The section of The Burial Of The Death allows T.S.Eliot to provide the true waste land of the poem: the modern city. The reality described in The Waste Land, as the title suggests, is nothing but "a heap of broken images". Reality, in terms of the post-war history or as Eliot admitted later, is at the same time stressing disconnection, lack of moral or spiritual values or divine faith and so on. The unreal city of London is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past; it is synthesized in "A crowd flowed over London Bridge" which highlights its dead state and absolute sterility. People pass over the London Bridge and seem like "ignavi" in Dante's Hell: they are disoriented and have no longer any hopes. London appears fantastical because it lacks meaning. There is only sex and no love, there is only motion but no dynamism, there is only dialogue but no real communication. The Stetson-dialogue is a perfect instance of this unreal communication where both words and meaning fail as the city is reduced to the unreality of a blooming corpse.

The narrator sees a man who he recognizes as Stetson. He than asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted last year in his garden has begun to sprout. With this character the narration return to the prospect of history. World War I is replaced by the Punic War; with this choice T.S.Eliot seems to be arguing that all wars are the same just as he suggests that all men are the same in the stanza's final line, when he quotes Webster and Baudelaire. "Hypocrite reader! - my likeness, - my brother!" We are all Stetson; Eliot is speaking directly to us. Individual faces blur into the ill defined mass of humanity as the burial procession inexorably proceeds.