CHAPTER I V

TRANSITION : THE HOLLOW MEN, ARIEL POEMS AND ASH-WEDNESDAY

The course of Eliot's poetic development after The Maste Land can best be described by reversing the title of Jessie Weston's book. As suggested at the end of the last chapter, the figure of the knight is being replaced by that of the saint. The term 'saint' of course encompasses the Christian context but goes beyond it to suggest an attempt at chastening the sensibility through the ascetic discipline of religion. As Lyndall Gordon has argued, the figure of the saint coexisted with that of a secular quester from the beginning, but under Pound's influence, the religious strain was held in abeyance. ^ •'•' But with the closing of frontiers,

as indicated by The fVaste Land, the quester had no other option but to effect a self-transformation through a change of roles, through a turning back to the poetry of religious candidature. That the magnum opus of 1922 marked a terminal point is clear from what Eliot wrote to Richard Aldington barely a month after its publication.

162 As for The l^aste Land that is thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style.^ ^'

As Ronald Bush has pointed out, some idea of Eliot's search for new form and style can be had from an introduc­ tion Eliot wrote to a slim volume of Paul Valery's verse and from the Clark Lectures of 1926 ^ "^ ^ In 1924 Eliot wrote an introduction to Mark Wardle's translation of Valery's "Le

Serpent". Earlier in The Sacred h/ood, Eliot had compared Valery to Dante in an unfavourable light and had castigated Valery for "exorcising" philosophy from modern poetry. But in the 1924 Introduction, Eliot displayed a change of attitude. Valery is now seen as a poet, who "extended" and

"completed" his personal feelings in impersonal verse; who reintegrated "the symbolist movement into the great tradi­ tion" of French classicism. Thus Valery represents the "completion" and "explanation" of the "experimental work of the last generation". Eliot further wrote that Valery raised "the music, the fluidity" of Jules Laforgue to new heights through a poetic organization of a much higher intellectual order than Laforgue's"

163 One can imagine what it must have meant for an ardent admirer and imitator of Laforgue like Eliot to suggest that Valery was the "completion" and "explanation" of Laforgue. The earlier Laforguian strategy of representing the inner life through dramatization is now being discarded in favour of Valery's technique of discovering a pattern of one's emotions. Howsoever hard and painful the process of change, the attempt at imposing a pattern on his emotions is clearly seen not only in the poems that follow but also in his statement in the 1924 Introduction that Valery understood "the truth that not our feelings, but the pattern which we make of our feelings is the centre of value".

If Valery is being privileged over an earlier favou­ rite Laforgue, in the Clark Lectures of 1926 a similar exercise of reassessment is undertaken with respect to another earlier model, Donne. These eight "Lectures on the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century" dealt with Eliot's old preoccupations with poetic excellence and tradi­ tion by applying new criteria. Whereas in the earlier essay "The Metaphysical Poets" - a review article on Grierson's anthology of Metaphysical poetry in 1922 - Donne was held up as a poet par excellence of unifield sensibility, now in the

164 Clark Lectures, Eliot argued that Donne's sensibility represented a dissolution of the fusion of thought and feeling, which is to be found in the mediaeval poets like Dante and Cavaleanti. Whereas the sensibility of the Ital­ ians is "classical" and "ontological", rooted in man's orientation toward absolute value, the seventeenth century roetaphysicals were "romantic" and "psychological". Donne, instead of contemplating metaphysical ideas for their in­ trinsic value merely plays with them. As opposed to Donne's "romantic" subordination of thought to feeling, Eliot recommended the wisdom of writers like Aquinas, Dante and Cavaleanti, who were interested only in the impersonal value of thought and feeling. These writers Eliot asserted, extended the frontiers of the everyday world by "the devel­ opment and subsumption of emotion and feeling through intel­ lect into the vision of God". The ontological enquiry into the nature of existence was evident even in their amatory work, where a statement of the effect of the beloved upon the lover served"solely ... to suggest the beauty and digni­ ty of the object contemplated".

The suggestiveness of these comments in relation to The Hollow Men and after becomes clearer by Eliot's acknowl­ edgement in the introduction to his lectures that the pivot

165 on which "the whole of my case turns" was his reading and interpretation of the Vita Nuova. Some of the most reveal­ ing observations are made when Eliot uses examples from Dante's handling of erotic material to criticise the degen­ erate "modern" sensibility represented by Donne. For exam­ ple, he charges Donne of conflating the human and divine aspects of love and goes on to say, -

"Donne, the modern man, is imprisoned in the embrace of his own feelings. There is little suggestion of [Dante's] adoration, of worship. And an attitude like that of Donne leads naturally to one of two things: to the Tennysonian happy marriage - not very different from Donne's own - which is one sort of bankruptcy; or to the collapse of the hero of Huysman's En Route : Men dieu, que c'es done bete. It leads in fact to most of modern literature; for whether you seek the Absolute in marriage, adultery or debauchery, it is all one - you are seeking in the wrong place".

Perhaps, that is the lesson the quester has learnt by the end of The Waste Land. But that is not all, for the

166 poet Eliot goes on to say in the fourth lecture, as he speaks of Donne's 'The Blossome',

"There is a great deal of the modern "recherche de I'absolu", the disappointed romanticism the vexation of resignation at finding the world other than one wanted it to be. The literature of disillusionment is the disillusion­ ment of immaturity. It is in this way that I have ventured to affirm that Dante is more a man of the world than is Donne" .

The phrase "disillusionment of immaturity" shows that

Eliot had clearly someone else besides Donne in mind, as he criticizes his earlier favourite for writing the kind of poetry he himself had written till recently, if The Waste Land is anything to go by. Any lurking doubt in this respect is completely eradicated when he targets Laforgue next in his assault. Like Donne's Laforgue's writings, too, had metaphysical origins : Laforgue "had an innate craving for order : that is, that every feeling should have its intellectual equivalent, its philosophical justification and that every idea should have its emotional equivalent, its

16? sentimental justification"/ Again like Donne, he too needed a Vita Nuova to justify and integrate his sentiments into a system of the universe. But instead, what Laforgue wrote was "a poetry of adolescence" unintegrated with an adult view of the world : he thus remains, for us, imprisoned within his adolescence, with a philosophy which should have been mature ... For Laforgue to have passed into a larger life would have necessitated a violent struggle, too violent for so delicate a constitution".

