i’ve decided to post an essay i wrote at university on TS Eliot, who as we know became a High Anglican in 1927. Needless to say, anyone foolish enough to steal it for their college essays should bear in mind their tutors will find this page easily enough, via Google. i’ve created hyperlinks to on-line editions of the poems i discuss.
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Discuss how far any of Eliot’s other poems [i.e. not 'Ash Wednesday'] are best considered in terms of religious search rather than belief.
Elberry
Graduate Society
March 2001
There is often something indecent about belief: I do not refer to the rabid bigotry of the incurable fundamentalist, who would likely be as rotten a human being whether religious or otherwise; but belief is often arrived at by short circuiting reason, and so carries that primal dishonesty through every cell of its imagining. Of course, only an idiot would deny the trans-rationality of significant experience, and the atheists who denounce religions for their “irrationality” are usually as loathsome as the aforementioned fundamentalists, and ultimately as irrational. It is certain that nothing can be “proved”: no matter how convincing the proof, it could so easily be a hallucination, and so often is. This does not obviate religion: but a spiritual imagining that is to be honestly centred within human understanding - and any other stance is worthless dishonesty - must carry that primal uncertainty through every stage of its evolution. Belief is not weakened by the avowal of its origins: as the introduction of a tiny quantity of carbon into the lattice of iron, disturbing its perfection, will radically increase its ultimate tensile strength, so the doubt in Eliot’s poetry enhances the plausibility of his final convictions.
Although there are marked shifts throughout Eliot’s long poetic career, the continuities are such that an understanding of the stresses of Four Quartets facilitates a closer reading of the pre-Christian poetry. By ‘Burnt Norton’, he has arrived at a fairly steady religious conviction, but still there remains the difficulty of understanding the flux of our apparently meaningless lives in the light of credal fixities. In this sense, Eliot’s poetry is always searching, and it is appropriate that after the compelling resolution of ‘Little Gidding’ he should have ceased to write poetry, or at least good poetry. The restless energy of Eliot’s poetry derives from the terrible gap between the desire for spiritual fulfilment, and the sordid, boring actuality of our existence. Although in his later years Eliot became increasingly respectable and donnish, it is well to bear in mind that the author of ‘Little Gidding’ was also the creator of Sweeney: this does not traduce the former; rather, it explains its necessity. In one of his letters, I think, Eliot writes of the hole in his life that only God could fill: in different ways, and with increasingly religious intonations, his pre-Christian poetry delineates the contours of this Beckettian void.
It is integral to Eliot’s spiritual honesty that he does not make unjustified claims for either spiritual fulfilment or abandonment: as with Dostoevsky, he acknowledges that the absence of God is not a pit of fire, but rather a kind of spiritual confusion, a miasma of contradictory impulses and corrupt nobility, amidst which the most one can hope for is to intensify the pain - as with Raskalnikov - to a point at which a knowledge of true evil will necessarily involve its obverse; and may of course lead to insanity, as with Ivan Karamazov. The truly modern hell is not that of Milton’s Satan on a lake of fire: it is tedium, spiritual apathy, sporadic, feeble desire. So with Prufrock, the absence of spirit is not experienced in agonizing pain, but in suffocating inadequacy, rather in the way a pair of lungs will depressingly continue to respire air from which the oxygen has been removed. The horror of Prufrock’s life is its gentility:
For I have known them all already, known them all -
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons (Eliot, 14)
Prufrock grasps for “objective correlatives” for his despair, but the particular affliction of his life is that he does not suffer enough, he does not exist enough. Coffee spoons are ludicrous in this context: yet there is nothing else. When he says:
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?… (Eliot, 15)
the trailing dots amply indicate the inadequacy of these images, these “butt-ends of my days and ways”. The condition of his spiritual vacuity is that his suffering is silent even to himself. It is not that, like Guido de Montefeltro, his agony is a secret he can only divulge to those he imagines as dead: there is no agony, only imagery redolent of aimless melancholy, and futile politeness; but culminating in a kind of eerie, unsentient automatism:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (ibid)
These lines convey some of the horror of Prufrock’s spirit, by suggesting the terrible, silent dereliction of his triviality. At least in pushing the polite banality of his life to this stark recognition, Prufrock implies his void. This emptiness is more nearly approached in ‘Gerontion’ and ‘The Hollow Men’, and in more explicitly Christian terms.
