Part I
Lines 35 - 41

The Hyacinth Girl

Below is a piece by Eliot where he is reminiscing about his student days in Paris:

I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.

The hyacinth is a male symbol (see myth of Hyacinthus)

The Exploring The Waste Land site has a poetic translation of Ovid's Hyacinthus transform'd into a Flower from Metamorphoses, Book X. It was

Translated into English verse under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, William Congreve and other eminent hands.

The lilac also is a male symbol (due to its form). Thus we have a connection from these lines, where Eliot remembers a sublime moment with a friend in the hyacinth garden, to lines 1 through 3, where Eliot laments the lilac season which reminds him of the loss of this friend. We are brought from lamentation to ecstatic remembrance and then back to lamentation again immediately in line 42 ("Desolate and empty the sea").

But other than the symbolism of the hyacinth is there any reason that we should believe that Eliot is remembering a male friend? We have the following to lead us to this conclusion:

• From Ariel's song in The Tempest. - the pearls are for the drowned man undergoing the sea change. The pearls are thus related to the drowned Phoenician Sailor. See also Lines 46 through 48
• In the deleted section of Lines 124 and 125 (see draft) the hyancith garden is remembered along with pearls being his eyes. In the hyancith garden was the hyancith girl. But we are reading "his eyes".

Maybe in reading "hyacinth girl" we should put the emphasis on "girl" instead of "hyacinth" ("They called me the hyacinth girl").