I have heard the key

The second DA is taken to mean Dayadhvam (sympathise, be compassionate).

Eliot refers in the Notes to lines from Dante's Inferno: "and below, I heard the exit from the horrible tower being closed up." The speaker is Count Ugolino, who, with his sons, was locked in a tower by his enemy, Archbishop Ruggieri, and allowed to starve to death. In the ninth circle of Hell, Ugolino and Ruggieri are trapped together up to their necks in ice, the hungry Ugolino eternally gnawing at Ruggieri's head.

He also cites the philosopher FH Bradley, who wrote "my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside..."

The third allusion is to Coriolanus, a tragedy by Shakespeare. Coriolanus is a Roman military hero; when his political ambitions are thwarted, he defects to Rome's enemy, the Volscians. He leads a Volscian army against Rome, but is persuaded not to destroy the city by his mother, Volumnia. The Volscians kill him for this perceived betrayal.

We are all, like Ugolino, in prisons from which there appears to be no escape; the quotation from Bradley suggests that these prisons are of our own creation. In other words, we are either unable, or unwilling (or both) to communicate or empathise with others. Coriolanus' brief moment of communion with his mother costs him his life.

Volumnia and Coriolanus

This somewhat pessimistic commentary on the possibility of compassion reflects a major and recurrent theme of the poem, the inability of men and women to communicate and empathise (the "Hyacinth Girl" speaker who could not speak; Why do you never speak; Philomela; Lil and Albert; the typist and the clerk).

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