The Burial of The Dead is the first section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I’m going to analyse  the I^th section of the poem consisting of the first twenty-three lines.

The title makes the reader think the poem deals with a friend’s death or a funerary ceremony. But T.S. Eliot used the word “Dead” to refer to all living beings which follow the eternal cycle of nature. In April spring starts and in the same time a fertile period begins for all living beings.  But T.S. Eliot identified April as the cruellest month. Indeed spring is the season where living beings are dominated by senses and “memory and desire” are mixing.  When April starts all things/livings come alive from sleeping, from death and from “dead land”. This process is an eternal cycle of death, life and death again; it can be compared to the Eleusinian Mysteries. The religious rituals were celebrated every year on the occasion of spring. During the rituals Greek inhabitants celebrated goddess of earth Demetra and her daughter Persefone. According to Greeks the second one determined the natural cycle of nature: Persefone lived 6 months in Hades and  the others in Earth, the turnover established the changing of the season (Hades: Winter-Autumn, Earth: Spring-Summer).  According to the myth every year Persefone died and returned to life. Indeed T.S. Eliot was very interested on mythological world.

In the 8^th line there is a change of scene: it seems a T.S. Eliot’s memory. This juxtaposition of scenes is T.S. Eliot’s technique. The change of scene can be compared to the change of season, indeed the line 8 starts with the word “summer” while the previous lines deals with spring.

In the 12^th line T.S. Eliot used a quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. In Wagner’s opera, while Isolde is going to Ireland, she overhears a sailor singing the quotation. The scene is followed by “you feel free”, the situation of freedom that the lovers Isolde and Tristan had only had with their death.  

In the 20^th line T.S. Eliot quoted from the Old Testament the scene of speech between Ezekiel and God. God asks if Israelites can live without soul, indeed  they are celebrating other divinities. A similar question (“what branches grow out of this stony rubbish”, where branches are the term to design men) is posed by T.S. Eliot. The question is obviously rhetorical indeed he said “you know only a heap of broken images”. Indeed from “stony rubbish” nothing cannot grew but there is “a waste land” or “the burial of the dead”. Maybe the dramatic atmosphere is due to T.S. Eliot’s attempt to describe the modern world after the  World War I.