The exasperation that is Eliot

R.A. Bella has a great post looking at some of the themes of Eliot's "The Waste Land":

A prevailant them throughout appears to be death, and life that cycles through death. Symbols of life are breeding lilacs(known for passion, beauty, deise, promise and life), summer, rain, rivers, lakes(all water representative of life) Where he writes," I will show you fear in a handful of dust, he is stating that life is fleeting, he writes again and again of life coming out of death. He writes of the warning of fleeting lives as he writes," Fresh blows the wind to the homeland; my Irish child, why are you waiting?He gives another symbol of life, the hyacinth girl. The line below says that 'waste and empty is the sea' Since the water represents life I am thinking that he is saying that life is empty when caught up in the past.