The extract I will analyze is taken from the first section of the poem The waste land. The poem is organized into five sections: The burial of the dead, A game of chess, The fire sermon, Death by water and What the thunder said. In this work, Eliot deals about a lot of various argues, such as the ancient vegetation myths, the legend of the Holy Grail, fertility ceremonies and mythological and religious figures: the reader can notice that the work is very complex. Concerning the extract, the reader creates some expectations about the possible content of the poem. The burial of the dead seems to indicate the poem will be about things that regards death. Besides the reader’s expectation is to read some reflections on death. From the first line, the reader can notice the use of the adjective “cruel” referred to the month of April. Cruel is something that provokes violence and so the reader isn’t able to understand the reason why Eliot uses this adjective. In fact April is the month of regeneration and rebirth. So it results difficult to find a possible link between April and the adjective “cruel”. In my opinion with this citation, Eliot wants to explain that in front of the blossoming of nature, the modern empty man feels more painful his fragility and his limits. It is important to underline Eliot’s choice to talk about this month: in the fourteen century Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about April yet, describing this month as the period in which flowers flourish. Interesting is the decision of Eliot to use lilacs as flowers in the poem. Lilacs were used in religious celebrations such as in funerals. So the choice reminds to the title of the extract: the burial of the dead. In the first part of the extract there are two scenes: the one is about spring, the other is about winter. In this last case, the scene is set in Austria and we understand this from the language used (there are German words and Austrian places such as the Starnbergersee and the Hofgarten).   In the scene, the narrator provides to give us some information about the protagonist’s childhood. He describes what she did during her stay in Austria: she drank coffee, she went on the sunlight, she talked for an hour and she went with the sled when she was in the mountains with her cousin. So we can say that Marie’s childhood was carefree and beautiful relatively, because she lost a lot of time in futility things during the past. At this point the extract refers to the last part of The burial of the dead in which the narrator provides to use some intertextuality to convey his message. First of all he uses Baudelaire’s citation when he speaks about the unreal city. Besides he gets ideas from Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia when he asks “a crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had no thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled”. This kind of intertextuality is used by Eliot to give more importance in what he says. In this part, Eliot critiques the modern society and their citizens. At the beginning they are compared to the sloth of hell, because they are indifferent in what happen to the other. Besides they are compared to the souls of limbo, because they hope for a better life but they don’t change their static routine. This section concludes with a reference to the preface of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, because Eliot describes man in his stupidity and hypocrisy as Baudelaire had done in his work.