English 1BH
Study Questions
“The Waste Land”
Please type up your answers to the following two questions in a single document. You will turn
this in at the beginning of class.
1. Finish “The Waste Land” and answer the following questions:
1. The poem paints the picture of a bleak wasteland. What ways does the poem suggest
that people might be able to escape from this wasteland? Or at least, what are they
trying as modes of escape. Give lines to support your arguments.
2. Pick one allusion that Eliot makes in the poem. Explain what it is, why you find it
interesting, and why you think Eliot might have included it in his poem. This does not
have to be a formal argument but just the beginnings of some possible ideas.
Please look over the following questions as you read through the poem. You do not need to type
your answers or turn them in. These questions refer to “The Fire Sermon” until the end of the
poem.
1. In “The Fire Sermon,” what is this disturbing scene about? How do the characters in this
section relate to the characters that we have met so far in the poem?
2. Explain how this “love scene” compares or contrasts to the portrayals of love in
Hemingway, Wells, Lawrence, or Hall.
3. Look for the war imagery in the love scene. Mark out all the words that could be used for
battle.
4. Think about the Buddhist reference to foregoing desire and passion. How would this
resolve some of the problems in the poem? For more information about the Buddhist Fire
Sermon, see: http://buddhism.about.com/od/scriptures/a/FireSermon.htm
5. How do the Christian images in the poem work with these Buddhist images?
6. Who’s Tiresias, and why in the world is he in this lady’s apartment? For more
information about Tiresias, see: http://www.pantheon.org/articles/t/tiresias.html
7. How does the lady feel after her lover leaves? What does she do?
8. In the last section of “The Fire Sermon,” things really begin to fall apart. Who is the
narrator “I” here, and who could be the “he” in the lines, “He wept. He promised a ‘new
start’”
9. Look at the note for Margate Sands. This seems to make the poem more personal. Does
that change our reading of any of these events?
10. Eliot refers to Augustine’s confessions, “To Carthage then I came.” Carthage is the site of
Augustine’s failure to resist temptation. Why does Eliot refer to this moment of
Augustine’s confessions?
11. In Section IV, Eliot refers to Phlebas the Phoenician. How does he relate to the drowned
Phoenician sailor from the tarot cards at the beginning of the poem?
12. In Section V, the footnote explains that the whole section refers to “the betrayal, arrest,
interrogation, and crucifixion of Christ”. What parts add to this allusion?
13. Section 5 also includes a reference to the biblical “Road to Emmaus.” Read that account,
and decide what part of the story Eliot has chosen to include and which parts he seems to
have left out.
14. What do Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Vienna have in common?
15. In lines 378-384, Eliot includes a lot of surreal images. What exactly are we looking at
here?
16. In line 386, Eliot writes that the “grass is singing.” What other singing occurs in the
poem? Any pattern?
17. What role does the rooster play in the biblical story of Christ? How does Eliot distort that
rooster here?
18. Where are The “Ganga” River and the “Himavant” located? Why does Eliot include them
here, and why doesn’t he use their more common names?
19. The thunder speaks one word, DA. What are the three meanings of that word? Look
carefully at the footnote that goes over the allusion to the Upanishads.
20. The last stanza of the poem is a flurry of images. We’ll look at these in class, but what do
you think they all mean, crowded together at the end here?