Consider the first verse-paragraph that opens The Waste Land:

These lines pose an intriguing question: How many people are speaking here? To answer it, we can only scrutinize the text in order to identify the lexical and syntactic patterns that distinguish each individual's speech.

If we begin to do that, we swiftly observe that lines 1–7 are very distinctive. We notice the participial constructions that end many lines: “breeding” (1), “mixing” (2), “stirring” (3), “covering”(5), and “feeding” (6), a pattern that is even repeated once more and reappears at line 8, in “coming over the Starnbergersee.” We also can't miss the use of adjective-noun pairings that occur in these lines, usage so insistent that there are seven of them: “cruellest month” (1), “dead land” (2), “dull roots” and “spring rain” (4), “forgetful snow” (6), and “little life” and “dried tubers” (7). Taken together, then, participial constructions and adjective-noun pairing seem to typify a coherent voice, and we can identify that voice for the moment as Zone 1. Further, we can also identify that voice as masculine, oddly, because we have no idea whatsoever who is speaking the poem's first four lines; yet they sound threatening (“cruellest month” and “dead land”), and minatory speech not assigned to any individual or source is conventionally spoken by a masculine voice.