The Burial of the Dead
The first part is
about the coming of spring in a sterile land.
The title is referred to a funeral
service in the Anglican rite called “The Order of the Burial of the Dead”.
We usually think of spring as
a time of love, re-birth and regeneration.
Here the poet refers to the starting lines of the General Prologue
taken from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where spring is seen as the start of a
new life.
However, in these lines the speaker says that instead
of spring being the best time of year, "Winter kept us warm, covering /
Earth in forgetful snow" (5-6). Existing is painful, so generating
new life is cruel. Winter is good, because it covers the
earth and keeps what is underneath warm.The verb “Covering” suggests the
concealment of truth. Therefore, winter is hidding the truth,
which is underneath. The speaker suggests that society doesn’t
want the truth to be revealed, people like winter.“ Mixing memory and
desire” suggests that even any act of remembrance and desire is seen as painful. The
juxtaposition of the nouns "Memory" and "desire" also makes
the reader understand an additional feature of Eliot's literature:
past("memory") and future(desire") co-exist together in one
dimension, along with the present.
This description of winter contradicts traditional
views about winter. Here it turns to be positive. It allows men to live in
peace and forgetful.
He uses some verbs in the ing form: “Breeding”
“Mixing” “Stirring” “Feeding”. They have connotations of growing and
birth, maybe a kind of rebirth of humanity.The words are hidden at the end
of the line suggesting there is hope for rebirth, but it is only hinted at the
ends of the lines.
The speakers are two.( I ,
we “ us” )
The second part is about the degradation of life in
the city. Here there are some references to time “ Under the
brown fog of a winter dawn”, “ a dead sound on the final stroke of 9” and some
references to place “ over London bridge, up the hill and down
King William Street ....Saint Mary Woolnoth”and to the inhabitants of
the city” A crowd, so many.....Sighs, short and infrequent, each man fixed
his eyes before his feet flowed up....” and other characters “One
I knew”.
“Unreal City" symbolizes London city, this is also an allusion
taken from Baudelaire’s poem in which this phrase refers to Paris
The speaker remembers watching a crowd flowing over
London Bridge like zombies, and says he "had not thought death had undone
so many" (Ch’io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta, Canto
3). Here, Eliot is definitely talking about the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno and
is comparing modern life to living in hell.
The people in this scene are also
sighing and staring (more Inferno allusions
from Canto 4) only at the ground in front of their feet. They seem completely
unsatisfied with their undead lives. The city is crowded but at
the same time, the people are isolated.
Those people are probably office
workers in the City. They are marked by the inability of communicating and
they live a situation of death within life. Death is everywhere and society is
destroyed, there is a reference to the First World War and to the
collapse of Europe that it brought.
Stetson is a character the speaker sees
by Saint Mary Woolnoth. He already knows him. They have probably fought
together in the First Punic War, which according to Eliot’s idea of history,
seems to reflect the recent past of the First World War. In other
words, the main idea is that all wars are equal because history is the
repetition of the same events.Stetson
may be a veteran of the Great War.
The speaker asks him if the "corpse [he] planted
last year in [his] garden" has begun to sprout"
Normally, we think of burying the dead in order to get
them out of sight. But this speaker is so weird that he thinks planting a body
in the ground is like planting a seed that's supposed to grow. The speaker then
gives Stetson some advice about keeping the dog and the frost away from
where the corpse is planted. What does it mean?
Here we can find a comparison between the modern
rituals of office workers with their daily “rituals” and ancient fertility
rites.
In the past, images of the gods were buried in the ground or thrown into water to ensure the coming of a new spring. Here, the image refers both to the routine of gardening and to the new man that may be born from the death of the old one.
Also, the idea of the sprouting corpse seems a grotesque parody of
Brooke’s image of the soldier being buried in a foreign country (in The
Soldier), where through his death he’ll help make England greater and
nobler.
The speaker also mentions a landmark street in London,
and notes how a church bell (of a real church—St Mary
Woolnoth) lets out a "dead sound on the final stroke of
nine" There the poet again associates religion and death.
The beginning of work in the City (final stroke of
nine), the beginning of work in the morning is bounded to death (a
dead sound of the final stroke), life in contemporary society is
similar to death according to the speaker.
In the final lines he's alluding to John
Webster's The White
Devil, which contains the same lines. However, the
word wolf is replaced by dog and the word foe by friend. The Dog is
written in capital letters because it may be the guardian of the dead, it
avoids re birth or coming back to life.
The Dog is the friend of men but
man tends to stop him before he digs: he is the friend
of men because he permits nature, a corpse, knowledge to surface but the
winter snow keeps men warm and they do not want it to be removed by the corpse,
tubers, knowledge.
His final words are from Fleurs du Mal by Charles
Baudelaire, a poem published in 1857. The reader is called “mon
semblable,mon frere”…the reader shares the poet’s same destiny. In other
words, the speaker personally blames the reader, himself, and
almost everybody for what's happened.
Modern man is spiritually hollow and barren; he is just like a robot that follows the
pre-assigned tasks. He wakes up early in the morning, changes his dress,
has his breakfast, goes to office, …he follows the same routine.
Modern man lives in a Waste land, although he has gained progress in
science and materialistic culture, yet he has no values, he is spiritually
dead.
