The Waste Land

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot takes his name by an Anglican service and is composed of four vignettes each one from a different speaker. The first one is an autobiographical one from an aristocratic woman’s childhood, where she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian which in that moment was a big deal. The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker tries to show the reader something different from the shadow in the morning and the one at evening. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a populated by ghosts of the dead. And he confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a famous line, accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins.