The waste land di Eliot: The burial of the dead analisi

The burial of the dead (La sepoltura dei morti): analisi in inglese del primo capitolo dell'opera The waste land di Eliot (2 pagine formato doc)

Appunto di simonepuppo96

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD ANALISI

T.S.

Eliot
, The Waste Land, The Burial of the Dead (lines 1-7)
The extract is taken from the "Burial of the dead", the first section of the Waste Land.   The name of the first section refers to an Anglican funeral service called "The Order of the Burial of the Dead". In the "Waste Land" Eliot's aim is to highlight the moral collapse of the Western society. In order to write "The Waste Land" Eliot considers Jessie Waston's work From ritual to romance.

For study purposes, it may be useful to organise the extract in two parts: the first one goes from line 1 to line 4; the second one goes from line 5 to line 7.
Right from the start of the extract, the intelligent reader notices Eliot's will to break with the existing tradition. The section, indeed, opens with "April is the cruellest month": Eliot parodies Geoffrey Chaucer's verse "April is the sweetest month". First of all, it is worth noting the reason of Eliot's choice to refer to Chaucer's verse: Chaucer is the first poet that had used English language for literary purposes.

The waste land: what the thunder said analisi capitolo 5

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD: ANALISI DEL TESTO

A common reader usually connects April to the rebirth of nature, so it is the "sweetest". However, Eliot turns that upside down. The sentence appears even more striking because of the use of the superlative. Then, the intelligent reader should wonder why, according to Eliot, "April is the cruellest month". An intelligent conjecture may be that April is the "cruellest month" because the human being confronts his life's brevity with the natural cyclic time. In addition, the intelligent reader notices that the juxtaposition of the words "April" and "Lilacs"  is not coherent, indeed "lilacs" are not usually associated with spring.  The juxtaposition of the nouns "Memory" and "desire" 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.
Analysing the second part, the intelligent reader notices that the whole text seems to be centered on contrasts( "Winter" vs "April"; "rain vs snow"; "lilacs" vs "tubers"). Again, in the second sequence, Eliot breaks the typical cultural principles by saying that "Winter", generally associated with cold temperatures, kept human beings "warm".

Thomas Eliot: riassunto in inglese

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD: ANALISI METRICA

T. S. Eliot, The Waste LandThe Burial of the Dead (lines 60-76)
The present extract is taken from the first section of the poem The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. It is arranged into 16 lines of different length. Considering the structure it might be divided into two sequences: the first one consists of a picture of an ordinary London’s morning after nine o’clock, while in the latter the poet addresses one of the members of the throng.