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Muze Annotation: The speaker in Eliot's dramatic monologue is a middle-aged man wandering through a symbolic urban landscape on the brink of despair. He perceives his life as empty, full of meaningless social rituals, and this feeling is only intensified by his awareness that there is another way of living--a kind of life he once glimpsed but that has now become impossible for him to attain. ('I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./I do not think that they will sing to me.') Written in Eliot's distinctive, elliptical style, the poem's major themes are the decay of western culture and the sadness of growing old after living a futile life. The poem, Eliot's first publication, appeared when he was 27.