With the following text, I'm going to analyze an extract taken from T.S. Eliot's first section of "The Wasteland".

As to the section's title, which is "The Burial of the Dead", it recalls on one hand the funeral ritual used by Anglican tradition to bury the deads, but on the other the burial of the God's effigy- which resorts to vegetative's rites, present when men still had values, and thought that the earth could live again, with God's grace. The recollection of the land, refers to the title of the entire poem, which is "The Wastelands", that refers to a barren, dead land: this is symbol of the cultural- and effective- death portrayed in those first decades of the 20th century by the First World War. That useless slaughter, caused the the downfall of art, literature - culture in general - a condition which is difficult to reverse. The "wasteland" can be a reference to both the Arthurian "Fisher King" and the Grail myth, emblem for the medieval "quest": the impotent king and his land - an infertile land - can only be saved by a journey of a questing knight. The grail myth's lance and cup, in the tradition of ancient Egypt's tarot cards, meant rising water of the Nile, and so renewed fertility. These are just some examples of the many quotations to traditional culture that the whole extract present: mr Eliot's convinction that tradition is fundamental when trying to be modern (we can't produce anything starting just from our feelings as Romanticism believed) made him study anthropology; that is the study of how people's actions are influenced by space and time in which they live, in order to give shape and importance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary Culture.

The extract presents the first 30 lines of the poem, joined in one big stanza with lines of different lenght. This text presents a series of different images, which apparently are totally disconnected: mr Eliot, anyway, uses this juxtaposition of scenes in order to better explain his ideas, linked together by the idea of death opposed to sterility. This is made possible by the use of the "mythical method" - myths and references to tradition help creating a central theme - and of the "objective correlative" - a chain of terms which can evoke a feeling, letting the writer be impersonal and so effective -.

The extract opens with a quote to Geoffrey Chaucer’s introduction to the "Canterbury Tales", where is told how: “April is the sweetest month”. This is turned upside-down, because the first sentence is "April is the cruelest month". This surprises the reader: April states for Spring, which is commonly linked to life, something opposed to the cruelty T. S. Eliot expresses.

The lilacs who breed out of the dead land resort purple, the colour which is used in Christian tradition by priests in funeral rites. The mixing of memories and desires, highlights the useless of the present: the land lives in the past remembering and in the future hoping, but doesn't give importance to the moment it lives, as the the contemporary world. The spring rain, that should bring new life, causes but empty roots.

Then, is told how Winter, is the season which makes the poet warm (creating a paradox): its snow help the birth of the little life of some dried tubers. The chronological order of seasons isn't followed.

After Winter, comes Summer: its typical rains force the reader to shelter under the Starnbergersee's colonnade. The Munich's lake is famous for the legend of a King who drowned in it: this recalls the Tristan and Isolde myth, which recalls The Fisher and the Grail myth. This, helps creating the idea that water is linked to death (one of the sections of the poem, will be called "Death by Water").

All this recalls James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (from which mr Eliot drew inspiration for his anthropology studies). Then the reader is faced with several German references: mention of the Hofgarten - the garden in the centre of Munich - and then an entire line in German, ‘No, I am not Russian, I am Lithuanian, a proper German.’, resorting to Nazism idea of a pure Aryan race, and so War. Then we have a child, Marie, remembering how she used to play with her cousin, and archduke. They used to play in the sled of a mountain - it's Winter, again -: past shows its importance.

The scene then changes and returns to the ‘waste land’ of the poem’s title. There is fear looking at the future, at what is going to grow from death - reference to the devastation caused by the First World War -. The question is "how can a civilisation rebuild itself after all that misery?". This spring will not be like others, ‘The Burial of the Dead’ seems to say.

In the last scene, the dramatis personae tells the reader to follow him in the shadow of a red rock - probably the only shelter born from a sterile rock -, and that a single handful of dust caused by the erosion of the red rock, will be enough to make the reader conscious of the death that surrounds him. This may explain the final reference to ‘fear in a handful of dust’: the title of this section of Eliot’s poem, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, is a reference to the Anglican Prayer Book, and its prayer for the burial of the dead: ‘Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.’ We are all dust, in the end.