1. An Exploitation and Critique by Megan Certeza
The wasteland
An Exploitation and Critique by Megan Certeza

2. Literary Devices In the poem
I found “The Wasteland” meta-theatrical since Madam Sosostris told a prediction or a story in paragraph four, an act within an act meaning a story within the poem with which we can infer was used buy a tarot deck since she is clairvoyant and uses symbols within the cards and mentions the Hanged man.
She uses the cards’ story as a foreshadowing of a maiden’s death which actually happens in the end.

3. My inferences and comments
We can infer that “The Wasteland” is part of a memory that someone had since it revolves around Madam Sosostris’s prediction, and so, we can infer that they are referring to England as a wasteland since there was a lot of death.
We can also infer that since the speaker speaks of death that he is talking about a king due to the section in his poem ”The Chess Game.”

4. The Wasteland / Insights and Comments
Since the wasteland refers to the old song, “London Bridge is Falling down, we can infer that it was the first wooden bridge that burnt in England during the Viking Wars.
The 'London Bridge is falling down' Nursery Rhyme is based on the one of the most famous landmarks in London. It's history can be traced to the Roman occupation of England in the first century. The first London Bridge was made of wood and clay and was fortified or re-built with the various materials mentioned in the children's nursery rhyme. Many disasters struck the bridges - Viking invaders destroyed the bridge in the 1000's which led to a fortified design, complete with a drawbridge. Building materials changed due to the many fires that broke out on the bridge.

5. Why had The author chosen to write about the sorrow inferring the past??
The poem is divided into five sections. In the first, “The Burial of the Dead,” the speaker is an old Austro-Hungarian noblewoman reminiscing about the golden days of her youth before the disasters of World War I. The second section, “A Game of Chess,” is set in the boudoir of a fashionable contemporary Englishwoman. The third, “The Fire Sermon,” mixes images of Elizabeth’s England, the Thames and Rhine rivers, and the legend of the Greek seer Tiresias. The fourth, “Death by Water,” is a brief portrait of a drowned Phoenician sea-trader. The fifth, “What the Thunder Said,” combines the above themes with that of religious peace. These parts combine in the poem’s overall montage to create a meaning that encompasses all of them. Because the poem is so complex, that meaning must be left to the individual reader; however, many students of the poem have suggested that, generally, Eliot shows his readers the collapse of Western culture in the aftermath of the war.

6. Cited sources
London bridge is falling down. Web. falling-down.htm
"The Waste Land - Summary" Masterpieces of World Literature, Critical Edition Ed. Steven G. Kellman. eNotes.com, Inc eNotes.com 31 Jul, <