Study Notes – TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes Page

HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 1 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes Preludes

- Written between 1909 and 1911 in Boston, Paris and London - Pictures of modern city life, dwelling on lives of squalor and routine - Ends with poet’s response and indifference of the universe - Hopelessness of human condition, timeless, uncaring power, no belief system - Poetry is conflict within oneself, quarrel with oneself - Conflict between naturalistic intellect and a religious desire - Common theme of life in the dirty grimy city - Imitates contemporary classical music form o Defines a modern identity that is exquisitely aesthetic and problematic - Prelude 1 + 2 o Urban metropolis and modernity, city as sordid and threatening in its ordinariness o Meaning is elusive and ambiguous o Written Harvard 1910, response to French tradition from a distance

One

- Description of a city scape, depraved side of a modern city - Backdrop for depravities of human kind, diminished state, lack of spiritual achievement - Assault on the five senses from big city - Words such as ‘burnt-out’, ‘gusty’, ‘grimy’, ‘broken’ accumulate to give an impression of the city as dirty and dull - ‘lighting of lamps’ enhance the idea of an action being performed in unison across the city - Traditional poetic lyricism, conversational effects and rhyme, clever subversion - Heavily implicit theme of modern city weariness, boredom and alienation - Crowded living (smell of steaks ... passageways) – intimate sense of debris and squalor o Urban built up environment - Vacant lots – where garbage is left, gathers and settles down – decay

Page 1 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 2 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - ‘broken blinds’ – return to the implicit theme of ruin in an urban physical environment - Heavy, insistent, subversive rhyme - Modern metropolis replaces late Romanticism, - Poem builds up a description of the modern city, based on New York and other American cities as well as Eliot’s knowledge of Europe at a distance - Urban crowds are implicit but unseen, vision of a strangely empty city wasteland of architecture, smells, images and debris of city life - Poet as a flaneur o Mixed identity, reference to the poet and the poet’s identity and understanding of the city, develops idea of poet walking through city and observing it

Two

- Preludes represents day in the life of a naturalist - Sympathy  all the hands o Viewing sympathetically the life of the working class - Personification “The morning comes to consciousness” - ‘trampled’ and ‘press’ convey an aggressiveness and impatience about the city - ‘with the other masquerades / That time resumes’ is moralistic o Masquerade – a false show or pretence, disguise, life as a performance - More actions performed in unison (recalling stanza 1) “all the hands...” - Urban crowds of people are seen indirectly and selectively ‘muddy feet’ and ‘hands’ o The urban crowds of the modern city are composed of workers and the poor - Even greater emphasis on squalor ‘faint stale smells’ ‘dingy shades’ - Aesthetic squalor of ordinary people of modernity as a grounds for rejection, image that returns to poet’s identity and contrast to modernity

Three

- Female subject – nothing romantic about portrait of life yellow soles etc. - Second person effect brings reader into poem

Page 2 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 3 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - “street hardly understands” personification again, - Final lines leave impression of filth - Paris blends with America into another unidentified and representative modern metropolis - Major change in perspective - In context the view is challengingly intimate, potentially decadent and even sexual - Character is ambiguous, poet and reader become combined, - Context of avant-garde tradition including Baudelaire and Laforgue o This is modernism where imagery turns dreamlike, strange and bizarre in a sophisticated, decadent and aesthetic way - Eliot shifts emphasis to a dimension with implicit questions about the conscience ‘your soul... sordid images’ - In a way that is characteristic of Eliot the meaning is ambiguous - ‘you’ is female (hair), ‘yellow’, ‘soiled’ add to impression of squalid prostitution - ‘vision... street hardly understands’ – beyond the understanding of ordinary people o What it means is unstated and unresolvable o Possible epiphany of aesthetic and spiritual sordidness o Or spiritual transcendence, a vision of universal spirit - Essential issue is the ending involves complicated and unresolved ambiguity and irony - Ending is a puzzle about an epiphany about the nature of the modern metropolis and modern identity, understatedly emotionally resonant

Four

- Powerful religious hunger  conscience, I am moved, notion of some infinitely ... o Years later became Christian, first foreshadowing of religious development - Spiritual life, religious hunger v natural intellects - Moment of religious desire is embarrassing therefore ends with return to naturalistic reality - Vacant lots – spiritually - Laugh – at religious thought