For Eliot, who too like Laforgue, had "so delicate a constitution", Donne and Laforgue, who had acted as his Virgils through the Inferno of his early life and poetry, now needed sturdier and more blessed persons like Dante to take him through the rest of his journey. It was Dante who had "passed into a larger life", who by an "adult view of life" had transcended his adolescent sensibility. Vita Nuova uses the same material as Laforgue's verse : "the material of adolescence; but it is handled by a mature man with a philosophy which assigned a place to such experinece". For Eliot, Vita Nuova came to symbolize a "record of the method of utilizing, transforming instead of

168 discarding, the emotions of adolescence; the record of a discovery analogues to those concerning the use of waste products of coal-tar in industry. The result of this dis­ covery was a real extension of the area of emotion and an attitude both more "spiritual" and more "worldly" than that of Donne, or that of Tennyson or that of Laforgue." In the third Clark Lecture, Eliot said, " The Vita Nuova is to my thinking a record of actual experience reshaped into a particular form." If the phrases, "actual experience" and "reshaped into a particular form" are given equal emphasis, one begins to see the relevance of these comments to Eliot's introduction to Valery. Both Dante and Valery demonstrate the importance of weaving an emotional pattern. For Eliot, the poems in Vita Nuova present stages in the growth of a young man's feelings "from Beatrice living to Beatrice dead." In other words, the work shows a development from the earlier poems expressing the selfish love-struck emo­ tions of an adolescent to the final sonnet which shows a "pilgrim spirit" directed heavenward and blessed with "a new perception born of grieving Love". The importance of Vita Nuova for Eliot at this stage becomes clear if we set it in the context of his own line of development. Right

169 from the start, as we have seen, Eliot's poetry, displays an emotional inclination towards romantic quests and, because of the disappointing nature of the world, an equally strong inclination towards chastisement through religious disci­ pline. The Vita Nuova handled the claims of heart as well as head in such a way that, it reconciled the tension be­ tween the two inclinations. To use the words from the introduction to Valery, it showed a way of emphasizing "not our feelings, but the pattern which we may make of our feel­ ings". The ironies of Donne and Laforgue now seemed to Eliot merely the "disillusionment of immaturity". From The Hoilow Men onwards now, he adopts Dante's "method of utiliz­ ing, transforming instead of discarding, the emotions of adolescence". And to that extent, though his poetry takes on increasingly religious tone and style, it does not mean abandonment of earlier thematic preoccupations, but their further exploration in a different mode. His poetry ad­ vances perhaps in the only direction it could go. The early romantic yearnings begin to merge into the religious long­ ings the figure of the knight begins to blend into that of the saint.

170 The Hollow Men Like The Waste Land, The Hollow Men follows the compositional technique of literary collage of fragments written separately at different times. ^ ' From the compli­ cated and protracted compositional history of The Hollow Men, it can be seen that Eliot, in spite of his avowed search for new form and style, repeated the last stages of the compositional process of The Waste Land The title and the Grail legend structure had been late additions to the poem. In using them Eliot was able to frame and unify the fragments and to introduce what A Walton Litz has called, a "spurious plot" that long obscured the personal element and lyrical centre of The Waste Land By repeating the same procedures of composition, Eliot gave to his inner drama of salvation an outer layer of narratives of Guy Fawkes and

Heart of Darkness. Consequently, he once again sent readers on a wild-goose chase through history and literature.

When The Hollow Men first appeared, it seemed very near to the nadir of despair, to express the desolation of

The Waste Land in a different, perhaps more personal way. The final lines have been seen as cri de coeur expressing

171 extreme defeatism. The early influential commentators like

F.R. Leavis, F.O. Matthiessen and Grover Smith have seen The Hollow Men as a mere extension to the earlier masterpiece. Stephen Spender's description of the poem as the 'coda' to The IVaste Land typifies that view of the poem.^'^ But Helen Gardner's description of The Hollow Men as "the bridge between The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday" indicatesits nature and place in Eliot's total work more accurately.

Perhaps the best way to approach The Hollow Men is to put its Conrad epigraph side by side with Eliot's own comments in his essay 'Baudelaire' about the people who do neither good nor evil, quoted in the last chapter. If, because of Pound, Eliot was not able to use the Conrad

epigraph to The Waste Land, here in The Hollow Men, he did use the announcement of Mr. Kurtz's death by the negro boy - 'Mistah Kurtz-he dead' - as an epigraph, which is no less 'elucidative' of the basic theme. This epigraph is not simply an affirmation of Eliot's obstinate faith in Conrad's 'weightiness'. Its thematic elucidativeness becomes clear if placed beside the 'Baudelaire' passage given below.

172 "So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human, and it is better, in a parodoxial way, to do evil than to do nothing : at least, we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors from statesmen to thieves, is that they arenot men enough to be damned."'

Mr. Kurtz, the symbol of evil and moral degeneration, is far superior to those who choose to do nothing. He was man enough to be damned. What the epigraph, thus, suggests is that Mr. Kurtz is dead and the world is now inhabited by the hollow men, the moral neutrals, whom The Waste Land described in Dante's phrase - 'undone by death". The third canto of Inferno where Dante describes this wretched race of persons, who lived without praise or blame, serves well to bring out all the connotative significance and force behind not only the title of the poem but also the opening section. Before they cross the river Acheron, in the city of Dis, Virgil tells Dante of these miserable souls.

173 .... This miserable fate Suffers the urretched souls of those, who lived Without praise or blame, with that ill band Of angles mixed, who nor rebellious proved. Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves Were only From his bounds Heaven drove them forth Not to impair his lustre; nor the depth Of Hell receives them, lest the accurst tribe Should glory thence with exultation vaine. ^l^J'

Virgil further tells Dante that these are they 'who have no hope of death, 'hateful to God and to His enemies' those who were never alive and whom both Mercy and Justice scorn alike. Thus the saints' vision of city dwellers stems from the knight's perception.

The first two lines speak of us as both "hollow" and "stuffed" - stuffed because hollow. And here the second epigraph - A Penny for the Old Guy -, a reference to the annual ritual of burning the effigy of Guy Fawkes, becomes operative. Though "filled headpiece with straw" the hollow men are people with suspended animation.

174 "Shape without form, shade without colour

Paralysed force, gesture without motion". (^•^<\\

If those, who have crossed and been admitted into death's other kingdom, remember the hollow men at all, they remember them, not "as the lost, violent souls" like those of Kurtz and Guy Fawkes, but only as the mere effigies of men. We the hollow men, do not have that consolation ei­ ther .

The poem posits three kingdoms of Death : (1) Death's other kingdom, (2) Death's dream kingdom and (3) Death's twilight kingdom. The first one is the world beyond death.

