As I get a better grasp on what is going on in “The Waste Land,” I find myself drawn to the lines: “You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water” 

because I feel that the poem is a collage of broken images. It feels like a lot of fragmented pieces that are not exactly cohesive at first (to this reader), from the staggered references to different mythologies, language changes, and other details. I know there are other biblical references to draw from these particular lines, about the broken images, but I find myself reading it like a clue for reading the rest of the poem. I can also feel the desolation Eliot is writing into this poem. The imagery is somber and as a reader I get a sense of loneliness, or the feeling of being left behind. With the context of WWI and the existence of a lost generation, this poem fits right into my general understanding of a lot of the literature from this point in time. I begin to feel the decimation that many people in the West witnessed as a result of that war from a removed or distant perspective. I also feel that there is a sense of resentment, because the magnitude of this loss was also seen as a waste to many people who lived through it. The lines I mentioned speak directly to the title of the poem. The wasteland that is being described is a place without war, as it has already happened and is gone in a physical or tangible way, but the memory and the trauma is still very much present. The ghost of the war is still floating through these spaces and adding to this weird empty feeling I get from that set of lines. These lines are a good example of the stillness I get from the poem. The signs of life, like crickets, trees, and running water are gone from the place in the poem. The image of that is unsettling.