Page 3 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 4 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - “assured of certain certainties” – sarcasm nothing is certain - Final image – cynical acceptance and survival - Poet is present (I am moved) but also merged with a character (his soul) - Laforgue – dreamlike fantasy, bizarre, lyrical, clever playfulness, aestheticism - People of the city are as sordid as its physical wasteland “conscience of a black...” o People of the modern city torture and destroy the soul - First two lines suggest a return to epiphany – spiritual reaching out across the sky o Next lines turn that possibility into an image of torture and destruction - Lines 4-16 reject the possibility of spiritual salvation for tragic mockery in a vision of the world as meaningly and squalid - Ends with heavily ambiguous irony - Makes Preludes a set that develops in terms of the setting in the city and the developing themes of the city as material, aesthetic, and a spiritual wasteland

Rhapsody on a windy night

- Another variation on the theme of poetry in the manner of contemporary music - Ironic account of the reality of the decadence of contemporary Paris and its mad, sordid mindlessness - Avant-garde imagery that is dreamlike and bizarre as well as clever and sophisticated (in the manner of Laforgue) - Art – an imitation of the madness and evocations of madness in French Modernism - Setting of a moonlight windy night, street is deserted - Street lamps eventually dominate his walk, act as triggers to disorganised imaginings - Lamp post stimulates him to remembrance of unlikely and confused memories - Struggle between two views of moving present and inert past (lamp vs memory) - Windy moonlight distorts memories of speaker into a nightmare - Theme of the passage of time - Eliot composed this poem in the characteristic manner of the French symbolists, o Especially Laforgue who concentrated a number of fragmented, broken images to suggest the sordid life and squalor of a modern city . Evoke a mood of nightmarish horror

Page 4 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 5 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - A situation that could be romantic—a midnight stroll in the lamplight and moonlight—is actually dominated by images of sterility, decay, isolation, and despair - Rhapsody does not explain feelings or thoughts in any general, conventional way. Readers must work to discover the complex patterns of meaning, sound, and structure underlying the stream of bizarre and banal images that make up the poem. - dictated by psychological connections - Takes reader into Paris as a city that is like a mad modern hell, return to normal is a return to a living death

Stanza One

- Begins a night’s walk through the city, emphasis is on the streets and how they are seen - Moonlight subverts the normal structures of the mind and replaces normality with dreamlike madness - Memory is lost and transformed, stressing a loss of normal standards and values

Stanza Two

- Woman who appears to be a prostitute - Implication that this other world offers itself to him - ‘Corner of her eye twists...’ a further exploration of dreamlike imagery that is bizarre and threateningly transgressive o Also an imitation of visions of drugs and madness, about cruelty, torture

Stanza Three

- Under drug-like influence, memory provides strange hallucinatory, dreamlike images - Continue theme of the debris of modernity (particularly spring) - Spring ready to snap suggest the mind at a point where it is ready to break into madness - Dreamlike avant-garde imagery

Page 5 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 6 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - Complex and contradictory ideas – madness of modernity

Stanza Four

- Vision: a cat connects with the memory of a child - Idea of eyes that are sightless and mindless - Old crab – icon of modern identity, grasping, driven by the need to have something - Dreamlike imagery, elaborated further, midnight kind of vision

Stanza Five

- Streetlamps continue to mark time - Line of French – moon not bearing a grudge o Confirms the Parisian identity of the city and the poem - Moon as a deranged, diseased, decadent goddess of modernity o Moon that ‘winks a feeble eye’ is linked with the earlier prostitute - A climax of dark, mad and subversive, decadent rhapsody that is in absurd and threatening contrast to heroic late Romantic music and literature

Stanza Six

- World of routine normality - The last line adds an obvious twist, that the issue here is that there is no escape in ordinary life. The suffering continues. - The urban scene cannot be escaped

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

- Written in 1911 in Paris and Munich - Published 1915 - Prufrock invites an unidentified ‘you’ to accompany him on an evening walk through the streets of a city, initial view decadent city, ambiguous and dreamlike place

Page 6 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 7 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes Form

