The Burial of the Dead

The title of the first part of the poem comes from the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer, the liturgical text of the Church of England. It begins I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord, establishing the thread which will run through this section: death and resurrection; the pain of physical and spiritual rebirth.

• In keeping with the theme of Burial, the poem begins underground. Bulbs that have been dormant through the winter start to break the surface of the land. They are resentful that their sleep has been disturbed.
• Cut to modern Munich. Marie, an aristocrat who seems to have been driven from her home by the Russian Revolution, reminisces about an idyllic childhood,  in comparison to her current rootless existence.
• The second stanza takes us to the biblical desert, where a menacing figure like the prophet Ezekiel warns of death in the dead landscape.
• Cut to the living landscape of a hyacinth garden: despite the romantic setting, the speaker is hopelessly paralysed and unable to communicate with the "hyacinth girl." The scene is bracketed by excerpts from the tragic Romantic opera, Tristan und Isolde, that suggest loneliness and isolation.
• The fortune-teller, Madame Sosostris (a modern day prophet), reads the tarot cards. Although she is a fraud, she inadvertently turns over cards that will have resonances later in the poem.
• Stanza 4: Modern London. The speaker, a very Eliot-like figure, joins the crowd of office-workers on their way into the City, and has a vision of them as the walking dead. He sees a friend and calls out to him, asking him if the human dead can ever return to life, as the bulbs do in the spring.

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