The Burial of the Dead

Part 1: Explication:
    
     Part one of the poem, The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, is symbolic to a book of prayer known as The Order for the Burial of the Dead that contains different parts of the bible. At the start of the poem we are immediately placed in London where “April is the cruelest month.” April, usually known as a lively month is in the season of spring where everything grows and blooms.  It’s ironic that they use April instead of a winter month that would usually represent dying or death. In this poem however, the winter months “kept them warm”.  The first four lines of the poem allude to the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales, ‘when April with his showers sweet with fruit the drought of March has pierced unto the root, and bathed each vein with liquor that has power to generate their inn and sire the flower.’ The poem, alluding to the tales, alludes to it in more of an opposite way. Instead of spring bringing showers and rain that would help the land, spring is known as the cruelest month probably hinting that there is little or no rain. The land that is now a ‘wasteland’ wouldn’t grow or want thing to grow there.
     Speaker 1 is an old German woman who starts talking in line 8 of part one that reads, “summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee”. When talking to her friend in the ‘Hofgarten’ she tells him/her that she is not a Russian woman at all, but is in fact a true German from Lithuania. The rest of the stanza from there is about the old lady reminiscing over past times. She talks about sledding with her cousin as a child, and from that we learn that her name is Marie. The old woman talks about her and her cousin sledding in the mountains because she felt ‘free’ in her youth. This is important because youth doesn’t last forever – when you are young you have the freedom to do almost anything because your body allows you to, but as you age your body starts to refrain yourself from doing some of these things – you start to lose your freedom. She connects sledding in the mountains to her freedom and youth.  The last line of the stanza represents her age and the death of the day at night. Reading and going south in the winter are general things people do as they get older – she has lost her youth, and has become a stereotypical aged woman.
     The second stanza starts out asking “what are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?” when oddly enough their parts are technically in the wrong order – roots shouldn’t clutch what branches grow, but branches should clutch what roots grow because branches grow from roots. The ‘son of man’ is an allusion to Ezekiel chapter 2 which is presented by, ‘ in the valley of dry bones, God asks Ezekiel, “ Son of man, can these bones live?” and is answered, “O lord god, thou knowest.”’ This connects to the death above ground – the valley of dry bones. The connotations of bones can perhaps be meant in a literal sense of people dying or that are dead. It could also be meant in a way that bones are the bones of the earth – and that the earth will persevere no matter what. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” is an allusion to Sibyl because she asked for a long life, but forgot to ask for long youth. She would no longer be able to do anything because she’d be a shriveled up woman who continued to live miserably.
      The second speaker, also a woman, starts talking midway through the second stanza in German, which translates into, “ fresh blows the wind to the homeland, my Irish darling where do you linger.” It alludes to Tristan and Isolde, a man that was sent to escort the princess back to his homeland for his king. However, they fell in love with each other on their way back, and because she was meant for Tristan’s king, their love was forbidden. They lacked a true relationship that they could have given each other, and because they could not be together, they committed suicide. The Speaker of this part, called hyacinth, is flower that grows in the spring between April and May, which are known as the cruelest months. The hyacinth that grows in what is insinuated to be the deadliest months are flowers for the mourning (because West Wind killed Hyacinthus with a discus because of all the attention he was getting from Apollon and Zephyrus. Apollon then transformed the dying youth into the flower, the hyacinth, which from there became the mourning flower). Both situations between Tristan and Isolde and Apollon and Hyacinthus are examples of the fail or lack of love.
     The third speaker, Madame Sosostris, is fortune teller in Europe, “the wisest woman in Europe, with a wicked pack of cards,” (tarot cards). “Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!” is a reference to the Temptest, a play from Shakespeare. In a ship wreck, two lovers die, another example of failed love. Belladonna refers to nightshade that is a deadly poison that is usually put into drinks, or put on the ‘rocks’. “Fear death by water” is a very dull phrase because we’re not sure if Sosostris is saying be afraid of too much or too little water – she’s foretelling something.
    The unreal city, London, has an interesting phenomenon that some likes to acknowledge that people cross the London Bridge and pass St. Mary Woolnoth on their way to the city. “I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,” this is an allusion to Dante’s inferno. Dante describes the people in limbo because they lived without praise or blame or didn’t know the faith. The people, who did know the faith or did live in praise or with blame, didn’t live in limbo so they were able to sigh and exhale in relief. “That corpse you planted last year in our garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” This is hinting that a year ago, a body was buried probably in the spring, because that’s the time that things bloom – also die.
     If the poem was to have a fourth speaker, it would start with, “There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, ‘Stenson!’ and then would continue to the end of the last stanza of the section. Here we are not sure whether or not this is the narrator of the poem or a whole other speaker. We aren’t given specific characteristics or names so we are left to question.

Things that will reappear: The Waste Land – Holy Grail, lack of: Water, spirituality, war, history (repeating itself), water, tarot cards, failed/lack of relationships.

Question: Second Stanza: “Son of man – and the dry stone no sound of water,” is that people questioning whether or not God is there? The land is a waste land, and so maybe they would believe that God would fix it, and because they haven’t, they question his existence. Lack of spirituality?