With the following text I'm going to talk about the end of the first section (The Burial of the Dead) of the poem “The waste Land” written by T. S. Eliot in 1922.

The text starts with the image of an "Unreal city”, which refers to Baudelaire’s “fourmillante cite”, present in its 1857 "the Fleurs du Mal", dealing with themes of modern eroticism and decadence. The Unreal City is a clear reference to Charles Dickens' Coketown, giving a modernist -impersonal and negative - view of the City.

T.S. Eliot starts, surprisingly, with a concrete setting, the district of West Minster covered by a wintry and brown fog. This is symbol for the Human insecurity during the first decades of the 20th centuty, and is reinforced by the image of the people who live there: a “crowd flowed” (recalling Giovanni Verga's idea of the progress' river) made of people who are all the same; they have no personality, no identity, they are lost in the mass. They are dead, even if they are phisically alive - The Hollow Man of mr Eliot will recall this theme - this is what makes the city look unreal. Dickens, in Coketown, told that all the buildings looked the same, and used black, grey and red, purple to talk about pollution.

People walk mechanically, as if they were robots or zombies, and they look at their feet: they are guilty because of their condition, and are not even able to see the fog; they have to work, and so move through the city, but only look recall death. There are two quotations to Dante Alighieri's poem: “I had not thought death had undone so many” - which refers to the city as one of Hell's circles, comparing the workers as dead souls expiating their faults and “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled” - which gives the idea of an impending death. Even the bell of the Church, sounds as death itself.

Then, the writer recognizes a man named Stetson - his friend Ezra Pound - and reminds him about the battle of Milarvo, during the Second Punic War (another war, as WWI): time is simultaneous as Modernism wants, and here T. S. Eliot shows his intent to talk to all human-genre. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal: the speaker asks Stetson wheter the corpse he planted in his garden was grown or not - recalling, once more, the idea of death and fertility.