These words represent what Weston characterizes as “Christian Mystery language,” whereby the words Hieronimo is Mad Again” becomes “Hieronymo’s mad againe” in TWL, used in “an unusual, metaphorical, sense.” Indeed, excluding this language, within this section already exists three different languages: French (De Nerval), Italian (Dante), and English, evoking the contents of the revenge play The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronima is Mad Again, written by Thomas Kyd. As Hieronima seeks to avenge the death of his son, he stages a play with the murderers, instructing, “Each one of us / Must act his part in unknown languages… As you, my lord, in Latin, I in Greek, / You in Italian, and for because I know that Bellimperia hath practiced the French, / In courtly French shall all her phrases be.” Placing this knowledge within TWL, we see the poem exhibiting the same multi-lingual characteristics as Hieronima’s fictitious play that is designed to be within another play (Thomas Kyd’s). This play-within-a-play-within-a-poem structure endows the poem with a minuscule quality. In other words, since Hieronima’s play is created by Thomas Kyd for his play, following this pattern, it is likely that TWL is created directly by Hieronima. Eliot writes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Perhaps the “fragments” directly references all of the literary works that have contributed to his writing of TWL, as well as the "fragments" of conflict that led to the outbreak of WW1. To end, after reading many of Eliot's sources and allusions, I still wonder about the significance of a lot of them, especially when they come together as a whole. But maybe the sources are meant to be fragmentary.

The speaker endows the person they are addressing with the label "friend," but, in accordance with the message posed by Francis Bradley in Appearance and Reality. how much knowledge do you need to possess about someone to consider them your friend? Philosophical themes pervade the sources tied to this section of TWL. When Bradley states, "A common understanding being admitted, how much does that imply? What is the minimum of sameness that we need suppose to be involved in it?," I was reminded of a Chinese ghost novel, which opened with the line (translated): "How can you be certain that every person you've ever met in your life is human?" Then, when I tried to find all mentions of the word "friend" throughout TWL, I only found 3 instances of its occurence in total, the first being the ending of "The Burial of the Dead": "'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men." Interestingly, this line was a reference Webster's White Devil, arguably one of the most un-friendly source, pervaded by betrayal, murder, and jealousy. Most notably, the "friend to men" isn't even human, but rather a "Dog," peculiarly capitalized.

The second mention occurs in "The Fire Sermon": "And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors; / Departed, have left no addresses." Effectively, the "heirs of City directors" abandon the people who once erroneously considered them as "friends," furthering this characteristic of indifference antithetical to friendliness. To me, this third and final instance represents the break-up of a friendship, with the speaker's "blood shaking my heart" just like how Flamineo is described to feel when he resolves, "Oh, cunning devils! now I have tried your love, And doubled all your reaches: I am not wounded." As Flamineo verifies the superficiality of his relationship and friendship (respectively) with Vittoria and Zanche through a bullet-less pistol, so does the speaker here in TWL utilize the booming sound and destructive nature of thunder to mark the end of their nebulous friendship.

This third person, unlike the figure characterised in The Brothers Karamazov as being "between us," is situated "beside you," rending "you" the middle person. Then, if, according to Smerdyakov, "That third is God Himself—Providence," could "you" in turn represent God? Interestingly, in Retelling of an Indian Legend by Marudanayagam, this middle person, only achieved by a total odd number of people present, is constantly erased, then brought back, by the addition of a second, third, and eventually fourth Alvar. Following the pattern of "where one can lie two may sit" and "where two may sit three can stand," I wonder what further accommodations can be made for the fourth person. For me, my mind goes to "where three may stand four can become God," because the fourth person is addressed as "Lord Vishnu." As such, it's interesting that the narrator in this line of TWL is intentionally creating an odd number, transforming "you" into the deity in the middle.

