The Waste Land,  T. S. Eliot

The Burial of the Dead

Unreal city, 60-76

The phrase "Unreal City" is actually refering to a city that is not real, it is indeed an unreal, dreamy, city.

The speaker remembers watching a crowd flowing over London Bridge like zombies, and says he "had not thought death had undone so many". This is a ghostly description. Here, Eliot is definitely quota ting the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno, and is comparing modern life to living in hell.

The people in this scene are sighing and staring (Inferno allusions) only at the ground in front of their feet. They seem unsatisfied with their undead lives.

The speaker mentions a landmark street in London, and notes how a church bell let out a "dead sound on the final stroke of nine" (associating religion and death).

"The Burial of the Dead" ends on a note, in which the speaker claims that he saw someone he knew from an ancient war (named Stetson, which refers to Esra Pound's hat) in the flowing dead-crowd and asked him if the "corpse he planted last year in his garden has begun to sprout".

Normally, we think of burying the dead in order to get them out of sight, but the speaker thinks planting a body in the ground is like planting a seed that's supposed to grow. The speaker then gives the Stetson man advice about keeping the dog and the frost away from where the corpse is planted.

His final words are from by Charles Baudelaire's I Fiori del Male, a poem that dealt with themes of modern eroticism and decadence. The reader can look at the last line, in french, might also as Eliot calling out the reader for being a lazy hypocrite. The speaker more or less admits that he's no better by calling you "mon frère" or "my brother" in French.