Notes of the 2^nd of April 2012

The Burial of the Dead takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service.

There are three different levels of meanings:

1)     the religious level with a reference to Eastertime (the resurrection of Jesus to save humankind). It means that a man has to die if he wants a rebirth.

2)     the naturalistic level: the rendering of nature by Eliot is not idyllic, it’s described as desolate and cruel.

3)     the third level refers to vegetation’s rites.

The first passage of the lyric describes a springtime scene, but this description is opposite to usual portrays of the season. The flowers, the lilacs, has the same color of funeral dresses. Following Modernist features Mr. Eliot presents a land mixing memories of the past and desires of the future. He deals with the ecological matter of human destruction of nature. It is shallow, sterile, dead. Winter covers the soil with the snow (this natural element appeared also in The Dead and is typical of Modernism, because it has the power to be “forgetful”).

Everything should be light in the initial scene, but this spring doesn’t give any regeneration. This image is taken from Chaucer (who in Canterbury Tales describes April as the sweetest month), but its point of view is completely altered. During Middle Ages people had to be below religious beliefs while during Eliot’s time the society forgot that credence.

The poem is a dramatic monologue and proceeds by the juxtaposition of scenes that are kept together by the similar desolation and the anthropological culture.

In the second scene people are not aware of reality, indeed showers of rain come suddenly but people don’t realize it. There are reference to circular transformation of nature, in particular the passage from spring to summer.

The text (most of all in the first part) is also characterized by the use of intertextuality (it recalls the collage technique) where moments are put together without a logical reason. Mr. Eliot found a text in a French village (Mentone)and he employed it through a nonsense juxtaposition for giving the reader the idea of fragmentation of the world, without values (religion, politics, science) and the sense of loss of the Modern Age. The uprooted characters presented are paradigmatic of contemporary society of Mr. Eliot, later he will call them “empty men”. 

The next scene is characterized by another intertextual use of cultural sources.

It’s used the metaphor of man who tries to cling to something for surviving.