“Equi-tone” or equal tone suggests that Mrs. Equitone says everything with an unchanging voice: what she says does not matter to her, as the forces of destiny spin our fates without caring too much about us.

And, of course, she has that bad cold.

From another angle, Christopher Ricks sees the equi-tone as a way of hiding Mrs Equitone’s deft little put-downs: “So gloved.” (T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, Faber, p. 186)

Another line from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, translated as “Desolate and empty the sea.”

There is a well established line of criticism that reads this as an allusion in opposition to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the draft of The Waste Land Eliot used a passage from Conrad’s story as the epigraph.

In Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men published in 1925, three years after “The Waste Land,” he used The Heart of Darkness to craft the epigraph:

“Mistah Kurtz — he dead”

A likely allusion to the this famous painting, Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo Da Vinci:

And, of course, to the sea rocks on the tarot card.

Dealing another card, the femme fatale.

Belladonna is Latin for “beautiful lady”. It is also a poisonous flower. The name of the plant comes from the practice of women using small doses of the poison as a cosmetic to dilate their pupils.

A pack of Tarot cards, used for reading the future. Wicked has the double meaning of ‘evil, bewitched’ and ‘awesome’.

The hyacinth is a male symbol, which makes the combination of hyacinth and girl intriguing. Sexual ambiguity! Dun dun DUN…

In drafts of The Waste Land, the hyacinth garden is linked with the drowned Phoenician sailor (see section IV):

“Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?”

I remember
The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes! [Boldfaced words omitted in final version]

The sailor, in turn, has been linked by some critics/biographers (first by John Peter in a controversial 1952 essay) with Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal, who died in World War I. Eliot had dedicated his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, to Verdenal and added a Dante quotation beneath the dedication in the 1925 edition: “Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.” In other words, there’s a line of criticism that views The Waste Land as in part an elegy for the poet’s dead male friend, and reads a homoerotic charge into the “hyacinth girl” passage.

Biblical allusion to Isaiah 32:2.

And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

Eliot may be saying that the world is filled with death and pain akin to a desert that yields no sweet relief from its hardships. We might connect this to Tantalus of Roman mythology, who was sentenced to spend eternity in the underworld sitting in a pool of water that would dry up whenever he would attempt to drink from it, with a fruit tree above him that would retreat every time he’d try to eat.

One of the most famous lines of the poem, it was later alluded to in the title of Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust.

It evokes the fear of dying: “dust to dust,” as in the Book of Common Prayer. Eliot probably also has in mind these lines from Tennyson’s Maud: A Monodrama:

Dead, long dead,
Long dead!
And my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head…

In the context of the poem, Eliot may be getting at a more metaphorical kind of death, the “death in life” that is profound grief or burnt-out sexual passion.

Countess Marie Larisch had a difficult marriage and enjoyed her time away from the Count. In her memoirs My Past she wrote of spending time reading and writing away from her husband in their Bavarian mountain home Villa Valerie (in the town of Rottach-Egern, 54 km south of Munich).

Nice digs, ja?