T. S. ELIOT, LA SEPOLTURA DEI MORTI  (1922)

For Ezra Pound

Il miglior fabbro

Aprile è il più crudele dei mesi, genera
Lillà da terra morta, confondendo
memoria e desiderio, risvegliando
le radici sopite con la pioggia della primavera.
L'inverno ci mantenne al caldo, ottuse
con immemore neve la terra, nutrì
con secchi tuberi una vita misera.
L'estate ci sorprese, giungendo sullo Starnbergersee
con un scroscio di pioggia: noi ci fermammo sotto il colonnato,
e proseguimmo alla luce del sole, nell’ Hofgarten,
e bevemmo caffè, e parlammo un'ora intera.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
E quando eravamo bambini stavamo presso l'arciduca,
mio cugino, che mi condusse in slitta,
e ne fui spaventata. Mi disse, Marie,
Marie, tieniti forte. E ci lanciammo giù.
Fra le montagne, là ci si sente liberi.
Per la gran parte della notte leggo, d'inverno vado nel sud.

Analysis of the first part of The Burial Of The Dead by T. S. Eliot.

The Burial Of The Dead is the first section of  T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and it is  composed of juxtapositions of scenes, connected by an atmosphere of death, ‘’waste’’ and ‘’sterility’’ created right from the title.

T. S. Eliot dedicates his poem to Ezra Pound, the poet who suggested him to remove some part of the text, as the quotation “For Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro” suggests.

It begins with a quotation from Petronius’ Satyricon, in which the speaker is the Cumae’s Sybil, a Greek prophet, who states that she wants to die: it probably refers to Eliot’s dissatisfaction about reality.

Just reading the first line, the intelligent reader feels surprised, because he wants to know why T. S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month”.

The poet speaks about April in a non-conventional way: generally speaking, April is linked to Spring, the season of re-birth, when the flowers bloom, the weather improves and people seem to be happy, but in the text it is linked to the adjective “cruelest”, so it acquires a negative connotation.

Mr. Eliot turns all tradition upside down: if April conveyed a positive meaning (for example in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), now it is no more linked to the idea of happiness and fecundity: Spring represents his interior dimension and it produces “lilacs”, the flowers of death.

The poem is a dramatic monologue and it is organized into two scenes: one of Spring, where the semantic field of nature is the opposite of what we are used to (the roots are dead, when they should be fertile, and the landscape is desolated and sterile), and one of the speaking voice’s memories.

The last one deals with the dramatis personae’s holidays in Austria: the speaking voice, using the personal pronoun “we”, referring to herself and her cousin, remembers when they were near the Starnbergersee, a lake near Munich, talking and drinking coffee. Then she remembers when they were children and they played with a sled in the mountains.

It is interesting to highlight the difference between the seasons: on one side T. S. Eliot describes Spring as the season in which “memory and desire mix”, that is a painful, sterile and negative period, thus referring to the moral crisis of the society.

On the other side, Winter “kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow”, that is to say it hides pain and suffering under a layer of snow, thus covering moral death.

Summer “surprised us (...) with a shower of rain”, it is full of beautiful memories of childhood and it refers to happy, peaceful and calm moments.

The word “water”, suggested by the expressions “dull roots with spring rain” (v.4), “ forgetful snow”(v.6) and “with a shower of rain” (v.9), is a key-word: it is connected to life and to the religious ceremony of baptism, so there is also the presence of the religious code.