(1) It is the opening phrases of the first section of “the burial of the dead”. The first section of The Waste Land takes its little from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman. “The Burial of the dead: famously opens with a reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with a desire for stasis and anxiety about the change, growth, and sexuality symbolized by April and the spring rain. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. However, it is a burial of a lost one. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable.

(2) The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. The slow, repetitive syntax and hanging participles, “breeding” “mixing” “stirring” seem to freeze and control the movement in the first seven lines. This despairing opening voice is universal and dislocated; it is not in a narrative, nor does it speak to the reader. The clarity and authority of this voice mark it as the voice of propriety, wanting to maintain clear boundaries and rules, and, at its most extreme, hoping to halt forward movement and stop the proliferation of possibilities in life or language.