"The Burial Of The Dead" is an extract taken from the first section of "The Waste Land" written by Thomas Stearns Eliot in 1922.
It starts with an epigraph in four languages taken from Petronius "Satiricon" which anticipate to the reader that the comprehension of the text won't be easy.

In the first line Eliot made reference to "The Canterbury Tales" of Geoffrey Chaucer. Differently from him, Eliot doesn't show April as sweet or  as a period of regeneration but he defines it as not only cruel but "the cruellest month". So the common conception of this month as been overturn probably to express the effect of the cries of values which excludes the possibility of a salvation.
That makes clear why it is define as a "Dramatic monologue".

Keeping reading you can find some key words related to the semantic field of nature: lilacs, land, spring, rain, roots. Again they  are represented in a negative way. The plants which are not entrenched on the plot died; in the same condition, men who are not  part of a community lives in a "panorama of futility and anarchy" ( "The Mithycal Method"). Therefore Eliot uses the symbolic meaning as paradigm of human condition of his time: the man indeed is not linked and not connected to any value.

This fragility and weakness are also express by the element of "snow" that as James Joyce's "The Dead" represents, is the hiding place for the problems so that men remain paralyse, stack in the time like a "patient etherised up one a table" ("The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock")

The text proceed with the memory of a rainy day where the protagonist did common actions like talk and drink. Than Eliot returns on the theme of connection among the people which is necessary for live in a condition of conscience and not to live in a vegetative state.

In the following lines Eliot insist to the desolation of the landscape express by the "red rock", which underlines the panorama of sterility, and he invites the reader to go under the shade of the "red rock" (this passage refers to the book of Ezekiel). There Eliot can shows you the fear of an "handful of dust" which recalls John Donne "Meditation IV".

The German words which follow are taken from "Tristan und Isolden" and were sang by a mariner who missed his girlfriend who has remain at home. In this. Romantic topic you can also see the sense of loss connected to the nostalgia.

Then there is an other memory about Hyacinth (remind to Eliot's poems "Dans le restaurant" and "The Weeping Girl" ) which transmit a vision of the time not linear where past, present and future seems to be the same thing.

"Looking into the heart of light, the silence". It refers to the "Hyacinth Garten" and to the vegetation rites ("The Golden Bowl" by Henry James). It also send back to the legend of the Graal where the impure knife fails his test because he didn't manage to pose the question on the exoteric meaning of the cup.
Indeed the expression "heart of light" refers to Joseph Conrad "Heart Of Darkness" where you can see the experience of the void which come out again in the following lines also taken from "Tristan und Isolden". The line is said by a shepherd who addresses a dying Tristan that still keeps waiting the arrival of the ship that will bring his Isolde.