- Variation on musical tradition, reference to classical art songs e.g. love songs - Dramatic and theatrical manner of speech - Love song form is not maintained - Part ode, part dramatic monologue - Radical exploration of poetic form, breaks traditional boundaries - Repeats setting in the modern city, further elaboration of imagery, dreamlike effects - Modern city of ruin and decadence, model of Paris, flaneur walking streets - Prufrock as dramatic persona for Eliot and his modern identity o Theatricality and self-absorption are accompanied by alienation complicated by insecurity, self-doubt and timidity o New vision of modern antihero as failure of identity and tradition in modern world - Identity is fluid, Prufrock addresses reader whose identity merges with his own - View of polite society and ordinary world of the city - Women and sexuality are a focus and used for a sense of failure of identity - Climax is celebratory but as a memory, nostalgia, celebration is ironic and paradoxical

Title

- Man modern figure, shouldn’t be in love song, - Incongruity indicates structure - Difference between romance and realism - Suggests a love song addressed to someone Prufrock loves, proves to be a song/poem about love and Prufrock himself

Allusion

- Characteristic of Eliot’s poetry - Ransacks literature of past  classist

Page 7 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 8 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - Tongue of flame tells Dante if I believe that anyone had come this deep in hell and left I wouldn’t tell my story but because no one has gotten back to earth I will tell you - Dante Alighieri’s Inferno - Guido is a damned soul in the eighth circle of hell, because Dante is in Hell with him, Guido believes that Dante is dead as well and cannot return to earth to report his story. - Highlights theme of loneliness, isolation, man being unable to tell his story (Prufrock’s predicament) - Dante says he will confess the truth of his crimes as no one returns alive from hell - Extends Eliot’s use of literary quotation and pastiche as a major poetic device - Prufrock reveals his thoughts in a monologue to the reader, tells the listener that he wants love and a companion, but is afraid to act because he fears rejection o Wants to have the same opportunity as Guido who reveals his honest emotions without “fear of infamy” o Prufrock tells the listener his thoughts believing others will never find out how he truly feels - Eliot’s poetry is for students, scholars of European languages and literature - Modernity is a period of a failure of tradition, a modern hell no-one escapes

First

- Question of identity  you and I - Two voices in Prufrock  realist vs romantic longing for relationship - Prufrock going to a party wants to talk to women, will he be brave enough to actually talk/sing love song - Romantic ring, rhyme, image first two lines - Like a patient  motif indicates Prufrock’s hopeless paralysis, scatters images throughout the poem, Prufrock being dissected, (pair of hands, eyeballs, severed head platter, nerves in patterns, Prufrock taken apart psychologically) - Exhibits inner most mind, moving through streets - Music of poetry (let us go streets to lead you to an) o Question (recurring motif) will he speak - Even before party experiencing a failure of nerve do not ask (I cannot face it now)

Page 8 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 9 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - - Prufrock invites an unidentified ‘you’ walk through the city, ambiguous, nature of visit left unexplained - Setting is a continuation of the physically sordid metropolis of Preludes - Prufrock is uncertain and threatened by a sense that the city and world are sinister, streets of ‘insidious intent’, avoidance of the ‘overwhelming question’ - Speech becomes an increasingly dramatic revelation of himself as a modern man of theatrical identity, pretence, evasion, equivocation and procrastination

Second

- Jump cut – move immediately to another scene - At the party observing the women - Past is superior to the present – great renaissance figure of Michelangelo, how can Prufrock compare - Make him feel insignificant, unable to insert himself into the party - Prufrock is a gentleman, access to a higher level of fashionable, polite society

Third

- Instead of talking to other guests, is staring at window, fog indicates isolation of Prufrock - Images of smoke continue dimension of dreamlike, mad, bizarre and decadent strangeness

Fourth

- Rationalise his failure of nerve, there will be time (theme meaning of time most continuous theme in Eliot’s career) time = getting old, advancing toward death, experience of a used up wasted life, can time be more than that (naturalistic view, oblivion)

Fifth

Page 9 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 10 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - To get up his nerve, prepare a face - Bundle of modern inhibitions and if he is going to break out of loneliness he will need to have a false identity

