wept,” which bears a clear relation to the line “by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion,” from Psalm 137. By preceding his use of the repetitive line in this way, of drawing from but varying other sources, Eliot is following in the footsteps of Spenser and his slight variation. This reflects the larger theme of variation and adaptation that influences the entire poem, and Eliot’s attempts both to adapt and to use directly the work of others.

This whole second section of “A Game of Chess” breaks formally from the first half. The beginning of the section is comprised of one large paragraph, unbroken, while the middle section, specifically lines 111-128, are broken up: indentations carry words across the page, whole sentences begin with one word on the line before, questions infect the poem. The form of the poem begins to break apart and descend here, mirroring the content and references to Hamlet’s Ophelia, who begins to break apart inside and descend into a state of madness. Interestingly, the line pulled directly from Ophelia, “Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night,” which ends this section of the poem, is not the last word spoken by Ophelia. This is surprising, as the crazed repetition of “good night” within Ophelia’s line seems like a final goodbye, and would not be shocking as the last words of a person contemplating suicide. Eliot is therefore both in accordance and disagreement with the original Shakespeare: his text breaks down like Ophelia, but his ending is taken from her middle. This reinterpretation reflects broader modernist themes of taking the old and adapting it to the new, which Eliot does repeatedly, and takes it to a deeper level within the form of the poem, mirroring the content of an older text within the form of his text.

The line “From satin cases poured in rich profusion; In vials of ivory and coloured glass / Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes” felt to me an interesting parallel between the line “Purple the sails, and so perfumed that the winds were love-sick with them;” from Antony and Cleopatra. While the clearest connection between these texts is the “burnish’d throne” line, an image that Eliot draws directly from Shakespeare, the description of lavish luxury that follows intrigued me. The lush, opulent imagery of “satin,” “rich,” and “ivory” mirrors similar imagery within Shakespeare, like the use of “purple,” a color which was costly to produce, and therefore associated with wealth and nobility. These images stand in stark contrast to the dark, deathly imagery of the previous chapter of the poem, like the “brown fog” and “dead sound.” However, underneath this rich imagery is a thread of suicide and violence more gruesome than that found in “The Burial of the Dead.”

Almost all of the sources we read include a woman of noble standing conducting some act of violence, whether it be suicide or violence against another. The imagery highlighted above from Antony and Cleopatra is vastly different from the ending where Cleopatra kills herself by being bitten by a snake. This pattern continues in Ovid, where Philomela is both “dressed magnificently” and later goes on to “strike” and “hack” the throat of her nephew, brutally killing him before feeding him to his father. In Aeneid, Dido lays on a “golden couch” before she gives “over to the flames,” thereby killing herself. All of these cases, which Eliot references over and over in this passage, infect the poem with a dark, gruesome meaning that would otherwise be covered by the richness of the imagery. This shows the nature of death and darkness, which can express themselves so clearly, as seen in “The Burial of the Dead,” or can seep into and hide themselves behind glamour and opulence, as seen in the beginning of “A Game of Chess.”

The line “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many” stuck out to me from tonight's reading. The line “I could not believe death had undone so many” is pulled from Dante, and discusses the trek of the dead towards Hell. By pulling this line and placing it in The Waste Land, Eliot is placing the reader in a form of hell, comparing the Urban Landscape of post-WWI London to the situation Dante experienced in Hell itself. This quote appeared even more interesting when considering Baudelaire as well, and his Seven Old Men. It reads “Then, I thought, must I, undying, contemplate the awful eighth,wondering if the old, ugly men he has encountered will continue to duplicate and grow further. These men have come “out of the same Hell,” drawing a direct contrast between the seven men and the “crowd” that flows over London Bridge. Eliot is wondering here about the nature of evil and destruction, and posing the question of perpetuity within destruction. What if this crowd that “death has undone” will continue to grow, the “awful eighth” being added again and again? Death, in this section, is presented as a never-ending horde, a swarm whose ugliness will replicate itself over and over.

The Tarot section of The Waste Land seems at first a random assortment of cards and ideas mashed together in a list. Of these ideas, the “man with three staves” struck me, especially because of Eliot’s description of him in the footnote. Eliot writes “The Man with Three Staves I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.” The tarot cards, including this one, are associated with Arthurian legends in a less “arbitrary” fashion by Weston, who argues that four objects related with Arthurian legends “exist today as the four suits of the Tarot,” thereby establishing a direct connection between the ancient legend and modern day Tarot cards.

The card of the men with three staves is of particular interest beyond simply Eliot mentioning it, primarily because of the religious imagery present in its composition. The card consists of a man with three sticks, two on one side of him and one on the other. These three wooden sticks can be seen as representations of the holy trinity of God the father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Further religious imagery comes from the outfit of the man. He is dressed in a red cape, with an armored arm poking out, and a thin golden circle resting on his head. This is reminiscent of the signature look of a Roman soldier during the time of Jesus’ death, with the crown potentially symbolizing Jesus’ holiness or status as “King of the Jews.”

