The Waste Land is to ‘Dans le Restaurant’ as the oak-tree to the acorn. At its heart is likewise an intense moment of passion, ‘ecstatic or terrible’, now removed into memory; and it operates a similar process of conscious analysis and expansion, to the point at which the objective predicament is resolved into a new order of feeling. There are of course great differences, as between a minor and a major work. In The Waste Land the historical sense is fully developed, so that the poet is struggling to unify a vastly more inclusive and complex sensibility. Moreover, he reaches to a further stage in his development: Phlebas' death by water is no longer the end, but the transition to an order of poetry wholly new in Eliot's work.

To follow out that development, and to read the poem as an organic whole in which ‘What the Thunder Said’ follows from and fulfils the rest, we need to keep our attention upon the poet within the poem.