Sixth – Repetition

Seventh

- First time he discloses why he is so inhibited - He has no physical attractiveness, inferior male - Conflict between romance and realism - Prufrock feels trapped in his life as a gentleman - Complication that Eliot develops a persona who sees himself in terms of the passing of youth and early onset of middle age, bald spot and thin hair

8

- Romantic motif  known them all, haven’t been able to do anything with that time - Coffee spoons  brilliant image, one spoon a day, hasn’t actually lived/had an impact

9

- Sprawling – trying to rationalise his failing of nerve, already morally given up - Realistic Prufrock believes he would be pinned to the wall as an inferior male if he spoke - Sees himself as a victim (insect) but also figure of urban culture inadequate for love

10

- Romantic, inviting arms, appealing image followed by realist Prufrock (brown hair – if you look closely not perfect) - (line 55-69) Focus turns to love, sexual, women’s arms, bare skin, perfume, seduced

Page 10 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 11 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - Sees others too clearly to make romance possible - Tries to gather courage – how should I begin - High point – Prufrock tries to formulate how he will address the woman

11 - shall I tell her I am lonely and I have seen my future if I don’t do / say something

- (70-74) Double identity, part gentleman of high culture part flaneur of working class - Inseparable from the ruin and squalor of the modern city

Four to eleven

- Dramatic irony, poem is largely about Prufrock himself, self-obsessed commentary - Modern narcissist, obsessed and tormented by self-doubt - Obsessed with and alienated by women, - Repetition of his fear of rejection

12

- gives up completely, now nothing but rationalisations of the failure of his nerve - sub-human form of life - burden of self-consciousness is uniquely human awareness of own inferiority, naturalistic mechanism - envy of a primitive feature - silent – if only he was a lobster he wouldn’t have to talk - how enviable compared to this awful human burden of self-knowledge - Image of crab, modernity as a reduction to subhuman existence

13

- drifts off – half oblivious - inescapable from inhibitions/insecurities - footman – time

Page 11 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 12 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes 14

- to have bitten off the matter – to put on mask of a bold lover - settling pillow – contemptuous gesture - the woman has previously given Prufrock encouragement probably - thinks he must have misunderstood, she couldn’t like him and so it would not have been worthwhile, never ask as thinks he will be rejected - Historical comparisons add to his identity and stature as a representation of an absurd anti-hero of modern times o Instead of a successful lover he is like Lazarus with the message of death

15

- nerves on screen, rejected even more dramatically, turning to the window

16

- though he and hamlet have delay action but they are not alike - Actually resembles Polonius - He is not Hamlet, ironic anticlimax, he is an antihero who defines modernity as a failure of the heroic and tradition and a decline into absurd inability to act - Emphasis on Hamlet-like procrastination and self-doubt throughout the poem ‘there will be time...’

17

- Needs to decide what to do with the rest of his life - what to do about bald spot, (part my hair) - final possible conflict realist Prufrock v romantic Prufrock - realist – trousers, romantic – mermaid - imagination of a romantic nature - Return to Prufrock’s doubts about himself, pathetic determination to follow fashion

Page 12 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 13 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - Contradictory vision of mermaids, classic image of love, desire and seductiveness of women, take men to their ruin

18 - realist strikes back

19

- grandly lyrical description, climax, visionary affirmation

20

- Drown – voices how he is thin, talking of Michelangelo, that is not what I meant - Deprive him of the possibility of fantasy - Too intelligent for fantasy but can’t make his way in real world - Lonely pathetic figure etherised of table - Dramatic contradiction, Prufrock is given a climactic, celebratory vision of romance and desire - Ending develops with ambiguity - Conclusion that you wake from that experience and ‘drown’ in return to life

Language devices

- Synecdoche – figure of speech in which a part represents a whole o Claws – crab . ocean (dark hidden place, don’t have to interact with others) o Emphasises disconnection, reflects Prufrock’s insecurities o Arms – women (tried to have meaningful relationship with) o Eyes – people around him and he thinks judge him - Characterisation - Alliteration – repetition of consonance sounds o Sudden leap and seeing that it was soft o Taking of toast and tea

