ANALYSIS OF THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD – T.S. ELIOT

The extract that I have to analyze is taken  from The Burial of the Dead, the first section of The Waste Land,  a complex, erudite and cryptic poem which consists of five sections and which was published in 1922. In particular I will focus my attention on the first twenty-three verses.

Just considering the title, the reader may expect the poem to about something that deals with death: for example the death of an important person; such expectation is created by two words: Burial and Dead.

Looking at the layout the reader can notice that the poem is arranged into stanzas and what comes immediately to his mind is narrator’s attempts to draw the reader’s attention. Indeed the poem starts with the sentence: April is the cruellest month; the use of the superlative has the function to draw reader’s attention and at the same time it conveys the idea of violence. Therefore April here is not associated to spring, re – birth and it is not considered as the sweetest month as Geoffrey Chaucer stated within The Canterbury Tales :

When in April the sweet showers fall

And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all

The veins are bathed in liquor of such power

As brings about the engendering of the flower.

However the mood of the first stanza may be considered tragic and the hypothesis is also confirmed by the use of words that recalls the semantic fields of “Death”: cruelest Lilacs, dead land together with the contrast between “spring” and “dead land”. Moreover the stanza may be considered tragic because it seems as if the human being is described as a weak creature subdued by nature and the intelligent reader can understand this thanks to the expression: Summer surprised us.

All these concepts are introduced by the speaking voice, who is a women: Marie. She tells about human being nature but also about her personal experiences: drank coffee and talked for an hour. She tells about her thoughts thanks to her net of memories and therefore the text may be considered a dramatic interior monologue, consisting of juxtaposed scenes. (…)