“I Tiresias”: Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Abstract

Most of the voices in The Waste Land blend, shift, and trail off in ways that are very difficult to chart. Speakers are often neither named nor distinguished from one another, and quotation marks are not a sure way to discern borders. Tiresias, however, identifies himself clearly three separate times:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.…

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs.…

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all.) (WL 218, 228, 243)

This ancient prophet stands in the middle of The Waste Land and narrates what critics usually refer to as the clerk-typist scene: a typist comes home to her small, cluttered flat, is visited by a clerk with whom she shares a meal of tinned food, and doesn’t resist when the clerk wants to have sex on her convertible sofa (WL 215–56). While Eliot footnotes Sappho before the clerk arrives and Oliver Goldsmith after the clerk leaves, the visit itself does not draw on any literary sources. Instead, it is witnessed by Tiresias, “the most important personage in the poem” (CP 72), according to Eliot’s note.