The Burial of the Dead- analysis

In the present text I’m going to analyze “The Burial of the Dead”, the first section of “The Waste Land”.

“The Waste Land” is a poem written by T.S. Eliot in 1922 and it consists of 5 sections, each one specially titled and created by the juxtaposition of scenes.
The title immediately sets the atmosphere, indeed the word “waste” provokes a sense of desolation and invites to think about a sterile land. The title is symbolic for all the poem, indeed the word “waste” identifies the central theme, which is the emotional and spiritual sterility of Western man during the 19th century after the WWI and the crisis of values.

“The Burial of the Dead” includes the first 30 lines of the poem. The title of the section is in continuity with the poem’s one: it reminds to sterility and death.
The section can be organized into 3 sequences: an introductory part, a report of memories and a part which makes the reader reflects about the situation of the Western man.

The first sequence opens with the sentence “April is the cruelest month”, which is an intertextual reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, who opened his poem by defining April as the sweetest month. Mr. Eliot wanted to overturn the positive concept of spring going back to the roots of culture, when people could still believe in values and hope for a rebirth of the land. Now the land his dead, sterile and cannot generate new life, except for lilacs, flowers of death (they were used in funeral rites). Therefore, spring is cruel because deceives man about a possible rebirth of nature, while actually the land is dead.
The “mixing of memory and desire” underlines the sense of vacuum of the present time: men live thanks to memory of the past and expectations about the future, so we’re blocked, not really living the present. Also the land is stucked in this situation: its roots are dull, they can’t produce anything, they are sterile.

In the second sequence, suddenly it is winter, season which parodoxically seems to be more reassuring, warm and fertile then spring. Indeed, it helps to generate a little life with dried tubers.
It is not full life (little, dried), but at least it is something, the land is not completely sterile.
The sequence introduces a speaking voice (winter kept us warm) who starts to tell the reader about his/her past: he/she remembers about a summer spent over the Starnbergersee, a lake used by T. S. Eliot to introduce the theme of death by water, indeed the lake was famous because there king Ludwig sank. The speaking voice tells about a shower of rain and then about the common way to spend time (drinking, talking…). Only at this point the reader understands who the speaking voice is: “No, I am not Russian, I am Lithuanian, a proper German.” (originally written in German), the need to remark the character’s identity recalls the need for contemporary man to have an identity. Moving on the reader understands that the character is a girl named Marie and she continues to recall her memories: her cousin, the mountain, the snow… it is again winter. Her memories introduces the theme of the importance of the past.

In the last sequence the scene changes again, returning to the waste land. The sequence is composed by questions and biblical quotation which underlines the sterility of the land: the only shelter that the man find is a rock (trees are dead), there is no sound of water…
Question and quotation are used to make the reader understands that the man have a role on all that desolation.

The poem is based on two opposite objective correlatives: sterility and the quest of fertility