This is the first section of the "Waste Land". Its name comes from a live in the Anglican Burial Service. It is composed of four scenes, each told through the perspective of a different speaker. The first scene is autobiographical. It is the fragment from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she remembers sledding  and where she claims to be German and not Russian. She mixes a meditation on the seasons with a thought about her current existence. The second section is an apocalyptic invitation to a journey into a desert waste. The tone mixes prophetic notes with childhood reminecenses  about a "Hyacith girl". These memories are filtered through quotations from Wagner's version of "Tristan und Isolde", which tells about adultery and loss. The third episode describes an imaginative tarot reading; some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading do not belong to the actual tarot cards. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts with a figure. They once fought in a battle that seems to be connected both to W.W.F and the Punic wars between Rome and Chartage. The speaker asks the ghostly figure, whose name is Stetson,  about a corpse planted in his garden. This episode finishes with a famous quotation from Baudelaire's "Le fleur du mal", which accuses the reader to share the poet's sins.

Like "Prufrock", this section of the waste Land can be considered as an evolution of the dramatic monologue. The four speakers, who struggle to find an audience, only find themselves surrounded by dead people or stopped by circumstances like wars. The sections are very short and the  situations are confusing. Another similarity with "Prufrock" is that "The waste land" employs only a partial rhyme scheme . The inclusion of literary references, quotations and fragments in other languages, make the passage more difficult to be understood. But they remind of the cosmopolitan characteristics of the twentieth-century Europe, as well as of the fact that we will never be able to perfectly understand each other.  

The "Waste Land" is dedicated to Ezra Pound, who encouraged Eliot to cut large sections of the planned work as well as to break with the rhyme scheme. The poem is a long work divided into five sections and it represents the degraded mess that Eliot attributed to modern culture, especially after the devastation of First World War. The poem communicates pessimism, as it is evident in the epigraph, which is taken from the "Satyricon". Here a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies, look at the future and says that her only desire is to die. This shows what Eliot sees in his age: a decayed culture and the awareness he will be forced to live with the reminders of its former glory. The poem opens with reference to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales". In Chaucer the pilgrimage takes place in April because spring is the season of rebirth, and so nature creates a parallel with the rebirth of the soul form the sins with the devotional pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Beckett. In the "Waste Land" April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. Regeneration is painful because it brings back memories of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter is the preferable season, because it is the time of forget fullness. Marie's memories from her childhood are also painful because the simple world she lived in has been replaced by the emotional and political consequences resulting from the war. The second scene contains a troubled religious proposition: the speaker describes a waste land of "stony rubbish" where he can see only a "heap of broken images". Nevertheless this scene seems to offer salvation, which in the end, thou, is only a handful of dust. The speaker remembers a woman from his past, with whom he had apparently some sort of romantic involvement, while the present setting is the desert. In the final line of the episode the attention shifts from the desert to the sea, which is the place of true, essential, nothingness itself. The lines comes from a section of "Tristan und Isolde" where Tristan waits from Isolde to come and heal him, but she fails to arrive. So the ocean is empty and it doesn't bring the possibility of regeneration. The third episode explores Eliot's fascination with transformation. Madame Sosostris transforms vague symbols into predictions. Eliot changes the traditional tarot pack according to his purposes. The drowned sailor is a reference to Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (it is a quotation from one of Ariel's song). In "The tempest" transformation is the result of a highest art of human kind, while here transformation is associated with fraud and vulgarity. The final episode of the first section establishes the true waste land of the poem, the modern city. Here London is like Baudelaire's Paris ("unreal city"), Dickens' London ("the brown fog of winter down") and Dante's hell ("the flowing crowd of the dead"). The city is desolated and depopulated. There are only ghosts like Stetson, a follow war can read of the speaker. With the reference to the garden, the idea of regeneration and fertility returns, even if Stetson does not reply to the speaker's questions, and so futility is the ultimate answer.

Last but not least, the two most important themes are: memory and the desolation of the present. the first, the topic of memory, especially when it is connected to the dead, is important because it creates a conformation between the past and the present, a juxtaposition that points out the bad decadence of the present. the second, which is only a waste of culture, tradition, philosophical and religious thoughts especially if compared to the greatness of the past. The greatness of history, tradition and the poets' dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.