Eliot inserts another important issue: the tarot and its symbols; in fact Belladonna is a poison, The Lady Of The Rocks is connected to the Monnalisa and therefore to her enigmatic and in addition in  the image of the Phoenician Sailor, Water, giver of life, becomes a token of death because the Sailor must fear death by water.

The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland of the poem, the modern city, in this case London, symbol of aridity of Capitalism. Eliot’s London references Baudelaire’s Paris (“Unreal City”), Dickens’s London (“the brown fog of a winter dawn”) and Dante’s hell (“the flowing crowd of the dead”). The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Indeed, the poet considers its citizens trapped in their routine and he compares them at the beginning to the sloth of hell because of their indifference to the future and then to the souls in limbo because they live, but not changing their lives they are still, dead.

When the narrator sees Stetson, the reader returns to the prospect of history. World War I is replaced by the Punic War; with this choice, Eliot seems to be arguing that all wars are the same, just as he suggests that all men are the same in the stanza’s final line where Eliot is speaking directly to the reader. Finally the image of a corpse buried in his garden suggests again the theme of regeneration and fertility.