Along with broad social issues, Eliot's multiple speakers bring in numerous personal reflections and memories. These emphasize the individual effects of the larger situation and convey the difficulty of maintaining individual hope while surrounded by greater devastation. Eliot often exposes this disconnect by the juxtaposition of images and myths traditionally associated with life and rebirth—spring, flowers, birds, rivers, and so forth—with their unfortunate counterparts in modernity. For example, the poem begins,

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land . . .

This opening is generally understood to refer to Chaucer's prologue to The Canterbury Tales, which presents April in a different (and more familiar) light: as the beginning of spring, growth, blossoming, and sweetness. Eliot's incarnation, however, has shifted the vision; it has become "cruel" to grow live things from dead ground—as in a land marred by the Great War and all its futile and horrifying death.

Throughout the poem, such images and allusions serve to reveal the disillusioned state of the world in modernity, particularly the failure of religion (or faith in any such higher order) to console after such a cataclysmic event as World War I.