I've read The Waste Land several times before, and although I admit that my understanding of the poem is  still very elementary, I nevertheless found it was refreshing to come back to The Waste Land after putting it down for a while.  It's as though the elusiveness of the poem makes it worth reading again, because I know that I'm going to view it differently than I did a few months ago.

I really love the way that Eliot transitions between voices and characters throughout these first two sections of the poem.  At one point in the first paragraph we meet a girl named Marie, who seems to come from an aristocratic family, "when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's," and "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." Interestingly, just a quickly as we meet Marie, she disappears in an ever-expanding dreary description of (what I think is a) literal waste land.

In the second section of the poem there is a rather confusing conversation from about line 111 to the end of the section.  The speaker is gossiping about a subject that was on everyone's minds after WWI--fertility.  There had been so much destruction and death during the War, and old systems (such as Marie's aristocracy) were decaying if not yet distinguished.  Eliot is really brilliant at adding tension to the dialogue of the gossip with the final bar call "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME."  Although the lines are technically unrelated, they work together to convey a real-to-life anxiety in the reader.

I'm sure that we'll talk about this in class, but I thought I'd mention Eliot's intentional use of archive in this poem.  The Waste Land essentially amasses the important western literature into a single poem that conveys a very contemporary mood.  I look forward to our classes this week, because I've certainly got a lot more to learn about this difficult poem!