Eliot's poem mixes the familiar and the unfamiliar in its depiction of a sterile land, blighted by war and decay. In the familiar "matter of Britain," the Arthurian legends, the wasteland is an obstacle on the way to the grail. See Browning's "Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (Norton 2B 1367-1373) for a Victorian representation of the wasteland which in many ways anticipates Eliot's.

The five sections of the poem are "The Burial of the Dead," "A Game of Chess," "The Fire Sermon," "Death by Water," and "What the Thunder Said." Consider the relationship between the titles and the matter of each section--an often elliptical relationship. What do the juxtapositions of, say, the "Shakespeherian Rag" and "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME," in "A Game of Chess," suggest?

Leaving the separate sections aside, one might also consider the litany of failed or debased seductions and even implicit rapes that punctuate the poem. Can we make connections between these and the similar failure in "The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?

The poem moves from continental Europe to England and finally to India. What, if anything, does each of these places seem to stand for in the poem, and why?

The poem ends with an incantatory prayer for peace: "Shantih shantih shantih." Is this resolution achieved or just asserted? That is, can we see the poem in the tradition of Donne or Hopkins, as moving through a "dark night of the soul," and coming out with renewed faith, or does it simply allude to this tradition without itself enacting it?