The juxtaposed fragments of The Waste Land are not arbitrarily located in relation to each other; in fact, they very much draw significance out of their situation in the poem, significance which is emotional and intellectual, as well as formal: in other words, “significant emotion.” Choosing not “to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism”, I will attempt to show that this “significant emotion” is essentially religious. Let us begin by examining “The Burial of the Dead” to see how these fragments, as they accumulate, enact upon each other, how they “unite to form a new compound”, how they alter the meaning of each like different works existing simultaneously in the same tradition.

The title is an unburial. Emerging contrastingly out of the thought of the burial of the dead is an image of early spring, tentatively expressed in a bitter, arid tone, through short and staccato syllables; the wet earth and renewal of spring are ironically juxtaposed against the thought of graves, ideas of birth and death fused in the locus of earth, and Chaucer's April of “shoures soote” is suddenly “cruelest.” The cautious diction, enjambed participles awkwardly and hypnotically ending three of the four lines that make up this first image, coming as we can readily see at the beginning of a long poem, suggests that the poem is going to have great force. This sense of being at the beginning of something is enhanced by the contained yet prominent vibrancy of the participles. In this beginning is memory, memory of the dead, and desire—that which looks to the future, as well as to the past; for desire is born of that knowledge which the past has awakened in us. Past and future are present in this beginning's present.

The tone changes suddenly to one of nostalgic reminiscence. It has become personal: “Winter kept us warm”, although it is still reserved, and continues to enjamb upon the articulation of participles. Comforts are remembered, but there is something ironic about them. It is incongruous that winter should be remembered for having brought warmth, or that in this context forgetfulness should be remembered, or the meagre sustenance provided by “dried tubers.” Suddenly, after three lines, the tone changes again, becoming even more particular, for the first time almost like the sound of a person talking. But it is not quite the sound of a person talking. There is an element of artifice in this speech, and we realize that we are hearing a fragment of a memoir:

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
and went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
and drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

These lines are resonant of a pre-war Europe, and there is something ominous about the sense of leisure they evoke. There is irony in these people's surprise by a shower of rain, who soon are to face so far greater a surprise.

The next line is in German, a line of conversation which easily could be overheard from the table in the Hofgarten. Its preoccupation with race alludes to mysteries of the origins of life and the evolution of consciousness. And it is a foreboding of war. Resonances of past and future, of birth and death, are commingled in this living fragment of pre-war civilization which has been transported out of its original present and into the present of the poem.

This is immediately followed by four lines of conversational English, in a female voice, possibly the same that recollected the Hofgarten, for there is a continuation in tone—the simple relation of particular events—and the passage begins with the mid-memoir “And when we were children.” Again, it is a pre-war Europe that is being recollected, a Europe of archdukes, but now we have gone all the way back to the innocence and fear of childhood:

He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In phrases that are so common they hold within them the collectivity of man, a sense of irrevocable beginning, of the loss of innocence, is evoked. What is being invoked—through its depiction in the particular—is a state of possibility that exists outside time or personal identity, a step in consciousness which every person may know.

The remaining two lines of the paragraph are somewhat dissociated from each other and from the lines preceding them, but not entirely. They could easily be excerpted from the discourse of Marie, drawing inferences from the location of the sledding incident; both are the declared conclusions of an older person, of a citizen of Europe.

The voice that opens the second paragraph is altogether different. It is an abstract, prophetic voice, that asks us rhetorically whether we see the origins, permanencies, significances, purposes, destinies of the “heap of broken images”—civilization's disparate, fragmented faces—we find in our consciousness, and then tells us that we cannot. As if to warn or admonish us, the voice insists that we live in a dry, barren, hopeless locale, in which it yet suggests it might show us

something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you . . .

