T.S. ELIOT – The Waste Land

Analysis on the first 18 lines

To start with, considering the title, the reader immediately thinks to a dead land, where there are no more human traces, where flora and fauna are dead. The title could also have a hidden meaning, as it could refer to spirituality or consciousness of men.

The first section of TS Eliot peom “The Waste Land” is called “The Burial Of The Dead”. It is not easy to understand what Eliot is refering to by the first 18 lines, but it seems to introduce the reader to one of the main topics Eliot deals with: the loss of point of references in contemporary society, after the WW1. The section opens up with "April is the cruellest month", which overturns the conventional way of perceiving spring. This could mean, as the following lines testify, that april, when nature rises again, highlights modern human being loss of purpose with more evidence. The first introduction is based on seasons, all of them apart from autumn, and the speaking voice, the narrator only comes out at line 15: Marie. As lines 12 and 13 suggest, Marie is lithuanian noblowoman (“staying at the arch-duke’s”), speaking in first person and telling the reader about her childhood, spent among the mountains with her cousin. It is interesting to notice how Eliot uses natural elements to create continuous contrasts, for example at line 17 (“In the mountains, there you feel free”), when he makes mountains a place where you can feel free, while mountains are conventionally associated to closed spaces and closed mind people, or also “breeding Lilacs out of the dead land” and “Winter kept us warm”. So, it seems that the first lines of the first verses are all based on contrast and on nature’s rebirth in a dead land.