Exploring The Waste Land
A draft page linked from The Waste Land, Part III, line 215

In the draft of The Waste Land

In the draft, the section of Part III dealing with Tireias, the typist and the young man carbuncular had 17 stanzas of 4 lines each, all rhymed ABAB.

This Tireias section consists of the lines

215)  At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

to

256)  And puts a record on the gramophone.

The original 68 lines underwent heavy editing to become the final 42. Some stanzas were deleted completely while others had lines removed. Some lines were changed and the ending words changed or removed, including the rhyming word. The rhyming pattern was not restored by Eliot. This was undoubtedly because of Ezra Pound's notation written upon the page

"verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it."

Citation:  "The Facsimile"   pp. 42-47


Exploring The Waste Land
File name: dq215.html
File date: Sunday, September 29, 2002
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