Wittily, these lines combine cross purposes toward the same end. Rhetorically—in regards to the question the voice has posed—they are repudiating the adequacy of focusing attention upon the shows they name, presumably upon the basis of their being personal or temporal; but the repetition of the phrasing, and the twisting of the shadow image to the point where it is suggestive of ghostly attributes of our identities that we may be unaware of, combine to create a tone that warns us to look more closely at these shadows, presumably for a meaning that is other than personal or temporal. The ironic separation of the activities of the shadows from those of ourselves achieves singular poignancy in the phrase “rising to meet you,” in which our shadow seems almost filled with desire to fuse its knowledge with us: this is language elevated to the truly tragic. The next line, while reminding us of our imminent annihilation, suggests that consciousness is permanent (“fear in a handful of dust”) and, furthermore, that we have something to dread in not coming to terms with our destiny.

It is no accident that immediately following upon this ultimate admonition should be voiced four lines from Tristan und Isolde which powerfully evoke the sense of a romantic and idealistic innocence buried far back in man's consciousness. How this is done is the substance of poetry itself, and really defies explication, although we might classify it as a working of what Eliot has called the “auditory imagination”: “feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feelings, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end.” Short lines and the use of cognates of prima; emotional significance contribute to this effect. The image of these four lines seems so old as to have preexisted each of our particular lives, something which was a part of us before we even came to be. It chastises us bitterly for having forgotten its original truth, its most sacred beauty, its most yearned for treasure, for having forsaken its once virgin and pervasive reality. It reproaches us for denying it possibility.

Innocent words of the “hyacinth girl”—the object of this emotion made particular and incarnate—are quoted by her lover in the next two lines. Yet in the five lines that follow, he describes how he failed her, how he “was neither / Living nor dead,” and “knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence.” The passage ends with another quote from Tristan und Isolde, expressing disillusion with romantic love, a sense of loss of innocence.

As the third paragraph begins, we find ourselves immediately in a more pedestrian setting: the parlor of “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante.” It is as though in the hyacinth girl's lover we had witnessed the fall of man from an original and pure state, as though something in his being made such a fall inevitable, and now—in Madame Sosostris; in modern day London—we are observing a latter stage of this fall as its repercussions have ingrained themselves in a society. The tarot cards of Madame Sosostris are like images, memories of the potent myths of the past. Perhaps the “drowned Phoenician Sailor” is the hyacinth girl's lover (the pearls then in the line quoted from The Tempest would be the tragic keepsake of his failure, which was a failure of vision, and quoting from an older literature would be further justified on the basis of its paralleling both the card's quoting of an identity, and the pearl's quoting of eyes); and perhaps Belladonna is the hyacinth girl. These images are presented as living forces in the present, with a capacity to influence or foretell the future. But although Madame Sosostris has presentiments and makes warnings, her vision is inconclusive and limited, as the voice addressing us “Son of man” has suggested ours is, and as the hyacinth girl's lover's was in the moment of his fall. The last three lines of her speech are in particularly common jargon. When she says “Thank you” she has either just been paid or complimented, a detail clearly meant to point up a pedestrian impiety in her comport. Her last line—”One must be so careful these days”—rings with an irony of which she, whose carelessness the words really accuse, is ignorant.

The short line beginning the fourth and final paragraph of “The Burial of the Dead,” with its semi-value of apostrophe, is somber and elegiac. The narrator of this passage, having observed a crowd of people on their way to work in a London dawn, remarks (in Dante's words) that he “had not thought death had undone so many.” He sees these people as dead in life. The city itself is “unreal” because no one really sees it, because no one who is a part of it is real in the sense of being alive or awake. They are barely breathing, and their eyes look only directly in front of them. By now, the presence of a theme of not seeing must be perfectly apparent (recalled, the imperative “Look!” after the line from The Tempest reveals itself as an admonition in the context of the whole poem).

