Reading The Waste Land

When I first looked at the poem "The Waste Land" I saw that it was about fifteen pages, which allowed me to assume that I would easily understand the poem. From my prior experience with poetry I assumed that typically the longer the poem, the more developed the ideas are. I thought that fifteen pages was definitely long enough for me to develop a solid understanding of the poem.

My first reading of the poem literally left me squinting my eyes at the pages with a very confused expression on my face. I have never read any of Eliot's work, and I was very, very confused. I think my first mistake was assuming that the poem was being spoken by the same narrator; then I realized that even each section wasn't being spoken by the same narrator. After I realized that there is more than one speaker in each section, things started to become a tiny bit clearer; not much, mind you.

Section 1 seems to be one of the less confusing parts of Section 1. I believe that the narrator is the woman named Marie. My first thought of when she says "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm; aus Litauen, echt deutsch"(Lines 12-130), is that it may have something to do with a war going on. I thought that the only reason why someone would claim to be a different race would be because a war is underway and one does not want to be associated with the wrong side. I think this would also explain why Marie is reminescing about her carefree childhood with her cousins, now she is under stress because of political turmoil. There are also many references to soldiers and war throughout the rest of the poem, which causes me to think this.

The theme that I find interesting in the poem is that of sex, which in this poem seems like a sad, detached act rather than a passionate act of love. In "A Game of Chess" sex is almost made into something that is expected of a wife; love, or even an emotional connection doesn't necessarily come along with that, and Lil is mocked by the other women for not being able to provide her husband with that because of her deteriorating appearance. Sex is also made into something that is required of a woman to give to her partner in Section 3, when the man proceeds to have sex with the typist although she is clearly uninterested. We discussed in class whether or not this could be considered rape, and I believe that although this doesn't exactly consitute the technical definition of rape, to me it seems obvious that this encounter was not the first of its kind. It seems to me that maybe in the beginning it was more aggressive and violent, and the smug attitude of the man makes me think that he believes he has conquered her because she no longer fights back.

So far these are the only thoughts that I have that actually have some evidence to back them up, maybe with further discussion I can understand the poem better.