The Burial of the Dead is the first section of Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.

The Waste land is a complex poem published in 1922. It consists in five movements (as an opera):

The Burial of the Dead

A Game of Chess

The Fire Sermon

Death by Water

What the thunder Said

Each section are appearently disconneceted, but they’re linked by quotation and hints to pre-Christian, Christian and other religions such as Buddhism (for example the third section), Eastern and Western culture, other previous intellectual and myth.

The title of the poem is significant: The Waste Land could be the Europe after World War I, but it could be also the sterility of Western culture or it could suggest London, where Eliot moved in 1914.

The structure is complex because there are lot of voices and also because there are lot of various quotations.

 Indeed The poem opens with a quotation from Petronio’s Satyricon. The speaker is the Cuma’s Sybil who is a Greek prophet, so it is a mythical quotation. The Sybil states she wants to die, this probably refers poet’s dissatisfaction about reality.

After the quotation there is a dedication to Ezra Pound that says: “For Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro”. It is a line taken from Dante’s Purgatorio.

Mr.Eliot dedicates The Waste Land to his friend the poet Ezra Pound as a grateful gesture for the help to cut less meaningful parts.

The first part is The Burial of the Dead.

The title is taken by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It refers to the Christian funeral ritual that comes from pre-Christian cultures.

The movement is composed by four stanzas each one has a different speaker.

The first one deals with the description of seasons. The tense used is the past tense, so it probably is a memory.

The speaker is called Marie, so she is a woman and she is aristocratic, indeed in line 13 she says: “when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's” and it is also “echt deutsch”(v.12), true German.

First season described is spring, but not as the reader expepcts: “April is the cruelest month,[…]”(v.1). Mr.Eliot turns all tradition upside down and in this case nature conveys inner dimension of human being, so April does not necesarilly mean happiness. Spring produces “Lilacs”, the flower of death. The month of the rebirth of nature symbolize death, and on the other hand “winter kept us warm”(v.5) “[…]feeding /A little life with dried tubers”(v.6). Spring means death because it mixes “memory and desire”, that is the poet becomes aware about what is missing, unlike in the winter where the “forgetful snow” covers everything.

After winter there is summer that is full of beautiful memories of childhood like the moments with her cousin. There is no a chronological order in the narration of memories, the speaker follows her time of consciousness.

The first line of the stanza suddenly comes back to the present, using a present simple, pointing out the distance between present and her passed childhood.

In all the stanza there is the presence of water: “rain”(vv.4-9) and “snow”(v.6). Water is symbol of movement but here is always linked with the concept of immobility: “Dull roots with spring rain”, “With a shower of rain; we stopped”. Movement means life symbolized by water, as in the Christian ritual of Baptism, but here water means death.

The second stanza the speaking voice adopts a prophetical tone. “Son of man”(v.20) is a quotation from Ezekiel 2.1.Using biblical language Eliot creates a parallel between Ezekiel’s question and Eliot’s one: “what branches grow /Out of this stony rubbish?”(v.19). The desolate set of this stanza is the portray of Eliot’s contemporary society, which is sterile, without ideals.

At line 31-35 there is a quotation directly taken from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in German.

The third stanza deals with a criticize to Eliot’s contemporary idea of wisdom. Madame Sosostris is a clairvoyante but she is considered “the wisest woman in Europe”(v.45). This stanza describes an hypothetical tarot reading from her.

In the final stanza the reader is walking in London, looking at workers that passed away like ghosts. Suddenly he recognizes a comrade in the Mylae battle. The stanza concludes with a line taken from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. “You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!“(v.76) The poet accuses the reader to share the same way of life, pert and out of law ( Baudelaire was a symbolist, in particular one of The Damned Poets.

The language used is high, meaningful and full of quotations. Besides the poem is a dramatic monologue, indeed there are four different speaking voices(polifony) as in a drama. Each part is a monologue played by a speaker. Mr.Eliot uses free verses, mixing different language(German, French, Latin and English).

In conclusion this section is the portray of his contemporary society that has lost all values and ideals, and so it is a dead society.