The Waste Land: Setting

The Waste Land is not set in any one place. Just as the poem features a range of vignettes with different speakers, it also features a range of references to different places. Following from the poem’s title, some of these settings reference natural scenes—albeit degraded ones. Indeed, the poem famously opens with the depiction of a lilac struggling to grow out of “dead land” (line 2). Likewise, much of the poem’s closing section, “What the Thunder Says,” centers on a barren, rocky landscape (lines 331–34):

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water

Contrasting with this scene of parched earth are the poem’s various references to rivers (e.g., the Thames, the Ganges) and to the sea. Yet waterscapes are equally associated with death in The Waste Land. Madame Sosostris indicates as much when she declares, “Fear death by water” (line 55)—a warning that we recall later when we come upon the bloated body of the drowned Phoenician sailor. Taken together, these various natural scenes create a kaleidoscopic setting constituted by places that are all degraded and barren, whether due to drought or to an overabundance of water.

Though The Waste Land doesn’t have a single setting, the spiritual heart of the poem is, arguably, the financial district in London in the first decades of the twentieth century. This district is known by locals as “the City.” Eliot worked at a bank in the City for several years, so he knew it intimately. And indeed, the poem features numerous references to streets, hotels, and churches in the area. These specific references date the poem to the early twentieth century. Crucially, the City takes on surreal and even infernal dimensions in Eliot’s poem. In the final vignette of “The Burial of the Dead,” for instance, the speaker describes this district as a ghostly land of the dead (lines 60–63)

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.

This short passage alludes to a poem by Charles Baudelaire and a novel by Charles Dickens. However, its most significant point of reference is a passage from the third canto of Dante’s Inferno, when the poet first reaches the gates of Hell and marvels at the sheer number of its denizens. Here, the “City”—note Eliot’s capitalization—becomes an “unreal” world populated by the living dead. Sapped of vitality and spiritually exhausted, the City proves as infertile and unproductive as the other settings in the poem.

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