Page 13 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 14 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes o Fix you in a formulated phrase o Illustrates emotions and mental state o Soft s with cat and fog, creates dream like quality o Following this is harsh sounding t to reveal his frustrations (monotonous and meaningless toast and tea) o Wriggling – insect, feel judged - Anaphora – repetition at the beginning of word groups o To have bitten, to have squeezed o Verbs imply action but Prufrock does not act, just contemplates action, by using infinitives to create anaphora demonstrates his inability to act, continues to prolong action by thinking about what he could do - Infinitive – word TO plus a verb e.g. to read, weaker than imperative - Syntax – sequence, order, arrangement, o Syntactical structure reveals the emotional state of speaker o Variations in line length reflect shifts in Prufrock’s train of thought o Prufrock is constantly concerned with what others think of him and whether he should make an attempt to make human connection, but he continues to convince himself that “there will be time.” . Good reason to be insecure, description as thin, not attractive, meeting place as marriage market, out on display, minutely analysed, . feels that he needs to make a connection with someone, . could be in love with idea of love not actually in love with someone (no description of particular person) . Pathetic, trousers rolled - Pronoun – I, o you (never told specifically who it is) modernism interest in psychology o inability to make a decision and take action . let us go, companion only in mind, o Prufrock begins a line with AND several times . Suggests he continues to delay action

Page 14 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 15 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes o He feels misunderstood and inadequate in communicating his feelings “that is not what I meant at all” o Embrace ambiguity, different opinions, more interesting, - Theme – human existence at end of poem o Prufrock’s ‘Love Song’ is not a love song . Wants a meaningful relationship with a woman but doesn’t make the effort to be in one . Own weak insights, insecurities and lack of will to change . Prufrock does not see himself as the individual who has the power to make choices and bring meaning to his life. o Water – symbol of the unconsciousness, dreamlike state . Rejection – mermaids wont sing to him . Mermaids represent man’s passion overruling the analytical mind  Prufrock’s ideas consume him and he doesn’t follow through with his feelings  Convinces himself he is not worthy of these creatures  When he does allow himself to imagine a life with them and with love, “human voices wake” him and he drowns  falling in love and endangering the person who falls in love with them, - Symbols o Yellow fog – personified as a cat . Like the cat, Prufrock wants to travel through the city with a companion . Fog represents the dream-like state he takes refuge o Eyes – ability to observe world as well as the world observing/judging him, women judging him, insecurities about appearance o Eternal footmen – even death snickers at his inadequacies - Allusions o Hamlet – indecisive (maybe being deceived by father’s ghost), to be or not to be, . Polonius is long-winded, frequently digress, makes him seem foolish . Prufrock does not consider himself a hero, is painfully aware that he has become the literal ‘fool’ and continues to worry about that others will say about him o “I am Lazarus...”- The Bible, gospel of Luke

Page 15 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 16 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes . Lazarus died and went to heaven and was requested to go back to earth to warn people about the horror of hell, but this is denied . Prufrock suggests if Lazarus did return he would tell everyone about the metaphorical hell in which he finds himself o “Head brought in upon a platter...” – The Bible, John the Baptist . Jewish prophet John urged people to change their immoral ways . Prufrock compares himself to the saint but doesn’t view his existence to be a “great matter”  If he were to have his head cut off it would just reveal his bald spot o Michelangelo . Famous Italian renaissance sculptor, painter, architect and poet  One of the most important artists of Italian renaissance . Reinforces Prufrock’s own inadequacies as he feels he can never aspire to David’s courage (famous sculpture)  Prufrock also seems to criticise the superficial, over refined society which he is a part of  Women don’t talk about anything significant, personal or meaningful o Mermaids singing – Homer’s Odyssey . In The Odyssey he is curious about mermaid song, gets tied to ship to resist . Unlike Odysseus, mermaids don’t sing to Prufrock

The Hollow Men

- All poems as a developing set of images, cultural references and definitions of his changing identity and sense of the modern world - Eliot begins to seriously consider the need for religious conversion - Deals with a modern failure of belief - Hollow men are a complicated, multiple identity persona in a complicated, ambiguous poetic site

Page 16 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 17 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes o Are like Dante’s ignavi as modern men, like mature Eliot at his point of religious crisis, Guy Fawkes figures made out of straw, figures out of children’s nursery rhyme, chorus of singers (paradox about prayer and salvation)