It appears as the kingdom of death only to those who are

"gathered on this beach of the tumid river". Death's dream kingdom is the world of illusion, of imagination and fanta­ sy, free from the pain of actual experience, unshadowed and, therefore, unreal. The last one - the twilight kingdom - is the world we inhabit, "the dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying". The second section, which originally appeared as the first of suite of poems called 'Three Songs' in Criterion of January 1925, mentions death's dream king­ dom. The speaker speaks in the singular here and expresses his fear of meeting the eyes. Whatever the. look the eyes

1 '/b contain - of love, scorn or reproach - they make him pain­ fully aware of his own spiritual inadequacy. He dare ' not meet them for fear of what they will make him formulate about himself. Prufrock could avoid meeting the eyes feigning a mood of modish ennui, but here the fear has to bci more clearly spelt out. Accordingly, the second section gives the source of the feeling of emptiness and vacuity. There has been both joy and pain. But joy is only in death's dream kingdom and when approached, it becomes pain which is intolerable. The dream of joy when translated into actuality becomes "that final meeting in the twilight kingdom" - a pain unendurable even in dreams. Like the young dandy in 'Portrait of the Lady' the speaker would like to borrow disguises, behaving as the mind behaves' rather than face the terrible agony of trying to live out one's dreams. The lesson the knight has learnt upto The Waste Land through the frustration of his various quests has been too excruciating to be forgotten.

The memory of the bitter lesson revives the vision of desolation, and creates some scepticism even about death's other kingdom. In this dead, cactus land the final desola­ tion can be known and it is in the form of impotent desire

176 of yearning. Here the people, who never lived, raise their hands to stony idols. The crucial question remains unan­ swered - whether beyond the threshold waking from the sleep of death, one's desire has any hope of fulfilment, or wheth­ er in death's dream kingdom also, we only deceive ourselves, as we worship broken stony images.

The Waste Land vision is carried forward to the fourth section where the world becomes a "valley of dying stars" and the "broken jaw of our lost kingdoms". The entire humanity is seen through Dante's eyes as the blind travellers or pilgrims, who "grope together and avoid speech gathered on the beach of the tumid river". The only hope of the hollow men is that the eyes may reappear again here 'as the perpetual star' as the "multifatiate rose". The ending of this section admits of some ambiguity.

The hope only of empty men.

In one sense, the reappearance of the eyes as the beatific vision is the only hope for the hollow/empty men in death's twilight kingdom. On the other hand, if 'empty' is taken to refer to those men who have emptied themselves of

177 all material loves and affections, the lines imply that the sight of the ' mul tif aljiate rose; is a hope which only such persons can entertain. Eliot used as an epigraph to Sweeney

Agonistes, the dictum of St. John of the Cross, "Hence the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union, until it has divested itself of the love of created beings". The broken syntax of the lines also reflects this ambiguity. This double meaning is particularly significant as the speaker sees himself not only as a failure, a defeated quester but also in the role of a religious aspirant.

In the last part of the poem beginning with 'Here we

go round the prickly pear', parody is being put to the

serious, purpose of bringing out the grim reality about

human life. If the nursery rhyme speaks about day-to-day

routine seen through the innocent eyes of childhood. The

Hollow Men illustrates the essential emptiness of life

through the eyes of experience. All that is certain in this

mechanical round of activities called life is the Shadow,

falling between idea and reality, the shadow of contingency,

which is the inevitable accompaniment of our life in time.

178 This renders life so ambivalent that one cannot simply go back to the cynicism of a sceptic and say wearily 'Life is very long', nor can one, with an act of faith, assert with any certainty 'For Thine is the Kingdom', and wait for the reapperance of the eyes. The poem ends on a note of ambi­ guity. It is possible to say that The Hollow Men is an attempt to pray or to say that, it finds prayer to the impossible. The last jingle is perhaps a fitting finale to the end of the world of the hollow men. Their world cannot end with thunder and lightening associated with a great cataclysmic event; even the end of their world is a non- event. On the other hand, as Dame Gardner points out, the

final jingle may be "a riddling answer to the riddle of

life, declaring in childish terms that the world ends with

the cry of helpless infancy: the whimper of a little crea­

ture drawing its first breath"

Ronald Bush, by advancing the evidence of Eliot's

introduction of Valery and also his French article "Charybde

et ScylJa: lourdeur et frivolite:", argues that Valery's

impact on Eliot may be seen in Eliot's own admission that a

line from Valery's 'Le Ciraetiere martin' - Entre le vide et

I'evenement pur - reminded him of Brutus's famous words.

179 Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phatasma or a hideous dream.

Valery's poem expresses a mood of melancholy scepti­ cism, which Eliot attributes to the agony of creation, to the sense of the ultimate futility of everything including creativity - a mood not dissimilar to that of Eliot at the time. Talking about Valery's philosophical scepticism Eliot said that there is "only one higher stage possible for civilized man and that is to unite the profoundest scepti­ cism with the deepest faith". Eliot tries to unite the two by yoking the poetry of meditation with the Imagist drama of the,, mi-di|le lyrics and the ritual chants. These, antiphonal stratigy together with syntactic ambiguity makes The Hollow

Men a poem that suggests both an end and a new beginning.

As earlier stated, The Hollow Men is best seen as an interregnum as a Janus-faced work that looks back to the poetry of knight's quest upto The fVaste Land and forward to the ascetic discipline of the saint in such works as Ash- i^ednesday and Four Quartets. This aspect of the poem is reflected both in its technique and imagery. Technically speaking, the poem departs from the use of Laforguian a

180 dramatic personae and irony, from the complex network of allusions, which were the hallmarks of Eliot's poetry so far. The poetic language is reduced to the barest essen­ tials. Neologisms like 'polyphiloprogenitive' in 'Mr.

Eliot's Sunday Morning Service' or rare expressions like'sa- pient suttlers and 'phthisic hand' give way to much simpler diction, where a word like 'multifoliate rose' draws atten­

tion of readers to itself by its singularity, and yet

presents no difficulty by its strong, common religious asso­

ciations. The imagery of men as mere effigies, scarecrows

are familiar enough. 'The broken jaw of our lost kingdoms'

is reminiscent of the 'dead mountain mouth of carious teeth

of the last section of The Waste Land. But intermixed with

this familiar imagery is also a,^, cluster of new poetic

images: of a fading star', the perpetual star', 'the multi- / fa'liate rose' from Dante's souls 'gathered on the beach of

the tumid river'. The introduction of this religious image­

ry points forward to Ash-V^ednesday and Four Quartets.

Similarly the use of these images as recurrent symbols and

the use of the word 'kingdom' to lead up to the broken and

faltering petitions from the Lord's Prayer anticipates the

treatment of imagery in the later poems.

ARIEL POEMS

181 Although the 'Ariel Poems' were a series of separate poems by contemporary poets, published as a Christmas card

by Faber and Faber, Eliot retained the title to designate

four of his poems he had contributed - 'Journey of tho

Magi', 'A song for Simeon', 'Animula' and 'Marina'. All

these are post-conversion poems and naturally deal with

explicitly religious themes.

