The Columbia History of British Poetry (145 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 569
At his greatest, Lawrence was a poet of love (though not of human relationships: his gift for portraying
them
was largely restricted to his fiction). Yeats, too, honored vital flow in such poems as "To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no," "Stream and Sun at Glendalough," and "The Cat and the Moon," among others. But Yeats is strongest as a poet of high demands, of dissatisfaction, not love. And EliotEliot's love smokes off immediately into Love. It disdains the accidents of creatures.
Eliot
Crafted to have the broken form of a confused will, Eliot's first masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1912), is already cinematic: image plus juxtaposition. Prufrock is, however belatedly, one of Nietzsche's nineteenth-century young men, his moral and religious spine broken by the say-so weight of history. Wriggling miserably between God and woman, the there and the here, Prufrock would like to be heroic, if that didn't require standing out, and to be a lover, if that didn't require putting it in. Something nags him to get beyond the toast and marmalade, the smoke and fogbeyond death. But what is beyond wants all, and that is not what Prufrock means to give, not it at all.
Prufrock was Eliot's first self-portrait in a distorting mirror. If the invisible alone matters, the poet's quandary was only in part how to tolerate a weak but spasmodic sensuality. The rest was his diffusion in what Wittgenstein called "feeling space," which "has nothing to do with position in visual space." How either find or lose himself there? Eliot was space-dispersed. In each of his masterpieces the
here
shifts, it is not to be mapped. He was already atomized toward genesis or terminus, but at the intersection of time and eternity the particles halted, drifted, waited.
For Eliot, the sacred, as distinct from the holy, had too much gravity, too much blood. This is his great difference from Yeats and Lawrence. He may have thrilled to Stravinsky's
Le Sacre du Printemps
(threatening a noisy member of the London audience with his umbrella); but he was not about to stir his hands in steaming bowels to find the
other
. For him, deity is ultimate refinement, and only this refinement has reality. Something finer, even, than light: the heart of light. Finer, even, than silences: the silence.
By modernist standards, Eliot was an anachronism, a poet not of the sacred but of the holy. If he could not accept the body, the reason is that
 
Page 570
it accepted him. Perhaps his marriage in 1915 to the disastrously volatile English woman Vivienne Haigh-Wood was either a sudden gamble at making it acceptable or a way. But it only doubled his unacceptability with hers. The marriage trailed sin like snail slime. It forced Eliot away from women toward a God already volatilized beyond staining.
Shocking the Prufrock in himself past inquisition ("Gerontion") into the beauty of terror (
The Waste Land
), the poet declared women the enemies of the Absolute, along with time and society (which, anyway, is women's stuff until
Four Quartets
). He thus prepared himself for the terror ofthe capital is daunting"Love."
Prufrock himself is unable to love either a woman or Love. His narcissism is a plastic suit in which he malingers, sweating a dull paranoia. Nothing touches him, and he will not touch anything except the imaginary fog lying like a cat beside his chair. The sea-girls by whom he says he lingers in the chambers of the sea (
by
, not
with
) are signs of death, wreathed as they are in "seaweed red and brown." Prufrock stews in his own incest dread. But his sense that he ought to squeeze the universe into a ball and roll it toward some overwhelming question (if such athletic spirituality were still the fashion) betrays the bad conscience of a would-be saint. For, like the young Eliot, Prufrock has had (according to a rejected passage) fantasies of conducting vigils. To leave the senses behind like the dust they are once the moistened mother-matter is removed, to get away from acid and sloppy particles ("Do I dare to eat a peach?"), would ensure that the mermaids will not sing to him again. But, really, he has no vocation for austerity.
"I would meet you upon this honestly," says the hero of Eliot's next masterpiece, "Gerontion" (1919). Yet this gerontion (little old man) hardly gets beyond Prufrock's cowardly amends to mother and God. Here Eliot's smarting salve is to imagine himself aged and shrunken past matings of any kind. The almost mock-grand woman "about to reach her journey's end" in "Portrait of a Lady'' is succeeded in this poem by the woman who "keeps the kitchen, makes tea, / Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter": the phallic mother as decrepit servant! This speaker is even more distant from the genius of mimesis and memorythe mother's bodythan the one in "Rhapsody of a Windy Night" (another early poem), who wants midnight to shake the memory only "as a madman shakes a dead geranium." The gerontion is matter long since dried of the mother and her legacy (what in "Preludes" Eliot calls "some infinitely gentle . . . thing").
 
