The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot's long poem in five sections on a spiritually barren modern world, built from many voices and fragments of myth and literature.

Start reading5 parts, about 3,000 words

Famous lines

• April is the cruellest month, breeding
  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
  Memory and desire, stirring
  Dull roots with spring rain.

  IIn context

  • Nature
  • Time

• What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
  And the dry stone no sound of water.

  IIn context

  • Knowledge

• I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  IIn context

  • Fear

• Unreal City,
  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
  I had not thought death had undone so many.

  IIn context

  • Life & Death

• The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
  Which an age of prudence can never retract
  By this, and this only, we have existed

  In context

  • Courage
  • Risk

• These fragments I have shored against my ruins

  VIn context

Contents

1. IThe Burial of the Dead
2. IIA Game of Chess
3. IIIThe Fire Sermon
4. IVDeath by Water
5. VWhat the Thunder Said