I had not thought death had undone so many

 

 

We are now in modern London, the "unreal city" of dirty brown fog. Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank in the City, and here he describes the morning commute to the office. He compares the office workers to the dead crossing the River Acheron into Hell in Dante's Inferno:

          And there, behind it, marched so long a file

          Of people, I would never have believed

          That death could have undone so many souls.

This section of the poem starts with a depiction of the soulless tedium of modern life and work, before returning to the opening imagery of burial and resurrection, but in a more violent and gruesome variation.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell claims to have inspired this imagery. In his autobiography, he writes:
"After seeing troop trains depart from Waterloo, I used to have strange visions of London as a place of unreality. I used in imagination to see the bridges collapse and sink, and the whole great city vanish like a morning mist. Its inhabitants began to seem like hallucinations...I spoke of this to T. S. Eliot, who put it into The Waste Land."

John Singer Sargent, Gassed


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