First of all, a reader might know that The Waste Land is not a simple as most of T. S. Eliot's works.

The poem is composed by five parts:

1. The Burial of the Dead
2. A Game of Chess
3. The Fire Sermon
4. Death by Water
5. What the Thunder Said

In the following analysis  I will consider only the first part of the poem.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

Analyzing the title, a reader might make conjectures about possible expectations on what might be the content of  this section. If we think about the words  burial and dead, the reader might expect an atmosphere which will surely will not be happy or beatiful, but rather one of desolation and fear, sadness or cruelness.

Going in depth, the reader might confirm his conjectures or not, but on a first approach such an idea sounds better idea than others.

The poem opens with the line "April is the cruellest month".

Since the first line a reader can understand that April, generally considered a positive month, is here defined "cruellest". If a reader  has studied English Literature, he might realize that such line recalls the beginning of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.  In all T. S. Eliot's works,  you can find numerous quotations from different authors or overturnings of parts from other texts.

Going on reading, the scene presents itself as a view of desolation and death (dead land, Lillacs).

The second section of "The Burial of the Dead" shifts from the voice of the powerless Marie and becomes the voice of the narrator. The first twelve lines of this section include three allusions from Old Testament and the narrator finds himself in a summer drought which hass transformed the land into a desert.

After that a new character is introduced, Madame Sosostris that is a "famous clairvoyante" that plays cards (a wicked pack of cards). She saw fear in a death by water, crowds of people walking and others signs of negative events. In this part Eliot's underlines the atmosphere  the reader has expected since the title.

Madame Sosostris' s prophecy seems to make a link with the city of London, the "Unreal City" under the fog of a winter's dawn. There are so many people that the narrator exclaims, "I had not thought death had undone so many" (63). People are like zombies that walk without a target, an aim. The scenes underline the situation of modern society, a negative point of view, a desperate point of view that shouldchanged to live better.