The burial of the dead is a poem by T.S.Eliot. It is dramatic monologue.

The poem starts with a reference to April. It traditionally reminds to spring, the season of rebirth, in particular of the nature. Eliot writes “the cruelest month”, it means that it provides violence. His idea about the month is the opposite of the one of the tradition. He turns upside down the value of the “old” literature, in particular he recalls Chaucer’s poetry. In fact Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales say “April is the prettiest”. : he considers spring as a joyful event that brings food, a warmer weather. So Eliot overturn this conception, the ideal order of the world has ben subverted: the modernists live in a sterile world that has no values but they try to look for an order. 

To express the opposition between his association of ideas and the traditional ones, he uses a religious and anthropological code.

In addition, the poet uses references to nature to better explain that nothing means nothing now, there are no more trues. The expectation of the human being can only be betrayed. In the second lines, he also refers to lilacs, a typical flowers of the funerals: this allusion reinforces the concept said before and so it may recall memories and the past. Speaking about time, the nouns memory and desire remind to Eliot thoughts about time. The present is set up by past and future together, by old recollection and expectation for the future. He also  speaks about the roots that may stand for culture: without roots a tree could not live so they are essential. The oxymoron “winter kept us warm”: men, when outside it is cold, stay at home near the fire and disinterested, empty, with any ideal: he reinforces the subverting. The forgetful snow that fall in winter kills and fossilizes anything that is on earth. People that constantly live like they were dead, will be forgotten by others.

At this point, the scene is set near Munich, in Austria. The colonnade is another place where people shelter from weather, in particular from rain and sun, elements that normally brings life to earth.

The sentences in German “I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German” underlines that people that live in the modern world have no ideantity non sense of belonging or homeland, they don’t have any roots, so they don’t have life.

During the poem he refers to the WWI, to the Russian revolution, to the Holy Bible “ Son of man...”, to Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and to Madame Sosostris, a fortune teller, considered the most wise woman in the world because she can read the future, as also the Cuma sybil does (preface of The Waste Land).

The unreal city recalls the city described in the love song of J.A.Prufrock, into the fog. It is London, where all of its inhabitants are controlled by work, routine, like in Hell: they are indifferent but the wish a better life the never will have. Referring to Milazzo, he universalized the problem of London . The poem ends with a quotation taken from Baudelaire.