Miller observes that if "we follow out all the implications of Eliot's evocation of Whitman's "Lilacs" at this critical moment in "The Waste Land" we might assume it has its origins, too, in a death, in a death deeply felt, the death of a beloved friend"..."But unlike the Whitman poem, Eliot's "Waste Land" has no retreat on the 'shores of the water,' no hermit thrush to sing its joyful carol of death." He further adds that "It seems unlikely that Eliot's long poem, in the form in which it was first conceived and written, would have been possible without the precedence of Whitman's own experiments in similar forms."