Analysis of the extract taken from the Burial of the Dead page 553-554

The Burial of the Dead is the first section of the poem The Waste Land. It is composed by five sections, The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water and What the Thunder Said, all accompanied by Eliot's own notes, needed because of the extremely difficulty of the poem's comprehension, with all its multicultural allusions, quotations and half-quotations, its references to the Christian World, the myths and some prophetic figures.

As it has been said before, the Burial of the Dead is the first section of the poem. Its title comes from the Anglican burial service, while the title of the whole poem refers to something which is no longer fertile, productive and prolific. The image of a waste land refers to the nature in general, but it could also refers to the human nature.

Since all titles and lines in T.S.Eliot have got more than one level of meaning, the title " The Burial of the Dead" could refer to the burial of the effigy of a king, to a God or to a sacrifice in the vegetation rites. Also according to this, there are three different levels of meaning: the naturalistic one, following which the nature goes to a rebirth every spring, the religious one ( because according to religion people who behaved well will rebirth too by resurrection) and the one linked to the vegetation rites. All this creates parallel and continuity between pre-Christian time, Christian time and Modern time.

The section opens with the definition of April as the " cruellest month". J.Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, wrote that April was the sweetest month; so why did Eliot turn upside down this definition? Eliot's decision is due to his consideration that April promises a regeneration that does not come and people hope for something that is not going to take place.

The whole rendering of the nature of the opening scene is a desolate vision. Instead of having nice flowers we have " breeding Liliacs ( which generally accompanies the funeral rite) out of the dead land ", a land that does not bring harvest, generation, flowers or  trees, in one word: waste.
In the third verse there is the expression of the Modernist concept of time, which is a simultaneous one.

References to the waste land are made also in the definition of the roots as " dull" ( v.4) even f the spring rain tries to give them life, without results.

In line five, winter is associated to the idea of warmth; indeed in winter time people try to stay inside, to feel protected. This behaviour becomes the metaphor for criticize people's tendency to escape life's problems. The poet also underlines that in the past people does not act in that way: they were plenty of values and ideals to follow and fight and the tried to reach them, they did not hide as Eliot's contemporaries did.

In line sixth Eliot uses the image of the " forgetful snow". It is a typical Modernist image, but, differently from what popular sayings said, the poet defines it as forgetful. The Earth covered by this snow feeds little life, proper of poor people.
 
According to all that said so far, the initial scene sets an atmosphere of death ( anticipated by the title too) in which everything seems to be lifeless; the land is waste, sterile. It does not give any regeneration.

In the second scene the " summer surprised us"; there is not a logical follow up to spring and the verb "surprise" reveals that people are not aware of what there is around them. There are also some references to natural events as the " shower of rain" from which people protect under a colonnade.

The park named in line 10 ( Hofgarten) is a place that the poet really visited during his stay in Europe. The park is in Munchen, the first European city in which Eliot stopped and had a coffee. 

In line 12 there is a German quotation that means " I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German". This quotation recalls the collage technique used by Eliot and prepares the reader to the meeting with many characters that seems to have no roots anywhere: these characters represent that-period humanity.
The quotation is clearer after reading the following lines: the writer juxtaposes memories and scenes and the protagonists are members of aristocracy. The thoughts belongs to a woman, Marie, and the reader can understand it because she remembers when she was staying at her cousin's, the archduke, and he took her on a sled. Marie may be the Countess Marie Larisch, who wrote an autobiography titled My Past. Mr Eliot probably read it and he used her memories. So the reader finds many habits of aristocracy, as go south in the winter and read the whole night. The woman may be also unable to sleep because of the brutality of the First World War, underlining in this way the sterility and the emptiness of that world.

The atmosphere of the third scene is an atmosphere of lost; indeed individuals had lost all their ideals, values etc. but id there are not ideals, there are neither heroes too, only anti- heroes.

In the third scene the poet refers again to an intertextual use of cultural sources.
 The poet uses a metaphor: the roots grasp as if the land was going to die, as men try to clutch to values in a world that is decaying. The earth is defined a "stony rubbish": the European cultural land is arid and dead, and no man tries to make it better because everyone prefers to hide. In this place there is no life because there is not water.
"Son of man" is a reference to the prophet Ezekiel. He wrote that God used it to address to him but it is also associated with Christ, whose death enabled the salvation of Man. Here the poet uses it to address to the reader.