The religious composition of this card connects Christian themes to the otherwise non-Christian practice of spiritual divination through Tarot readings. This contradiction, which is also apparent in other Tarot cards, is similar to the Christian/pagan contradiction within the Arthurian legends. The legends, as Weston argues, pull from both folk and Christian stories, and both stories must be understood together to understand the true background of the final legend. Similarly, the listing of many different Tarot figures in The Waste Land emphasize contradiction, and are meant to loose the reader in a mess, both on the surface and underneath, that can only be understood when multiple conflicting parts are held together.

I find there to be a connection, and contradiction, between the opening lines of The Burial of the Dead and the reading from The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales read, in contemporary English, “When April with its sweet-smelling showers / has pierced the drought of March to the root, / and bathed every vein in such liquid / by which power the flower is created;” This set of lines is describing ostensibly the same thing as Eliot’s opening, the coming of spring after a long cold winter. However, the language and characteristics couldn’t be more different. Chaucer, through the use of the language “sweet-smelling” and “bathed,” paints spring, and more specifically April, in a positive light, focusing on the “power of the flower.” Even the more harsh language of “pierce” and “drought” are associated with a noble April, who is destroying the dreariness of March. In contrast, Eliot describes April as “the cruellest month,” furthering his description with “breeding,” “mixing,” and “stirring,” all language that implies a more sinister and darker nature of what April is doing. Eliot’s choice to start a poem titled The Waste Land and a section titled The Burial of the Dead with a description of seasons turning from darkness to light may at first seem contradictory. However, when comparing Eliot to Chaucer, it becomes clear that he has taken a description of April as a beautiful and positive actor, and has twisted it into a malevolent being, destroying the warmth and comfort of winter. This twist, from beauty to malevolence, can serve as a reflection of time, and how it twists what was once beautiful into something evil.

The original title of the poem struck me as a powerful reflection on voice and perspective, and as an invitation to read deeply into perspective throughout The Waste Land. "He Do the Police in Different Voices" immediately suggests differing perspectives, with “different voices” implying multiple “voices” inhabiting the same body. These different voices, in the original Dickens, are being performed by Sloppy, a young “long boy,” who is described as a “beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.” This description of Sloppy is surprising and comes in contrast to both his name, which is derived from slop, a word defined with vocab like “mudhole,” “dung,” and “slime,” and from the descriptions given of Sloppy as having “an open mouth of disproportionate capacity” and as “ungainly” and “awkward." This description of his mouth's “disproportionate capacity” and his bodies “ungainly” nature alienates Sloppy from most humans, and does not lend itself to an understanding of him as “beautiful.” Furthermore, “dung” and “slime” are not words typically utilized to describe a boy who does “beautiful” readings. Therefore, Sloppy’s ability to do “different voices” is surprising, forming a contrast to the dehumanizing descriptions given of him. The line “He Do the Police in Different Voices” is a rare but beautiful humanization of a character who is otherwise defined by his abnormality. As the original title of Eliot’s poem, this invites the reader to seek out different perspectives and look beyond the surface to find humanity in the abnormal.

The Waste Land suggests a desolate place, a barren landscape devoid of life. The waste land that appears in Le Morte D’Arthur fits this description, when “sithen increased neither corn, nor grass, nor well-nigh no fruit, nor in the water was no fish.” (4) This land is lacking, defined by “nor,” known for what it does not have. While the war-torn context of the poem lends itself to an understanding of a waste land solely defined by depravity, a careful inspection of the texts that inspired this title reveals a different, and more hopeful, interpretation.

In her work From Ritual to Romance, Jessie L. Weston identifies a cycle maintained across the variations of the myth of the Holy Grail. In this cycle, a land goes from paradise to waste land and back to paradise again, with the health of the land tied directly to the health of its King. Though the waste land is barren and bleak, the stories of the Holy Grail carry with them a level of hope, a promise that on the other side of the waste land is a restoration to what was. In this sense, a waste land must not simply be defined by its fall from previous glory, and instead must take into account a promise of a better future. The story of the Bible and the vegetation ceremonies studied in The Golden Bough mirror this understanding of a waste land, sharing a similar progression from paradise to barren waste land, followed by a resurrection.

The story of the fall, referenced explicitly in Le Morte D’Arthur (“When sinful Eve came to gather fruit, for which Adam and she were put out of paradise,” (6), is potentially the most well-known example of a transition from paradise to waste land. The biblical waste land, though full of human sin and suffering, is also full of hope, hope for the coming of the messiah and a return to the paradise of Eden. Similarly, ancient vegetation ceremonies occur in a waste land, the barren time between the fertility of the spring and fall, reflecting the “yearly decay and revival of life.” (Frazer, 7) The death and resurrection in both these stories (albeit one is of the gods and one is of mankind), is similar to that found in the quest for the Holy Grail, and is essential to understanding the title The Waste Land.

The title of Eliot’s poem places the poem in a sort of limbo, having fallen from a paradise that was before yet not having reached a paradise that is to come. This imparts upon the poem a tension between the loss of what came before and the hope for a future restoration. Like the Israelites in the Old Testament and the ancient civilizations in winter, the waste land is waiting for a better future, for a resurrection and restoration that is still to come.