After the epigraph to Sybilla and the dedication to Ezra Pound, the poem starts with a statement: “April is the cruellest month” which  recalls to Geoffrey Chaucer's “The Canterbury Tales”. Chaucer believes that April is the month of regeneration on the other hand, in Eliot’s work has a negative connotation. April is considered cruel because it promises a regeneration that will not come. On the other hand winter ,which is generally connected to death , has a positive value because people stay at home to find warm and protection.

After that, Eliot introduces a new scene.  The image of the lake is fundamental: in 1886 the king Ludwig II had drowned and so the lake became the symbolical image of what goes under the name of “death by water”. The idea of “death by water” is connected to a quotation from “Tristan and Isolde” that the reader will come across in lines 31-34 and 42 where the text hints at the figure of a king who is like the fisher king of the Graal Legend. He was a sterile king. 

There is an atmosphere of death wich is also clearly introduced by the title of the first section of the work (The Burial of the Dead). It is the name of a religious service which is celebrated when somebody dies.

Right from the start the intelligent reader understands that the dramatic monologue works on the opposition of sterility and fertility, death and life, and takes into consideration the possibility of a regeneration.

The second scene is set in summer and it is a record of the memory where two joung people took sheltered under the colonnade and they had some coffee and talked. There is another memory in the same scene; there is a memory of childwood when the speaking voice  ,together with her cousin, were staying at archduke’s house and the voice remembers a moment when he went on a sleigh and he was afraid to fall.

The next scene is again a scene of dryness . We have the idea of nayure again (roots and branches). These lines also recall the Bible. In the Bible T.s. Eliot finds a very fertile contain of symbols and images appearing in all his literary work. The intelligent reader can appreciate the use of intertextuality: Eliot refers to Bible, to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and Goeffrey Chaucher’s “ The Canterbury Tales”.

"The Burial of the dead" ends with the image of an “Unreal City” recalling to Baudelaire’s “fourmillante cite”. Eliot refers to the financila aspect of London where people flows over London Bridge, they are going to work but they are compared to ghostly figures and the scene is covered by an atmpsphere of death and anxiety. Eliot refers to Dante’s Inferno and compares humans to the “ignavi”: people is not able to act and they haven’t hope.