The Waste Land
Death and regeneration

Themes of death and regeneration more generally occur throughout The Waste Land, especially in "The Burial of the Dead". Unlike in fertility myths such as that of the Fisher King, however, "death is never redeemed by any clear salvation, and barrenness is relieved only by a chaotic multiplicity, which is not only an ironic kind of fertility, but is also the distinctly urban chaos that the young Eliot appreciated as conducive to his work." The poem opens with a resistance to growth after a winter that represents a "living death", and a yearning for stasis which contrasts with the Sibyl of the epigraph, who longs for a death that means escape from a static existence. "The Burial of the Dead" also describes a dry and lifeless desert scene which, despite the prospect of shade and therefore respite, promises only a vision of death – to "show you fear in a handful of dust". Madame Sosostris draws the drowned Phoenician sailor, but he is later a symbol of Adonis, representing the promise of spring and thus renewal, and his drowning can be read as an allegory for baptism, a spiritual rebirth. The living death of The Waste Land sees people bury corpses and expect them to sprout, in a deliberate reference to the rituals of Osiris as described by Frazer, when priests would bury effigies of the god to ensure a good harvest.
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