It's also worth thinking about the mid-points of other things mentioned in the Hesse source. Hesse writes, "But in the case of the magnificent daughter, it is not weariness which shows itself as a form of hysteria, but a passionate exuberance. She is haunted by the future." In order to be "haunted," one must draw from past fears. And the fact that "the future" becomes the object implied to impose such fears onto the "magnificent daughter" makes the future --- what hasn't happened yet --- appear to be a mere replay of the past. Thus, the daughter is not merely trapped in the middle of the past and the future, but watching the two relative states of time blend into each other, just like how TWL obscures the difference between "you" and a God-like figure.

The narrator's satisfaction with merely the "sound of water over a rock," quenching their desire for water, reminded me of a phrase in Chinese - “望梅止渴" - which translates to looking at plums to quench thirst. Just as imagining the sourness of plums makes one's mouth water, helping with thirst (albeit ineffectively), so does imagining the sound of water over a rock lead to a dissatisfactory conclusion: "But there is no water."

This pattern of clinging onto a symbol representative of one's goal in order to feed on the illusion of achieving it exists also within Harrison's study of Ancient Greek religion and mythology. Namely, Harrison analyses,

Zeus in human shape was not seated thereon, otherwise we should have been told, but his throne may on certain occasions have been tenanted by a symbol as awe-inspiring as, or even more than, himself,—his thunderbolt.

Interestingly, the occupation of Zeus' throne by the "symbol" of a "thunderbolt" renders the Greek god's simple attribute its very own divine being. Referring back to the title of this section, perhaps "What The Thunder Said" can thus be rephrased as "What the Thunderbolt Said," because if Zeus' weapon can become god-like, so can the lightning bolt preceding thunder become equally as loud and fear-inducing. Additionally, maybe the use of "thunder" to title this section, which, according to Harrison, should be better replaced by a thunderbolt, is why the thunder couldn't effectively "call... on the rain to fall and everything to grow up new," and put an end to the drought.

The typescript of "Death by Water," annotated on by Pound, mimics this "sea swell" characterized by the rising and falling of water. Seen most prominently after the only indented line of the draft, which begins with "For an unfamiliar gust," Pound repetitively draws what looks like many slanted and upside-down "V"s below the line "Above the roar of waves upon the sea." Here, an interesting, perhaps unintentional, interaction between the author (Eliot), the editor (Pound), and Eliot's words plays out. The V's, forming a wave-like doodle underneath the line, satisfies what is actually said in the line, which is that the line itself is situated "above the roar of waves," as represented by the V's.

It's also interesting to note how Pound's edits only begin to lose their uniformity towards the middle of the manuscript. In the first section, Pound draws either horizontal or vertical lines to indicate his changes, while in the second, his lines gradually become jagged, sometimes intersecting with one another to communicate chaos and whim. Yet, despite all this messy, even overwhelming, critique, we see that only the ending, present in Eliot’s early manuscripts and free from any edits, makes it to the published version. As such, the middle portion of the manuscript could be seen as representing the passage of the above-mentioned mechanical wave, with the beginning being a state of living, and the ending being a state of death, both considered mundane without the presence of a threat to life that is the destructive wave.

Within Morris’ The Life and Death of Jason, we see a similar theme of inconsequentiality emerge. As Hylas and the sea-nymph decide to “set our hearts to think of happy things,” they essentially allow “the water [to] cover… them,” rendering the water from waves as a means of undoing all the chaos and irresolution in life. Perhaps the draft of “Death by Water” undergoes a similar process: after trying to make the stories of “fishing” and “eating what there is to eat” work, Eliot and Pound eventually settles on the scene of the Phoenician’s death, the part that truly matters.