As the 'Journey of the Magi' was published in August

1927, two months after Eliot's baptism and confirmation in

the Church of England, naturally enough, the poem centres

around the agonies os spiritual transformation. As in tho

earlier poems, Eliot voices his personal feeling through an

appropriate persona - one of the Magi, who undertook a long

and arduous journey to watch the birth of Christ, by follow­

ing his star they had seen earlier, and who, in a sense,

were among the first converts of Christ. However, 'Journey

of the Magi' differs in one important respect from a mono­

logue 1 ike'Prufrock' . Whereas 'Prufrock' debates about

facing the 'overwhelming question- a future contigency

here the speaker recapitulates his experience in the past

182 and its impact upon the present. The element of retrospec­ tion here shows that Eliot is able to achieve objective detachment - without resorting to the Laforguian strategy of dramatization and irony.

The opening section gives an account of the journey, stressing the hardships the magi had to face. The words are taken from Bishop Lancelot Andrewes's Nativity Sermon of

1622. Ronald Bush, basing his argument on Richard Abie's article on the influence of St. John Perse on Eliot, directs attention to the Persean elements in the opening sect ion . Perse's Anabase was translatedd by Eliot between

1926 and 1930. Later on, in 1949, Eliot said that Perse's influence 'can be seen in some of the poems which I wrote after I finished the translation: he influenced ray images and also perhaps my rhythm. Whoever examines my late work will find that this influence perhaps never disappeared".

The sixth canto of Anabase is particularly relevant because it inspired the opening section of "Journey of the Magi"

As Perse pointed out to Eliot while commenting on the draft

of his translation, the purpose of his description of the

183 upcountry march of Cyrus's Greek mercenaries was not to call up to mind's eye any single journey as such but to suggest the significance - at once geographical and spiritu­ al - of a journey toward the interior.Eliot in describing the journey of the wise men, not only borrows images like

'the silken girls bringing sherbet' but also the incantatory syntax and the figurative thrust of Perse. Consequently, the magi's journey becomes spiritual one from old to new moral dispensation, which, in turn, symbolizes Eliots own spiritual quest. Both the magi and Eliot have 'a cold coming of it'.

The next section speaks about some other details of the journey. It mentions some interesting images.

"Then at, down) we came down to a temperate valley

Wet, below the snow-line, smelling of vegetation

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the

darkness

And three trees on the low sky.

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

184 Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves our the lintel

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins". i;^\ •''^ - \\ o)

The interest of these images lies in the departure

Eliot makes from the traditional account of the wise men's journey by referring to Calvary's 'three trees on the low sky'. Thus the frontiers of religious allegory and fiction­ al frame of the poem are blurred here. Secondly, the Magus, who mentions these details, is unaware of the spiritua1/symbolic significance they came to acquire later on. For him they are just naturalistic details of his journey. One more point of interest is the cluster of images like 'the running stream and the watermil1'and 'six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver", which obviously possess some indefinite personal significance, as is clear from what Eliot says in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.'

"Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a life-time, do certain images recur, charged

with emotion, rather than others ? ... six ruffians seen

185 through an open window playing cards at night at a small

French railway junction where there was a water-mill, such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feelings into which we cannot peer".

By conflating the these fields of reference - Bibli­ cal, fictional and personal - Eliot's pymbolic configura­ tion, as Bush says, almost "flaunts the indeterminacy (!->' of the poem. No single field is privileged over the others.

The reason for this may be seen in a letter Eliot wrote to

Virginia Woolf from Los Angeles, in which he says that in

America "doubt is cast on the reality of things". ^^^> in

the same way, doubt is cast on every cluster of images

introduced from diverse fields of reference - the innermost

recesses of the mind and Christian exegesis. Both the

worlds stand for different ways of coming to terms with the

mystery of birth and death, which mutually imply each other,

which in turn dramatize Eliot's own transition from the

knight to the saint stage. The Magus's perplexed question­

ing, his equal trust or scepticism about both these modes of

apprehending reality correspond to Eliot's own state of

18fa mind, soon after the conversion. Like the Magi, he has

traversed through the waste land, putting up with the ardu­

ous journey towards Christ, and now retrospectively, the

Magus, unable to gauge the full significance of the journey,

asks at the end.

: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death ? There was a Birth, certainly,

.... I had seen birth and death

^(^ But had[ through; they were different, this Birthi was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

.... no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation

With an alien people, clutching their gods.

J should be glad of another death. (^\\o)

This retrospective questioning of an experience that

IS out of time is a familiar enough textual strategy. In

The Waste Land, after the Hyacinth-garden episode, the lover

describes his state of suspended animation.

i was neither

18/ Like the lover, the speaker iii •V-h\j> ^c.oi>i Ci ^C^V»CAJ about his epiphanic experience : did he see Birth/Death?

Heart of light/silence? Or is 'silence' the 'heart of light'? This questioning, the uneasiness of going back to the old ways, the sense of alienation, and also the inabili­ ty to surrender completely to the new set of values - all these illuminate Eliot's own state of mind who, too, had, through conversion, discarded his old self and feels scepti­ cal about the new. The fact that through the persona of the

Magus, Eliot speaks equivocally may not show a full confi­ dence in the Christian explanation of things, but he is at least willing to consider it as a possible alterantive.

"Journey of the Magi", in our paradigmatic terms, dramatizes the quester's abandonment of the knight's shining armour and also his uneasiness in the new saintly robes.

188 A SONG FOR SIMEON

The poem published a year after Eliot's confirmation, recalls Simeon's song of praise one of the hymns of the

Anglican service also known as Nunc Dimitis. This song of leave-taking perhaps accords well with Eliot's own state of feeling at the late stage in his poetic career. The slight variation from the Prayer Book in the title of the poem - it

IS a song for and not of Simeon - indicates perhaps that the poem is both a tribute to him and an interpretation of his spiritual state.

Hovering between the blooming hyacinths and the winter sun, the opening lines express a mood of having outlived one's purpose, familiar enough from 'Gerontion".

Like the old man, Simeon, who has eighty years and no to­ morrow ' says,

My life is light, waiting for the death wind.

Like the feather on the back of my hand.

The second stanza brings out the darker implications of

renewal through Christa' birth. The arrival of Christ, the

new dispensation, will mean death of Simeon's old self (his

"house") and all his plans for the future of "my children's

189 children." In the same way, the new role of the 'saint' would mean the disintegration of the 'knight's world. In the third, he accepts with difficulty the Christian future forhis posterity, the time of maternal sorrow. Only he would like to be spared living through the catastrophic times that lie ahead. If Gerontion had no heroic past,

Simeon is too tired of life, after four score years, to live through a heroic future.

Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and

prayer.

Not for me the ultimate vision. ..^ %

This mood of psychological exhaustion takes us back to The Hollow Men but whereas the earlier poem ambiguously hints at some hope, Simeon has "seen (thy) salvation" and his only request to God is to let him depart peacefully.

An interesting, stylistic feature of 'Simeon' - in

fact, of all the Ariel Poems - is the radical departure

Eliot makes from his earlier technique of presenting the

self. Whereas the earlier poems spoke through many voices.

