Come, the narrator in the first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” intones, and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Line 30). This opening section serves as an invitation to acknowledge what is difficult and even disturbing: the morally bankrupt and spiritually enervated condition of a civilization capable of sustaining a pointless and brutal war for close to ten years, a war conducted with unprecedented savagery that left more than 20 million dead—most civilians. The four episodes, presented as evidence of this civilization’s decline into spiritual emptiness, reveal lives of the living dead—lives lost to hope, adrift in ennui, in a perilous, surreal culture-scape that is barren and cheerless, a civilization lost to its own grandeur now little more than “[a] heap of broken images, where the sun beats/And the dead trees give no shelter” (Lines 22-23). Marie, the countess, lives only in her few memories of a distant childhood, sledding in the mountains where for the briefest moment, she felt “free” (Line 17). Now she dreads the return of spring. “April,” she says, “is the cruelest month” (Line 1), preferring the uncomplicated wintery world of her spiritual paralysis and emotional indifference.

There is a fleeting image of a young girl, her long hair wet from rain, carrying hyacinths—an image of life, innocence, happiness, and natural beauty that inexplicably fades.