Born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888, Eliot studied at Harvard and Oxford before abandoning his postgraduate studies at Oxford because he preferred the exciting literary society of London.

Nevertheless, his poetry changed the landscape of Anglophone poetry for good. Even in his most famous poems we can often detect the rhythms of iambic pentameter – that quintessentially English verse line – and in other respects, such as his respect for the literary tradition, Eliot is a more ‘conservative’ poet than a radical. Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. For a more detailed analysis of the closing lines of Eliot’s poem, see here.

What should we make of this assemblage of literary snippets from various periods of history, and from both high and low culture (French poetry, children’s nursery rhymes)? One way of analysing ‘What the Thunder Said’, or the closing lines at any rate, is to posit that the speaker has finally gone completely mad: ‘Hieronymo’s mad againe’, Eliot says, quoting Thomas Kyd. 1587) and finally, the word ‘Shantih’, which Eliot says is roughly equivalent to our phrase ‘the peace which passeth understanding’, repeated three times. ‘What the Thunder Said’ concludes with a collage of quotations from various sources: the nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is falling down’ (suggesting the demise of London as the centre of a vast empire and trading power) Dante’s Purgatorio (‘Then dives him into the fire which refines him’) the Pervigilium Veneris, a Latin poem dating back nearly two thousand years, followed by a Tennyson poem (‘O swallow swallow’) a sonnet by Gerard de Nerval (‘the Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower’) Thomas Kyd’s Elizabethan play The Spanish Tragedy (c. Each of these three commands is meditated on in the lines that succeed it – so, for instance, after ‘DATTA’ we find the question ‘What have we given?’ followed by reference to ‘a moment’s surrender’ – a giving (or giving up) of oneself. It is variously interpreted as datta (‘give’), dayadhvam (‘sympathise’), and damyata (‘control’), taken from the Upanishads, a series of sacred texts important to both Hinduism and Buddhism. The sound of the thunder – DA – is analysed and interpreted in different ways by those who hear it. Then, finally, rain comes to the land, and there is a thunderclap. Can one remain spiritually pure and focused, or will the lure of the body become too strong? We are also in the realms of Arthurian myth here, and the Grail quest: the Chapel Perilous was the place, in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, where Lancelot was tempted – as with ‘The Fire Sermon’, temptation re-emerges as a theme. Shades of the Gothic are introduced here, which are echoed by the bats with the baby faces in the chapel.

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