190 with the speaker being a tentative, composite self (Prufrock or Gerontion) or historical identities as in the characters of The Waste Land, in "Siraeon" or, earlier, in 'Journey of the Magi', the speaker is one who possesses the substantive unity of soul' a phrase which Eliot uses in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' while speaking about the 'personality of the poet. Not without reason, does Eliot hold up Brown­ ing as the model for all non-theatrical dramatic poetry.

This would imply that Eliot, in the role of the saint, is in search of a more integrated personality.

ANIMULA

In 'Animula' one finds the saint's interest in the stages of soul's development. Animula is a meditation on a

Dantean text with which it begins : Issues from the hand of

God, the simple soul. In Purgatorio (Canto XVI), Dante presents life as a pilgrimage generated by desire, and Eliot adopts Dante's text to his own purposes. The poem is an account of the stages in the development of a soul. In tho first of the four sections that comprise the poem, the

191 child-like state ia described as the soul delights in mere sensations, hopping around butterfly-like, in the world of. objects. The movements of the soul in its infancy are de­ scribed, as the fog in 'Prufrock', in terms that remind the reader of Eliot's favourite animal - the cat.

'Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs. Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm.

Retreating to the corner of arm and knee.

Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor

And running stags around a silver tray; ^ ti-, •,

In this state, the soul does not make any distinction between fact and fiction. It is 'content with playing-cards and kings and queens/ what the fairies do and what the servants say'. As in Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortal­ ity from Recollections of Early Childhood" this period of glad animal movements is soon over and is followed by 'the heavy burden of the growing soul'. It is a period when the soul has to contend "with the imperatives of'is and seems'".

192 Hamlet-like, the soul is perplexed by the task of interpret­ ing the semiotics of appearance and reality; troubled and benumbed alternately by 'the pain of living and the drug of dreams', torn between the conflicting claims of 'desire and control'. Like Coleridge, in 'Dejection : an ode', with the loss of joy, the soul now takes refuge in 'abstruse re- search' as it eurls up symbolically behind Encyclopaedia i Britannica. If the soul, as it issued from the hand of God, entered into the delightful world of sensations, the same simple soul, as it now issues from the hand of time, is thoroughly mauled by experience.

Irresolute, and selfish, misshapen lame Unable to fare forward or retreat Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom.

This is the final stage of the soul in its earthly sojourn. The terms of description call upto mind many of Eliotic figures like Prufrock, Gerontion and the hollow men. 'Unable to fare forward or revert' this state of confusion and suspension is reminiscent of Arnold in 'Dover Beach' -

193 'And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarmsof struggle and flight,' (18)

Quite expectedly, such a confused soul leaves its papers in total disorder, as it departs, after the viaticum, and lives in the first silence of the world beyond. As it issued from the hand of God, it entered the world of 'chang­ ing lights and noise'. Now, as it issues from this world, it enters the world, "the heart of light, the silence". The poem ends with a plea for prayer for the people like Guit- erriez, who amassed worldly success and fortune, for Boudin, tragically blown to pieces and for Floret, 'by the boarhound slain between the yew trees'. The name 'Floret', associated as it is with flowers, recalls Adonais who was killed by a wild boar. Like the water mill passage in 'Journey of the Magi', the image of the boarhound and the yew tree seems to spring from the deeper regions of Eliot's mind. As Helen Gardner reports, Eliot once dreamed of a 'boarhound between the yewtrees'. Whatever the type of the soul, wordly successful, or beautiful as a flower, there is a need for everyone to pray from the beginning of its journey through

194 the world. The New England, Puritan heritage of Eliot is clearly evident here. In his view, man, being a fallen creature, cannot attain salvation all by himself. The soul / need/ some supernatural aid, and one of the ways of getting / that assistance is prayer. By modifying the words of Ave Maria from at hour of our death' to 'birth', Eliot high­ lights the need of the prayer for the soul'and also the danger of leaving it to itself, as it moves through the world of 'changing lights and noise'. Thus the poem looks

forward to the queater's appeal to the Lady in Asb-Mednesday and stresses the difficulties in the path of the saint.

MARINA

Like the other Ariel poems 'Marina' is alao concerned with the theme of death of the old self and the birth of a new one. In our paradigmatic terms, the poem is a comment on the transformation of the knight into the saint. Here the theme is linked up with the Recognition scene in Shake-

spheare's Pericles. With the unexpected discovery of his long-lost daughter, Marina, Pericles feels as if he were

made into a new man. He is as it were, reborn through his

195 daughter and tells Marina.

'Thou that beget'at him that did thee beget'

The discovery of the daughter is thus also a moment

of self-recognition and she the agent of his spiritual

rejuvenation. The opening lines of the poem capture Peri­

cles 's feeling of joy through sea-imagery, associated with

Eliot's own happy memories of Rogue Island, on the Maine

Coast.

What seas what shores what grey rocks, and what

islands

What water lapping the bow

And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through

the fog

What images return

O my daughter. / \^^'^)

The next verse paragraph denotes the death of the old

self or selves, symbolizing as in 'The Fire sermon' the

figures in the parade of the seven deadly sins. They "are

become unsubstantial .... By this grace dissolved in place".

Pericles, overjoyed, finds the discovery to be too

196 good to be true and he asks Marina whether she is really

flesh and blood or a fairy. Eliot's questions in the third

paragraph express the same anxious joy. 'Given or lent'

Pericles does not quite know whether this moment of bliss is

really given or just lent. The 'Whispers and small laughter

between leaves' again come from the storehouse of Eliot's

memory, where these images are associated with children, joy

and innocence. In the end, Pericles expresses the need to

rebuild the old ship and to -

"Resign my life for this life, my speech for that

unspoken

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships".-,,,-.

A remarkable thing about 'Marina' is its blending of

the pagan and the Christian. Whereas the joy of recognition

is described in pagan terms, the death of the old selves

employs specifically Christian ones and so is the doubt cast

over the blissful moment. In fact, the poem displays some

ambivalence toward the whole recognition. And this is clear

from the epigraph to the poem from Seneca's Hercules Furens.

After buetally slaughtering his wife and children in a fit

of madness, Hercules, on waking, asks in wonder "what is

197 this place, what country, what region of the world?" In the letter of 1930, Eliot wrote, "I intend a criss-cross between Pericles finding alive and Hercules finding dead - the two extremes of the recognition scene."

Although the violence of Hercules's senseless slaugh­ ter of his family is not mentioned directly m the epigraph, the criss-cross' of the two recognition scenes does provide an ironic perspective on Pericles's bliss of regeneration and new life. Like the other three Ariel poems, Marina depicts the painful process, the mid-way state of dying to one life (knight) and passing into another (saint). The poet, at this stage, is 'terrified and cannot surrender' .