One could say that Prufrock cannot bring himself to even begin the search for religious truth, that “overwhelming question”. But Gerontion is haunted by energizing memories of loss, and if he will not actively contemplate an escape from his void, he is at least aware of what he has lost:
Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger (Eliot, 39)
The crucial difference is between “sign”, the word used in John’s Gospel for the Synoptics’ “miracle”, and “wonder”. The revelation transpired, and was mistaken, in the same way the crowds demanded party magician miracles from Christ. The irruption of spirit into the world was not experienced as revelation, but as a kind of mute, haunting corruption, almost a black mass:
Came Christ the Tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. (Eliot 39/40)
The collocation of “depraved”, “judas”, “whispers”, “caressing hands”, and the images of restlessness, occult ceremonies, and erotic temptation, induce a suffocating sense of degeneracy, a corruption into which the moment of spirit, the Tiger, was expended. Years later, bereft of the implied passion, Gerontion is aware of this betrayed moment as a terrifying regret:
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? (Eliot, 40)
Unlike Prufrock, Gerontion can articulate spiritual realities in their uncompromising ferocity. It is because he is aware of the squandered moment that he suffers. The Tiger becomes vengeful:
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. (ibid)
Or perhaps this is not a simple “you can have Justice or you can have Mercy” eschatology: perhaps Gerontion fears the resurgence of spiritual possibility because, comfortably trapped in his regrets and rhetoric, salvation would be too stark a transfiguration; it would be like being eaten alive, as Eliot later presents it in ‘Ash Wednesday’. Gerontion may be in a state of abject spiritual poverty without this revelation; but, after all, he always has his rhetoric to console him.
The situation is bleaker in ‘The Hollow Men’; but bleaker so as to be brighter, inasmuch as this harrowing landscape more nearly resembles the dark night of the soul, the precursor to enlightenment. The way up is the way down: so this stark vision is a religious search by implication. Without God, we exist in a twilight half-existence, neither one thing nor another:
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralyzed thought, gesture without motion. (Eliot, 89)
In this particularly Beckettian poem, Eliot sketches a state of being so reduced as to barely qualify as human:
We are the hollow men,
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat’s feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar (ibid)
The Waste Land imagery of dry grass, rats and broken glass aptly evokes the shattered dereliction of man without God. Individual identity has disintegrated, as it repeatedly did in ‘Gerontion’, but has resolved into a terrible dessication of utterance, numb and imperturbable, the “Alas!” but a faint sussuration. Salvation is present, and as in ‘Gerontion’ is regarded with some ambivalence, though the traumatised concision of this poem precludes Gerontion’s evasive rhetoric:
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star. (Eliot, 89/90)
As with the rose garden of ‘Burnt Norton’, Eliot begins with the impossibility of desire, and subtly shifts from speculation to presence. The transition from “There, the eyes are sunlight on a broken column”, indicating the veiling of the eyes in dream, to the more vividly present “There, is a tree singing”, enacts a tentative movement to this dangerous beauty. The terrain is considerably bleaker than in ‘Gerontion’, but the hope of salvation is conversely clearer. Although the poem denies the eyes:
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom (Eliot, 90)
the very clarity of this unrhetorical denial is in some way more hopeful than is the poetic verve of Gerontion’s:
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact? (Eliot, 41)
Although the later poem denies the salvation of the eyes, of spiritual sight, it nevertheless counters itself in the passage I have discussed above, and in the bare recognition of the hollow men as:
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men. (Eliot, 91)
The “unless” hanging off the first line encapsulates the religious search of the hollow men: lucid nihilism, unless - the hope of salvation an unaccountable possibility intruding from without the circle of despair. The Dantean echoes of the Virgin are obvious enough: her status in the Middle Ages as something like the symbol of Mercy and Grace is appropriately evoked herein. Because this hope is of an external agency, it is the hope “of empty men”: only those vacuous enough, foolish enough, could hope; conversely, only those who have been purgatorially emptied can dare to hope. In this duality lies a spiritual search: if emptiness can be construed as nihilism and as purgation, then the way up is the way down, and this clairvoyant despair is the movement towards God. To then resolve this horror by inversion would be, as Camus might say, to ignore one of the terms of the equation: although hope persists, it must honestly persist. So it is that the poem closes with a simultaneous positioning of desire and despair, with the Shadow as the supervening absurdity of our existence:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow (Eliot 91/2)
Recalling the ontological solipsism of the Bradley citation in The Waste Land, the Shadow severs the ideality of consciousness from reality. The tension between subjective ideality and bloody-minded reality is the generative agony of Eliot’s poetics, as I have mentioned previously. The poem then moves to an oblique Christology:
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow (Eliot, 92)
”Essence” cannot but recall the lengthy disputes about the ontology of Christ within the Trinity. Christ as the Incarnation of God, the physical deliverance of redemption to Fallen man, echoes the previous evocation of the Virgin. And “descent” can be fruitfully read as either the Incarnation or, more appropriately for this poem, the Harrowing of Hell. Although the Shadow is inevitably in place, the oblique approach to religious salvation is indication of the poem’s submerged spiritual striving.
