The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot, 1922

The Burial of the Dead, 8-26

These lines talk about how “summer surprised us”, meaning that the poem's speaker has a crowd they hung out with in the past but the reader has not clear who “us” is. “Coming over the Starnbergersee” makes the location of the memory more specific, the speaker talks about how the group walked past a bunch of fancy columns and ended up in a city park, how they drank coffee and talked for an hour. In a time of emptiness the reader remember a scene of his past.

Then you have a strange line in German that says “ I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German” and it suggests that a true German can come from the country of Lithuania, which has Germanic historical roots.

The following lines go on with the speaker's memories of childhood. The reader can find out that the speaker is the cousin of an archduke, which means that he or she probably came from a pretty rich background. The archduke took the speaker out on a sled and told her not to be frightened. The reader find out at this point that the speaker's name is Marie. It turn out Eliot's actually alluding to a real figure named Marie Louise Elizabeth Mendel a Bavarian woman who became Countess Larisch when she was nineteen. There is a theory about the reason why Eliot insert her in his poem: the countess Marie barely avoided being killed when a socialist workers' movement swept across Bavaria and encouraged the killing and the imprisoning of anyone of Marie's high class. One again, there are notes of the decline of traditional, high culture in a modern world of stupid, violent, and worst of all, average people. Marie remember the good times she had lived when she was young, when she could feel free in the mountains. Her words seems to suggest a nostalgic atmosphere.

In line nineteenth it's not Marie who's talking anymore, but someone else. These lines throw you three verses from the Bible, and they basically talk about how people's soul is like soil without water. The first allusion in lines 19-20 asks the reader what could possibly grow from his/her spirit. It's interesting to notice a phrase commonly used in the Bible, “Son of man”.

Lines 21-23 allude to Ecclesiastes and they say that the reader probably doesn't know the answer to this last question, because all people know about life is “a heap of broken images”, meaning that people live their life on a superficial level and don't bother to draw your thoughts together into any meaningful ideas.

People live in a world that is as hard on them as a beating sun, but their trees are dead, and they can't comfort them or give them shade.

People dying from spiritual thirst, and there is “no sound of water”. All people are going to get is a half-hearted comfort, like a shadow under a “red rock”. Eliot's negative opinion about people's existence and their condition in the world is quite obvious.

The next line invites the reader into this shadow, since it's the best he/she is going to get.

In these lines the concept of the Waste Land comes out. Eliot's speaker describes a desert, and it's just about as awful as deserts can get (no water, dead trees, red rock). Wherever people are, they are surrounded by stony rubbish, whether real or figurative, and the speaker clearly is not happy about it.