Page 571
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"after the knowledge that worldly caresses "Weave the wind." Something else, some love, or Love, has been neglected. Whose heart was the gerontion once "near . . . removed therefrom / To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition"? Was it male or female? Still in the mother's force field, in the wrath world of matter, the gerontion imagines the dead as "fractured atoms" ''whirled / Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear." As for Christ, his energy seems fiercely material ("Christ the tiger"). What is still missing from Eliot's spiritual exploration is an utterly incorporeal Other, a mother-free "you."
In his greatest poem,
The Waste Land
, the poet finds this Other in the Eastern indifference to incarnation. The poem dedicates itself to the Om, the Eternal Silence, of the Upanishads, but chiefly by bitter negation, by portraying the human world as a tower of Babel. This required many voicesvoices too much, or too little, satisfied with themselves. It required (in both senses) a
rendering
of incoherence. The poem tips the reader off to its method: "Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe." To "fit," as Thomas Kyd's Hieronymo does, is to devise a deluding language farrago in which sinners, at first unknowing, will be trapped and killed. Eliot thus pointed to the poem's deep coherent purpose. Relatively few readers have seen this. Many speak of the poet's mere grouse against life (quoting Hieronymo Eliot on this score), not recognizing how Eliot invites their hearts to beat obedient to controlling hands, including his own.
Here is the fullest development of his patch-and-jump cinematic method. From the first this poet, who composed in fragments, practiced an evasion of any "whole" that, like a nursing breast or beat, would ease him into being here. His instinctprotective, brilliantwas to touch and abandon. Superficially, the movement of "Prufrock" and "Gerontion" resembles that of, say, Lawrence's "Fish," but the meaning has been reverseddisjunction is brokenness, mimesis handles only wormy apples. This world is something to have done with.
To address a few of the reasons that
The Waste Land
is a great poem: one is the way Eliot's typical touch-and-go movement expands here to take in a variety of countries, cityscapes, landscapes, personalities, classes, idioms, periods, texts, moods, perspectives, and levels of intensity. Nothing like this perplexed and perplexing heterogeneity had ever appeared in English. (
Ulysses
, published in the same year, 1922, is perplexing but not perplexed.)
The Waste Land
is the great poem of the age
 
Page 572
of the novel, sharing the latter's penchant for raw contemporaneity, mixed styles, dialogic movement. But its compression rebuffs the jabbering world, even so. Missing is Joyce's epic appetite for earthly life's seriocomic losses and gains.
Also worth stressing is the absolute modernity of the diction. In fact, this up-to-dateness, which was initially for Yeats and Lawrence a struggle, is already perfected in "Prufrock." No dry bits then or now to snip from the plant. In addition, like "Prufrock" and ''Gerontion,"
The Waste Land
has authoritative new rhythms. There is none of that faded literariness that mars two earlier poems, "Portrait of a Lady" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." The smartness of "Half-past three, / The lamp sputtered / The lamp muttered in the dark. / The lamp hummed," from "Rhapsody," is like Virginia Woolf at her most self-conscious (which may well mean Woolf remembering "Rhapsody"). Although "Rhapsody" shows Eliot's horror of attachment to this world, bidding us see the cat devouring "a morsel of rancid butter," the child pocketing "a toy that was running along the quay," "An old crab with barnacles on his back" that "Gripped the end of a stick which I held him," the poem itself is conspicuously attached to the conventional idea of verse, and brings out the relativethe seriousausterity of
The Waste Land
.
Not least, this last is great in being religious beyond the channels cut out by the currents of sensibility in the Westreligious in the way Eliot continued to approve, as "an act of the imagination." As "act,"
The Waste Land
frees Eliot from the crab claws that consist of being a mother's son, a creature. To what can we surrender and "By this, and this only, . . . have existed"? Not human love, as most interpreterssentimental Westernershave supposed: except for the rare moment of casual secular grace, say, "Where fishmen lounge at noon," the human in this poem is unreal, it is death. Rather, to that superhuman Grace to which the heart responds "Gaily, when invited." Gaily? The first invitation in the poem had seemed a sudden blow of light and silence. For Eliot, too, made the modern rediscovery of religion as terror. Find a decayed hole in the heart's mountains and wait.
But Eliot could not long hold to the Eastern Absolute-without-distinctions (to so radical, devastating, and exalting a continuity). Perhaps he needed, after all, to incorporate the feminine in his religion, the more so because his youthful near-sweetheart, the American Emily Hale, had reentered his life as spiritual companion. Perhaps he needed neighborly and pacifying church ritual, as Vivienne deteriorated first before his
 
Page 573
eyes, then as he hid them from her, hid himself, his addresseverything except his conscience. Then, too, as a follower of the French hierarchist, Maurras, Eliot adopted Christianity, considering it the necessary discipline of the West. (He even said that "
the
Christian world-order is ultimately the only one which, from any point of view, will work.")
However that may be, "Ash-Wednesday" (1930) is addressed to a female figuretoken, phantom, idolwho hovers between the sacred and the holy, who is now all but transparently Emily Hale, now the Virgin, now the Deity, as her panels are moved this way and that by a speaker at once starved for female care and committed to starvation as the rectification of hunger. Is Eliot sure of his ground here? In
The Waste Land
he acts (as the working title has it, "he do the police in different voices"); here, he alternately poses, his speech wadded with high-sounding phrases,
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
and sings:
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
Is it the presence of the feminine in high places that makes Eliot write with a slight insincerity, and as if before sympathetic, admiring eyes?
In this poem, the poet half turns the primal mother fantasy against itself; he plucks out its gentle element and lets the rest go. The forbidden but not forbidding Lady of the poem teaches the love that is denialthe denial of the appetite and desire that lead, for Eliot, only to "an old man's mouth drivelling, / beyond repair." Not hers the sweet "Blown hair . . . , brown hair over the mouth blown"and yet, if not hers, no one's. She walks in "White light folded."
Thus reconciled to the feminine, having etherealized it, Eliot would now "Redeem / The time." Or he would and would not. He is not altogether ready to forgo primal nostalgia: "And
after this
our exile" (emphasis added). But he would avoid this world's pregnancies ("a slot-

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