The first three lines are a description of a desolate land, where only lilacs can grow and men can only live in the present.

Indeed the extract starts with the quotation ''April is the cruest month''. It means that the month that would regenerate the land now can't do it anymore, failing to the expectations that men had  for the spring as season of reborn and return to life. ''Mixing memory and desires'' means that men can only live in their present without have no more pleasure from the memories of the past or the expectations for the future. They are paralyzed  in their reality like Joyce's antihero characters. Also the rain can't feed the roots, because they aren't deep-rooted in the ground, referiring to the roots of the human nature and, as other Elliot's quotation say ''I can't connect nothing with nothing'',  beause of the crysis of value men have lost they roots with their past and need to use the mitical method as '' a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history''. 

Human beings are able only to protect theirself with snow, isolating themself from any emotions to avoid their fragility, underlining a difficulty to relate with others. They can't draw anymore to the past model of ''hero'' and only the model of antihero can represents the contemporany man. In the summer, there is a return of rain and a constantly need to take cover from it, while ''drink and talk'' is a superficialy way to connect people. The phrase ''Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch'' means ''I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German'' and has the meaning to get a identity.  We reproduce ourself with the language, so we are the language we use. Marie is a  german princess who is a globe-trotter symbolizes of the rootlessness of the modern man. She, entirely, lived her life on the physical level. She did not remember her parents, brothers or sisters but only her cousin with whom she had a relationship. Eliot considers such ties necessary for culture, real life and morals. So she is a representation of the modern humanity which lives mainly on the physical aspects. In the second stanza there is a recall of a nature unable to regenerate itself and so a lack of links of the man with the tradition. The landscape is desolated and it plays on the alliteration sound in opening quotation ''red rock''. The insistence of ''rock'' underlines the panorama of sterility which creates the rotting of the poem. The invitation to go under the shade of the red rock and the red rock itself is the image of the church and recalls a passage from Ezechiele. On the other hand the quotation ''I will show you fear in a handful of dust'' is taken from the death of saint marcisus and it hints at the fear of the human beings that don't want to wake up in April because it's the cruelst month.

The third stanza ''Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Iriscb Kind,Wo weilest du?'' is an extract from Wagner's famous opera "Tristan and Isolde " which is a story of guilt love. The lines are song by a man who misses his girlfriend who has remained at home. This is a romantic topic and recols a romantic vision of love.

The lines of the fourth stanza are linked to ''Dans le Restauraunt Elliot's poet that he writes in his youth. The hyacinth garder recalls the peace of love and as well the vegetation rites and the sacrifice to hyacinth, the god. To tell the truth it also recalls to the legend of the Graal where the impure knight fails his test because he didn't manage to pose the question on the esorte meaning of the cup. In these lines Elliot resorts to different intertextual quotations to communicate the sterility and the fragmentatic nature of a civilation that has lost his values.

The second part of the fourth stanza presents a fortune teller. Elliot knows that to understand the present, we need to know the past, and he presents us a figure much considered in the '500, because there wasn't a sviluped logic science, while astrology was considered a nobile science that can interrogate the metaphisic. The scene of the fortune teller starts with an high register, because her name is Madame Sosostris, but immediatly follow a very low register, because she had a bad cough, creating a parody of the character that underlines her human aspects. Indeed she is an cheating fortune teller. These scene are apparently disconnected between them, but to tell the truth they give a sense of powerless of the man when he is in front his limitation.

The final stanza begins with the image of unreal city, a crowd of people flows over the London bridge. A man sees “Stetson” with whom he fought in a war and asks him about a corpse that he planted last year.