Analysis of The Burial of The Dead from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

The Burial of The Dead is the first section of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.

Just starting from the title, the reader comes across a very upsetting image, that is the burial of dead people, which reminds death, and decaying bodies.

The first lines build up indeed a very disconcerting picture, based on the contraposition of positive elements (April, the month of the rebirth of life; the lilacs; “desire”; “spring rain”) and negative ones (“cruellest”, “dead”, “dull roots”). It is a complete reversal of what the reader may expect from a description of spring: flowers can only grow out of a dead, sterile land, and the gentle spring rains call back to life just “dull roots”. The attack the poet is moving is clearly directed towards April, the “cruellest” month, which seems to spread its benefits upon a miserable, unworthy world. Thus the reader may think the poet feels uncomfortable in such rebirth of Nature; and indeed, “winter kept us warm”, says the dramatis persona, who is the narrative voice in the poem. Winter, generally considered a cold, unproductive season, here is said to be “warm”, and it feeds “a little life with dried tubers”. Thus, winter appears to better fit the narrative voice’s mood; she probably does not like the confusion, the amusement of spring, and she rather prefers the intimacy, the solitude, and the forgetfulness only winter can give.

The following description of Marie’s (the narrative voice’s) experience in Germany, seems to violently disrupt the thread that crosses the whole poem. It is a trivial scene, where Marie’s fear when she goes on a sledge melts with apparently pre-packed sentences as “in the mountains, there you feel free”. However, the link is hidden in the attack towards the world, which is the main topic of the first lines: the banal story is indeed a description of the futility of the common man’s existence, and of his preposterous presumption to dig out truths from trivial, stupid events. The sentence “in the mountains, there you feel free” clashes with the fact that Marie “was frightened”: how can you say you are free when you are frightened? Also the sentence in German language, where Marie (or her interlocutor) insists on being a “true German” remarks the stupidity of people who give importance just to nationality, as if it were what makes a person a good or a bad one (we have to remember that, a few years after The Waste Land’s publication, racist laws were promulgated in great countries like Germany and Italy).

The attack towards the most part of humanity reaches its climax in the following stanza: men are arrogant beings who presume to know, and so they assume they can “say”, or “guess”. Here, T. S. Eliot quotes the Bible, saying that man knows just “broken images”, and the world he has built around him is a place where dead trees give no shelter, and singing crickets give no solace.

The part where he describes the “unreal city” is also very representative. It is a city of dead people, as becomes clear reading the quotation from Dante’s Inferno; particularly, the quotation comes from the canto about the ignavi, people who did not nothing, neither good nor bad, in life. These people “fixed their eyes on their feet”: they have no apparent life. Suddenly, the poet recognizes a person, and he calls him “Stetson”, which is however a brand of hats: people are substituted with their clothes, since there is no other possibility to discern single identities. The horrid image of the corpse planted in the garden, which is mentioned in the following speech, adds to the image of the beginning: as lilacs grow out of the “dead land”, leaves should come out a corpse. Thus, it is from the utmost violence, from the nastiest things, that the poet (and the few “good” people left) must dig out what is really helpful in the world. However, the poet cannot consider himself out of the corruption of the world; he is similar to the reader, he has the same weaknesses; he is just able to say what other people are too hypocrite to affirm.

Thus, the section of the poem comes to its conclusion: it is an act of accuse towards a world, where no one, even the poet, is immune to corruption, but very few have the courage to face and fight against a world which has become a “waste land”.