Upon reading these two stanzas, it appeared to me that they both might be spoken by the same narrator. Specifically, the same voice appeared to be maintained throughout the stanzas: the same clipped rhythm, and habit of geographically tracing the events of the person's life indicates to me that the lines recounted the events of a particular female individual in TWL. From there, I began to unpack the narrative the speaker was describing. Two moments stood out to me in particular.
1a) Eliot’s phrase "Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew / Undid me" mimics the lines spoken by the noblewoman La Pia in Dante's Purgatorio, in which she says: "'Siena made me, in Maremma I was undone" (Aligieri, line 134). She attributes her cause of death to her husband, saying “He knows how [I died], the one who, to marry me, / first gave the ring that held his stone’ (Aligieri, lines 135-6). Her “undoing” is the result of marital violence and betrayal, placing her among the many wronged women in The Waste Land—Philomela, Baudelaire’s unnamed sex worker, Ophelia—each undone by male lust, violence, or moral failure. However, in the waste land, the woman is undone not by violence in particular, but by the emotional futility of intimacy in the modern world.
1b) I discovered a painting by Dante Rossetti entitled “Pia de’Tolomei” while researching more on La Pia. In the painting, La Pia is captured as she fiddles with her wedding ring, surrounded by a lush scenery of ivy overgrowth and a fig tree, as well as a sundial, letters, a prayer book, and the rosary lying beside her. The religious objects no doubt serve as testaments to her devout faith, whereas the sundial likely indicates the passage of time, and perhaps in reference to the time passing during her suffocating and unfulfilling marriage with her husband. The surrounding botany also forms a striking contrast to the barrenness of Eliot’s waste land. As a fruit-bearing tree, the fig tree reflects the physical vigor and health of La Pia, as well as her fertility. By contrast, the ivy—often associated with climbing and clinging—suggests the confinement and isolation of her unhappy marriage.
2a) The speaker continues the same pattern of geographical mapping in the second stanza. It is here that the reader comes to most certainly understand that the voice belongs to a female speaker. She recalls an unfulfilling sexual encounter, dismissively calling it “the event,” followed by her partner’s promise of “a new start” (Eliot, lines 297–98). However, her partner only weeps afterwards. While La Pia is undone by betrayal and violence, the speaker is undone by the recurring disappointment in sex, and by the emotional sterility of her relationships. In both cases, women appear as passive victims of the shortcomings of intimacy and romantic relationships.
2b) The reference of “a new start” also echoes the poem’s larger preoccupation with fertility and regeneration, recalling the Fisher King myth. Yet the failure of this promise nods back to the spiritual barrenness of the modern world, in which intimacy is hollow, not sacred.