The stanzas that ensue are indented, each line shorter than normal, mimicking a block quote. Perhaps Eliot is citing the lyrics of a song that "crept by me upon the waters" in the stanza above. Now, in a sense, the readers aren't simply reading TWL anymore --- they are listening to it. The importance of sound over sight is seen in many sources, particularly Augustine's Confession, the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible, Fire Sermon Discourse from the Buddha, and Purgatorio. Reflecting on his sins, Augustine writes in Book 10, "But they who know how to praise Thee for it, 'O all-creating Lord,' take it up in Thy hymns, and are not taken up with it in their sleep. Such would I be. These seductions of the eyes I resist..." Here, songs and hymns, perceived using the sense of hearing, can serve as a pathway to conversion. And the necessity to "resist" the "seductions of the eyes" can be elucidated by the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." Evidently, Augustine is still in the process of demonstrating sorrow for his sins and not yet "pure in heart," just like how the sinners have to ascend from Inferno to Purgatory to the Heaves, where a "vision of God [is] represented by the yellow triangle at the very top." In order to be forgiven for one's sins, then, one needs to first listen and be stripped of sight.

As we've discussed in class, Eliot's belief in the possibility of a universal religion has allowed for a commonality to be observed between Buddhism and Christianity. In Fire Sermon Discourse, the Buddha preaches also for an "aversion for the eye [and] an aversion for forms," which to me possesses two meanings. The first being an aversion to the perception --- implying sight --- of "forms," or, in other words, using eyes to see objects that make up the tangible world around us. The second being an aversion to "formalities" --- one formality being the act of gift-giving, which is also mentioned in the Bible: "That thine alms may be in secret."

Thinking about the broader meaning of these song-like stanzas, it's important to note how the Rhine daughters' words --- "Weialala leia" --- repeated in "The Fire Sermon," evokes the tune of an implied song that they dance to while persuading Siegfried to return the ring. Yet, as Siegfried chooses to keep the ring for himself, perhaps the state of "The Fire Sermon" remains in a state of "Burning burning burning burning," never reaching a final state of salvation.

In this section, old age becomes a point of emphasis. Just as "I," implied to be Tiresias, listens as the "music crept up by me upon the waters" and empathizes with both the "she" and "he" in the sexual assault scene preceding the previous line, so does Forslin in "The Jig of Forslin" become an all-knowing, even at times future-telling, figure. For example, Forslin reveals powers of omniscience by stating, "[H]er child is born and dies," with "her" referring to an arbitrary chorus-girl that isn't even given a name; we also know that at the time of her "faint[ing]," her child hasn't even been born yet. During the chaos of the destructive fires that very night, Forslin goes on to express about another woman, "She knew that her child was dead, that she herself was dying..." This brought to my mind a line from Laforgue's poem from last night's reading, "She did not understand that loving had been inimical to love." Here, the gradual, perhaps painful, process of "dying" parallels the amorous actions of "loving" someone, with the end result of the former being a definitive state of death, unpainful, while the end result of the latter becomes antithetically a lack of love, for "loving" is "inimical," or harmful, to love. Then, one may ask, where does old age come into play, the awkward mid-way between "death" and "dying"? Or, could old age be synonymous to "dying," for it simply implies the end of a continuous period of "aging"? To me, being an "old man" connotes a hopefulness in the liberation after death. Just as Whitman writes in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Come lovely and soothing death," Tiresias the narrator seems to be emphasizing his seniority in hopes of escaping a Sybil-like life, plagued by his punishment of blindness, and uselessly prophetic, for he can not predict, only try to summon, the end to living.

Unlike the line "O wedding day-afters, oh lacy bits of things!" in Laforgue's "Complaint of a Certain Sunday," the trash/leftovers mentioned here are interestingly absent from the river. Furthermore, the source of these obviously human-produced waste remains nebulous - "other testimony of summer nights" - as opposed to the clear setting of the aftermath of a "wedding," a large celebration creating a great deal of waste. In effect, something that seems positive - the absence of waste - is also rendered boring and uncelebrated, affirming Laforgue's outlook on life ("And until nature shows a nice and kind concern / Attempt to live the humdrum turn"). Interestingly, the line that Sophie and Grace have both mentioned above - "The nymphs are departed" - also exhibits the motif of an unnatural absence, only this time, it's the absence of something that is considered objectively positive, the nymphs in Spenser's "Prothalamion" with baskets of flowers for the two brides. Both of these absences, one supposedly positive, one supposedly negative, all lead to an inexplicable feeling of melancholy. As advocator of spiritual democracy Edward Carpenter would contend, through a myriad of voices and landscapes, "I see a great land poised as in a dream," the beginning of "The Fire Sermon" can be best described as a dreamscape. In this "dream," perhaps for a waste-less world, the side-effect of purity becomes silence, established through the knowledge of the narrator that eventually, the song will "end," leaving the Sweet Thames to "run softly," an action void of much noise. Here, a paradox is introduced, whether it's better for to have "a great land waiting for its own people to come and take possession of it," thus creating human-made waste and destruction, or to leave a land barren, untouched but mundane.

