In the final stanza of “The Burial of the Dead” T.S. Eliot introduces the comparison that will frame the rest of the poem, London (the modern  city) as a wasteland. Eliot starts with “Unreal City ” in its own line which takes away some of the significance that London had given itself at the turn of the century. He turns the London of this stanza into an absurd bizarro London that is filled with ghosts of the death. “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” The language is very dull and makes London into a foggy mess of a city with words like brown fog and winter.

    The crowds Eliot is referring to in this stanza are the dead from WWI returning to their city as unfulfilled souls. “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,/ And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” They died in battle, but that is not enough for the disappointment implied by these lines. A soldier can still pave his way to heaven by dying on the battlefield if his cause is true. Eliot suggests that the men fighting and dying are doing so futilely and nothing is coming from their sacrifice. In this stanza the ghosts end up in front of a church “where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours/ With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.” In this church there seems to be a continuation of the futility of sacrifice. Saint Mary is just watching the time pass and Christianity’s promise that Jesus died for our sins is forgotten along with the dead who leave no traces on Earth.

    This failure of Christian spirituality is continued with the unanswered questions posed to Stetson in the second half of this stanza. “‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” This passage continues on the theme introduced in the first stanza of the poem about April’s failure to spawn growth. But in this case the corpse is the seed that won’t grow and it represents a more spiritual fear of the impossibility of eternal life promised by religion. The corpse died last year but our assumption is that it hasn’t grown since then. There is a sense of worry by the voice of this stanza that implies if Stetson’s corpse didn’t obtain eternal life than something must be wrong, and he too, along with all the other dead, won’t achieve spiritual eternity.

    Eliot builds the panic in the last few lines by use of repetition. “‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?/ Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,/ Or with nails he’ll dig it up again!” By blaming the Dog, the speaker is shedding humanity’s responsibility, and by extension, his own. By capitalizing Dog, Eliot turns it into a sort of Anubis figure who was in charge of bringing the dead to the afterlife. But in this case he just digs up the corpse again, preventing the transition.
   
By not responding to the questions Stetson represents the futility of learning from the dead, which can be read as an impossibility to learn from history. The overall tone of this passage is dejection, confusion, and anger. Eliot just seems to create misfortune after misfortune, each one predicated on the fact that there is no solution. How can the speaker learn anything if Stetson won’t reply? In this passage Eliot ties together the failure of Spring with the failure of religion and history in order to create the Modern City as the ultimate failure to connect them all. Throughout the entire poem Eliot uses many seemingly unrelated allusions to develop this point further and suggest that the Modern City exists in a realm of fragmentation that is looking for an answer/solution when there is nobody to give one, just as Stetson doesn’t respond to the speaker.

How did you read it?

Following the death and the waste of WWI, London attempted to piece back together and recreate the memory of a seemingly enchanted pre-war history. In The Waste Land, Eliot attempts to dispel the myth of a pre-war utopia and a post-war return by throwing attention on the ugly realities of existence, of death and lack of meaning.

The impossibility of growing life out of death, of turning the old into the new is presented from the very first lines of the poem: "April if the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirrying/ Dull roots with spring rain." The immediate image created by those lines if that of the "dead land." The roots are dull and although Eliot describes lilacs growing, the image fails to invoke the beauty it should because the flowers grow in a cruel month and out of dead soil.

Beyond the physical image of the decayed landscape is Eliot's more significant worry about a disconnect between memory and desire. London desires a lush spring but will not (or cannot) let go of the winter, of its past. "Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/ a little life with dried tubers." London's memory of its enchanted history and tradition kept it warm during the war, "covering" it and "feeding" it, but also hiding the realities of the dead land beneath the snow.

It is spring now and London refuses to face the realities of its barren land. Eliot suggests that as long as London tries to hold on to its mythic memory of itself, there can be no growth. This failure to bridge the gap between London's storied history and its present is further emphasized by Eliot's allusion to The Canterbury Tales in the first line. As Eliot fails to accurately recall Chauser's line he asserts his belief of the impossibility that London will return to an idealized pre-war existence. 

The conflict of the poem arises out of the missing link between the past and the present, a missing unifying source that gives meaning to both death and rebirth, to the history of civilization and to its future. That question you quoted Hanna from the last stanza is the pivotal question of the poem: "That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” The speaker is asking whether anything has grown from a corpse, he asks for evidence that the natural life cycle is restored and he might leave his purgatory London to reach heaven. He wants to know if his death in battle means anything. That Stetson does not answer suggests there is no answer; that nothing comes out of death, only silence. This unanswered question extends to all the dead from the war. If one soldier's life means nothing, does the sum total of all the dead add up to meaning?