Saint Mary Woolnoth

St Mary Woolnoth

The journey through the waste land that is the unreal city continues on the route Eliot would have taken to work in Lombard Street: from London Bridge station, over the Bridge itself, then along King William Street. 

His comparison of the office clerks to the Dead (I had not thought death had undone so many) is reinforced by the description of the sound of the bells of Saint Mary Woolnoth (a church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the early 18th Century):

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine

Office workers would be expected to be at their desks by 9.15 am: the doom-laden language suggests the deadly-dull pointlessness of their work and their lives.

Eliot will return to real-life experience of walking in city of  London in The Fire Sermon, in which the church of St Magnus Martyr provides a welcome spiritual relief.

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