The work opens with the burial of the dead in a harsh spring that mixes memory and desire, depicting a modern wasteland where the sun beats down on stony rubbish and dead trees offer no shelter. Madame Sosostris reads Tarot cards, warning of death by water, while crowds flow over London Bridge in the brown fog of a winter dawn, trapped in mechanical routines of modern existence.
The second section shifts to an opulent yet suffocating interior where a wealthy woman's nerves are bad, juxtaposed with a coarse conversation in a London pub about a husband returning from the war and the grim realities of working-class survival. The urban landscape pulses with alienation, from the banks of the Thames to the mechanical encounter between a bored typist and a small house agent's clerk, witnessed by the blind prophet Tiresias.
Water becomes a central motif, absent in the dry, sterile landscape but present in the death of Phlebas the Phoenician, whose bones are picked by underwater currents. The final section evokes a difficult journey through mountainous rock where there is no water, only dry sterile thunder and the haunting presence of an extra walker on a white road.
Amid falling towers of ancient and modern cities, the thunder speaks three commands: give, sympathize, and control. The poem concludes with fragments shored against personal and cultural ruin, ending with the traditional Upanishadic peace that surpasses understanding.
