ABSTRACT
Reading any of his major poems allows a different picture to emerge when it comes to Eliot and sexism. Tiresias shares with other figures in the poem such as the Sybil of Cumae and Madame Sosostris a double existence: he-she-it has the ability to experience the time-bound world of everyday life as well as the timeless realm of spiritual perception, the numinous. In his 1939 prose essay titled The Idea of a Christian Society, T. S. Eliot critiques what he terms "the mechanistic life", a way of existing that according to the poet denies the integrity of religious perception of the concrete unfolding of existence. The poem's fragmentary English indeed presents a fractured ontology; its modern English ironies point to cultural entropy. The author strucks further by the rhyming of "hands" with "sands", which suggests Philomela's terrible ordeal of being powerlessly pinned to the soil.
