This chapter will deal with the character of the Sibyl who is introduced in the Epigraph of T.S. Eliot's most famous poem The Waste Land (1922). The chapter will argue the centrality of the Sibyl's character throughout the rest of the poem, and how, despite not being explicitly mentioned in the remainder of the poem, she is straddling the spatial and temporal dynamic within and beyond the poem as an omniscient force.

As per Greek mythology, the Cumaean Sibyl was the oracle who prophesied and sang the fates of men and wrote on oak leaves. Virgil's Aeneid described her as the guide to the underworld (Hades). Ovid's Metamorphoses narrates how Apollo granted her immortality in return for her virginity. Later, when she refused him sexual favours, he allowed her to wither and wane into old age as she had forgotten to ask for eternal youth. Her shift away from her benefactor, Apollo caused her to pay a heavy price for immortality as she continued to grow tinier and feebler and was consequently kept in a jar. Eventually, like Ovid's Echo, only her voice was left.