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

The mention of the particular “King William Street,” the remembrance of someone who really lived, the observation of the muted final clap of a church bell tolling the hour; these details contrast the speaker's awakeness with the listlessness of a crowd that “flows.” Suddenly, as in a story of Poe, or a prose poem of Baudelaire, the speaker recognizes a familiar face and cries out its owner's unparticularly particular name. This has a macabre and suggestive quality about it, this encounter with, and recognition of, one of the dead. It bears a quality of making death local, while bringing the quality of death to what is local. It is something of an encounter with the conscience of humanity, this encounter with a representative of the dead in life. And it is thus just as much the speaker's encounter with his own conscience, with the City that lives inside of himself, and the things and people and voices that populate it. I must add that much of what I am describing is merely philosophic; a phrase like “A crowd flowed over London Bridge” has the power, especially when audibly spoken, to stir the senses and the emotions profoundly and significantly without necessarily activating the logical or intellectual faculties at all. This is because it uses words, syntax, diction, rhythm, and cadence in ways which tap profound complexes of meaning buried in these elements of language, meanings which are as innate a part of our memory of language as they are innate a part of our memory of our senses.

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

The reference to Mylae is of course, as has been cited frequently in Eliot criticism, a reference to a battle in a war waged for profit in 260 B.C. Clearly the reference is to a situation parallel to that of the first world war. “In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,” to quote Eliot's 1923 essay on Joyce, Eliot continues to suggest that there is timelessness to the sorts of knowledge that engage man, that that which exists in the particular exists preeminently in possibility, outside of time, as an ideal of itself—one that may come to life again in the apprehension of an individual, in time. This apprehension is thus a crossroads where past and present are one. So it is in the ghostly and reproachful realm of possibility that the speaker has met this figure Stetson. These lines mock the multiple distances particular time has made out of single unified time or timelessness. The “corpse” is all that is unremembered, all that is unseen—all, the possibility of which is unassented to. Included in that baggage, of course, are the dead of the war, as well as the dead in life. The speaker is daring Stetson to look into his own soul, bitterly and garishly transfiguring commonplace expressions into grotesque representations of festering hypocrisy and ironic reality. The lines transfigured from Webster provide a further touch of irony by suggesting that it would be an ungenial circumstance should such a corpse come to be dug up; the idea being clearly a sarcastic one, its purpose seems to be to threaten Stetson with his own conscience. In the last line, stolen right out of Baudelaire, the speaker openly identifies Stetson with himself.

Throughout this poem we have been confronted with a type of vision which sees the presence of the past and the future in the present. Above all this is a vision of spiritual potentiality, of the presence of a single unified wisdom of energy of which is engendered all temporal or particular phenomena. Philosophically this must be seen as inevitable and self-fulfilling, for accounted in its entirety the universe must inevitably be seen as whole. And if time never ceases, then its activities must necessarily be unmeasurable as contained instances. What is whole then is what is timeless, or what encompasses all time.

Even particular identity is disrupted in this poem. Its juxtaposition of discontinuous voicings suggests that the contemplation of reality cannot be contained to any one particular identity. If identity is the medium of time, or time—which is essentially comprised of distance or of space (by extension of the fat of its divisibility)—is the medium of identity (in the particular), then, abolishing particular time, all of identity that can remain is the single unified identity in which is incorporated all truth. So each human identity is in reality a particular manifestation, given the appearance of a particular hue or identity on the plane of time, of the total possibility of consciousness or knowledge. And thus, each man's consciousness answers to the same conscience. More profoundly, each man is each other man, and thus it is no coincidence when we discover upon reading Eliot's notes to the poem that the figure of Tiresias, named in Part III, unites all the identities in the poem, and that “What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.”

Eliot is suggesting that the poem is a single apprehendable image, or body of knowledge, which comes to be understood not chronologically or temporally but as a single entity simultaneously in the senses—as truth, if it could be divined, itself would be. Throughout the poem it is a moral adherence to this conception of truth or knowledge which gives birth to a mocking of confinement of vision to the particular, and to a tone of dread or reproach which would have us remember the context of all our actions. It is this assent to possibility which characterizes religion.