THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

T.S. ELIOT

Unreal City.
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!
You were with me in the ships at Mylae!
The corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men,
Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
You hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!"

Always belonging of the first section there are an another scene. The following extract is the end of the first section of The Waste Land. The presence of the “fog” is a tipically topos on the description of cities. The first line isolates two words that presents the topic of the section: “Unreal City”. The speaking voice refers to a Modern city whose the “brown fog” suggests that it isn't the cleanest of places. The phrase “Unreal City” is a quotation of Charles Baudelaire, a 19^th century French poet who wrote Fleurs du Mal (1857). The speaker remembers watching a crowd flowing over London Bridge like zombies. He uses the word “flowed” generally used to describe a river. So he wants probably describes the people as a continuous and homogeneous stream. Moreover he compares the modern life to the life in hell, the place where all the dead people are. So there is a reference of Dante's Inferno. He creates an hellish atmosphere and action is also expression of suffering.

He describes the people and they appear unsatisfied with their undead life. In particular he describes worker (who finish to work at nine o'clock, when the bell sounds) in a specific place of London: a landmark street that it is noted how a church bell of the actual church St Mary Woolnoth. Indeed the section gives to the reader geographic information. The sound of the church bell connect the semantic field of the religion to the dead: “With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.”. The verb “stroke” underlines the strong and the pain a blow, suggested also by the alliteration of strong sound how “d” and “k”.

In a formal sense the reader should also notice how Eliot uses also rhyming couplet, like he does with "feet" and "Street" or "many" and "many".It has reminders of the old structured, orderly world that once existed in Europe

These classic quotations remind the cultural fragmentation that Eliot is trying to convey in this poem.

In the final lines the speaker claims that he saw someone he knew from an ancient war (named Stetson) in the flowing zombie-crowd. The dead body remembers the primitive ritual of burial where people buried the images of the goddess of fertility.