![]() Compare this section of the poem with the man from ‘A Game of Chess’, the poem’s second part, who talks of still being ‘in rats’ alley’ among the bones of ‘the dead men’.Įliot’s inspiration for these lines from a passage from the Inferno, a poem by the medieval Italian poet Dante (part of his three-part Divine Comedy): Why? One answer is survivor’s guilt: many of the young and middle-aged men travelling to their jobs as clerks in 1922 would have been veterans of the war, who would have seen many of their comrades killed in action in northern France. All of this death has ‘undone’ the living. ![]() ![]() ‘ I had not thought death had undone so many’.Ī reference to the crowd of commuters walking across London Bridge at dawn, on their way to their office jobs, this quotation suggests the emotional and psychological scars left by the First World War. Is he suggesting that such wars are nothing new, and have been a continual feature of all empires and all civilisations? ![]() ![]() Eliot even refers to one of the battles from the Punic Wars, the Battle of Mylae, in the ‘Stetson’ section towards the end of ‘The Burial of the Dead’. ![]()
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