1st line: subject April, the month representing the change of the world from winter into spring. They do not speak about April in the ordinary way that is the change of season, but as if April brought negative elements with it. T. S. Eliot takes the lines at the beginning of Canterbury Tales and twists their sense, representing a world where regeneration can't occur.
The poem starts with a quotation from the Greek language which works as a epigraph. The lines in Greek are taken from Petronious' Satyricon and represent the desire of the oracle to die, due to a deep psychological affliction. The exact words are: "Moreover, I've also seen the Sibyl of Cumae with my eyes hanging inside the bulb. And when the children asked her << Sibyl, what you want? >> She answered << I want to die >>" .
Everything turns to the twilight in the epigraph, which represents the poetry world as a desert land not anymore fertile, but waste, anticipating the sense of the book. T. S. Eliot wants to show how modern society is ruining classical culture. By the reutilization of classic material Eliot juxtaposes scenes representing the old Western culture to the new sense they have and understands the decline of Western society.
T. S. Eliot celebrates in the beginning of The Waste Land Ezra Pound ("To Ezra Pound the best smith"),father of Imagist Poetry ,a current developed in the early years of the 20th century which exploited the linguistic power as well as the emotional power of images. Elliot dedicates The Waste Land to him because Elliot promoted innovative forms of poetry and also because Ezra Pound was one of the most significant people with whom T. S. Eliot had come into contact and Ezra Pound had read The Waste land in its manuscript form and had suggested to cut some of the poem's part. The parts that Ezra Pound cut were THE MOST NARRATIVE.