Notes about T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: The Burial of the Dead

The Waste Land is a poem written by T.S. Eliot. It starts with a quotation in Greek language. The lines in Greek are taken from Petronius Satyricon and they say the following words:

"Del resto, la Sibilla, a Cuma l'ho vista anche io con i miei occhi penzolare dentro un'ampolla e quando i fanciulli le chiedevano - Sibilla, che vuoi?- Lei rispondeva - Voglio morire-"

Western world culture was born from Greek language. The sibyl represents human being essence and her desire of death means a psychological and/or physical sufference of humanity.
After the epigraph T. S. Eliot inserted a dedication in Italian to Ezra Pound. He was the father of imagist poetry, a kind of poetry which developed in the early years of the 20ieth century, which exploited the linguistic power as well as the emotional power of images. Mr Eliot addressed the dedication to him because Mr Eliot promoted innovative forms of poetry and also because E. Pound was one of the most significant people with whom Mr Eliot had come into contact. Moreover E. Pound had read The Waste Land in its manuscript form and had suggested Eliot to cut some of the poem parts, that were the most narrative.
So Mr Eliot in this way thanked him for his technique advices. Mr Eliot considered writing as a work in a workshop and for this reason E. Pound is defined  a smith in the dedication.
In the poem there is intertextuality. Sibyl gives her soul to a god and in this way she creates a relationship with him. It is the archetype of the indulgences: to give something in order to obtain something other (also Goethe and Marlowe wrote about it). So asking favours to god is a technique that man used also before Christian world. One of the structural themes of the poem is the decaying of society from pre-Christian world to nowadays.
The quotation is taken from the part of the dinner at Trimalchione's: dinner is the moment that give an order to the day and it is had in the evening. In this way the writer shows how everything is decaying.
Sibyl's old age and the dinner are important symbols in the epigraph and they recall the title: the land is waste because it is sterile and solitary and man here cannot find anything to live. The poem uses many languages and ends with three quotations in Sanskrit language: in this way Mr Eliot shows the conglomeration of human being and underlines the central position of man and also how he changes. He show all human times and cultures. Mythic method is the structural element: the narrative part is taken away and it is replaced by mythic method.
Western world culture was born telling stories and T.S. Eliot with his poem wanted to show how society was destroying classical culture, that is the culture on western world founds itself.
Mr Eliot tried to understand how man faces life. Mr Eliot draws near scenes of old texts, that are the bases of western culture, throughout lyric and he shows how they are transformed in other: they are becoming waste texts in contemporary society.
So the epigraph shows a waste land where man does not want to live.

The first part of the poem is titled The Burial of the Dead.

The subject of the first lines of The Burial of the Dead is April, when the nature changes from winter into spring. The lines do not present April in an ordinary way because it is defined as "the cruellest month".

In April nature blooms, but Eliot begins his poem with The Burial of the Dead: he overturns the naturalistic conception of the earth.

Eliot says that April is cruel: the first lines recall the beginning of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is considered the best poet in English poetry, because he was the first who used English to write poetry. But Chaucer writes that April was the sweetest month, while Eliot carries it in an existence level: April promises a regeneration that will not happen.
So there is a metaphor of the nature, of the existence and of values.