Wasteland Blog Post

I decided to pick theme number 2 "The poem is about the sterility or emptiness of human relationships, including but not limited to romantic/sexual relationships." One of the passage I wanted to bring attention to is in passage 2 "A Game of Chess" lines 139-170.  That section talks about a conversation happening in a bar and specifically a woman who does not want to have anymore kids and tries to avoid sexual intercourse with her husband. I think this is a commentary on the theme because it's ironic that the theme is about sterility while we have a woman in the poem who can have kids but just chooses not to have kids and we have another character reference in the poem, the Fisher King, who cannot reproduce but wants to be able to. This relates to modern life due to the fact that there are unfortunate people who cannot have kids and want kids but there are those who are fortunate to have kids but does not want them and chooses methods like abortion. 
The other section I want to bring attention to that supports the theme are lines 249-256. The section talk about how a woman is glad that the sexual intercourse is over because she simply is doing it just to get it over with, but there's not a lot of love involved and we can agree that the relationship seems like a dull one. This really shows the emptiness of human relationships because the speaker of the quote "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over" is not really connecting with the person she just slept with. It almost seems like a burden to the speaker. We can also make the conclusion that it was rape especially because the other lines in the poem keeps referencing Tereus, a character from another story, who raped Philomela.