Plot Note: The poem’s narrator is a rootless European in a state of near insanity. He is writing the poem in an attempt to assert some order in the middle of what he perceives as a world in chaos. The temporal context of the poem is the period immediately following the first World War, but its time scheme is confused because the narrator is an extremely learned man whose mental instability renders him unable to distinguish between what he is experiencing in fact and what he simply remembers from the books he has read. This insight will help clarify much of the poem. Often the narrator is reminded by an actual experience of something he has only known in imagination. Hence, Tiberius and Queen Elizabeth are as "real" to him as the river Thames and the colorful characters along its banks. This is because the "reality" of the poem is a subjective phenomenon deriving from the mind of the narrative persona.

Lines 9-11: The narrator identifies himself as a member of the "lost generation" and a denizen of the cafe society of post-war Europe. 

• He foreshadows the poem’s theme with his frustrated sense that out of a "heap of broken images" something new is struggling to be born ("dull roots with spring rain"; "what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?")

Plot Note: the poet is a lost soul whose own confusion echoes the general breakdown of order following WWI. He is searching for his own sanity, but also for faith in the significance of life itself.

Lines 12-19: The poet’s voice merges with the voice of Marie, a woman to whom he speaks in a cafe.

• This episode establishes another theme of the poem: the breakdown of the distinction between male and female and of the natural cycle of sexual regeneration. (What the poet is looking for is a return to the old cycle of the seasons in which a period of  "drought" is followed by a fertilizing rain. Rain represents loving, and therefore fertilizing, sexuality; dryness represents loveless, and therefore unsatisfying, passion.)

Lines 31-42: This episode is followed by three examples of failed romance, representing the breakdown of the cycle of sexual rejuvenation: a) the Irish sailor from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde; b) Tristan and Isolde from the same opera; c) the "hyacinth girl" in the garden, probably an actual memory from the poet’s past.

Lines 43-59: The poet goes to visit Madame Sostrosis, a fortune-teller who represents the debased condition of religion in the modern world. 

• Although Madame Sostrosis is a charlatan, she uses tarot cards which are themselves the product of centuries of spiritual insight. As a consequence, her prophecy has some truth. It becomes the organizing principle behind the rest of the poem. In her reading she sees: a) the Phoenecian sailor of Book IV; b) Belladonna, the "lady of situations," identified with the woman in the bar in Book II; c) the "man with three staves" who is identified with the Fisher King of Books III and V; d) the "one eyed merchant," identified with Mr. Eugenides, who approaches the poet in Book III; e) crowds of people, like those the poet passes on the streets of London and those in his memories of the massive immigration which followed the war; and f) an empty place where the "hanged man" should be, a reference to the incident in Book V in which Christ’s disciples fail to recognize him on the road to Emmaus. (The "absent martyr" is another reference to the general loss of religious conviction that is the subject of the poem.)

Plot Note: During his wandering in the vicinity of the Thames River, the narrator experiences a series of visions and actual phenomenon which roughly correspond to Madame Sostrosis’ prophecies.

Lines 60-76: The narrator emerges from the reading-room into the foggy light of a London morning. He sees a crowd of people crossing London Bridge. But in his distracted state, he imagines that they are the dead souls who haunt Dante’s Inferno, or figures out of one of the urban nightmares of Baudelaire ("unreal city"). He singles out one phantom in particular, a man named Stetson, whom he mistakes for a fallen comrade from WWI. In his temporal confusion, however, the narrator cannot distinguish WWI from the Punic Wars (between Rome and Carthage), a conflict he may have read about but obviously could not have experienced. The incident establishes the universality of human experience and the interchangeability of all wars.

Book II: A Game of Chess

Plot note: The function of this book is to contrast the legendary splendor of the ancient world with the corruption of the modern era. The book also establishes the eternal significance of the mating ritual. In the modern world, however, this ritual has become a sick reflection of the practices associated with Cleopatra and other famous temptresses of antiquity.

Lines 77-111: The poet describes the splendor of an ancient palace presided over by a beautiful queen, probably Cleopatra as Shakespeare imagined her in his Antony and Cleopatra. ("The chair she sat in like a burnished throne.")

