NOTES OF 2^ND APRIL 2012

The Burial of the Dead

The first section of The Waste Land is made up of four scenes, each from the perspective of a different speaker. The scenes, seemingly without mutual connection, are juxtaposed and hold together throughout the same atmosphere of death, loss and fragmentation, and the same anthropological connectors.

The juxtaposition of different people’s moments is one of the main features of the modernist novel where the reader is expected to give a sense to the whole text.

The first scene is an autobiographical extract from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls that she is German, not Russian. The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the desolate state of her life.

The second section is a prophetic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader “something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you”. The prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a girl and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after a meeting with her. These reminiscences are filtered through quotations from Wagner’s operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss.

The third episode describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck.

In the final episode the speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he fought in a battle. The speaker asks the ghost about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a line taken from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins.

This section of The Waste Land can be seen as a dramatic monologue. The four talking speakers are desperate because they need to speak but they find their audience just in dead people. The poem employs only partial rhyme schemes and short traditional part of structure. These are meant to reference to the literary past, aimed to achieve both a stabilizing and a de-familiarizing effect. The inclusion of fragments in languages other than English further complicates the understanding. The reader is not expected to be able to translate these immediately; they are reminders of the cosmopolitan nature of twentieth-century Europe and of mankind’s fate after the Tower of Babel: We will never be able to perfectly comprehend one another.

The section named The Burial of the Dead takes its title from the Anglican burial service The Order for the Burial of the Dead. The title could also refers to the effigy of a king or a god as a sacrifice in vegetation rite, which was a pre-Christian rite planning the burial of a king’s effigy or a god’s for luck.

The poem opens with the word April, which is generally known as the month of rebirth both of nature and Christ; the rebirth’s theme creates a parallel between pre-Christian times, Christian times and contemporary times. 

The line containing the word April (“April is the cruellest month”) represents an upset of the tradition. Indeed, Eliot takes it from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales where the Middle Ages poet said that April was the sweetest month. The decision of Eliot to turn that line upside down is due to the consideration that April promises a regeneration that doesn’t come and people hope for something that will not take place. Furthermore, Eliot realizes that in Chaucer’s age people had trust beliefs while in modernist time people have lost ideals. This observation leads Eliot to turn upside down a well-known tradition line, adapting it to the contemporary times.

The first scene of the first section of The Burial of the Dead gives an atmosphere of death. The land is connoted as dead. It breeds lilacs, the flowers used in funerals, and mixes memories and desires: the hope for rebirth is contrasted by the dead land that cannot permit any new birth.

Lines 5-7 contain a paradox: “Winter kept us warm”. Winter is associated to cold and snow but during the winter people try to keep protection of them staying inside the houses; but staying inside is a way that does not permit to face life. So people hide themselves and they are afraid by the snow that covers the land. Winter and snow are forgetful and they lead people to paralysis.

It follows a scene taken from the memories of Marie, the speaker talking in here. She talks again about season, mentioning the summer that surprises people not waiting for it. People not waiting for summer represent the unaware mankind that does not realize what it is living.

Line 12 is written in German language and it recalls to the collage technique used by Eliot to convey human fragmentation but it refers also to the lack of roots. Indeed the scene closes presenting memories of people busy in doing futile things, going everywhere without a real and significant destination.

The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night: to read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture.