In the present text, I am going to analyse an extract taken from the first 30 lines of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land named The Burial of the Dead, in order to understand how the writer’s stylistic choices and the words used make meaning and what is the message of the poem.

Starting from the title, it recalls different levels of meaning. For instance, it is the name of a funeral ritual used in the Anglican church to bury the dead, but it also appears as a call to the burial of the God’s effigy, formerly a pledge of nature’s rebirth in the rites of vegetation. It is not a case that Eliot traced the history of human culture back to its origins, since his aim was to retrace those of literature related to it. He fitted into a broader context of the study of anthropology, that is to say of man's action in relation to the space and time in which he lives, in order to find a solution to the lack of elements in which to believe of his contemporaries. Indeed, the rites of vegetation refer to a mixed mode between magic and ritual to relate to nature by men, when they still had faith. According to this point of view, the title suggests the central theme of the poem which is concerned with the breakdown of civilization, its result which is the death in life and the difficulties of cultural regeneration.

Already from the first reading, it is clear to the reader that the poem is composed through juxtapositions of images and scenes that are different and apparently disconnected but with strong literary resonances. They symbolize what remains of the world to man, after the loss of what he believed in and the advent of the sense of emptiness that oppressed him: “a heap of broken images”, as T.S. Eliot says.

The extract is arranged into one single stanza of 30 lines of different length. Obviously, each line has a specific meaning in the economy of the poem.

Starting from the first line: “April is the cruelest month”, it is a quotation taken from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where the writer states that: “April is the sweetest month”.The quotation has been modified with the specific aim to highlight the impossibility of nature to regenerate itself in the Waste Land. Indeed, spring has been since the rituals of vegetation and then also in the Middle Ages, from when T.S. Eliot takes the citation, an occasion of rebirth and therefore of life. Thus, the cycle of season is juxtaposed with that of life and of man, unable to find new life. Spring is also the gush of water, traditionally a symbol of life, in sharp contrast to the drought of the Waste Land.

Even the flowers that are born from the earth are symbolic. They are lilacs and their purple color recalls the bishops’ vestments during funerals, recalling the imminence of death, also emphasized by the term “dead” referred to the land.

“Mixing memories and desire” is also a reference to the emptiness of the present. According to Mr. Bergson’s point of view, with whom T.S. Eliot agreed, human beings are unable to live in the present, since they life is a continuous mix of memories of the past (“memories”) and expectations for the future (“desire”).

Even the “spring rain”, a bearer of life, brings to surface only empty roots, which are unable to produce anything.

After the scene that opens the poem as a desolated and sterile land set in spring, the time changes in winter without following the chronological order of the seasons. In order to increase the paradox contributes the description of the Waste Land during this season, apparently more positive and reassuring than the spring. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the writer speaks of "feeding a little life with dried tubers".

Then follows the summer season, characteristic for its sparse and thin rains, which forces the dramatis personae and the person who accompanies him (or hypothetically his conscience) to shelter under the colonnade of the Starnbergersee. The lake is located near Munich and is famous for the mad Austrian sovereign who drowned in its waters. Death by drowning is linked to the quotations of Tristan and Isolde and alludes to the figure of another king, The Fisher King, who became sterile due to a curse, causing the sterility of his own land. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that the sovereign translated the will of God into the earth, therefore the land itself and its inhabitants also depended on the sovereign. The curse can only be lifted by the arrival of a stranger who must put or answer certain ritual question, as happened in Franco Alfano and Giacomo Puccini’ opera entitled Turandot. According to Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, the myth of the Fisher King was combined with the legend of the Grail, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper which contained his blood. Its search became a powerful narrative image for man’s search for spiritual truth. Also in this case, the searcher can save the king and his land asking the proper question. The last reference is to James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, from which T.S. Eliot drew inspiration for his anthropology studies. The cultural cycle is therefore juxtaposed to an equivalent cycle of the seasons, since the writer also describes a usual way to spend the summer days, drinking coffee and talking, away from the rain.

The following line is written specifically in German to enhance its meaning and distinguish it from the rest of the poem. It is translucent as "I am not a Russian at all, an original from Lithuania, a true German" and is an example of exaltation of what then in Nazism will be the purity of the Aryan race.

Continuing the narration for scenes apparently disconnected from each other, the poet describes his experience as a child, confirming the coexistence of the past of each of us in our present.The environment is winter again. The dramatis personae tells of his experience as a child with his cousin in the mountains on a sled, recalling the snow in verse 6. In this context, the dramatis personae appears as the questing knight of medieval myths, whose task was to ask the proper question to lift the curse that caused infertility. He answers to himself through a quotation from the Gospel: "Son of man, you cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images", which appear sterile, dry, lifeless. Indeed, the reader cannot but-notice the presence of the sun (a reference to verse 10) which dries up and evaporates the water, the dead tree incapables of giving shelter in the summer with its foliage, the cricket unable to give relief and the stone lacks any sound of water, images that refer to death.

In the last scene, the dramatis personae addresses the reader directly asking him to follow him in the shadow of the red rock, the only shelter although born from a sterile rock (the infertility is highlighted by the liquid sound of the words “red rock”). The shadow of which he will be a spectator will be different from any other he has ever seen. A single handful of dust, probably caused by the erosion of the red rock, will be enough to make the reader aware of the sense of emptiness that surrounds him and the mistake he made to find himself in this situation. It is the reason why it will arouse fear. Yet the awareness leads to being a new opportunity to save the Waste Land, through the regain of the emotions, spirituality, intellectual vitality and faith of the past cultural world analyzed by T.S. Eliot.In the last verse the poet's message is enclosed: the reader not only has to find something to believe in, but also has no guides. He will have to be able to understand what is right and what is wrong without any judgment from the writer.

In all my analysis, I described the scenes represented by the poet as apparently disconnected from each other, yet, on closer reading, the reader is able to make some connections. For instance, the theme of the sun or snow described above or the contrast between fertility and sterility that develops throughout the extract. T.S. Eliot uses the mythical method to link the scenes of his poem through myth and inter-textual references to texts dating back to any period of the history of literature. It reminds me of the extract taken from D. Lodge’s Nice Work, where Robyn, the female protagonist, states that: “there are no origins, there is only production and we produce ourselves in language”. Another way to relate different objects, in this case emotions, is the correlative object, a formula that allows communicating the indescribable emotions experienced through linguistic forms. An example is the interrogative phrase from verse 19 to verse 20, which manages to convey the strong desire for fertility that is opposed to the sterility of the Waste Land.