Lines 112-173: The poet overhears a conversation between two crude women in a.modern pub. The women are discussing an illicit affair that has left one of them pregnant during her husband’s service in the war. The conversation reinforces the theme of the poem: the breakdown of moral order and  the absence of revitalizing sexuality. Their conversation makes clear that there is nothing in the modern world to inspire husbands and wives to remain faithful to one another or to bring healthy new lives into the world.. The women in the bar are both literally and and metaphorically "faithless". Their husbands are just back from a horribly destructive conflict; and one of the women is trying to abort a child that has clearly been conceived outside of marriage.

• The pregnant woman is the "lady of situations" from Madame Sostrosis’ prophecy.

Plot Note: For the sake of clarity we might understand Book II as a sequence of recollections and impressions in the narrator’s mind. Walking into a tawdry bar, he is reminded of what he has read about more splendid times. And as he sits in the early morning darkness of the place he overhears a conversation between two "war widows." The interchange attracts his attention because he is thinking of the prophecy he has just heard and is trying to determine whether his own experiences will affirm or contradict it. However, because the narrator is mentally unstable, instead of ‘hearing" a conversation or "remembering" something he has read, he "becomes" the object of his reflection, actually transporting himself back to the palace of Cleopatra in Egypt, and later identifying himself completely with the two women whose conversation he overhears. This is an important idea in the poem, and it helps to explain the work’s narrative confusion. The poem is an object created by a consciousness that is itself in fragments, unsure of its identity, place, or relationship to time. Frequently in the poem, the poet achieves a moment of psychological balance by becoming someone else, like Tiresias (Book III), or Cleopatra (Book II),.or a disciple of Christ on the road to Emmaus (Book V).

Plot Note: The poet emerges from the bar and walks along the banks of the Thames. In crumpled cigarette packages and empty liquor bottles he sees the evidence of many late night romantic interludes beside the waters of the river. This observation reminds him of other, more glamorous, romances he has read about in the great poets of the Elizabethan renaissance.

Lines 175-186: The poet contrasts the ugliness of the modern Thames with the beautiful river of Sir Edmund Spenser’s "Prothalamion." In Spenser’s poem, the river provides the backdrop for a celebration of a marriage. By contrast, in the modern world, the riverbank is a profane site where "the loitering heirs of city directors" satisfy their passions and then depart, leaving no address."

Lines 187-207: The poet identifies himself with the Fisher King of the legend of the Holy Grail. While "fishing in the dull canal’ (the Thames) he witnesses several further episodes of loveless passion. Finally, he watches as Sweeny, an embodiment of the debased condition of modern man, takes a taxi into town to meet Mrs. Porter, a faithless modern wife.

• The sound of birds (‘Twit twit twit’) reminds the poet of the legend of Philomela, a virtuous woman from mythology who, unlike Mrs. Porter,  refused to submit to an aggressor and was raped ("so rudely forced"). The incident provides another example of the contrast between idealized virtue and modern depravity.

Plot Note: We might think of the Fisher King as an actual fisherman the poet passes as he walks along the riverbank. In his confusion, however, the poet associates this figure with the hero of the grail legend, the wounded King of a barren land, and with the martyred Christ, who was also a "fisher of men." The Fisher King is also the "man with three staves" of Madame Sostrosis’ prediction.

Lines 207-215: At noon, a merchant from Smyrna approaches the narrator and makes a homosexual advance upon him. The merchant is further evidence of the decline of the modern age and is identified with "the one-eyed merchant" of Madame Sostrosis prophecy.

Plot Note: Convinced that he has seen all of these things before, the narrator merges his personality with that of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Greek legend. Tiresias was also a man who had "seen it all." But he represents superior insight and spiritual awareness rather than the mundane cynicism of the narrator or the quack spiritualism of Madame Sostrosis. Tiresias also embodies the theme of sexual ambiguity implicit in Book III; and he provides a universalizing point of reference for the narrator’s observations of modern life. His presence in the poem encourages us to regard the things he describes as universal elements of the human condition rather than as isolated phenomenon.

Lines 215-255: Tiresias  (the narrator) watches as a "young man carbuncular" carries on a sordid affair with a young typist. The affair is another example of the loveless passion that Buddha warned against in his "fire sermon," from which the title of Book III is derived. When their exercise has ended, the lovers part, and the woman places a record on the gramophone in her apartment. The relationship provides another example of the contrast between an idealized, poetic love and love as it occurs in the modern world.

