User:Michelle Scheuter

The last lines of the poem are a conversation between Marie and a person spotted on the street. “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?” This conversation discusses a past and an attempt to move on into the future. The buried corpse could be a friend and the garden a memoir and a way to move on. Did the person in question move on or did things get in the way that prevented closure? “O keep the dog far hence, that’s friend to men, or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!” Keep those memories at bay or the terror of the past will be reopened. “You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon frère!” You, hypocrite reader, my fellow, my brother; this line is also the last line in “To the Reader” from Charles Baudelair’s “Fleurs du mal” or flowers of evil. This last line can have several different meanings. One of those is the fellow and brother is the people themselves. They mourn and live in self-pity of what the war as brought and done to the community yet they do not do anything to change the situation. They do not pick themselves back up from this chaos and destruction and bring new life to the world around them. They continue to live in the past and hold fear for the future. Another meaning could be directed to the reader of the past. The reader sees what is going on around them and does nothing to change it.

The last lines of the poem are a conversation between Marie and a person spotted on the street. “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?” This conversation discusses a past and an attempt to move on into the future. The buried corpse could be a friend and the garden a memoir and a way to move on. Did the person in question move on or did things get in the way that prevented closure? “O keep the dog far hence, that’s friend to men, or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!” Keep those memories at bay or the terror of the past will be reopened. “You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon frère!” You, hypocrite reader, my fellow, my brother; this line is also the last line in “To the Reader” from Charles Baudelair’s “Fleurs du mal” or flowers of evil. This last line can have several different meanings. One of those is the fellow and brother is the people themselves. They mourn and live in self-pity of what the war as brought and done to the community yet they do not do anything to change the situation. They do not pick themselves back up from this chaos and destruction and bring new life to the world around them. They continue to live in the past and hold fear for the future. Another meaning could be directed to the reader of the past. The reader sees what is going on around them and does nothing to change it.

By comparing these two mapped versions for “The Burial of the Dead” there are many similarities. Some of those are more obvious than others. The main ideas through this section of the poem are memory, death and life. This section is about the war, what happened before it and what has come because of it. T.S. Eliot has pulled from different references that all say the same thing that he is saying in his poem. Where there was once death there will be life again. Eliot progresses from a child-like innocence past to a horrific present, but shows that there is light in the future. What was once known may never be again, but it will survive and become something else, maybe even something greater than it was before.

By comparing these two mapped versions for “The Burial of the Dead” there are many similarities. Some of those are more obvious than others. The main ideas through this section of the poem are memory, death and life. This section is about the war, what happened before it and what has come because of it. T.S. Eliot has pulled from different references that all say the same thing that he is saying in his poem. Where there was once death there will be life again. Eliot progresses from a child-like innocence past to a horrific present, but shows that there is light in the future. What was once known may never be again, but it will survive and become something else, maybe even something greater than it was before.