The Waste Land – by T.S. Eliot

The Burial of the Dead

The Waste Land is a modern poem written by T. S. Eliot and it is arranged into five sections; the first one is named The Burial of the Dead. What follows is an analysis of the first 18 lines of the first section.

First of all, the intelligent reader should take into consideration the title. It makes the reader understand the atmosphere of the whole composition: the adjective waste connotes the land as a bad one. In particular, as a sterile and uninhabited land. Immediately after the title, there is a quotation in both Greek and Latin language. The Latin one refers to Sibilla Cumana, the priestess of Apollo and a prophet. So, Eliot is referring to mythological figures and to the religious code. Since the quotation is in Latin and Greek, Eliot assumes that the ideal reader is a person who can understand English, Latin and Greek and therefore the ideal reader must be a well-read person. Finally, before the first section begins, there is a dedication to Ezra Pound, the founder of the Imagist movement and T.S. Eliot’s friend. After that, the poem starts with the title of the first section: The Burial of the Dead. It immediately suggests a melancholic, sad and mysterious connotation and refers to the religious code. The nouns burial and dead contribute to create a gloomy atmosphere underlining what expressed previously by the title of the poem.

Considering the structural level, after a first reading to the extract to analyze, the intelligent reader can notice it could be arranged into two sequences:

• the first one is composed by the first seven lines and its function is to set the atmosphere;
• the second one covers the remaining eleven lines and seems it reports the memories of somebody the reader does not  clearly know yet.

The first sequence starts with a declaration: April is the cruelest month. April is also quoted at the beginning of Joffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, but there is a difference: Chaucer says April is the sweetest month. Therefore, he refers to April according to the traditional idea of it. On the other side, Eliot says it is the cruelest month and consequently he reverses the conventional idea of April. This underlines that in the Modern age there are no more objective truth, men did not have any original values to believe in, and therefore people can oppose themselves to the conventional ideas. So, the sentence apparently seems a contradiction because April is generally associated to the beginning of spring, when nature reborn. But, on the other side, considering the title, thinking of April as a cruelest month is logical because it is the month when the land should be regenerating after winter, but regeneration in a waste land cannot happen. The only flowers that grow in the land of the poem are lilacs, generally associated to death because you usually find them at funerals. This explains a connection with the title of the section. In addition, April mixes memory and desire. The words underline the typical Modernist features of a simultaneous view of time and relativity. According to them, life is a mixture of past memories and future expectations. The author is speaking at the present which is the time of the consciousness and through it you can relive the past and think about the future. But memories and expectations does not allow you to live the present to the fullest and the idea of not living refers, in a way or another, to the idea of dying. Therefore, there is another connection with the title of the section. The roots, metonymy for land, are dull: they cannot produce anything because of the land’s sterility. Going on, it suddenly comes winter that kept us warm, breaking the cycle of seasons and creating another paradox where winter seems to be more reassuring, more fertile than spring. Indeed, it helps to feed “a little life with dried tubers”.

Considering all the above, Eliot uses the classic stereotype of taking into consideration the nature, but he presented it as a sterile and unproductive land. It follows that it does not produce anything, only lilacs which refer to death.

The second section is set in summer. The use of past tenses and the speaking voice “us” make the reader understand the narrator is remembering some moments he lived with another person or other people in Germany. Indeed, there are two German references (Starnbergersee and Hofgarten) and a line totally written in German. In particular, the narrator is remembering the moments spent drinking and talking. After that, there are also memories of the narrator’s childhood which seem to be bad ones as the verb “I was frightened” suggests. Only at the 15th line the reader understands the gender and the name of the narrator: a female one, called Marie. In the memory, she is in the mountains with her cousin, probably in winter since they went down on a sled. It follows that there was the snow, recalling the 6th line where winter covers Earth “in forgetful snow”. 

Summing up, in the first 18 lines, T. S. Eliot sets the atmosphere of the waste land and after that uses a female narrator which remembers her past times, as if she wants to relive them.