The narrator repetitively states this phrase, rushing Lil to get ready to see her demobilized husband. Interestingly, this reminder sporadically appears throughout the section, as though Lil is still trying to get ready up until the ending. However, the present tense used during the first utterance of “HURRY UP ITS TIME” (“Albert’s coming back [Albert is coming back]”) contrasts with the past tense used during the last utterances of the same phrase (“Albert was home.”) To me, this phrase not only creates a feeling of hurriedness akin to a professional game of chess, when the players have to make a move within a controlled time frame, but also evokes Middleton’s A Game at Chess and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the former, the Jesuit Black Bishop’s Pawn, in his attempt at seducing and entrapping the Virgin White Queen’s Pawn, beckons her to “Come, come, be nearer.” Colloquially, saying “hurry up” can be interchangeable with “come on now,” which possesses a similarly commanding tone, but the two differ in the lack of directionality present in the former. The narrator/friend (?) of Lil orders her to “hurry up” —- but to do what? In the short period of time before her husband’s imminent arrival - “ITS TIME” - Lil has, rationally speaking, no means of resolving her marital conflict which stems from the inability to have kids; making herself look “a bit smart” as a way of “hurrying up” proves to be a futile move, and she ends up pacing around in the same spot. Meanwhile, although “be nearer” contrarily connotes a clear direction given by the Black Bishop’s Pawn, it is a direction that the Virgin White Queen’s Pawn refuses to take: “But nearer to the off’rer, oft more wicked.” In Hamlet, we also see this unfulfilled “coming,” as Ophelia sings, “And will he not come again? / And will he not come again? / No, no, he is dead.” Here, “come” connotes revival - a “coming” back via the cyclic nature of life and death - but the inability of Hamlet to come back places Ophelia in a stagnant state no different from Lil, White Queen’s Pawn, and Black Bishop’s Pawn. Perhaps “The Game of Chess” ends in a stalemate.

Here, separate stories - namely, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Paradise Lost, and Antony and Cleopatra - converge. The tragedies experienced by the aforementioned four women could be attributed to the Cupid-like figures in their lives. In Aeneid, Venus explicitly seals Dido’s death when she commands her son, Cupid, or Love/Amor, to make her fall in love with Aeneas; it is Philomena’s father who gives Tereus the green light (“I now entrust to you my Philomena”) to sail away, fulfilling the king’s incontrollable sexual desires; the argument could be made that Eve’s fall from Paradise is the result of her being “the fairest of her Daughters,” chosen by God to be both in and banished from Paradise; finally, recounting the moment Cleopatra and Antony met, Enobarbus describes how “on each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids.” Only further reading about Cleopatra’s captivity and seeing the rather antagonistic role of surveillance that Cupid plays in TWL - “(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)” - can we see this supposed symbol of love being perverted, transforming into lust and sexual impulses that turn out to be deadly and gruesome, as in the case of Tereus’ fate of ingesting his own son.

