COMPREHENSION

-Focus on the three themes of the section, as explained in the introduction. Find references to them in the text.

The journey of Christ's disciples to Emmaus:

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?

The approach to the Chapel Perilous in the Holy Grail legend:

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

The present decay of Eastern Europe:

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth 
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

-circle all the images associated with sterility

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock

But dry sterile thunder without rain

stumbling in cracked earth 
Ringed by the flat horizon only

In this decayed hole among the mountains

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

INTERPRETATION

-what is the Thunder's advice?

A vision of the world as wasteland, awaiting the arrival of the Grail that will cure it of its ills. The end of the poem seems to suggest that that Grail is still within reach.

-what do you think "these fragments" are?

The word “ruins” is of particular importance: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The narrator is still attempting to stave off destruction...or perhaps he has at last surrendered, accepting his fate and that of the world.

-the journey is come to an end. What final message is conveyed in the concluding lines? Why do you think the last words are in Sanskrit?

The poem ends on a note of grace, allying Eastern and Western religious traditions to posit a more universal worldview. Eliot calls what he has assembled “fragments,” and indeed they are; but together they add up to a vision that is not only European but global, a vision of the world as wasteland, awaiting the arrival of the Grail that will cure it of its ills. The end of the poem seems to suggest that that Grail is still within reach.

-what causes obscurity in Eliot's poetry?

Eliot's poetry is a mix of different culture, different languages, that includes in an opera, with the use of correlative objective, symbols:  his language became obscure.