"Among many haunting lines in T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land", according to interestingliterature.com, this one "stands out for its sinister suggestions of death, mortality, and the ultimate futility of all human endeavour. If the poem as a whole seems to offer a vision of civilisation as a pile of textual rubble or ruins, with all of human achievement in literature, religion, and myth reduced to those 'fragments' which the speaker has 'shored', then "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" does the same for the human species."
The 'handful of dust', to which the mysterious and elusive speaker of Eliot's lines refers, and which Faulkner echoes, is often interpreted as a reference to human mortality. In the Book of Genesis, God says to Adam, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." And at Anglican church burials, the words "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" mark the return of the human body to that state from which, according to the Bible, it originally came.
© Haydn Thompson 2021