![]() The first question to be asked in the poem is rhetorical and relates to renewal. We leave Marie behind for the time being. There is a change in the voice, the speaker. 'The Waste Land': The Burial of the Dead, Lines 19–42 Lines 19–24 In winter, she goes south, presumably for the warmth. She reads at night, perhaps to alleviate boredom, perhaps because she is older. The reader is introduced to Marie at last, in person, so to speak, as she looks back on childhood freedoms whilst staying with her cousin, the archduke.Ī first-person admission ends this opening stanza. Here is a straight translation from the German: 'I am certainly no Russian, I come from Lithuania, a true German.' Lines 13–18 Are we to take this mention of Bavarian aristocracy as a symbol of the decline of this class of people, given the context and the poem's main theme of the loss of the old order? Line 12 This little scene appears to be from Eliot's meeting and chat with Marie Larisch in 1911. The first solid fact is given to the reader to play with the Starnbergersee placing us firmly into Germany, the group together again ('us') drinking coffee in the Hofgarten ('court garden' near the Starnbergersee) to escape the rain. One of the longest lines in the whole poem, line 8, is fourteen syllables, trochaic and fades away into the Starnbergersee, a large lake to the south of the city of Munich in Bavaria, Germany. James Thomson, in his poem 'To Our Ladies of Death' (1863), may well have inspired Eliot's seventh line: 'That we in turn may feed her with our death:'. The warmth is for real the snow helps people to forget that the earth is full of the dead. ![]() But what is new is the speaker revealing 'us'-a group, a family, a collective? ![]() The pauses repeat, as do the participles. The upside-down world continues with a warm winter, the opposite of what we'd normally expect. There is no full-end rhyming, but the echo of spring is heard in all of those participles. Note the recurring present participles-'breeding,' 'mixing,' 'stirring'-which keep the reader in an unusual Whitmanesque here and now. Hence the 'Memory and desire' of the third line as April comes round again and Eliot thinks of his young friend, tragically lost. my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I can tell) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli. In a published memory of Verdenal, Eliot recalls their last meeting in Paris: ![]()
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