The old affliction of The l^aste Land ~ the inability to surrender - still remains. This condition of being suspend­ ed between two selves hasArnoldian overtones - 'Wandering between two words, one dead and the other powerless to be born ' .

198 ASH-WEDNESDAY

Ash Wednesday is the first, long poem to come ater

The Waste Land. The thematic and stylistic differences between the two are striking. Whereas The Waste Land pre­ sented a frightening vision of the collapse of civilization and a cuJ de sac, as it were, for the poet himself, with a glance at the Upanishadic injunctions as a possible way out,

Ash-Wednesday is the first major attempt at rebuilding that world through a positive act of faith.' If the Ariel poems show a wavering between the old and new selves, in Ash- Wednesday the choice had been made and in our paradigmatic terms, the knight has taken the leap into the realm of the saint. The poem no longer deals with questions of choice and decision but, as the title implies, the theme here is penitence. And penitence implies a proper attitude to the follies of the past, a recognition of the present and a resolve for the future. Stylistically, unlike The Waste Land which like Tennyson's deep in "Ulysses", that moans with many voices, Ash-Wednesday presents a unitary speaker, who is a far cry from the Laforguian persona. In fact, the author speaks here in his own person.

199 Though, evidently, Ash-Wednesday, with its Lady and her intercession, is based on Dante's Vita Nuova, it is interesting to see how the poem fits into the tradition of mediaeval religious poetry and the Romantic poetry which speaks about the Religion of Love and the Cult of Beauty. While discussing the mindset of Prufrock, a reference was made to its nympholeptic features. In such a mental frame­ work the erotic and the ascetic strands are inextricably linked up as a result of which the beloved is seen as a "saint" of love and the lover becomes her "knight"; if he dies he is canonized as her "martyr". The religious poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries demonstrates a close interweaving of the romantic and the religious strands. For example, the 15th century piece "I will serve ray Lady Until Death", by an anonymous poet, illustrates the point wel1.

Euery man delytyth hyly in hija degree Hym for to stand in his ladyys grace And i am one of them - I say for me - That will be besy in every maner place Her for to serue beningli and purchace

200 Her mercy, and ther-vppon a-byde Unto deth me do sett a-syde.

The words like "grace", "beningli" and "mercy" make the title and the poem suggest both the romantic and reli­ gious dimensions. The speaker is not only a "knight" ex­ pressing his resolve to serve his Lady, but also a religious aspirant resolving to serve the Holy Virgin with dedication. "I will serve my Lady" shows a characteristic feature of mediaeval religious poetry where the religious expression stems from and easily blends with romantic yearning. A few other poems, like "A Love Message to My Lady: or "I will have no other Spouse" display a similar intermingling of the amatory and the asectic.

In his book. The Allegory of Love, C.S.Lewis traces the origins of the mediaeval religio-romantic poetry. After outlining the characteristics of courtly love as seen in the poetry of the troubadours, he concludes,

" Before the close of the twelfth century we find the Provencal conception of love spreading out in two directions from the land of its birth. One stream flows down into

201 Italy and, through the poets of the Dolce Stil Nuovo, goes to swell the great sea of the Divine Comedy, and there at least, the quarrel between Christianity and(Lover religion was made up. Another stream found its way northward to mingle with the Ovidian tradition which already existed there and to produce the French poetry of the twelfth cen­ tury. "^^

One notices how the first of the two streams flows through the religious lyrics of the 14th and 15th centuries, through the religious poetry of Donne, Herbert and other Metaphysicals, through the poetry of Blake in the Romantic age. The latest example of this tradition is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel". It is in this tradition, intermixing Christianity and Romantic love that Eliot's

Ash-Mednesday fits. Thus, though , Ash-Wednesday resembles Dante's situation in Vita Nuova, it is firmly rooted in that native tradition of English religious poetry where the religious expression is primarily a sublimation of romantic yearnings.

The composition and eventual publication of Ash- Wednesday follows the same tortuous pattern as that of its

predecessors like The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, Thii

202 is a suite of short poems, some of them published separately and not quite in the same order in which they finally ap­ peared. The first part of the sequence published in Decem­ ber 1927, called "Salutation" forms the second section of the final poem. This was followed in the Spring of 1928 by "Perchio non Spero" (Because I do not hope) which became eventually the opening section of the poem as we have it today. In the autumn of 1929 came "som de I'Escalina", which is the third section of the poem. Ash-Wednesday appeared as a single poem, in its present form, in 1930.

Thus as with the earlier poems, especially The Waste Land, with Ash-Wednesday there is no narrative linearity, instead the poem has the circularity of a musical composition. Once again, the unity of structure resides in the emotion genrat- ing the poem rather than in the outward form. If The Waste Land deals with the theme of disillusionment through its five sections, Ash-Wednesday centres round the question of "turning" : turning away from the past and turning toward the future, the question, that is, of death and rebirth. The first major poetic statement after Eliot's official conversion, the main theme of Ash-Wednesday is an acceptance

203 of conversion as a necessary and irrevocable act, an adven­ ture of faith implicitly believed and accepted. There is no turning back now.

Section I

The first section opens with a statement of renuncia­ tion expressing the poet's resolve to turn away from the past. What is interesting about these opening lines ia that they are an adaptation of Cavalcanti's poem "Perch io non Spero di tornar giami", where the poet languishing in exile and despairing of return asks the ballata to take the word of his sorrow and illness to his lady in Tuscany. Thus Cavalcanti's lines from a romantic context are used here to express a mood of contrition. The "turning" is double turning, "away" from the material world and turning "to" God in a penitential mood. The slight modification in the fourth line of Shakespeare's twenty-ninth sonnet (Desiring

this man's gift (art) and that man's scope) serves to com- \ press in a single'line the whole world of ambition, power and pomp. A line like.

Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?

20' echoes the ennui of Prufrock's 'And I have known them all already, - known them all'- Morever, coming as it does on the heels of the Shakesperean allusion, the line may, be seen as a parody of the lark that "rises at the break of day/ From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate" at the end of the twenty-ninth sonnet. Eliot substitutes the lark with the aged eagle stressing his state of exhaustion. Similarly in mediaeval Christian allegory, the aged eagle burning its wings in sun's flames and, blinded, falling down into a fountain of water denotes the spiritual rebirth of a sinful soul. Perhaps the line expressing the eagle's ina­ bility to stretch its wings highlights the seriousness of the poet's psychological exhaustion.

The lines that follow explain the inevitability of renunciation. Things of this world are caught up in tempo­ ral process.

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign ? Because I do not hope to know again The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I know I shall not know

205 The one veritable transitory power. ^

As Ronald Bush points out, these first few lines are stylistically interesting.^^ A question like "why should I mourn" implies that "I mourn". And therefore, although the lines speak about renunciation, the intense attraction of things renounced creeps through the text, inspite of the attempts to suppress it by means of incantation. The last two lines, of the second verse paragraph acquire almost lyrical intensity displaying the conflict between desire and control.