Like Lucy mentioned in her annotation last year, the previous line references Canto 3 of Dante's Inferno, wherein the "horrendous accents" and "cries of rage" of the impartial sinners contrast the passive acceptance of the "short and infrequent" sighs belonging to undefined subjects. I, however, registered the subsequent line as more Dantean than the former: as "each man fixed his eyes before his feet," I am reminded of how the Uncommitted "are eager to cross the river, / for the justice of God so spurs them on / their very fear is turned to longing." In TWL, each man also conforms to a uniform action, becoming identical to each other, with their primary navigator --- the eyes --- focused in the wrong direction, on the body parts that carry them --- the feet --- whose motions are dictated by God. Though not necessarily as eager as the those entering Charon's boat, the men's actions communicate the same incapacitated state. This could be more of a stretch, but the literal interpretation of "fix[ing]" one's "eyes before [one's] feet" also evokes the imagery of eyeballs being a detachable part of the body, which made me think of one of the film adaptations of Inferno that we watched in class last year, where eyeballs were being fried in Hell.

Other forms of punishment and torture can be found in this stanza. Quoted directly from Baudelaire's Les Fleurs de mal, the end to "Burial of the Dead" accuses the readers, in breaking the fourth wall, of being "hypocritical." Baudelaire's poem, written as a critique of industrialization in 19th century France, is also passive, but not any less impactful. The "I" in the poem "contemplates the awful eighth," as though he himself would inevitably be dragged into becoming one of the "seven old man," the "ironic double." Baudelaire --- and Eliot by extension --- could be possibly alluding to the fact that though our reality isn't always as gruesome as Inferno, our thoughts, our "contemplations," drive our tangible actions to a larger extent that we think, that passivity (potentially also viewed through the lens of WW1) can do as much harm as movement.

It’s interesting to note, as we’d talked about briefly in class, the switching of gender in TWL. Marie, Empress Elisabeth’s niece and the woman whom we assume “I” is referring to, becomes the “hyacinth girl,” who, as Lemprière elucidates, is actually a “beautiful” and “youth[ful]” boy “beloved by Apollo. The love between Apollo and Hyacinthus thus parallels the German quote right above it, which is an excerpt from Richard Wagner’s modern operatic staging of Tristan and Isolde: “Fresh the wind blows / towards home: / my Irish child, / where are you now?” (3). To me, the essence of the quote is not in the young sailor’s mockery, but in the romance that ensues afterwards, when Brangaene, Isolde’s handmaid, refers to her “lady Isolde” as her “dearest beloved” (7). Furthermore, as the unwilling bride arrives at Cornwall, only to be met with Tristan’s death, we see again this natural impulse arise within Brangaene: her stage directions is described as “(impetuously and tenderly embracing Isolde),” the implicit expression of her homosexual desires (16). Eliot furthers this theme through the imagery of eyes. In what feels like an alternate reality or the afterlife, where Hyacinthus hasn’t died from the game of quiots and is capable of “[coming] back from the hyacinth garden” along with Apollo, Hyacinthus’ “eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead.” When analyzed alongside Isolde and Brangaene’s interaction, when the handmaid tells Isolde, “If she is to hold herself of worth in your eyes, / place your trust in Brangaene now,” both Hyacinthus and Brangaene recognize that the authenticity of their connections with their lovers can be proven through these very organs (7). By extension, the denial of this connection —- when the eyes fail, when Isolde does not respond to Brangaene’s proposition — becomes a tragic account of impermissible love. A scene of homosexuality in TWL can only be told through a heterosexual facade --- a love story between the “hyacinth girl” and her counterpart, a “he.”

Referring to the previous Dickens excerpt, where we are introduced to Sloppy, I'm interested in the unmentioned presence of liquids in the first 30 lines of The Burial of the Dead. In etymology, "slop" can be defined as "refuse liquid of any kind" or "household liquid waste." This becomes especially interesting when reading the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, in which it is explicitly stated that "April with its sweet-smelling showers / Has pierced the drought of March to the root, / And bathed every vein (of the plant) in such liquid" (1). In comparison, when April is "breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire," as well as "stirring / Dull roots with spring rain," The Waste Land seems to be intentionally avoiding to mention the true subject of the sentence - water (53). For though April serves as an adequate umbrella term for Spring and the rejuvenation such season represents, it's inadequate to imagine the month alone without drawing attention to the other implied force capable of "mixing" and "stirring" through its characteristic liquidity, and, along with air and sun, of scientifically "breeding" life. Upon reading Amber's comment from last year about how "breeding" is also a positive term for fertility, this makes me wonder if the converse also applies; specifically, whether the orphan Sloppy, whose name is in itself a disdainful pun on liquid waste, flows, like the invisible liquid breeding Lilacs in the poem's opening lines, throughout The Waste Land, permeating all of Eliot's later lines. Could a waste land be run on liquid waste, never able to purify itself?

