The Burial of the Dead (I)

Lines 1-4

April is the cruellest month,

breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Lines 5-7

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers..

Lines 8-12

Summer surprised us, coming over the

Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bing gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

Lines 13-18

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.

Lines 19-26

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)

A funeral service in the Anglican rite is called ‘The Order of the Burial of the Dead’. The title of the first section of “The Waste Land” refers to it, since it is a metaphor for the condition of contemporary man, whose life is meaningless, empty, alienating and quite similar to death. The following passage is the opening of the poem; it introduces its most important images and dominant theme, that is the contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility of the present world. The structure of the poem consists of 5 sections: the first is the Burial of the Dead.

“The Burial of the Dead” is the first section of “The Waste Land” written by T.S. Eliot in 1922. It is the most revolutionary poem of the modern period. It is a crucial date in the development of world literature and English literature in particular. The poem derives from the collaboration of Eliot with Ezra Pound who suggested him to make some cuts at the poem before publishing.

The poem starts with a quotation of Petroniuos’s Satyricon, where the cuman civil (a person that can live in the present, future and past) affirms he wants to die. The first line sets the atmosphere enriching the meaning of the title.

Right from the start the reader understands he is in front of a new way of writing, consisting of juxtaposition of quotations in cubistic style. Especially in the first part, the poem adopts inter-textuality as its privileged device. He was the first poet to use juxtaposition of quotations as a way to write poetry. His poem represents a revolution in writing and Eliot embodies that cosmopolitan attitude of modern poets.

The first question the reader should ask himself is why April is called the cruellest month? April is generally connected to spring, but each word in Eliot offers multiple interpretations. April mixes memory and desire, conveying the modern concept of time as simultaneity. Memory refers to an experience already done and desire is connected to future expectations. The first piece of expectation is that April stirs dull roots with spring rain. But these are just expectations that won’t find concretization, since actually land is dead and sterile and it won’t produce fruits, flowers or whatever. These lines create the atmosphere, that is sterile and mysterious, they set a sad and negative atmosphere, where the land of spring sounds as the land of winter. The narrator speaks about a land which is dead: the poet chooses the lilacs, the flowers general used in funeral. The poet creates the atmosphere of death and right from the start there is no positivity. The adjective waste itself does not create positive expectations and it reminds to the theme of death. The poets speaks about April as if it were a winter moth, therefore everything seems to turn upside down. The line turns Jeffry Chaucer’s initial lines in the Canterbury Tales upside down. In Eliot’s poem April is the cruel month that gives to birth the flowers of death.

The poem is the result of the juxtaposition of scenes. What is the link between the sections? The atmosphere of the scenes connects the different juxtapositions. There is no proves that the speaking voice of the first scene is the same of the second, revealing the polyphonic nature of the poem.

In the second scene the speaking voice remembers an episode set when it was raining during summer thanks to a memorial recover.Returning to the past with the mind reveals that you are not fine in the present.

The language used in the scene is everyday language, and different speaking voices are fused up in an unit.

Eliot wants to convey a feeling a mood of something missing a pervading sense of loss and death.

The last part of the first section opens with a question of the speaking voice, who wonders what branches grow out of this stony rubbish. Earth is defined a stony rubbish, that is  a metaphor for sterility, for the absence of communication proper of the modernity. The speaking voice is doubting that a new life, a regeneration may come from a land defined stony rubbish.

The line is not the result of a link but it comes from a juxtaposition of scenes. “Stony” “rubbish” and then “dry” belong to the semantic field of infertility: the poet adopts a language that doesn’t live any possibility of rebirth, any hope.

T.S. Eliot has created a new inter-textual space quoting Ezekiel: “Son of man, you cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images”. T.S. Eliot recovers myths, symbolic images, in order to create a new message in the inter-textual space. The writer quotes a biblical event, whose protagonist is the prophet Israeli in order to convey the message that human beings, always seduced by something futile, can’t hope to receive a regeneration or a rebirth. A “heap of broken images” is all man might gain, it is a metaphor for the left relationships and for the broken unity. Eliot is suggesting to return towards that old unity through a cosmopolite poetry. Eliot is firmly contrary to those closed systems that don’t open themselves to different perspectives. The writer adopts inter-text from different sources cause he wants to convey the fragmented essence of contemporary reality.

He uses fragmented language not only because of war but also because people have lost the sense of importance to be related, connected and iter-related.

T.S. Eliot took inspiration from different cultural references, he juxtaposes different scenes connected by the atmosphere of loss, the loss of unity that was given by cultural social human values that could give a reason to live. The modernist crisis has caused that loss of traditional ideals on which men have based their lives. Now they have lost their points of reference, they must find the sense of life on their own.

In front of a fragmented, disorganized and chaotic world upset by the modernist crisis, quest becomes a key words: men must look for a solution, for a going forth out of the waste land. That’s why the correlative objectives “water” and “rock” acquire essential meaning: water stands for rebirth, regeneration and fertility, on the contrary rock stands for sterility and loss of relations. It is not a coincidence that water also recalls the religious ceremony of baptism, that celebrates the birth of a new life.