The Rhine Maidens, the spirits of the Rhine River from Richard

Wagner’s Ring Cycle, are parodied as Thames Maidens, the

spirit of the Thames.

Queen Elizabeth I and her favorite, Leicester, are imagined on

the Thames, contrasting the opulence of the Renaissance with
the industrial waste of Eliot’s time.

Saint Augustine, an early Church Father, is alluded to in the

line referring to Carthage. Augustine wrote The Confessions in
which he tells of his conversion from a dissolute youth to a life
of religious asceticism.

The Buddha’s sermon in which he spoke of everything being on

fire is referred to in the repetition of the word “burning.”

Roman soldiers are suggested by the allusion to “torchlight

red on sweaty faces” in the final section of the poem, which
presents the capture, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus in a
series of images and allusions.

The thunder is personified and made to speak the words of

Prajapati, the Hindu God of creation.

The Prince of Aquitaine is a character in a poem by Gerard de

Nerval, an early nineteenth-century French poet whom Eliot
quotes. The prince, like the poet/narrator, laments the fallen
glory of his condition by using the image of a fallen tower.

Hieronymo is a character in the Elizabethan revenge tragedy,

The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd. Eliot’s allusion suggests
the vicissitudes of his own emotional condition when caught
between the despair engendered in him by the waste land
around him and within himself, and the as-yet-unrealizable
possibility of salvation.

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