Analysis of The Burial of the Dead

The Burial of the Dead belongs to a poem arranged into five parts and named The Waste Land, written in 1922. The poem is the masterpiece of T.S. Eliot (it gave him a primary position on the literary international panorama) and it may be considered -along with Joyce’s Ulysses- the greatest work of all modernist literature.

The Burial of the Dead is the first of the five section of the poem, which starts with an epigraph taken from Petronio’s Satyricon in Latin and Greek, the languages which generated Western culture. The epigraphs quotes the Cumaean Sibyl, the prophetic old woman of Greek mythology that guided Aeneas through Hades and had been granted immortality by Apollo. Declaring “I want to die”, the Sibyl represents the essence of the human genre that can’t get on with a life devoid of hope. 

Her story is told by the protagonist of the Satyricon, Trimalcione, during the bizarre dinner he offers to his unusual guests. In Western culture dinner is a  ritual of contemporary style of life: it comes before  sleeping, during the sunset, thus it refers to the idea of decline. The Sibyl’s predicament and the reference to Trimalcione’s dinner mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: he lives in a culture that has decayed but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former glory.    

After the quotation, the reader can find a dedication “For Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro”, to an American poet and founder of an innovative poetic movement known as Imaginist poetry. Eliot wants to pay homage to a great innovator of poetry, someone to consider an example to follow most of all for his experimental  style. Thus, recalling a quotation from Dante’s Inferno, Ezra is defined “better blacksmith” as he “forged” literature in the same way a smith forges the iron.

The poem is marked out by a meaningful use of intertextualit and by different and complex levels of meaning. Reference and reworking of the literary past, achieves simultaneously a stabilizing and a defamiliarizing  (?)

The world of The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier time, but it cannot be approached in the same way. The inclusion of fragments in languages different than English is a further complication. The reader is not expected to be able to translate such a situation  immediately; rather, they are reminders of the cosmopolitan nature of twentieth-century Europe, a sort of Babel Tower where we will never be able to perfectly comprehend one another.

The Burial of the Dead is composed of five sections and, like Prufrock, the lyric employs only partial rhyme schemes and can be seen as a modified dramatic monologue.