April is the cruellest month The Waste Land begins with a subversion of the first lines of the General

Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. He paints April as a month of restorative power, when
spring rain brings nature back to life: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath
perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licóur / Of which vertú engendred is the flour;” it’s an
image repeated to the point of cliché in subsequent centuries. But in the wasteland of Eliot’s modern world,
amid the ruins of the World War I, the Chaucerian image of a fertile, resurrective April becomes suffused with
cruelty. It is, ironically, winter that “kept us warm.”

Marie Marie is Countess Marie Larisch, who played a pivotal role in the Mayerling Incident. The lines are
taken from her book My Past and from Eliot’s conversations with her. Through biographical knowledge of the
countess, readers can make connections to Crown Prince Rudolf and the scandal that allowed Archduke Franz
Ferdinand to become the presumptive heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and through Ferdinand to World
War I (and, perhaps, also Prince Ferdinand from The Tempest).

A heap of broken images Eliot’s endnotes for the poem connect the following line to Ecclesiastes 12:5: “Also
when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish,
and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the
mourners go about the streets.” But it also resembles Ezekiel 6:4: “And your images shall be broken.” Though
the “heap of broken images” is one of many depictions of post-war decay in the poem, it can also be taken more
generally as a metaphor for how present consciousness consumes past culture. Hugh Kenner, one of the great
scholars of Modernism, explained this element well, arguing how the line evokes: “the manner in which
Shakespeare, Homer, and the drawings of Michelangelo, Raphael, and the Magdalenian draughtsmen coexist in
the contemporary cultivated consciousness: fragments, familiar quotations: poluphloisboio thalasse, to be or not
to be, undo this button, one touch of nature, etc. […] Cities are built out of the ruins of previous cities, as The
Waste Land is built out of the remains of older poems.”

Madame Sosostris The name Madame Sosostris is reminiscent of Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, from
Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow, which was published in late 1921 while Eliot was working on The Waste
Land. In Huxley’s novel, Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana is the moniker Mr. Scogan uses when he
masquerades as a woman who tells fortunes at a fair. This cross-dressing gender play foreshadows the sexual
ambiguity of the Tiresias figure, who appears later in the poem and whom some scholars take as its central
consciousness. Madame Sosostris’s clairvoyance, even if she is merely a charlatan seer, further solidifies her
connection to Tiresias and to the Cumaean Sibyl in the poem’s epigraph (taken from Petronius’s Satyricon).

a wicked pack of cards Eliot admitted in his endnotes that he was “not familiar with the exact constitution of
the Tarot pack of cards,” but he used the symbolic register of the divinatory deck to spin a web of his own
associations: James Frazer’s Hanged God from The Golden Bough, the Fisher King of the Grail quest (through
Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance), the Phoenician Sailor (a presence later in the poem), death by water,
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, etc. Eliot later said, “I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose
chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.”

Those are pearls that were his eyes This line is pulled directly from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the context
of the play, Ariel says this line in a song to Ferdinand, describing Ferdinand’s father’s supposed death by water.
This line is repeated again in the second section of Eliot’s poem. Another line from this section of The Tempest,
this one by Ferdinand, shows up in the third section of the poem: “This music crept by me upon the waters.”

Unreal City The “Unreal City” is borrowed from Baudelaire’s “The Seven Old Men”: “Unreal city, city full of
dreams, / Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passers-by.” Eliot’s “Unreal City” is modern London. The
urban scene that makes up the final piece of the first section of The Waste Land is set in the city’s financial
district where Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank. Eliot’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, and Dante’s Inferno merge into
a hellish tableau. The phrase “Unreal City” returns in the third section of the poem.