Form

- Variations on musical genres, nursery rhyme, philosophical meditation, echoes of prayer - Free verse, short lines, Eliot achieves a voice between a song and chant - Setting is a further variation on view of modernity as a world of ruin, wasteland

Dante’s ignavi

- Souls who cannot ‘cross’ to Hell, spiritually slothful who never committed themselves to good or evil - Hollow men are representative of people who are not fortunate enough to be damned - Modern meaninglessness, no significance to life

Epigraph

- Mistah Kurtz – He dead, icon of the horror and promise of modernity - A penny for the Old Guy – Guy Fawkes - References to two hollow men with flamboyant lives (tending to attract attention) - In the end just hollow, problem of burial of dead, (don’t believe in afterlife, then what does death signify, what are you physically when you die [hand of dust and that’s it])

Part I

- Two voices in combat – conflict with himself, naturalistic intellect battling religious desire o Seen in Preludes religious desire subtly mentioned - Naturalistic

Page 17 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 18 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - State of paralysis because of a lack of belief in rebirth (shape without form...) o Permanent extinction of cells cast shadow on this life making it meaningless . Makes this life seem meaningless, what is the point, what are we here for o Middle lines add philosophical definition of their condition as unreal souls, existential nothingness and horror - Speaker envies Christians who can confront death with no fear (bold, courageous) o Religious believer in life after death - Remember us not as lost violent souls, just as pathetic figures - Hollow – empty and pitiful, don’t have strong eyes to face death - Variation on Eliot’s earlier imagery of sordid city of modernity, rats and broken glass - - The choice is between permanent extinction and belief in a spiritual life after death - “The epigraphs at the beginning of this poem establish the existential crisis, hinted at in ‘Preludes’, between the Naturalistic Intellect and religious desire. Those that believe death brings a permanent extinction are hollow – since permanent distinction makes this life meaningless. These hollow men, not believing in a spiritual life are pitiable and empty”

Part II

- Motif of eyes o Judgement against the hollow men - Rhyme scheme – lyrical quality - For hollow men the [angel] voices are distant o Star – hope of another world, realm of potential being o Disappearing because of lack of belief - Social mask, hide hollowness, disguise - Final meeting  crossing to death’s kingdom - Another world ‘death’s dream kingdom’, things are much better, false afterlife imagined as an escape by the failed souls of the Hollow Men

Page 18 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 19 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes Part III

- Describing reality - Stone images – represent efforts of human kind to establish a myth of rebirth (pyramids, stone hedge, cathedrals, Easter island) o Wish for immortal life - Supplication – man is dead, no voice, can’t ask for immortality but still pleading - Star – realm of another world better than this one disappearing - Intense religious mood trembling... - Prayers of an unbeliever, rising up in the speaker, can’t be suppressed, o In end naturalistic wins (only to broken stone) - Account returns to an arid world of strange images

Part IV

- Psychological impact of lack of belief – intensifying of loneliness that has largely dominated Eliot’s poetry - Last place – before entering deaths other place - Subordinate clause unless... - Perpetual star – star of Bethlehem, of faith - Rose – symbol of incarnation of Jesus, God - Upsurge of religious desire, has to be suppressed, hope only of empty men - Hollow men reassure themselves that eyes of God don’t appear here, they are beyond the confrontation of true salvation

Part V

- Unified voice, naturalistic prevailed - Child’s nursery rhyme containing adult perspectives - Falls – sense of agility capitals, shadow of death – biblical reference psalm 23:4 - Idea of death is always there, constant reminder - Parody of a Christian worship service (thine is the kingdom)

Page 19 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 20 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes o God prayer most important prayer o Thine is death not God o Lord’s prayer is an incoherent jumble of words - Priest chanting and congregation replying - Life is very long – statement attended by irony - Syntax breaks up, speaker can no longer complete his sentence - Conclude with version of child’s nursery rhyme, tone of liturgy with naturalistic substitution - Bang – Kurtz and guy fox - Rest of hollow men whimper – plea for immortality (stone image) o Form of embarrassment refusal to acknowledge reality that there is no spiritual realm, no satisfactory answer to burial of dead

