A reading of the second part of The Waste Land

‘A Game of Chess’ is the second section of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, the impact of which was profound and immediate. The title partly alludes to a game of chess played in Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women, but also to another of his plays, A Game at Chess. You can read ‘A Game of Chess’ here; below, we offer a brief summary of this section of Eliot’s poem, but we’ll stop and analyse the more curious aspects of it as we go, pointing out its most curious features.

In summary, ‘A Game of Chess’ begins with a long description of an ornately decorated room in which a woman is sitting on a ‘Chair’ like a throne (the first line of ‘A Game of Chess’ is actually an allusion to…