"The Burial of the Dead" Annotations
From The Waste Land Wiki
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It speaks to a proliferation of men, each a twin of the other, who look like death, much to the horror of the author. It shows Eliot's concern that society is composed of the living dead, and is crippled by the infertility and senility thereof. | It speaks to a proliferation of men, each a twin of the other, who look like death, much to the horror of the author. It shows Eliot's concern that society is composed of the living dead, and is crippled by the infertility and senility thereof. | ||
| − | ===Lines 64-65=== | + | ===Lines 64-65, ''The Inferno''=== |
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, | Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, | ||
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. | And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. | ||
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| + | This section recalls Dante Alighieri's ''The Inferno.'' The first circle of Hell, filled with the unbaptized, is limbo, where each soul spends eternity fretting about their fate, because like Sybil they "have no hope of death, and so abject is their blind life that they are envious of every other lot." | ||
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| + | Life is stagnated at this period--men are stuck mentally in the realm of death, and yet they live. Women seem incapable of associating and rejuvenating the men. In a sense, the whole of society is in limbo. | ||
===Lines 66-68=== | ===Lines 66-68=== | ||
