The Waste Land

Section III “The Fire Sermon” of The Waste Land by Eliot talks about how this is taken from a sermon that Buddha in which he encourages people to give up earthly passion and how to seek freedom from earthly things. This leads to sexual encounters and a religious confrontation. The section starts up in a scene in which rats and garbage are surrounding the speaker who was fishing. The speaker as the poem tells us is then propositioned by Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris’s tarot pack. Eugenides invites the speaker to go with him to a hotel known as a meeting place for homosexual trysts. Later on in the story the speaker proclaims himself to be Tiresias, which was a figure from classical mythology which had both female and male features that at the same time is blinded but can “see” into the future. The speaker is observing a young typist who is waiting for her lover a dull and some type of arrogant clerk. The woman allows the clerk to have something with her. After the clerk leaves the typist thinks the whole thing between them was over. There are some moments of tranquility in the poem such as the description of the interior of the church, the Thames.