Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
Now I am going to analyze the last part of the first section "The Burial of the Dead" (line 60-76) :
Eliot's London references 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".
It gives the reader a description of modern London, in particular, with the financial part of London. The poet talks about a crowd that flows over London Bridge: people are going to work, but they are like ghostly figures like lifeless. There is a quotation taken from Dante's Inferno: "I had not thought death had undone so many".
The word "sighs" is the most significant symbol of their condition. The atmosphere created by the poet is an atmosphere of death: also the sound of Saint Mary Woolnoth conveys this idea, because it is a "dead sound". It is like a funeral.
Going on the poet recognize a person in the crowd and calls him "Stetson", maybe it is Ezra Pound. And continues "you who were with me in the ships at Mylae!": it is a reference to a battle during the Punic War between Rome and Cartagena. That is an important passage that underlines the simultaneous concept of time. After that the speaking voice asks Stetson if "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?". And continues "O keep the Dog far hence...or with his nails he'll dig it up again!".
At the end he concludes with sentence in French , quoting Baudelaire taken from "I fiori del Male": "You! Hypocrite lecteur!- on semblable, - mon frere! ".