The End of The Waste Land: Hope for Our Voyage

The last two parts of The Waste Land are called Death by Water and What the Thunder Said. The second to last section is the shortest of all because, perhaps, Eliot despises this kind of death more than all others. Death by Water simply narrates the story of Phlebas the Phoenician, a sailor who got drained by a current in the ocean and killed. I believe Eliot despises this kind of death because he describes Phlebas as once handsome and tall, but now simply dead.

I think the last section, What the Thunder Said, is one of the most important parts of the poem. Here, Eliot describes and combines deaths by water and by fire. As Juan Mauricio Venegas said in his blog, I think fire might represent spontaneous, and passionate humans, while water represents calm humans that allows the fire to stop and come back some other time. Hope is also very important in the last part of the poem. When Eliot tells the story of a voyage through a mountain with no water, I believe the water represents hope. 

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

This relates to modern society where all humans want to get to the top of the mountain, but if they don't have any water they won't get anywhere. Therefore, I believe that indirectly Eliot is trying to tell us that we always need hope to achieve our goals.