A handful of dust

The speaker in this section of the poem seems vaguely threatening, and the repetition of shadow...this red rock turns an apparently friendly invitation into something quite disturbing.

The handful of dust recalls the story of the Sibyl from the epigraph to the poem. Apollo, god of prophecy, offered the Sibyl anything she wished in return for sleeping with him. The Sibyl picked up a handful of sand, and asked for as many years of life as she had grains of sand in her hand; unfortunately, she forgot to ask for eternal youth: so she lived for many centuries, all the time withering away with age, but unable to die.

The fear Eliot refers to is the horror of witnessing the relentless decline of civilisation while unable to do anything about it.

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