Analysis of “ The Burial of the Dead”

The text I’m supposed to analyze is the “Burial of the Dead” and it is the first section of T.S. Eliot ‘s masterpiece “The Waste Land”.

Right from the title the reader may expect the poem to be about death and the word “burial” suggests the reader the idea of a funeral.

The text is an evolution of the dramatic monologue and the four speakers only find themselves sorrouded by dead people or stopped by circumstances like war. It begins with the end of winter and the arrival of spring with April. According to the tradition April is considered when the spring comes and when there is the rebirth of life but Eliot doesn’t follow the tradition and he says that “April is the cruellest” because there is no hope and it is so violent. It denies rebirth. It is a waste land.

Death and snow are typical themes of modernists. There is an attempt by April which is totally useless, it is not able to transform the land. The human being tries to be isolated. There is a dramatic atmosphere, very well anticipated by the title. The landscape is desolate and it plays on the alliterative sound “r” in “red rock”. The insistence on rock underlines the panorama of sterility which creates the setting of the poem. The invitation to go under the shade of the red rock, which is the image of a church recalls a passage from “Ezechiele”.

T.S. Eliot adopts an anthropological attitude. Man became fragment. “ I will show you fear; in a landful of dust”: this line is taken from the death of Saint Narcissus, it hints at the fear of the human that do not want to wake up in April because April is cruel. The verse sung by a seaman who misses his girlfriend are a romantic topic and they recalls a romantic vision of love. The expression “heart of light” sends back to Conrad’ “Heart of Darkness”. In both cases here and in Conrad it is the experience of the void, which comes out in the following lines also taken from “Tristan und Isolded”. The idea of the reader gets from the scene where a dying Tristan is still waiting the arrival of the ship that will bring his Isolded is one of loss and melancholy. The human being is either afraid or he feels something missing. T.S Eliot  resolves to different intertextual quotation to community of sterility and the fragmentary nature of civilization that had lost his values.

T.S. Elliot claims that to understand the present the reader has to understand  and has rooted in the past. He presented a fortune teller as in a medieval ballad and also in this passage the theme is dead. The scene of the fortune teller starts with an higher register which is immediately followed by a lower register. T.S Eliot exploits the image of somebody who is apparently able to see into the future; but the style and the tone of the lines is here a parody of the same woman. The speaking voice refers to the pork of the cards the lady uses as “wicked”. The drowned sailor and death are not only Christian references they are more likely to be symbols dating back to the fertility rites, while Madame Sosotris is Eliot’s contemporary version of a cheating fortune teller who is not able as were the divinatory rights. Man doesn’t know anything about the future.

The Burial is one of the most nostalgic sections that has a revivalist effort going into it is an attempt to mix 'memory with desire'. The mystical experiences of the Hyacinth Girl passage or the constant surge of memory, reflecting on a buried past, the shadow of the dead rock that is tempting and soothing at the same time, a past of harmony and a present of desolation are accompanied by frustration and loneliness as in the London Bridge spectacle of death unmaking so many. The tarot-metaphor is also initiated, which above all connotes predestination. The blooming Corpse is an almost melancholy image that closes The Burial.