The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot is composed of five section. The first section's title is "The Burial of the Dead" and it has five scenes. Let's analyse the two last scenes.

T.S. Eliot introduces a new character: Madame Sostris, a very famous tarot reader. The tarot is a deck of 78 picture cards that has been used for centuries to reveal hidden truths. People in the past have discovered in the tarot a powerful tool for personal growth and insight. In this case Eliot use tarot for his literature purposes. In fact some the symbols, that are shown up, will come true in other sections of the poem. Symbols which become predictions, are very important because the setting is still the "waste land" so everybody is in search of answers. Everyone need to believe in something so Madame Sostris is considered the wisest woman in Europe. T.S. Eliot organizes the scene as a real fortunetelling episode. The tarot reader, in fact, has a pack of cards and tells the figures she sees. The symbols which are shown up are a lot: the drowned Phoenican Sailor will return in the fourth section "Death by Water" and it represent clearly the death by water; it also makes reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Those are pearls that were his eyes" is a quote from one of Ariel's songs). The Belladonna/ The Lady of the Rocks/ The lady of situations represents the danger of female seduction and the threat to masculinity. The "Belladonna" is in fact also a poisonous plant. There is also a reference to Leonardo da Vinci's "Monnalisa". The man with three staves represents the Fisher King and the Hanged Man represents sacrifice.

In the last scene of The Burial of the Dead, the intelligent reader finally understands that the waste land is actually a modern city. The unreal city is in fact London. There are some intertextuality quotations: Baudelaire's Paris ("Unreal City"), Dickens's London ("the brown fog of a winter dawn") and Dante's hell ("the flowing crowd of the dead"). The city is desolated and inhabited of ghosts and unreal people. The only concrete person maybe is Stetson: the main character of the scene stops him and then they start a sort of conversation. Stetson maybe represents T.S. Eliot's friend Ezra Pound. In their "conversation" returns the theme of fertility ("has it begun to sprout' Will it bloom this year?"). Finally, Eliot quotes Webster and Baudelaire, back to back, ending the address to Stetson in French: "hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!"