The Fire Sermon

The third part of the poem is named after a speech delivered by the Buddha to his followers. Everything is on fire, he said, "Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of delusion; with sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure and despair."

We must put aside lust, hatred and delusion if we are to escape from suffering and samsara, the otherwise endless cycle of life, death and rebirth.

In this part, we are taken on a journey down the River Thames to the sea, through the moral waste land of modern London, but also through time and space.

• We begin in a meadow by the side of the Thames. It is littered with empty bottles and cigarette ends, left behind by young people after an al fresco party.
• In stanza 2, the Fisher King's voice is heard from a rat-infested canal beside a gasworks, where sex-workers (Mrs Porter and her daughter) ply their trade.
• In stanza 3 we hear birdsong, reminding us of the story of Philomela in Part 2.
• In the City itself, the speaker is propositioned by a middle-eastern businessman, a reincarnation of Phlebas the Phoenician in the next part.
• Tiresias, the mythological prophet who has been both man and woman, watches sympathetically as a typist has unsatisfactory sex with her boyfriend in her untidy flat.
• An interlude at London Bridge, where the music and chatter from a pub, and the beauty of a church, provide a brief respite from all this lust and delusion.
• Further eastwards into the oil and tar of the industrial part of the river. We are transplanted to Elizabethan times, where the queen flirts with her favourite nobleman.
• We hear the voices of three nymphs, the Thames maidens, who speak of their various unhappy sexual experiences. We travel down the Thames estuary to Margate, where the third nymph expresses her hopelessness.
• Sudden cut to North Africa. St Augustine prays to be rescued from his own lust.

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