Journey of the Magi

- Eliot writes in terms of a complicated persona - Poem works as a realistic dramatic monologue that recreates the journey of the magi with graphic realism - Combination of Eliot’s mature religiousness with elaborate poetic wit and cleverness - Appropriation of the voice of the Magus for Eliot to celebrate his conversion to Anglicanism - Retrospective renewal and transformation of Eliot’s earlier poetic identity - Voice of Magus echoes sense of defeat (Prufrock, Hollow men) - Biblical illusion – literary performance, words and phrases have special resonance and meaning - ‘Three trees on the low sky’ – three crosses of crucifixion - ‘dicing for pieces of silver’ – Judas payment to betray Jesus - ‘Hard and bitter agony’ – agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and at Crucifixion - Evocative representation of a journey of magical, visionary and prophetic religious revelation - First stanza – impressive elaboration of the journey in terms of dramatic realism

Page 20 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 21 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes o Voices – doubts about the journey o Last two lines create ambiguity and confusion for reader, mimicking confusion and revelation of the magi - Second stanza – world changes, different landscape, o Biblical allusions are prophetic and magical in a transforming Christian way o Nativity scene omitted – major act of poetic sophistication and subversion o ‘it was (you may say) satisfactory’ – combination of voice of reserved modern city man with the voice of the humble convert - Third stanza – Magus is confused and redeemed at the same time o Transitional state into redemption, voice for Eliot as a representative mod Christian o Last lines are confrontational, build on state of the Magus alienated in the old ways of his pagan world, echo death of beliefs . Christian testament that life is an imitation of Christ, faith is a death and rebirth

Eliot

- Young American student, conservative Christian background - Chose to explore the culture of European aestheticism and decadence, passion for avant-garde French poetry and the French culture of Modernism - His poetry of 1910-11 is an exploration of his identity as a young American who found his poetic identity and voice through immersion in French avant-garde culture of Modernism o Poems are an exploration of this form for his own purposes - Later poems are products of his assimilation into England and the high religiousness of the Church of England

My Essay

Overall

- Eliot’s skilled manipulation of language - Highly effective and profound impact

Page 21 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 22 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - Our world reflects who we are, our potential, our experiences, our ideals, and this relationship between individuals and their world is a central aspect of T.S. Eliot’s poetry, often reflecting the philosophical dilemma’s that concern individuals. - The fragmented and sometimes grim world of these poems reflect the modern man’s neurosis, the uncertainty of life, and the struggle between naturalistic intellect and religious desire - images create a sombre tone for the reader, emphasising the emptiness and disconnection of these individuals in relation to their sense of identity and in some way spiritual fate

Prufrock

- An examination of the modern man, an anti-hero, inhibited by his insecurities - Insecure and isolated individual, scared, fear of judgement and rejection - World mimics his emotionally unstable state, moving between different landscapes - Stilted personality, paralysed state of being, (patient image) - Fragmented syntactical structure - Middle-aged persona - Never escapes cycle of loneliness as suffers from a failure of nerve and an excruciating level of anxiety about the judgement of others - Insecure perspective contrasts romantic focused on youthful, heroic, natural - Modernism  critique of urban world, harsh portrayal of landscape - Uses objective correlative to convey emotions through images and monologue - Representation through surrounding world in fog, lonely men echoing Prufrock’s fate

Hollow Men

- Uses world of characters to reveal concerns and ideals of modern individual - Crisis of being and conflict between naturalistic intellect and religious desire - Allusion to Dante’s inferno, spiritually slothful, never committed themselves to good or evil o Not accepted into heaven or hell, “lived without praise, without blame”

Page 22 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 23 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes o Failure of religious belief - Naturalistic perspective, no afterlife, supplication that is never answered - Ominous views of cactus land, result of perspective of individuals o Metaphor to reveal concern of men, life is meaningless, wasted, pathetic

Rhapsody

- Emotive and powerful language to convey emotions and reaction to their world - Moonlit windy night, speaker on walk, street lamps dominate, acting as reminders of fragmented memories and imaginings - Irony – situation could be romantic but emulates a nightmarish vision - Structure and syntax portray chaotic state of thoughts, beats, incantations show madman - Last twist – world seeks to escape, horrors daily life more threatening than dreamlike madness of city

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