The Ariel poems stand as scupulously honest accounts of the near approach to religious salvation. They are more clearly Christian than the preceding poems, not only in overt imagery, but in spiritual positioning. These poems of the late twenties, along with ‘Ash Wednesday’, are principally concerned with the striving for an acknowledged and ambiguously desired religious truth. In different ways, they are about the painful but necessary transition from the old life to the new.
‘The Journey of the Magi’ uses the story of the “three wise men” as a figure for the difficulty of religious search. The beautifully concrete details are testament to the gruelling, unheroic act of spiritual transition:
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory.
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women (Eliot, 109)
I have an image of camels as the most stubbornly unhandsome of quadrupedal luggage-bearers. It is this unglamorous work which Eliot construes as the real labour of spiritual trial. And yet the Magus is not an unadulterated authority: though not as wholly as Gerontion, he is locked into his limitations. The regret for their summer palaces - either a retreat from the spiritual trial, a wish to return, or, less likely, the lucid renunciation of this former, heathen luxury - is neatly juxtaposed against the more obviously base impulses of the camel men. The Magus obviously privileges - if only aesthetically - the “summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,/ And the silken girls bringing sherbet” over the lowly camel men “wanting their liquor and women”. And yet, spiritually speaking, what is the difference between the two? The taste and opulence of the one is of no account in terms of an ultimate truth. The Magus, by dwelling over these lost pleasures with the rapture of Nick in The Great Gatsby, betrays his imperfect detachment from the merely secular.
The subtlety of this poem’s spiritual positioning is only fully evident in a close reading of the fine tonal distinctions at work throughout, by which the Magus inadvertently provides a telling commentary upon his pretensions and spiritual incomprehension. In his reading, Eliot very skilfully elicits the grumbling - again, surely comparable to the “cursing and grumbling” of the camel men? - of the Magus in his grumpy mutterings:
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it. (ibid)
It is hard not to smile at the increasing rancour with which Eliot reads this catalogue of diminishingly dangerous trials, culminating in the spectacularly unthreatening dirty, expensive villages. Of course one can read these trials as symbols of the hostility of the world to Christians, but for a king to moan about “high prices” on his way to acknowledge the Incarnation is a detail of incomparable observation. The voices
singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly (ibid)
are clearly their own.
Eliot’s genius is apparent in the ease with which he juggles the spiritual seriousness of religious search with the comical pretensions of the Magus. After the cascade of Biblical imagery, the Magus comments obtusely: “But there was no information”. The concatenation of imagery acts as a bewildering collage of fragmentary significance:
And three trees on the low sky.
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued” (Eliot, 110)
I would guess this unexplained compression of imagery - while clearly prefiguring the crucifixion, and the white horse of Revelations, among other things - is positioned without commentary other than “But there was no information” to suggest the incomprehension of the Magus before symbols of such theological resonance. His vision is predominantly secular, and his account of the birth of Christ is accordingly amusing:
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. (ibid)
This reads like a bank manager’s report upon a paper given at a conference. But Eliot’s insight lies in the fusion of comic inadequacy and genuinely bitter spiritual transition:
were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death. (ibid)
The comedy of “We had evidence and no doubt” accedes to the “hard and bitter agony” of spiritual transfiguration, the Tiger. The religious search is the slow, painful extinction of the previous self; it is a kind of death. Even in the lovely ‘Marina’, the transformation is rendered as shipwreck:
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my
Timbers (Eliot 116)
In one of his letters, Eliot noted that his conversion to Christianity had by no means made his life easier, despite the inevitable accusations of cowardice. The Magus returns to his kingdom and his own people are now “an alien people clutching their gods”: faith, as Kierkegaard, said, is plunging into water 70,000 fathoms deep; the step into religious faith makes one an uneasy citizen of the City of God, a stranger to the City of Men, to use Augustine’s terminology. The difficulty of the manoeuvre springs from the ambivalence of our condition as an inextricable balancing between the Divine and the worldly. Religious belief is not a static truth by means of which one enters the Kingdom of God; it is a continual search for truth within imperfect temporality.
Similarly, Simeon’s trial is the acceptance of an unglorious, non-political redemption, a Messiah differing radically from his expectations. And in coming before the Roman persecution, Simeon shares the belatedness of modern Christians, who are denied that epiphanic clarity:
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision. (Eliot, 112)
Eliot construes religious search as the gruelling ordeal of daily sacrifice, not the martyr’s incandescence. It is a process of alienation from that which one has previously cherished, although in Four Quartets Eliot envisages a way of folding the rose garden of personal memory and desire within the fire of God’s destructive love. The Four Quartets proceed from the standpoint of belief, but this is a continual dialectic with reality, and thus for Eliot even the final stance of ‘Little Gidding’ is a belief searching for its own expression in time. Belief, in this sense, is still searching.
Word Count: 3251.
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963.
