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SMilan - The Burial of the Dead from The Waste Land
[author: Sara Milan - postdate: 2007-12-26]

The Waste Land (1922) is a highly influential 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. It is perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem of the 20ieth century. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem  the poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature.
Talking about the structure The Waste Land is a poem divided into five sections. The five parts are entitled:
1. The Burial of the Dead
2. A Game of Chess
3. The Fire Sermon
4. Death by Water
5. What the Thunder Said

The first four sections of the poem correspond to the Greek classical elements of Earth (burial), Air (voices - the draft title for this section was "In the Cage", an image of hanging in air; also, the element of Air is generally thought to be aligned with the intellect and the mind), Fire (passion), and Water (the draft of the poem had additional water imagery in a fishing voyage.) The title of the fifth section could be a reference to the fifth element of Aether, which is included in many mystical traditions (one line here mentions aetherial rumours.)


The first section is called the The Burial of the Dead. The atmosphere is pessimistic. The first section speaks about death. It adopts intertextuality as a favorite media, right from the fist line and difficult or impossible regeneration. Contemporary title has been turned upside down. Generally speaking April is considered the month during which nature is born again. Here there is a different matter: April is considered cruel because it promises  events that will not be satisfied. Moving from denotation to connotation the intelligent reader will understand that the human kind doesn't seem to have many possibilities to be regenerated.  Western culture seems to live in a condition of cultural sloth. The section is made up of the juxtaposition of scenes that do not seem to follow a logical arrangement.

What creates a link between the scenes is the atmosphere.

 

Scene one provides an image of natural waste and it is juxtaposed to a summer scene followed by an image of waste and the rock of trees that don't give any shelter. There is no water and to be precise not even the sound of water can be hearr. Rather you have the idea of a red rocking scenery and then comes the image of a girl coming from the hyacinth garden girl, full of sensuality, and the idea of a lack of knowledge. And then comes Madam Sosostris a vulgar figure replacing the profound culture of the past . Sosostris is a mock Egyptian name (suggested to Eliot by 'Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana', the name assumed by a character in Aldous Huxley's novel Chrome Yellow who dresses up as a gypsy to tell fortunes at a fair).

In the end we have the image of a ghostly London, where people going to work in the morning remaind ghostly figures. Their are compared  to the "dannati" in "Dante inferno".        


The intelligent reader understands that Eliot disregards time references in that he puts together people who lived during the Punic war and contemporary people. The style of the work in part grows out of Eliot's interest in exploring the possibilities of dramatic monologue.

This interest dates back at least as far as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Eliot also enjoyed the music hall, and something of the flavour of this popular form of entertainment gets into the poem. It follows the pattern of the musical fugue, in which many voices enter throughout the piece re-stating the themes.