The Waste Land doesn’t have just one speaker. Instead, the poem features a range of different voices, which Eliot referred to as “personages.” Already in “The Burial of the Dead,” we readers are introduced to four of these personages, each of whom is associated with one of this section’s four vignettes. The poem begins with a woman named Marie, who recounts memories from her childhood in Germany. The second vignette features an anonymous speaker describing a barren landscape. The third-person speaker of the third vignette describes a tarot reading presided over by a woman named Madame Sosostris. The fourth vignette shifts scene again, this time to a ghostly version of London described by another anonymous first-person speaker. Other than the breaks between stanzas, Eliot offers no clear indication of when one speaker stops and another begins. Nor is it clear whether individual “personages” return at different points in the poem. For instance, the rocky landscape described by the second speaker in “The Burial of the Dead” seems to return at the beginning of “What the Thunder Said.” But whether these speakers are the same remains unclear. When taken together, the various personages in the poem create a disorienting cacophony.

Though the chorus of fragmented voices is cacophonous, the poem does feature one personage who stands out from the others. This personage is Tiresias, who recounts the scene between the typist and her lover in “The Fire Sermon.” Tiresias is a legendary blind seer from Thebes. As Ovid recounts in the Metamorphoses, Tiresias once came upon two mating snakes, and when he struck them with a stick, he instantly turned into a woman. Some years later, a similar situation resulted in Tiresias being turned back into a man. Because he had experience as both a man and a woman, he was asked to referee a debate between Jove (Zeus) and Juno (Hera) about whether men or women get more pleasure during sex. When Tiresias said women get more pleasure, Juno blinded him. To compensate, Jove then gave him the gift of foresight. Thus, Tiresias is a prophetic figure who unites the masculine and the feminine. In his own notes on The Waste Land, Eliot emphasized the important role Tiresias plays in the poem:

Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, . . . so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.

If all the poem’s personages all “melt” into one another, as Eliot suggests, then they converge symbolically in Tiresias, the figure who has already seen and “foresuffered all” (line 243).

It’s also worth considering the role played by the poet, who appears obliquely as the figure responsible for collaging together the poem’s various fragments. Curiously, the poet seems to speaker through these fragments. Consider the famous closing lines (426–33):

     London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
     Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
     Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
     Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
     These fragments I have shored against my ruins
     Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
     Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
                       Shantih     shantih     shantih

This passage collages together several quotations from texts in various languages. The only line that isn’t a quote is the fifth, where the poet says: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The following line appears to respond to this statement with a declaration of action: “Why then Ile fit you.” It’s as if the poet is telling us that they’ve scavenged through the ruins of civilization and come out with “fragments” that they will now “fit” together. Yet the I of “I have shored” is not identical to the I of “Ile fit you.” Indeed, the latter line is a quote from Thomas Kyd’s play, The Spanish Tragedy (1592), the central character of which is Hieronymo, who goes mad after his son is murdered. But by virtue of their juxtaposition, the two I’s effectively melt together, allowing the poet to speak through Kyd’s language. The poet is thus both a collager of fragments and a modern avatar of Hieronymo, who’s gone “mad againe.”

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