There are plenty of other images suggesting sterility in Eliot’s poem: the desert landscape with the ‘red rock’ inspired by the Old Testament books of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes (see ‘The Burial of the Dead’), and the ‘if there were water’ sections from the beginning of ‘What the Thunder Said’, before thunder arrives and rain finally falls again. This myth is bound up with the Holy Grail legend from Arthurian myth, and the journey described in ‘What the Thunder Said’, the final part of The Waste Land, was partly inspired by Grail Quest stories. Only the arrival of a pure-hearted stranger, such as a knight from Arthur’s court, will be able to restore life to the land. The Fisher King is impotent and his land, similarly, is sterile: nothing will grow. Weston’s 1920 book From Ritual to Romance. An important (if last-minute) unifying myth for The Waste Land is the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King: both this myth, and the very title of Eliot’s poem, were suggested to him by Jessie L.
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