THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD – ANALYSIS

The Waste Land was written by Thomas Sterns Eliot and was published in 1922.

Eliot received a great help from Ezra Pound, who changeded the structure of the book.

Taking the title into consideration, the adjective "waste", it conveys the idea of something desert, arid, desolate and sterile. It is associated with the name land, so the waste land is Europe, after a period of strife and death, devastated by the First World War. The Waste Land consists of five sections:

The Burial Of The Dead

• A Game Of Chess
• The Fire Sermon
• Death by Water
• What the Thunder Said

In The Waste Land it must not ignore the fact that the First World War , which ended even four years before the publication of the poem , had been seen as unnecessary and insane carnage that had squandered millions of lives and led almost bankrupt the great European nations . The waste land is also London, where Eliot lived , and where he set some scenes of the poem ( such as completing the first section , which takes place on Westminster Bridge ) .

A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem’s epigraph, taken from the Petronius's Satyricon, in Latin and Greek, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl’s predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former glory.

Within the piece there are citations of the most disparate works of literature and art in general ( in the poem are the verses of Dante , Baudelaire , Ovid and many other poets , but also songs of Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner

The second line is in the Italian vernacular used by Dante in his Divine Comedy, who called it the Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel in song XXVI of Purgatorio.

The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It sounds paradoxical because spring is generally associated with life and love. Lilacs refers to memory and past, and the flowers are connects with the symbol of fertility.

Winter is connoted in a positive way, people can find protection in it. The winter sleep is disturbed by the arrival of the spring with the revival of memory and desire.

After that the time shifts from spring to summer, "summer surprised us".

"Coming over the Starnbergersee" makes the location of the memory more specific, because Starnbergersee is the name of a lake that's just a couple miles south of Munich, Germany. 

Eliot describes more specific memories: a rain shower by the Starnbergsee and the coffee into the Hofgarten, a small public park in Munich.

It follows a sentence in German, which translated is "I'm not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German".

Later there is a flashback with a clear reference to Russian Revolution (verse 12).

It leads into a scene in the speaking voice's childhood, where children tried to have fun on a sled in winter. 

Probably Eliot alludes to a real, historical figure named Marie Louise Elizabeth Mendel, a Bavarian woman who was born into a family with royal roots, and became Countess Larish when she was nineteen.

Then he return to the tone of the incipit, describing a land of the "stony rubbish", a waste land; it is a biblical reference because Eliot quotes Ezekiel 2.1 and Ecclesiastes 12.5, using biblical language to construct a sort of dialogue between the narrator and a higher power. 

The "heap of broken images" recalls the idea of fragmentation typical of modernism and it underlines modern's man disorientation and loss of values.