‘The Waste Land’: a new reading
Embedded in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922)— within all the foreign phrases, mystical chants and obscure allusions, the desert landscapes, urban desolation and godless universe—are six concise, intense, dramatic episodes featuring characters in conflict. Poetically effective and emotionally moving, they are the most striking parts of this difficult poem.
We now know that the speaker in the first episode is Eliot’s ether-sniffing, nervous, neurotic, even crazy wife Vivien. In a series of abrupt questions, she urges him to speak. He remains almost silent; she never stops talking and gets on his nerves:
“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?”
She repeats in poetically effective jagged phrases: bad, speak, what, thinking, noise, wind, know and nothing: the final thematic word. It must have been irritating, then maddening, to hear her meaningless rant all day. He expresses his own accidie, or spiritual emptiness, by mournfully referring to the morbid rats’ alley. No wonder Eliot had a nervous breakdown in Kent in 1921 while writing the poem.
He now repeats “nothing” and emphasises his depressing spiritual void: “On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” She concludes this scene by asking, “What shall we do tomorrow? / What shall we ever do?” In The Great Gatsby (1925) the spoiled and bored Daisy Buchanan echoes these lines by lamenting: “What shall we do with ourselves this afternoon? and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”
An older Cockney woman recalls, in skillfully reported speech (I said, she said, chemist said) and with colloquial grammar, the advice she gave to a younger friend about how to handle her husband. He’s recently been discharged from the World War One army and, after a long separation, is about to come home. During her recollection, the publican announces five times the legal closing time and last chance to order drinks—HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME—suggesting the urgent need to act as well as the threat of impending death.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did. I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set. . . .
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said. . . .
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. . . . .
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.
The older woman warns Lil that her sexually starved husband will leave her if she doesn’t shape up. Instead of getting the desperately needed false teeth Lil, who’d nearly perished after giving birth to her fifth child, used the money to have an abortion. The operation depressed her, and ruined her health and her appearance. It’s all very well for her friend, using the quaint word “antique,” to give well-intentioned but offensive advice. But poor Lil, who doesn’t seem to know how to use or get contraceptives, though she could get abortion pills, is trapped between bitter alternatives. (Her crucial problem is explained in parentheses.) She could have acquired new teeth or got rid of her child; she could now refuse her husband’s sexual demands or risk his rejection or another abortion. Eliot satirises both the officious and the ignorant working-class women, but his own domestic problems are just as agonising as theirs and his sex life even worse.
In only eight lines, Eliot portrays the setting, character and speech of a Greek businessman, whose homosexuality is acceptable in the Levant but a criminal offence in England:
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
Modern London becomes the ghostly Baudelairean city; the brown fog suggests a dubious character and “Mr.” gives him an inappropriate formal title. Ironically, Eugenides in Greek means well-born. Like the famous Smyrna figs, the currants in his pocket are either a snack or sample of his fruity exports. Ci.f. stands for carriage, insurance, freight, a shipping agreement in which the seller covers the cost of sending the goods to London. The documents of ownership are handed to the buyer in exchange for a bank draft payable on sight.
Despite his grubby, unshaven appearance, the Greek invites the speaker— in colloquial French, not his native language— to a meal and a squalid escape from the city, to two huge luxurious Victorian hotels. The Cannon Street Hotel in the City of London is next to the Cannon Street railway station, the main terminus for travellers to the Continent. The Metropole Hotel on the Brighton seafront was notorious for sexual assignations, as described in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. In 1922, the year The Waste Land was published, the Turks massacred many of the Anatolian Greeks and drove them out of Smyrna, a Mediterranean port on the west coast of Turkey, ending the Greco-Turkish War that had begun in 1919.
Once again, Eliot — who was straining to maintain his social position with a lamentably low income as a bank clerk — describes the sad and meagre life of the impoverished lower classes, and portrays their squalid and unsatisfying sex life. The typist returns home, clears away her messy breakfast and gathers her undies, poetically illuminated “by the sun’s last rays.”
the expected guest,
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defense;
His vanity requires no response
And makes a welcome of indifference. . . .
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stair unlit.
The sexually aggressive but pimply suitor has a menial job, yet bears the self-regard of a lower-class upstart, like a war profiteer and industrial nouveau-riche from West Yorkshire. The meagre tinned meal consumed, the lover takes advantage of the young woman’s weariness and decides to pounce. Though not at all attracted to the lubricious man, the woman (not described) permits him to explore her body. He doesn’t at all care that she lacks feeling and, now sexually excited, hastens to satisfy himself. He gives her an unpromising farewell kiss and, groping his way down the stairs, just as he’s groped her body, descends into the darkness of his private hell.
Miserable himself, Eliot will not allow his characters to have a gratifying sex life. Alone in her flat and unfulfilled by the encounter that seems to end their brief affair, she echoes his vanity by looking in the mirror and adjusting her messed up hair. Knowing there’s no future with him, she’s glad he’s gone and their sexual contretemps is finished. In one of Eliot’s most effective allusions, he quotes Oliver Goldsmith’s lines that shed light on her misery and tragedy: “When lovely woman stoops to folly / And finds too late that men betray / What charm can soothe her melancholy, / What art can wash her guilt away?”
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass;
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces around her room again, alone
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
She’s now alone again, confined in solitude. She tries to forget him and comfort herself with a modern, mechanical, even robotic gesture, and seeks the unavailing solace of music.
Echoing Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland,”: “Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them,” Eliot, in a mock-heroic comparison, describes the bold boating couple on the English river. The sexually acrobatic young woman manages to copulate in a canoe without tipping over into the water:
“Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart,
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised ‘a new start.’
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
The carbuncular young man promised nothing; this man makes false promises. He is emotionally upset; the woman, ignoring her false hope and inevitable rejection, is apparently stoical and indifferent. Humble people expect nothing.
All these satiric scenes take place in London, and portray romantic misery and sordid sex. Cutting to the heart of the poem and concentrating on these vivid dramatic episodes—the crazed wife, depressed Cockney, Levantine homosexual, abandoned typist and sexual canoeist—provides a new and more interesting way to read The Waste Land.
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had thirty-three books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway came out in November 2025. The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.
