From its epigraph to its concluding character, old age suffuses The Waste Land. The multi-faceted nature of the poem provides an opportunity for the distribution of geriatric characteristics across multifarious characters and situations. Some elements—sexual transgression, failing eyesight, wrinkled appearance, an inability to act—have been encountered before in Eliot’s poetry. Other aspects, including insomnia, anamnesis, deafness, voyeurism and kinesthesia, appear for the first time. His elderly characters can draw upon memory, which they possess in abundance (unlike the figures in the subsequent ‘The Hollow Men’) and they demonstrate with their old age life’s relentless temporal linearity, in contrast to the non-linear kaleidoscopic form of the poem. The Sibyl, Marie, Phlebas, the pub ladies and Hieronymo all display particular traits of old age, deployed by Eliot for a range of purposes—and they all unite in Tiresias, “the most important personage in the poem”, and Eliot’s most significant blind old man.