The Waste Land – 1922

The Burial of the Dead

The title is a Christian funeral ritual that comes from pre-Christian cultures.

The QUOTATION

The poem opens with a quotation from Petronio’s Satyricon.

The speaker is the Cuma’s Sybil who is a Greek prophet, so it is a mythical quotation.

The oracle is consulted by young men who asked her what did she want, and she answered that she only wanted to die.

This will could be interpretated as a rebirth desire: in order to rebirth first we have to die. In Christian culture Jesus Christ had to die first to resurrect.

The DEDICATION

“il miglior fabbro” is a line taken from Dante’s Purgatorio.

Mr.Eliot dedicates his works to his friend the poet Ezra Pound.

Mr.Pound corrects the poem removing all narrative parts, so he works on the text as a “fabbro” forges iron.

FIRST LINES

The common reader not understand why April is the cruelest month, because in our culture April means spring, the season of the rebirth of nature.

“April is the cruelest month,[…]”(v.1) is a quotation from “April is the sweetest month” the first line of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer was the first poet in English culture who adopted English in literary language.

Mr.Eliot turns all tradition upside down using language in a multi-layer dimension. In this case nature conveys inner dimension of human being, so April does not necesarilly mean happiness.

“[…]breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land”(vv.1-2) Nature does not produce roses, it produces Lilacs, the flower of the dead. Nature is cruel and unfavourable.

The “dead land”(V.2) and the “rain”(V.4) recalls rock and water, they’re the most important objective correlatives in Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Water symbolizes fertility and rock symbolizes its opposite.

These two symbols come from heathen rituals of vegetation, but they’re used also by Christian culture.