In this section, Eliot mixes biblical elements from different sources, among which the Bible itself, Ecclesiastes, and Haggard Rider's King Solomon's Mines. The verse cited by Eliot is part of the preacher's picture of the desolation of old age:

Ecclesiastes|12:5: Also [when] they shall be afraid of [that which is] high, and fears [shall be] in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:

And compare also:

Ecclesiastes|12:7: Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

However, Eliot, who had at the time of writing The Waste Land not yet converted himself to the Anglican Church (which he did in 1926), mixes the biblical imagery with other, non-biblical elements from H.Haggard Rider's King Solomon's Mines. In the speech quoted below, Umbopa the Zulu endowes his Western companions with some Zulu-wisdom about life:

"What is life? Tell me, O white men, who are wise, who know the secrets of the world, and the world of stars, and the world that lies above and round the stars; who flash their words from afar without a voice; tell me, white men, the secret of our life- whither it goes and whence it comes!
         "Ye cannot answer; ye know not. Listen, I will answer. Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo, we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the hand with which we hold off death. It is the glowworm that shines in the nighttime and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset." (my italics)

The structure of Eliot's paragraph follows Umbopa's speech; the emptiness of significant meaning that was present in the first section of The Burial of the Dead implies Eliot's "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out if this stony rubbish?", corresponding to Umbopa's question "What is life?". The white men in H.Haggard Rider's novel cannot answer: "Ye cannot answer; ye know not." and neither can the people in Eliot's poem: "You cannot say, or guess". Umbopa then goes on to answer this question ends with "it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset", which recalls Eliot's "Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;" Similar images that refer to African dance rituals occur in Rider's She, to which Eliot seems to refer also among others in the Four Quartets

see also