THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD, T.S.ELIOT

Lines 1-20

The title “The Burial of the Dead” refers to the funeral service in the Anglican tradition, which was coned “The Order of the Burial of the Dead”. Furthermore the reader notices that the words “Burial” and “Dead” are written in capital liner and capture his attention.

As a consequence, the reader can understand that the semantic field of the dead is the central in the poem.

The poem is structured as an opposition between its two main parts, separated with fullstop at line four. Indeed the two sections are entirely arranged into lines that end with an enjambement, waking the reader read them all in once. Moreover, the two blocks represent the two opposite periods of the year: spring, which stands for rebirth and winter, which usually stands for death.

April is the cruellest month,breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land,mixing

Memory and desire,stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers..

The atmosphere changes. The speaking voice introduces a new place and he gives to the reader geographic information (Starnbergersee:location of the memory more specific, because Starnbergersee is the name of a lake that's just a couple miles south of Munich, Germany. ). In the line 12 the speaker was having a conversation about who counts as a "true" German, and suggests that a true German can come from the country of Lithuania, which has Germanic historical roots.

The following lines reflect the speaker's memories of childhood through framentary images. Eliot's actually alluding to a real, historical figure named Marie Louise Elizabeth Mendel, a Bavarian woman who was born into a family with royal roots, and became Countess Larisch when she was nineteen. But it isn't entirely clear why Eliot inserts Marie into the beginning of his poem. Eliot probably uses in this poem her to symbolize the collapse of traditional forms of government. The speaking voice indeed uses short sentences divided by fullstops.

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,

My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened.| He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. |And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

The fragmentation is probably date from the form in which the memories are presented in our head. Many times indeed we mention a few moment and the scenes are not entirely clear.