Analysis

"The Waste Land"

1)  "The Burial of the Dead"

"The Waste Land" is a central work of Modernism which takes its place besides Joyce's Ulysses. It is divided into five parts with no logical continuity between them: 1) The Burial of the Dead; 2) A Game of Chess; 3) The fire Sermon; 4) Death by water; 5) What the Thunder Said.

The translation of "wasteland" is usually given as "terra desolata" but it can also be simply a place which has been abandoned, left to itself to fall into ruin. Its destruction or desolation might not necessarily be due to natural causes but rather it refers to an interior, psychological wasteland. In the poem past and present interrelate and have a simultaneous existence just as they do in the mind. These time shifts are linked by the free association of ideas and flights of thoughts in the mind of the narrator. The poem is also a kind of monologue of remembered dialogue by several characters drawn from the past and the present, from history, poetry and the imagination. In addition, the poem is a web of references to and quotations from a variety of cultural sources.  Furthermore he uses the myth to tell the story. The myth gave the novel a sense of narrative and allowed the author to concentrate on the characters' mental emotional states.

The first part of the novel "The Burial of The Dead" begins with a dedication to Ezra Pound, father of Imagism who inspired Eliot to use the correlative object. After that the poem begins with "April is the cruelest month...". An intelligent reader can understand that Eliot wants to create a contrast with Chaucer's  "Canterbury Tales" meaning that the present is worse than the past . April is considered by Eliot in a negative way. If you go on reading the poem winter, different from April, is connoted in a positive way, it is comfortable. During the winter people can sleep and also they forget what they must do. The landscape is desolated and it displays on the allitterary sounds of the "r". The instance of rock underlines the panorama of sterility which creates the setting.

The main sentences are "stony rubbish" "a heap of broken images" "dead tree" dry stone no sound of water" "fear in a handful of dust". This lines cover an important point in the novel which is fragmentation, sterility. The last sentences is taken from John Danne and it is a forceful image of death.