Lines 255-290: Standing on the street below the typist’s window, the poet hears the music from her gramophone and looks across the Thames, comparing what he sees to the image of the Thames as it appears in history and literature.

• He contrasts the oily, modern river, crowded with industrial barges, to the Thames of the age of  Elizabeth I (1558-1603) as it is appears in Froude’s biography of the "virgin queen."

Lines 291-305: The strains of the music remind the poet of fragments from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, an opera about the last days of the world.

• Each fragment of song is about a woman (the three Thames-Daughters) who has been violated, used as an object of pleasure rather than love.
• Each is a further example of the general pattern of lovelessness and self-indulgence, which the poet perceives as the nature of human relations.
• The section closes with a longing reference to Augustine ("to Carthage then I came’) who was saved from sensuality by his discovery of Christ. Several other religious references emphasize the spiritual decline of the world.

Plot Note: Wandering in imagination, the narrator receives a mental picture of a Phoenecian sailor drowned beneath the the sea, his dead body tossed around in perpetual cycles by the currents of a whirlpool. The impression probably comes from a news report that the poet remembers as he reflects on the significance of the Tarot reading earlier in the day. The sailor is a symbol of the futility of Capitalism (the Phoenecians were famous merchants) and is also associated with the drowned sailor of Madame Sostrosis’ prophecy.

Lines 312-321: The poet describes his vision of Phlebas the Phoenecian, who has been dead "a fortnight."

Book V: What the Thunder Said

Plot Note: In fantasy, and in an ever-declining mental state, the poet imagines himself one of the disciples of Christ, watching as his master undergoes betrayal, crucifixion, and, perhaps, resurrection. In the poet’s mind, the betrayal of Christ functions as a metaphor for the general disruption of the natural order and as an explanation for the  absence of spiritual nourishment (cf. the absence of rain, of love, and of fertility).

Lines 320-366: The poet describes the Garden of Gesthemane and the betrayal of Christ. In his typical manner, he presents the scene from the perspective of a participant engaging in an act of recollection rather than as an authority who has merely learned about an event at second hand ("After the torchlit red on sweaty faces").

Lines 330-366: The poet "remembers" an episode along the road to Emmaus when the resurrected Christ may have appeared to him and his fellow disciples as a hooded and mysterious figure.

• it is significant that the poet/disciple does not recognize Christ when he appears ("Who is the third who walks beside you?). The theme of the poem is the absence of spiritual consolation.

Plot Note: As the poet continues to degenerate mentally, the associations within his poem become increasingly incoherent and complex.

Lines 365-377: In the poet’s imagination, the road to Emmaus becomes combined with the image of a highway leading out of the war-ravaged territories of Eastern Europe. The poet confuses the sound of airplanes overhead with the cries of mothers who have lost their children ("murmer of maternal lamentation"). The imagery of the poem becomes hallucenogenic and apocalyptic, suggesting mutation, disorder, and hopeless despair ("bats with baby faces, ... crawled head downward down a broken wall").

Lines 388-400: Standing before a ruined cathedral (perhaps a bomb site left over from the war), the poet concludes that he is at the gates of the Castle Perilous, where the questing knights of Arthurian legend prepared to approach to the Holy Grail. But the chapel has been destroyed. It is a "decayed hole among the mountains."

Lines 400-424: As thunder echoes overhead, the poet imagines that he hears the voice of God telling him what he must do to find the Holy Grail ("Then spoke the thunder").

• The thunder seems to announce the traditional Hindu/Buddhist/Christian  injunction against surrendering to the senses and ignoring the spiritual dimension of human life. The thunder commands the poet to "GIVE of himself," to "SYMPATHIZE with others," and to "CONTROL his passions."

Lines 424-435: As the poet fades into madness, he struggles to find in his poetry some source of order that might satisfy his desire for religious conviction. ("These fragments I have shored against my ruins.") But he disintegrates emotionally before he has the opportunity to reflect upon the message of the thunder or to arrive at spiritual insight. Ironically, the poet’s last lines, "shantih, shantih, shantih" (which translate roughly as "the peace that surpasses understanding") are, by the end of his poem, the incoherent ravings of a lunatic rather expressions of the wisdom the poet has been struggling to acheive. The poet finds peace by losing himself to madness rather than by finding peace in God.