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I. The Burial of the Dead

The section title comes from the Anglican burial service. It opens with a description of spring as something to be dreaded, with the comforting static nature of winter giving way to the forcible activity of spring. Eliot moves to the more specific location of Central Europe around the period of the First World War, and adopts a prophetic tone describing a sterile desert. Quotations from the operatic love story Tristan und Isolde bookend a memory of the "hyacinth girl", with the narrator trapped in a static existence between life and death, unable to profess his love. The scene then moves to the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, who is described in ironically down-to-earth terms, and the Tarot cards she draws foretell events in the rest of the poem. The final part of "The Burial of the Dead" is a description of London as Dante's hell, with inhabitants trapped in a death-like state following a meaningless routine.