The Waste Land is a poem expressing emotions of what it was like to live through World War I. From just the few pages we have started to read, there is a sadness that exists throughout the writing and the uncertainty that existed for many people in this time. Eliot use of classical commentary in the poem, to me, shows a simplier time that many in this time began to look back to. He seems to use Greek, Biblical, and other forms of classic writing to exhibit virtue and an ideal lifestyle that is lacking within the world during WWI. He also bends the meaning of words to mean the opposite, if that makes sense. He plays with words to show extent of the suffering.

There are two instances that caught my attention when Eliot used words to exhibit what he was trying to feel. The first is within the first few lines of the poem. It starts on line 5, "Winter kept us warm covering/ Earth in forgetful snow." This use of word twisting is very expressful. When one thinks of winter, the first you don't usually associate it with is being warm. But winter brought a slow and even in some instances a stop in the war. So for a few months, they were able to kind of forget there was so much going and the new snow would cover up many of the battlefields and let people forget what was to come on those same battlefields in just a few months. The other interesting use is in his description of the "unreal city." It paints a picture of the mourning people in the cities, which it seems to Eliot was becoming too common of a sight in this lifetime. This use of words and twisting of words really seem to stretch back to a time when war did not tear apart the world. The classical "throwbacks" paint the world in as the hightime of life for anyone, but now people look forward to the winter time when they used to look forward to the spring and summer time. It seems to Eliot that the world has turned upside down.