Having seen the Wasteland performed majestically and rather brilliantly by Fiona Shaw, I regret to say that although her expressions, her dynamism through movement and tone and her enthusiasm when relating the 23-minute poem made it infinitely easier, I still found it a poem seemingly impossible to understand. I read over it once out loud to attempt a further understanding of the complex poem and surprisingly, ideas that hadn’t occurred to me the first time I heard the poem began to bloom, for example the extended metaphor within the section ‘The Fire-Sermon’. The ‘female breasted man’, Tiresias, is something out of the ordinary, as his name suggests, a fantastical character extracted from a Greek or Roman myth or legend. He describes himself, comparing himself to a ‘taxi throbbing, waiting’, again suggesting the idea of the mechanical versus the natural, and the real versus the fantastic. His ‘waiting’ shows his desolate nature, torn between two sexes and unsure of his life’s path. In a completely pure and in no way voyeuristic, he contemplates a man ‘rudely forced’ into a woman, whose boredom is clear. One imagines how tragic it is that one who in lost in the world and who mourns his identity, contemplates the regular mortals and comes to realize that even they are unsure of their lives’ paths. This anecdote amongst so many others within ‘The Wasteland’ is a common problem: the assertion of identity and the strife to assert one’s identity by comparing oneself to others.

Perhaps the song that follows this section is part of a random stream of consciousness, which was necessary within the poem, as it is in itself the running of thoughts of the narrative voice. Or perhaps, as it comes directly after a short story about one’s assertion of identity, it is a medium through which the narrative voice asserts his personality, as music is a common way to identify oneself. The use of places shows, again, the importance of identity.

Having understood the section of ‘The Fire Sermon’ best within the poem, I believe that ‘The Wasteland’ is essentially a poem about identity, about finding oneself, through themes such as the latter, sexuality, death, relationships and time.