The Cycles of Arcadia
First of all, the album itself tells us: “The cycle must end.”
Making an album is, in many ways, a repetition - returning to the same emotions, themes, and wounds, with only subtle variations each time. Even in Arcadia feels like the final iteration of that process: the version of the cycle where it finally reaches its end.
Vessel wakes on the shoreline of the Waste Land and moves through the cycle one last time. Song by song, he experiences joy and grief, love and loss, happiness and heartbreak. He revisits it all - not to escape it, but to accept his fate and learn how to live with the memories.
Eventually, he drifts back to the shoreline of the Waste Land once more. But this time, something changes. With the breakdown that closes the album - Infinite Baths - the cycle doesn’t restart. It breaks.
What makes Even in Arcadia a cycle?
There is so much to unpack in The Waste Land that I want to focus on three things in particular: why it functions as a cycle, the idea of death by water, and how lines 320–321 of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land connect to Look to Windward.
T.S. Eliot and Vessel share several striking similarities in their writing. Both rely heavily on elemental imagery, draw from multiple religious traditions, and repeatedly use specific words and symbols with consistent meaning. One shared motif is the garden - or imagery closely tied to it - which appears in both Eliot’s poetry and Vessel’s lyrics as a symbol of loss, memory, and a longing for something once whole.
Look to Windward and The Waste Land are directly connected through lines 320–321 of the poem:
“O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”
If you listen closely to the first breakdown of Look to Windward (around 3:37), you can hear Vessel screaming “Death by water.” This is not only the title of the fourth section of The Waste Land, but also the section in which these two lines appear - making the connection explicit rather than coincidental.
The Waste Land begins much like Look to Windward. The people inhabit a place they no longer recognize, moving through life like empty vessels, stripped of purpose. Something within them remembers who they once were and what meaning felt like, yet they have no idea how to reach it again. These same themes echo throughout the lyrics of Look to Windward. In that light, the line “Will you halt this eclipse in me?” can be read as Vessel’s plea - to stop the transformation into one of the hollowed-out masses and instead reclaim his sense of self.
Look to Windward is cyclical in the same way The Waste Land is. The poem tells a story of spiritual desolation and ends with the words “Shanti Shanti Shanti” - an ancient Sanskrit mantra used in both Hinduism and Buddhism to invoke peace, tranquility, and harmony. Shanti means peace, and repeating it three times traditionally signifies peace on three levels: internal, external, and universal. Both religions also believe in rebirth - that the soul moves through multiple lifecycles before reaching its final state.
By ending The Waste Land this way, Eliot frames the poem as a cycle rather than a conclusion. Each cycle is different, just as each rebirth produces a different self. In this context, Shanti Shanti Shanti feels less like resolution and more like resignation - a quiet “better luck next time” before the cycle begins again.
Look to Windward
Vessel on the shore in The Waste Land
Part IV.
Death by water
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land
by: Daniele Castellano
In Greek history and mythology, the idea of an “infinite bath” is less about taking a literal bath and more about rituals involving water. In ancient Greece, washing oneself held symbolic importance and often took place at specific moments, such as after returning home from war, or at sacred locations like the springs of Epidaurus, where washing was part of rituals of healing and renewal.
In Greek mythology, there is no single example of an infinite bath. Instead, there are three different interpretations, each with its own meaning. One example is the eternal punishment of the forty-nine Danaïd daughters who murdered their husbands on their wedding night. Their punishment was to endlessly fill a vessel - sometimes imagined as a bathtub - with water. However, the vessel was cracked, and the water continuously leaked out, making it impossible to ever fill. The only way to escape this punishment was not to complete the task, but to accept it and stop viewing it as a punishment - to accept one’s fate.
Another interpretation of an infinite bath appears in the underworld, through the river Lethe, one of the five rivers of Hades. Lethe possessed the power of forgetting, and it was said that anyone who drank from it would lose all memories, both good and bad. Drinking from Lethe can be seen as an infinite cycle of forgetting, a repeated erasure of the self.
A third example is the ritual bath taken by Hera, the queen of Olympus. Once a year, Hera bathed in the sacred spring of Kanathos in the hope of renewing herself and restoring her relationship with her husband, Zeus. This bath symbolized rebirth and purification, and it was believed to return Hera to a virginal state, despite her previous relationships.
Although Hera’s ritual involves an actual bath and therefore fits the literal definition of an infinite bath, what truly connects all these examples is the idea of repetition. Each one is defined by a loop that can be difficult - or impossible - to escape. The Danaïds endlessly filling the leaking vessel is a loop. Drinking from the river Lethe again and again is a loop. Hera bathing in Kanathos once every year on the same day is also a loop.
An infinite bath, therefore, is not just about water. It represents an endless cycle in which, no matter how much water you pour, drink, or bathe in, you return to the same place again and again. This eternal repetition is the true essence of the infinite bath.
Infinite Baths
The Danaïd daughters filling a
cracked vessel
Godess Hera taking a bath in Kanathos
The river Lethe