“
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
VoiceThe Waste Land · II. A Game of Chess
II. A Game of Chess
Section 2 of 5
In a richly decorated room, a neurotic woman demands conversation from her silent companion. The atmosphere is oppressive, theatrical. Amid fragments of speech and allusion, this Shakespeare quotation surfaces — Ariel's song about a drowned father whose bones become coral and eyes become pearls.
Why This Matters
Shakespeare's Ariel song from The Tempest, repurposed as a haunting refrain — death as sea-change, not extinction.
death/rebirthallusiontransformation
The Lady of Shalott
John William Waterhouse, 1888 · Public Domain