Tiresias...

[Mark David Tristan Brenchley]

 and, we all know which sex Tiresias said got the best side of pleasure
(much to Hera's wrath). The point about Tiresias in the Wasteland is that
whereas in the myth he returns to his normal state, in the Wasteland he is
still he, of "wrinkled dugs", ie. a man with the breasts of an old woman
(no longer fertile, devoid of sexuality). It is precisely his lack of
sexuality that enables him to comment on the Wasteland, devoid as it
is, of love. This picks up on the violet imagery of the poem, which seems to symbolise a world between two states
(just as the sky in Prufrock is neither alive NOR dead), light and dark,
man and woman, allowing for the horizontal, a temporal structure of the 
poem.

Mark