The Waste Land | Part 5, What the Thunder Said |

Summary
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Summary
After the brief water interlude, the poem returns to the wasteland—and the speaker's first words imply that
things are coming to a head. The speaker refers to what has come before: fire, icy "silence," and "stony"
places; lamentations and prison and calamity; death and decline. "Here" is a place with only rocks and no
water—neither sound nor silence.

The speaker, now addressing someone in the second person, wonders, "Who is the third who walks always
beside you?" This unidentified figure is apparently wrapped in a cloak. And then the speaker asks about a
sound of "maternal lamentation." The speaker is made to think of various "falling towers" in cities,
including London.

Shifting again, the speaker offers an eerie image of a woman with long hair, "bats with baby faces," and
towers with tolling bells. Then there is an empty chapel with swinging doors.

Next, the speaker begins a description of the Ganges River and the sound of thunder. In a chanting tone, the
speaker repeats a series of almost fable-like verses about the thunder, the turning of a key, and the familiar
image of a boat on a calm sea. And that leads to a sequence spoken by someone fishing.

The final stanza is what appears to be garbled series of references—snatches of songs, verse in English,
Italian, and French, and a final chant-like closing.

Analysis
Just as Part 3 becomes more constrained by its tight rhythm and through its sustained use of consecutive
end rhyme, Part 5 breaks out of that mold in its gradual shift away from occasional end rhyme (lines 322
and 24, 335–36, 339–40, 378–81, 383–84, 420 and 424). This is what the "thunder" is telling the reader, if
the reader listens. Specifically, there is a sense of something coming to an end, and that is signaled
immediately in the first three lines: "After the torchlight red on sweaty faces / After the frosty silence in the
gardens / After the agony in stony places" (lines 322–24). Appropriately, end rhyme is used, but readers are
being told that something has happened—"After ... After ... After"—and so they wait for the aftermath.

After this, Eliot performs a rapid series of rhythm changes. The previously exhausted pace picks up into a
fever pitch—like the traveler who sees water and finds new inspiration: "Here is no water but only rock /
Rock and no water ... / If there were water / And no rock / If there were rock / And also water ... / But there
is no water" (lines 331–32, 346–49, 359). Perhaps these are words of desperation? But the rhythm tells of
something different: disappointment. "There is no water" is not enough to discourage this questing speaker
who continues to move, from rock to rock, despite the lack of water. The interest is apparent, the shift away
from slack boredom—from ennui, from exhaustion—is apparent at the level of language.
For the speaker seems to be describing an earnest, determined "knight" who, despite wrack and ruin—
despite hunger, thirst, and physical exhaustion—will finish the game. "After the agony in stony places," the
knight—whoever they may be—diligently stays on course. If no branches continue to trip the hero up,
other snares exist in the form of mirages. Recall that, according to some versions of the Arthurian Grail
Legend, the Grail had a tendency to appear suddenly, out of thin air, and then disappear just as quickly. The
point in The Waste Land—reinforced through all the images of water, which are withdrawn or negated as
soon as they are presented—is not that one should get the water, just as the point in the Grail legend is not
to get the Grail cup. Rather, the key is how someone approaches the prize, the spirit in which the
unattainable prize is sought and how it is understood. Previous scenes of boredom and ennui indicate that,
because of varying circumstances, the quest has been abandoned, the effort or the labor not thought to be
worth all the struggle. Here, however, after all that fire and water and ruin, the quest has not been
abandoned.
It should be no surprise that those old persistent images of death and decay come back with a vengeance. In
place of personified branches there is a "dead mountain mouth of carious teeth"—"carious" being another
word for tooth decay. The "rock" is ubiquitous, as implied in the many repetitions in the first dozen or so
lines. And vegetation is "dry" (line 355). Then, in the first of two significant allusions to the Grail legend,
the scene shifts from the "decayed hole among the mountains" (line 386) to the site of an "empty chapel,"
where "only the wind's home" (389). This sequence is likely the last test of the questing knight, whoever
they may be: they are confronted by nothingness. How, after all the suffering—after making it through the
wasteland itself—will the knight respond when they do not encounter a "prize" but rather emptiness? The
response seems to be the right one when said in the right spirit: "Dry bones can harm no one" (391). The
knight will not be spooked by what is not alive and, therefore, what cannot harm them. And with that, the
spell appears to be broken: "In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust / Bringing rain" (lines 394–95).