The old name for The Waste Land, He Do the Police in Different Voices, fortified the connection I’m beginning to see between Eliot’s poem and my assigned summer reading, The Novel and the Police. At the outset, the published epigraph, when translated, directly quotes Trimalchio from the Satyricon: “In fact, I actually saw with my own eyes the Sybil at Cumae dangling in a bottle” (4). Here, the idea of the carceral, as D.A. Miller (author of Novel and the Police) would call it, is introduced expeditiously. As Lucy stated in her annotation last year, Eliot’s “final work is layered with authors who influenced his writing, his own version of ‘doing the police in different voices.’” Indeed, in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, where “He Do the Police in Different Voices” originates, adoption seems to be Mrs. Higden’s latter priority as opposed to her fervent verbalization of the undesirability of the “poor-house,” a place to where she would rather be “kill[ed]” than “taken” (12). Dickens’ fascination with imprisonment seems to pervade his work, for the Court of Chancery, an unlocalizable punishment system in another Dickens novel, Bleak House, also ultimately finds a tangible agency of power within the police. As such, while Sybil’s captivity is mythological, and that of those in the poor-house can find semblances in the inhumane orphanages of real-life, they all boil down to the theme of losing freedom due to the actions and confinement from an external power. Finally, it’s interesting to note the existence of a “fly cop” in Eliot’s old first section of the poem, who initially attempts to bring the narrator and his friends “to the station” until they are rescued by Mr. Donavan (4-5). Why Eliot designed a plot that delineates the characters’ lucky escape, and why he then removed this section, along with the quote from Conrad, remains unanswered. My current interpretation is that Conrad’s quote expresses a revelation one gets before a definite death - “the supreme moment of complete knowledge” - but such definitiveness departs from Eliot’s intended message, which latches on ambiguity (1). And the title, doing the police in different voices, reveals Eliot’s true intentions. Only by introducing all these forms of captivity without offering a solution - and a means of escape - can readers truly get the sense of being trapped in a waste land, and begin to seek out ways of returning to simply a “land” without the carceral.

In The Golden Bough, fertility is valued not only in terms of vegetation, but also female fecundity: “These two things, therefore, food and children, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons” (6). Such emphasis on physical health transcends gender lines too, as Jessie L. Weston concludes in her essay that “the main object of the Quest is the restoration to health and vigour of a King suffering from infirmity” (3). Thus, while one interprets “Waste Land” as simply a locality suffering from drought and lack of vegetation, the second connotation of “waste” does not imply a wholly lack-of something, but the remains of what-used-to-be - expired crops rotting away on a hopeless land. A parallel to this imagery exists in the poem’s portrayal of humanhood. Overwhelmed by masculine desire to “beget children” and the expectation that “The King… must not be allowed to become old or feeble,” The Waste Land begins with a “dramatic union of the sexes,” when “my cousin,” speaking from the “hyacinth girl’s” perspective, “gave me hyacinths first a year ago” (6; 6; 53-4). Yet gradually, the narrator (perhaps not the same person anymore, if even identifiable), pressures Lil to “make yourself a bit smart” for her husband, compensating for an evidently troubled marriage (58). At the end of part II, “I” ask, “What you get married for if you don’t want children?,” enunciating the couple’s point of contention (59). As such, the “waste” in the poem’s title refers to not only a miserable landscape, but also the human condition, when infertility - referring to both biological infertility and a choice to not have children, which, in the perspective of men, renders the woman equal to “waste,” a being that is still present (unlike rainfall) but useless despite her presence. As we continue to read the poem, this is an important comparison to keep in mind.