The last stanza of the final section, "What the Thunder Said," is deeply elusive, as the speaker pulls together some of the "heap of broken images" he mentioned in the poem's second stanza to reference renewal and rebirth.

The speaker is fishing as the stanza opens, the desert behind him. He has found some water, which is an idea reinforced by the quote from the children's nursery rhyme "London Bridge is Falling Down" (London Bridge goes over a river, the Thames). Western civilization might be collapsing, but there is still water, which represents nature and life, to be found amid the fragments of civilization.

Eliot's speaker alludes to several of these nourishing fragments, all of which share the common theme of survival. First, he alludes to the medieval poet Arnaut Daniel from Dante's Purgatorio:

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.

Quando fiam uti chelidon.