Somebody's on to something!

Simply Me has a simply brilliant reading of "Burial of the Dead," the first section of "The Waste Land" (TWL):

The first section of the poem is titled the "The Burial of the Dead", sounds great? NOT. I thought to myself why would I want to read something that is titled that way. The title threw me off and the poem is nothing what you expect it to be. Eliot is talking about more then just literarily burying the dead. He is talking about the seasons dying. Summer is great but then fall comes around and everything dies. Also in the first section he says, "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." Made me think of how the birds migrate south in the winter for the warm weather. Maybe the world which he is living in "dies" so to speak because all of this.

She's right! One of the themes of TWL is the death and (hopefully) rebirth of the earth. Almost all ancient cultures had something called a "vegetation myth," a way of explaining to themselves (pre-science) why the earth grew cold and dark for a third of the year. If you put yourself in someone else's shoes who doesn't have the benefit of science to explain winter, it's a pretty frightening thing to experience.

Here's the vegetation myth in Greek Mythology, the story of Demeter and Persephone.