ABSTRACT

Thomas Stearns Eliot's statement confirms the sense of verbal selfconsciousness with which The Waste Land opens. Contrast the ending of 'The Burial of the Dead', where bringing memories back to life takes on a satirically sinister physical aspect: the 'corpse' of the past may 'sprout' and 'bloom'; it is dangerous to dig up the past. A large fragment Eliot had been shoring against his ruins for at least five years was a version of the six lines beginning at line 24, originally the opening of the aborted poem 'The Death of Saint Narcissus'. The last lines of 'The Burial of the Dead' ward off this sort of analysis even as they gesture at it, by their springy rhythm which gives them a frenetic, unhinged air, by their sinister talk of sprouting corpses, by their speaking of the dead with a macabre sort of life, by the fact that they are spoken to someone possibly named after a hat, 'Stetson'.