The subject of the first lines is April. The lines are taken from the Canterbury Tales by Choser where April was defined sweetest. In The Waste Land the lines speak about it in a different way from ordinary, as if April brought negative elements, it promises a regeneration will never happen.

The poem The Waste Land starts with a Greek quotation, which works as an epigraph. The lines in Greek are taken from Petronio's Satyricon and they say the following words:

“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 >>”

Sibilla encloses the human genre's features. The epigraph anticipate the poem's theme and an athmosphere of an arid and infertile land where the human doesn't find toold for live. This poems expresses Modernism spirit and testifies degradation of society.

"To Ezra Pound the best smith"

T. S. Elliot dedicates the poem to Ezra Pound, father of Imagest Poetry, a current which developed in the early years of the 20^th century wich 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 Exra Pound was one of the most significant people whom he have came in contact. Ezra Pund have read The Waste Land in it's manuscript form and had suggested Elliot to cut some of the poem's part. The part that Elliot cut were the most narrative.

Elliots juxtaposes the foundant tests of Occidental tradition so the reader must get in a position of humility with the knowledge of all the most importants tests of Occidental society.