ay a broken sex ceremony can take place. The broken ceremony can also occur when there is a lack of love, as shown in lines 222-256. This passage describes a scene between "the typist" and "the young man carbuncular". What passes between these two individuals is a sex ceremony that is devoid of love and emotion (except for, perhaps, the emotion of lust on the part of the young man). The typist is indifferent to the whole event and the young man’s "vanity requires no response" (l. 241). For a ceremony to be effective, the participants have to have some degree of faith in what they are doing. They must believe that the ceremony will result in something worthwhile. The participants in this broken ceremony had no faith in what they were doing; they were just going through the motions. This is made obvious when the secretary says "’Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’" (l. 252). Another way that broken ceremonies (broken due to lack of components) are presented in the poem, are ceremonies of nature. It seems as though the waste land is always waiting for the ceremony of rain, the bringing of water, to the dry land. For most of the poem the water never arrives because there is always something missing. In lines 331 and 332 Eliot says, "Here is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water". In line 342 there is, "dry sterile thunder without rain". The lack of water in ceremonies of nature that require it, lead to a broken ceremony.. Even at the beginning of the poem Eliot tells us that we, "know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water." (ll. 21-24). Clearly this is wrong, and this lack of water is a main theme, and a main broken ceremony in The Waste Land. Conversely, ceremonies can also be broken when there are too many components in the ceremony, a something extr...