Because I cannot drink There, where thus flower and springs flow, for there

is nothing again. / q-)

Even a glimpse of what is renounced, through the images of flowering trees and flowing springs, is enough to suggest their intense attraction felt unmistakably by the poet. Thus, though the asceticism of the saint has been accepted, the old knightly world still beckons with its temptations. Incantation, amounting almost to a frenzied chant, remains the only recourse for the poet to keep these allurements at bay.

206 Engaged on his job of reconstructing the self, the poet is greatly facilitated by the relativity of the tempo ral world. Perhaps that is the only cause for rejoicing.

Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are ... C'^r)

As a result, the poet can renounce the face that seemed "blessed" once. Other things that must be discarded en route to faith are self-absorption (These matters that with myself I too much discuss/Too much explain) and "things done" - hankering after the infirm glory of the positive hour. But this renunciation is not possible without divine help, for the "wings" of the "aged eagle" are no longer useful for "flying"; they have become mere"VanB to beat the

air". Reviewing The Education of Henry Adams, Eliot com­ pared Adams's conscience to "wings ... beating vainly in a

vacuum jar". ^ But in seeking divine aid, Eliot is trying to solve the problems of the man, embarking on the adventure

207 of faith in terms of the problems of the poet. Wings are of course traditionally associated with poetic imagination. One recalls Keats's "wings of poesy" in "Ode to a Nightin­ gale" . The wings that have lost their power and have become mere vans to beat the air, call to mind Arnold's description of Shelley as "an ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain". The air, too, is small and dry, rendered smaller and dryer by the flapping of these vans. The poet, stripped of his wings' power, called upon to sing in arid air also reminds one of William Morris's the 'idle singer of an empty day' in the 'Prefatory Verses' of Earthly Paradise. Under the circumstances, the only wisdom the poet can hope to acquire is the wisdom of sitting still.

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still. C^fe)

These lines solve at once the problems of the poet and the man. Artistically, sitting still is a condition analogous to Keats's Negative Capability, in that there is no irritable reaching after fact and reason. One allows the experience to work on the mind rather than the mind work on the experience. This looks forward to 'East Coker' where

208 the soul is asked to wait for the darkness of God to come, which will enlighten everything. Sitting still, in moral terms, comes from St. John of the Cross. In The Dark Night of the Soul, he advises the novitiates to attend passively upon the event rather than force the moment of illumination into being, for such moments cannot be willed into exist­ ence. But "sitting still" and "caring and not caring" may have other source too. For it looks similar to the Hindu ideal of attachment and non-attachment as enunciated in the

Gita. Lord Krishna exhort Arjuna on a number of occasions to attain to a state of equanimity of mind. The famous advice about doing one's duty without expecting the fruit thereof and thus be both attached and non-attached to action

was adopted later on more explicitly by Eliot in Four Quar­ tets. But Lord Krishna's insistence in the Gita on this quality indicates the importance of this attitude in life.

Like the Gita, Ash-Wednesday, too, lays stress on renunciation and non-attachment. But it is not easy to attain to such a state of mind. Sometimes even a stitha- pradnya may have some difficulty. In such an eventuality, the Lord's advice is.

209 And yet however much A wise man strive, The senses' tearing violence May reduce his mind by force.

(Then) Let him sit, curbing them all - Intergrated (yukta) - intent on Me : For firm established is that man's wisdom whose senses are subdued.

By invoking divine help through Ave Maria, at the end of the section, Eliot tries to integrate himself into Him by a conscious effort at meditation, which incidentally is also one of the subjects of the next section. SECTION-II

The prayer from Ave Maria is in a sense answered in the second section, which presents a scene of disintegra­ tion, death of the old self and the Lady in meditation. As earlier stated this was the earliest to appear from the suite of poems, under the title "Salutation". Though salu­ tation refers to Beatrice's greeting gesture toward Dante in

Vita Nuovg, the title may carry another sense also. Eliot was officially admitted into the Anglican Church in June 1927. As Lyndall Gordon reports.

210 On 29 June 1927 the doors of Finatock Church were firmly locked against idle spectators, and Stead poured the waters of regeneration over Eliot's head.

Next morning Eliot was taken to the Bishop of Oxford, Thomas Banks Strong, at Cuddesdon. In his private chapel the Bishop laid his hands on Eliot's head and said, "Defend, O Lord, this thy Servant with thy heavenly grace, that he may continue thine for ever".

>•

And soon after, that ia in December 1927, "Saluta­ tion" appeared. Putting these facts together, it is really touching to see the poet "saluting" the world with his remade self ! The title thus refers as much to the Lady's gesture as to Eliot's own.

In this section, what he says, he says through a plethora of allusions and symbols. Major in this complex network are (1) the Lady, (2) the white leopards (3) the juniper tree and (4) the allusion to Ezekiel.

The Lady, as earlier suggested in the chapter, moves through a penumbra of associations - literary and religious. She is the Lady of mediaeval religious poetry whom the knights/saints will serve unto death, Eliot's Lady of Silences, as Helen Gardner points out, is "both Virgin and

211 Mother, uniting perfect innocence and supreme experience, at once Mater Gloriosa and Mater Dolorosa, who smiles by the cradle and weeps by the cross and stands crowned with the swords piercing her heart". As the mediator between the poet and God Eliot's Lady resembles not only Dante's Bea­ trice but also Rossetti's Blessed Damozel. Derek Traversi

points out that the Lady in Ash-Mednesday has a pre- Raphaelite air. about her. Perhaps Eliot also was struck by this similarity, as can be seen from his essay on Dante where he admits that he was unable to appreciate Dante's world of high dream because of his prejudice against the pre-Raphaelite imagery. He says,

"Rossetti's Blessed Damozel, first by my rapture and

next by my revolt, held up my appreciation of Beatrice by many years". ^

Eliot's "revolt" against the 19th century poets like the pre-Raphaelites is, of course, well-known, what may not be equally known is his "rapture" with the Blessed Damozel. Lyndall Gordon has added one more dimension to the figure of the Lady.-^*^ According to her, Emily Hale, Eliot's beloved in adolescence, renewed her contact during her last two years, 1927-29, at Milwankee Downer College (which eventual­ ly became a part of the University of Wisconsin). The

212 prospect of meeting an old love, after many years, was almost a reenactment of Dante's renunion with Beatrice on the verge of Paradise, as Eliot experienced the recrudes­ cence of an old passion into a new emotion. Like Beatrice Eliot's Lady forgives him for his dereliction. In his 1929 essay on Dante Eliot translated the following lines from Purgatorio Canto 30 according to Gordon, he owned to bo autobiographical . -^-^

" Olive-crowned over a while veil, a lady appeared to me... And my spirit ... without further knowledge by my eyes, felt, through the hidden power which went out from her, the great strength of the old love. As soon as that lofty power struck my sense, which already had transfixed me before my adolescence, I turned ... to say to Virgil: "Hardly a drop of blood in my body does not shudder: I know the tokens of the ancient flame".

