Eliot takes from James Fraser’s “The Golden Bough” and Jessie L. Weston’s “From Ritual to Romance” myths of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King that mix pagan culture and the Christian faith. The Fisher King’s character, that is the last descendant of the Grail King, appears for the first time in the Arthurian legend by Chretien de Troyes: because of his injury that makes him impotent, his reign is made barren and only a virtuous knight could save the country. The episode of the Smyrna merchant brings to mind the spread of the pagan worship of fertility by Phoenician merchants. The historian Menander talks about Hiram I, King of Tyre, who starts to build the temple of Melqart and Ashtart and he was the first to celebrate Melqart’s awakening. This worship is linked to the magic-agrarian Canaanite rituals that the Phoenicians have spread in North Africa, Sicily, Spain, Cartagena and Malta. In contemporary ages the theme of infertility is taken up by Giuseppe Ungaretti in “Soldati”, in which he describes the man who is living a difficult moment as dry leaves, during the autumn, taken away by the wind.
In contemporary society
The British group Deep Purple resumes the opposition between sterility and fertility, life and death, which Eliot talks about in the first section of his masterpiece. According to the band April is a personal evocation of a beautiful but sad time. Before the blossoming of nature, the empty men without purposes feel their inner sterility in a more and more painful way. “April is a cruel time Even though the sun may shine And world looks in the shade as it slowly comes away Still falls the April rain And the valley's filled with pain” As in The Fire Sermon, where it’s described a squalid sexual encounter, where a woman is represented tired and bored and she’s indifferent to the man’s provocations, in the film “Revolutionary Road” the female protagonist April blames her husband to have oppressed her and destroyed her dreams. She searches happiness in the memories of ancient times.
Also Virginia Woolf gives her representation of water in a section of her “To The Lightshouse”. Here the water has a dynamic movement: the breaking of waves evokes a lot of feelings in the heart of the main character.