NOVEMBER 29, 2016

SUBMITTED BY ANAM TARIQ

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

ANALYSIS

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

The Burial of the Dead is the first of five sections that make up The Waste
Land (1922), T. S. Eliots landmark modernist poem. The Burial of the Dead
establishes some of the core themes of The Waste Land: death, burial,
rebirth. It also hints at the impact of the First World War on the people of
Europe. T. S. Eliot said that his research into vegetation rituals and
ceremonies fed into The Waste Land. This masterpiece is a critical
commentary of modern life, especially what it can do to the human soul,
which is not always pleasant to behold. The Burial of the Dead helps set up
the themes and ideas behind the poem as a whole.
The Waste Land is written in a literary vein known as modernism using a lot
of allusions, It is heavily composed of 76 lines using the technique of
enjambment.

The central theme in this section is the futile search for life . The idea of
death and birth is repeatedly seen in many of the allusions and
description . It is common to think in terms of sorrow and rebirth of
death in terms of bliss but Elliot is suggesting the otherwise. Death is
salvation if a person only live for once , to rise again an again is not
less than the torture.

There is a paradox at the very beginning of the poem: April is the cruelest
month. Shouldnt it be the kindest? The lovely image of lilacs in the spring is
here associated with the dead land. Winter was better; then, at least, the
suffering was obvious, and the forgetful snow covered over any
memories. In spring, memory and desire mix; the poet becomes acutely
aware of what he is missing, of what he has lost, of what has passed him by.
Ignorance is bliss; the knowledge that better things are possible is perhaps
the most painful thing of all. Eliots vision of modern life is therefore rooted
in a conception of the lost ideal.

Thus does Eliot begin his poem, labeling his first section The Burial of the
Dead. He lay out his central theme before the first stanza has even begun:
death and life are easily blurred; from death can spring life, and life in turn
necessitates death. Life devoid of meaning is death; sacrifice, even the
sacrificial death, may be life-giving, an awaking to life. Eliots vision is of a
decrepit land inhabited by persons who languish in an in-between state
.Perhaps , they live, but in so far as they seem to feel nothing and aspire to
nothing, they are dead .Eliot intimated that it may be better to do evil than
to do nothing at all -- that at least some form of action means that one
exists.
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The key image in "The Waste Land" may then be Sosostriss vision of
crowds of people, walking round in a ring. They walk and walk, but go
nowhere. Likewise, the inhabitants of modern London keep their eyes fixed
to their feet; their destination matters little to them and they flow as an
unthinking mass, bedecking the metropolis in apathy.

From this thicket of malaise, the narrator clings to memories that would
seem to suggest life in all its vibrancy and wonder: summer rain in Munich,
coffee in a German park, a girl wearing flowers. What is crucial to the
poems sensibility, however, is the recognition that even these trips to the
past, even these attempts to regain happiness, must end in failure or
confusion. Identities are in flux. It depicts the current crisis of identity, with
individual nations slowly losing ground to a collective union.
It is appropriate, then, that the narrator should turn next to a clairvoyant;
after gazing upon the past, he now seeks to into the future. Water, giver of
life, becomes a token of death: the narrator is none other than the drowned
Phoenician Sailor, and he must fear death by water. This realization paves
the way for the famous London Bridge image. Eliot does not even describe
the water of the Thames; he saves his verse for the fog that floats overhead,
for the quality of the dawn-lit sky, and for the faceless mass of men
swarming through the dead city. Borrowing heavily from Baudelaires
visions of Paris, Eliot paints a portrait of London as a haunted (or haunting)
specter, where the only sound is dead and no man dares even look beyond
the confines of his feet. Eliot seems to be arguing that all wars are the
same, just as he suggests that all men are the same in the stanzas final
line: You! hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, mon frre!: Hypocrite
reader! my likeness, my brother! We are all Stetson; Eliot is speaking
directly to us. Individual faces blur into the ill-defined mass of humanity as
the burial procession inexorably proceeds.

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis

vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo."

In a nutshell, is that modern people are losing the ability to connect with
the things that make us authentically human. He especially saw us as failing
to communicate meaningfully with one another, to set up systems of morals
that serve the human soul, and to muster up the courage to be proper
caretakers of the world around us. After all, if we cannot speak to each
other effectively, what chance do we have of developing values and passing
them onto our children, let alone fixing the world's many problems? To put it
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THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

another way, we as modern folks are effectively 'dead' to traditional values

like courage, community, and morality. What we think of as our individual
'lives,' our daily activities and dealings with one another, are in Eliot's eyes
equivalent to a mass burial of dead souls.