The Oral Significance of Poetry: The Waste Land read by a different speaker at http://librivox.org/the-waste-land-by-t-s-eliot/.

Many times, when we read a certain text, we forget to grasp the essential details the author subtly includes throughout the lines. When someone reads a piece of poetry for the first time, they generally accent different words or phrases than the author. Every time I read a poem, I pause in between verses in order to interpret each of these phrases as a single, independent unit; however, when I listened to a different speaker read the T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, I discovered that he does not make any pauses in between verses and reads the entire stanza as a sentence. In this case, the reader only makes very long pauses at the end of every stanza, which are understood as something similar to paragraphs. This makes the poem a lot easier to understand, as the speaker made The Waste Land sound like a story, where the verses converged to form a series of clauses that together conveyed more meaning than each of the verses alone.

In order to emphasize the meaning of certain fragments of the poem, the speaker accented several words that, as one may understand, are crucial to understanding the author’s purpose in writing this piece. For example, I noticed that the speaker focused attention on the sixteenth line of the poem, a verse that I had never really paid attention to when I had read the poem to myself. “In the mountains, there you feel free.” (line 16), may conceal a vast significance that may be crucial to understanding the message of the poem. Mountains in general, especially snowy ones, are isolated placed where there is infrequent human activity. Eliot may be trying to say, therefore, that humans may only be free when they are distant from civilization and its evils; thus, it is understood that T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is condemning mankind and everything associated with it.

Besides emphasizing important sections, the speaker accented specific words in each of the verses. For example, in lines twenty-six to thirty, the reader emphasized a series of words, which are showed in capital letter in the following example:
“And I will show you something DIFFERENT from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you FEAR in a handful of DUST.” (lines 26-30).
This makes the poem a lot easier to understand while simultaneously establishing the mood of the piece. The words “fear” and “dust” make tone of The Waste Land negative and pessimistic. The mood of the poem is one of the most important elements to understanding the meaning of the poem as a whole. If I had accented different words when I read the piece to myself, such as “show”, “morning”, and “rising”, I might have thought that T.S. Eliot was trying to convey a message of happiness and discovery instead one of misery and hopelessness.