‘“Where all the waters meet”: Seas Lakes Rivers in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry.’

Sea-, river-, and other waterscapes incessantly flow in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, marking its most meaningful moments. Their sources are: geographical/topographical (New England Atlantic coasts, Mississippi-Missouri and Thames rivers); (auto-)biographical; literary (Holy Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, J. Conrad); mythical (Ulysses, the Fisher King, the Grail cycle, Norse mythology, Wagner’s Tetralogy); religious and mystic (Bhagavad-Gita, Upanishads, cult of the Virgin Mary); symbolical and metaphorical (voyage of human life); psychoanalytical (sea as place of metamorphosis, concealment, loss, temptation, recognition, self-recovery and re-integration); occult, esoteric and initiatory (Tarots symbolism). What is peculiarly remarkable is that Eliot’s poetic journey starts by the sea shore (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), and concludes by a spring (“Little Gidding” V), thus symbolically reversing the natural course of water, and emblematizing the poet’s own life and experience, as in his famous line “In my beginning is my end”.