As Kelsey has already pointed out, The Waste Land is full of interesting references that are easy to get lost in.  For a first time reader, the amount of glossing this poem needs is a bit daunting, especially considering how short it it as an actual poem.  However, having read Ulysses which as published during the same year (1922) I cannot say I was surprised that this work also contains so many allusions to classic works.  From what I understand, the poem was originally published without Eliot's notes, but were later added to justify publishing the poem in book form.  Much like having Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated handy, I was thanful to have some annotations to the poem that elucidated more fully Eliot's own notes.  In regards to the classical allusions, the one that stood out to me, primarily because it is the most familiar, was the constant references to Shakespeare's The Tempest.  More than once, Eliot draws on the famous line spoken by the magical Ariel that "[t]hose are pearls that were his eyes."  It is a choice line for Eliot's poem, as in Shakespeare's play Ferdinand it tricked into believing that his father is dead from a shipwreck and his body now lies far underneath the water.  The image of having pearls for eyes is then meant to connote the glassy stare of a dead body.  Following the first stanza in "A Game of Chess", there is a dialogue in which nerves, noise, and knowing nothing all converge around this Shakespearean line and the question "Are you alive, or not?" which is never fully answered (126).  This specific section of the poem brought me back to the many conversations we have had in class around soldiers' experiences in the trench.  As readers, we do not know where this conversation is happening as it is separated from the stanza proceeding it.  When I first read it, I imagined the voices as disembodied and the conversationg taking place in a sort of blackness.  Considering the title of the poem, I think this section is meant to invoke the trenches, an actual waste land, with its references to rats, alleys, and spooky noises.  Tossing in The Tempest lends this section of the poem an added layer of tragi-comedy in a way that I am not sure I can fully articulate but that I thought was at least worth pointing out.