The final piece to this Arthurian puzzle is the Fisher King himself: "I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the
arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?" (424–26) One of several nautical images, this
is the most direct reference (outside of Eliot's footnotes) to the legendary figure of the wounded king whose
physical healing will help heal the land itself. Reshaped through medieval French and British writers, this
figure had become associated with the Christian notion of a deity whose sacrifice had the capacity to
redeem humankind. Various sources, including Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval and
its Continuations (written by other writers after Chrétien's death), Robert de Boron's Joseph of
Arimathea and Merlin, and a massive compendium known as the Vulgate Cycle, tell of a fisherman
revealed to be in fact a wounded king. And, in some versions, the latest descendent in a long line of Grail
Keepers. Through misadventure or battle—and, in one version, self-mutilation out of grief—this Fisher
King (sometimes identified as "Bron") was pierced through the thighs. In other versions the king is not
wounded per se, but suffers from some unknown ailment. He tells the grail knight Perceval that his
rejuvenation depends on Perceval performing a number of tasks. These include atoning for past sins,
mending a broken sword, and asking required Grail questions, including "Whom does the Grail serve?"
Though Perceval falls short of completing these tasks—for example, mending the sword only partially—he
perseveres. He eventually gains spiritual redemption for past sins, mends the broken sword entirely, and
helps to restore the king's health. Some versions say the restoration happens when Perceval slays the villain
responsible for the Fisher King's grievous wound. Others say the king is healed simply after Perceval asks
the Grail questions. In another version where Perceval is replaced by Galahad, the questing knight heals the
wounded king by applying blood from a Holy Lance.
Though the Fisher King legend has its origins in pagan myth, including various cycles of Celtic oral
literature, the form that is most familiar—and shaped in those sources by Chrétien, de Boron, and the
Vulgate Cycle—is overtly Christian in nature. The Grail itself is said to have caught the blood of Christ (a
motif echoed in late-20th-century films like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), and the healing of the
"king" and subsequent restoration of the land analogous to Christ's resurrection and redemption of
humanity. Eliot, who converted to Christianity in the late 1920s, was already familiar with and intrigued by
the mixed ancestry of the Grail legend—the fertility rites that evoked for him and his contemporaries rich
possibilities of symbolism and imagery.
For proof that Eliot did, at least in literary (if not in personal, spiritual) terms, embrace the Christian
interpretation of the legend, the final section of The Waste Land is filled with allusions to incidents like
Christ's agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (line 328) and Jesus's journey to Emmaus. The latter incident
is possibly hinted at in the following passage: "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" (lines 360).
Here, the "third" seems to be some divine figure, and the poem itself certainly has its share of those. The
biblical passage in question comes from Luke 24: 13–16, where two men walking along the road to
Emmaus do not initially realize that Jesus, who has just risen from the dead, is walking beside them. In
Eliot's rendition, the identity of the figure is made even more ambiguous by the admission that he—the
speaker—is not sure whether he sees a "man or a woman." While the Grail legend is clearly key in the
poem, who's to say that this figure in a "brown mantle" is not Tiresias, who, after all, was both man and
woman? The ambiguity is appropriate for a poem that has featured a strange assortment of men and women
who blend into each other.
As another indication of Eliot's diverse religious and philosophical source material, the healing ritual that
ends the poem derives from Hindu fables about self-discipline. The meaning of the thunder, according to
Eliot's note in the first published edition, comes from the Brihadaranyaka—Upanishad. "Datta,"
"Dayadhvam," and "Damyata" translate as "Give, sympathize, control." In terms of the ill or neurasthenic
patient motif, this section (lines 400–23) signifies the long-awaited moment where the speaker gains
control, where the "sea [becomes] calm" (421). But it happens only after learning to give of himself and to
sympathize with "each in his prison" (414). Words like blood shaking my heart (line 403), revive (417),
and controlling hands(423) seem to confirm new circulation, new healthy energy, new calm and control. It
is appropriate, then, that the poem ends with "Shantih shantih shantih," which translates as "The peace
which passeth understanding."