T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, The burial of the dead, VV. 60-77 – Analysis.

The title of the poem written by T. S. Eliot in 1922 makes the reader understand the atmosphere of the whole composition and then of the extract he is going to analyse: the adjective waste connotes the land as a bad one. It becomes negative and useless. Eliot considered modern culture as a degraded mess, he thinks that the First World War had destroyed Europe and made it become a waste land, a land without any possibility of future life, of future glory. The poem is a long work divided into five sections, the title of the first one, o that from which the extract is the introduction, is The burial of the dead. The nouns burial and dead contribute to create a gloomy atmosphere underlining what expressed previously by the poem’s title.

Before the beginning of the text in analysis, the poem presents a quotation from Petronius’s Satyricon: the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. Putting such a quotation at the beginning of the work, Eliot creates a bound between the woman’s words and the land subject of the poem. He lives in a decayed culture remembering its previous glory and with any possibility to die.

The extract includes the last seventeen lines of The burial od the dead. The gloomy atmosphere continues in all the lines, which seem to have no logical connection, because of Ezra Pound revision of the poem (he suggested Eliot to remove all the narrative parts from the work), and which do not present classical metrical scheme. The extract is organized into two sequences:

-          The first includes the first nine lines and introduces the scene specifying the setting and the atmosphere of death that pervades it;

-          The second one is made up by the remaining ones and reports the meeting between the speaking voice and another man that the narrator knows.

The first line of the first sequence sets the setting of the lines: the City is the financial quarter of London. The same line is a quotation of the French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire: Unreal City recalls Baudelaire’s Fourmillante cité. The extract will be a critic to the financial part of London, and then of the contemporary society. The second line, contains another quotation, from Dickens’s Hard Times: the fog that covers everything in the city is the symbol of decay, of the cultural decay in which Eliot has to live.

The third line introduces other characters; they are presented as a crowd, there is no sense of individuality. The crowd is dead and is going to hell: death is now on the foreground. The line is another quotation, in this case Eliot reports part of Dante’s Inferno (Ch’io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta). Death is everywhere and society has been destroyed by it: there is a reference to the First World War and to the destruction of Europe that it brought. Everyone looks to his feet, it may be a correlative objective to convey the idea of desperation, of fear or of shame for the sins that make them go to hell. This way of walking can however be justified by the presence of fog.

All this is followed by the beginning of work in the City (final stroke of nine); the beginning of work in the morning is bounded to death (a dead sound of the final stroke), life in conventions and in the contemporary society is similar to die according to the narrator.

The second sequence is bounded to the first thirty lines of The burial of the dead: the corpse recalls the dried tubers that bring no life for man; the series of questions underlines the impossibility of return to life for the human society in Eliot’s contemporaneity. Dog is the friend of men but man tends to stop him before he digs: he is the friend of men because he permits nature, corps, knowledge to surface but the winter snow keeps men warm and they do not want it to be removed by the corps, tuber, knowledge. The last sentence closes the extract in a circular way bounding the second sequence to the first one: is a quotation from Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal; it is reported in its original version. This makes the reader understand another feature of Eliot’s writing: the use of multiple languages.