THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD FROM T. S. ELIOT'S THE WASTE LAND

   The Burial Of The Dead is the first section of The Waste Land. It starts with a quotation from Petronius' Satyricon and a dedication to Ezra Pound.

   The first stanza describes many periods of the year: April, winter and summer, associating them to some memories. The poem proper begins with a description of the seasons. April emerges as the "cruellest" month, passing over a desolate land. It is a reference to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but it expresses the opposite concept. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past.
The second stanza presents many images of a dead and sterile nature : Eliot returns to the tone of the opening lines, describing a land of "stony rubbish"; arid, sterile, devoid of life, quite simply the "waste land" of the poem's title.
The third stanza is a German quotation from Tristan Und Isolde, while the forth introduces Madame Sosostris' character, a clairvoyant, she is known across Europe for her skills with Tarot cards.
The final stanza is a description of London as an "unreal city", depicted as a place of death, in which a crowd of people flows over London Bridge while a "brown fog".

  The images he uses recall the decline of Western culture, showing images of death in both nature and civilized places. The seasons generate flowers like lilacs, which are symbols of death. Other symbols are dead trees and arid rocks, giving the idea of sterility and stillness. The decline is also stated by the idea that a clairvoyant is "the wisest woman in Europe". A clairvoyant usually is a liar and a cheater, but now in Modern society she is an intelligent person, showing a degraded culture. Death is present even in civilized places like London City: the dead in the garden and "dead sound on the final stroke of nine".

   The use of quotations is a sign of Eliot's will to recreate a continuity between past and present. This is also coherent with his idea of innovative art as the ability of asserting past poets' immortality in his verses.