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MSuppan - 5A - The Burial of The Dead (last part)
by MSuppan - (2012-04-10)
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The poem goes on with another image: a crown of people are walking in a winter morning. That is just another quotation taken from Dante, considered a model of perfection by T. S. Eliot. It remembers the passage when all  the damned people are walking together nearby the Acheron. There are so many people and it means that so many people are sinner, almost all the World. Everyone is on foot, silent and looking down. They are like a river, there are no differences among them, they are all damned. It is a really sad image of society; Eliot wants to criticize it and its value. People keep on going on foot till Saint Mary Woolnoth, where a clock seems to be the metaphor  for the gate of the Hell. The narrator and his behavior remembers Dante: he recognizes someone among the crown, he wants talk to him. He stops him, he the man is called Stetson. A body has been planted in a garden by Stetson and the narrator asks him about that. He tells him to be careful: the Dog might do a mess, even if is a friend of the human being. The Dog recalls obviously to the Cerberus, a mythological there headed dog, which destroys everything and the damned in the Inferno. So the closing scene remembers the title of the section: The Burial of The Dead. All of them are sinner and it is just another critic to the society. In conclusion the section starts with the scene of two kids and ends with a dead: there is symbolically a circle, life.