T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, The Burial of the Dead (lines 1-7)

The extract is taken from the "Burial of the dead", the first section of the Waste Land.   The name of the first section refers to an Anglican funeral service called "The Order of the Burial of the Dead". In the "Waste Land" Eliot's aim is to highlight the moral collapse of the Western society. In order to write "The Waste Land" Eliot considers Jessie Waston's work From ritual to romance.

For study purposes, it may be useful to organise the extract in two parts: the first one goes from line 1 to line 4; the second one goes from line 5 to line 7.

Right from the start of the extract, the intelligent reader notices Eliot's will to break with the existing tradition. The section, indeed, opens with "April is the cruellest month": Eliot parodies Geoffrey Chaucer's verse "April is the sweetest month". First of all, it is worth noting the reason of Eliot's choice to refer to Chaucer's verse: Chaucer is the first poet that had used English language for literary purposes. A common reader usually connects April to the rebirth of nature, so it is the "sweetest". However, Eliot turns that upside down. The sentence appears even more striking because of the use of the superlative. Then, the intelligent reader should wonder why, according to Eliot, "April is the cruellest month". An intelligent conjecture may be that April is the "cruellest month" because the human being confronts his life's brevity with the natural cyclic time. In addition, the intelligent reader notices that the juxtaposition of the words "April" and "Lilacs"  is not coherent, indeed "lilacs" are not usually associated with spring.  The juxtaposition of the nouns "Memory" and "desire" makes the reader understand an additional feature of Eliot's literature: past("memory") and future(desire") co-exist together in one dimension, along with the present.

Analysing the second part, the intelligent reader notices that the whole text seems to be centered on contrasts( "Winter" vs "April"; "rain vs snow"; "lilacs" vs "tubers"). Again, in the second sequence, Eliot breaks the typical cultural principles by saying that "Winter", generally associated with cold temperatures, kept human beings "warm".

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land – The Burial of the Dead (lines 60-76)

The present extract is taken from the first section of the poem The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. It is arranged into 16 lines of different length. Considering the structure it might be divided into two sequences: the first one consists of a picture of an ordinary London’s morning after nine o’clock, while in the latter the poet addresses one of the members of the throng.

The description of the City  is vivid and realistic in terms of temporal and local setting. For example the reader can notice some references like the City (the financial heart of London), the London Bridge (a bridge across the River Thames leading to the City), King William Street (a street in the City of London), Saint Mary Woolnoth (a 20th century church in the city), ninth hour (the opening time for the offices).

Going on reading the poet’s attention falls on the overcrowded setting with the commuters hurrying along their offices. The capital letter (City) connotes London as an economic and financial hub and at the same time it works as a critique against all that regards money, including the citizens, locked in their routine. Firstly they are compared to the “Ignavi” of Dante's Inferno and after to the souls of limb, thanks to a skilled juxtaposition of quotations taken by La Divina Commedia.

In fact fragmentation is a technique frequently adopted by Eliot. As a matter of fact “Unreal City” is an allusion to Baudelaire's poem "The Seven Old Men" (Crowded city, city full of dreams / where the ghost in broad daylight stops the passer-by), where London acquires a spectral dimension: it's unreal, full of dreams and inhabited by ghost moving in broad daylight.

In the following lines (vv. 4-5) Eliot links London’s citizens’ acting to Dante’s Inferno’s damned people. Line 4 represents the crowd of working people compared to a multitude of dead people, while line 5 is an allusion to Inferno, Canto IV ("Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, / non avea pianto mai che di sospiri / che l'aura etterna facevan tremare") and represents the frantic  life of London where no one has got time.

Finally the speaking voice adds further details: the crowd flow down King William Street to the church Saint Mary Woolnoth, whose bell strikes the hour, like a funeral toning bell ("dead sound").

In the second sequence the poet recognizes a member of the crowd, Stetson, who, according to the speaking voice’s words, was a companion at the battle of Mylae. Here the poet totally disregards time differences -  the battle of Mylae was fought between the Romans and the Carthaginians in 260 b.C , during the first Punic War – witnessing his unconventional simultaneous concept of time, where past and present co-exist. Once again the reader notices T.S.Eliot's strong idea that classical values are no longer present in contemporary existence

After that the speaking voice asks Stetson if the corpse he planted had begun to sprout or of it has been disturbed by frost and he warms him to keep the dog distant because he might dig it up.

At the end he concludes with an original quotation by Baudelaire, taken from Le Fleurs du Mal: "You! Hypocrite lecteur!- on semblable, - mon frere! " addressing directly with the reader, charging him with compliant hypocrisy: we are all an undefined mass walking as a burial procession proceeds.