In his observations on Purgatorio Eliot calls the last cantos, from xxvii to xxx to be precise, "those of the

greatest personal intensity in the whole poem".. -^ (Emphasis, Eliot's). It is most likely therefore that in the renewal of contact with his adolescent love Eliot felt the same Dantesque resurgence of an old passion. Gordon also reports that while discussing with Stead how Dante's love for Bea-

213 trice merged into love of God, Eliot said eagerly and rather shyly, "I have had that experience" and lapsed into silence. 33

The three white leopards have their own literary heritage. They recall the beasts also three in number, that met Dante at the outset of his journey in the dark forest, in the middle point, the turning point of his life. Howev­ er, Eliot's leopards do not have the same sense of overpow­ ering fear which Dante's beasts had. They are beneficent in their effect, radiantly, almost heraldically white and are closely associated with 'the cool of the day' recalling the

Garden of Eden.

The juniper tree is obviously drawn from the story of

Kings. Leonard Unger had identified Grimm's story 'The

Juniper Tree' as one of the sources of Eliot. The juniper tree is thus associated with the theme of death end rebirth, which in its turn is related to the theme of the unity of

life and death beginning and end, which is explored further

in depth in Four Quartets. Ronald Bush attributes juniper tree to a misleading translation of St.-John Pearse's French

"Jujubier" from the seventh canto of Anabase, ^ as it

symbolizes a field of crossing, Eliot's "discoveries of new objects fit to call up new emotions", of which Eliot spoke

in his 'Note aur Mallaume et Poe in 1926'."^^

214 The section opens with an address to the Lady, in which she is told of the destruction of the poet's old self. The white leopards have devoured his legs (suggesting physi­ cal strength), his heart (the organ of emotions), his liver (the organ of sensuality) and his brain (the organ of sense perception). Of these, the heart, the liver and the brain correspond, as Grover Smith has indicated; to the vital, natural and animal spirits in Galenic physiology, which sprang from Democritus and which Dante mentions in Vita Nuova, as he relates the impact on him of his first meeting with Beatrice. The white leopards have wrought destruc­ tion, but the phrase "in the cool of the day" and their whiteness drive away any notion of gruesome violence. They are in a sense agents of the poet's spiritual rebirth, for rebirth is not possible without the disintegration of the old self. If Gerontion dreads,

"The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours",, >

here the poet welcomes the dissolution of his self at the hands of the white leopards.

The parts rejected by the leopards, the bones under­ neath a juniper tree recall not only Grimm's story but also Ezekiel, chapter 37, where the prophet asks :Shall these

215 bones live ?" These bones can "chirp" and shine with brightness, even in their dryness because of the Lady's loveliness and meditation. The poet sacrifices his deeds to oblivion, even his love, from which renunciation he hopes new life will spring.

It is this which recovers

My guts, the strings of my eyes ... (^'\T^

As the Lady withdraws in a white gown to meditation, the poet decides to follow the example of "the woman in white" by concentrating, by contemplating upon his resolve. By achieving absolute forgetfulness, of the old self, the poet can hope for rebirth. The scattered bones can come together as prophesied by Ezekiel. The phrase "with the burden of the grasshopper", recalls to mind Ezekiel's "the grasshopper shall be a burden and desire shall fail".

Then follows the litany of the bones to the Lady, very much like the litanies to the Holy Virgin and, as Smith and Tindall point out, like the litanies de la Rose of Gourroount. The Lady as the Rose of Memory and of Forget- fulness resembles not ony the Holy Virgin but also the Lady in the mediaeval allegories of courtly love, where a rose is the symbol for the Lady whose love the hero strives to attain. The Lady is presented here, who, like Coleridge's

216 Imagination, reconciles all the opposites.

Lady of silences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of Memory Rose of forgetfulneaa Exhausted and life-giving

Worried reposeful. \^<\j - •^

She now becomes the focal point of concentration. In her, all the oppositions, contradictions and paradoxes of life melt. She is the "Garden" where the great agony of frustrated love and the greater agony of fulfilled love terminate. This is reminiscent, in a lighter vein, of Oscar

Wilde's epigram in Lady Windermere ' a Fan that there are two tragedies in the world, one not getting what one wants and the other getting it and that of the two, the latter is far more pathetic. If unsatisfied love is a torment, satisfied love is the greater torment as it seems to postulate an eternity, which it, under its temporal aspect simply cannot possess. And the Lady is the one, who, both in her romantic and religious manifestations, marked the 'end' - both 'con­ clusion' and 'purpose' - of all the quests.

End of the endless

21? Journey to no end Conclusion of all that Is inconclusible. ^v'^^^

As the mediator between the poet and God, she is also the Inexpressible - Speech without word and/Word of no speech. The poet's medium, words can have meaning only when related to the Word through the intercession of the Lady. The litany ends by expressing thankfulness to the Mother of the Garden that reconciles all the opposites for "the single Rose is now the Garden". The Lady, with her contemplative dedication, has introduced into the poem the concept of reintegration - Grace. We have been brought to the Garden which is both the Rose Garden of Roman de la Rose at the

heart of which inaccessible and intensely desirable, the object of love resides and also the Garden of Eden, where God walked "in the cool of the day".

The section closes with the song of the bones "scat­ tered and shining". It is a song of acceptance of their self-limited past.

"We are glad to be scattered, We did little good to each other".

It is a song sung in the desert, recalling The Waste

218 Land, but it is sung under a juniper tree and in the cool of the day. The desert no longer symbolizes the "immense panorama of futility and anarchy" but it is something God- given, it is the natural "inheritance" of the soul, which has ceased to be concerned with the considerations of unity and division, with "love" and "desire" for all these contra­ dictions are now resolved in the Lady. The allusion to Erekiel's prophecy in the last lines stresses the fact that the good in the concept of unity will come in the fulness of time. What is of primary importance is that we recognise our inheritance.

... This is the land. We have our inheritance.

This may seem ironical, in that whereas the inheri­ tance of the Jewish tribes was the restoration of their land, our "inheritance" is only "the broken jaw of our lost kingdoms". But that precisely 'is the point of this section : accept the inheritance' whatever that be in an asceti way. The Legacy of the dead shall be found to be regenerative. Even the fragmented world of the knight can be redeemed into the "green and pleasant land" through the Lady*

219 SECTION III

After the themes of renunciation and acceptance of our inheritance, the third section shows the poet on his spiritual ascent, described in the image of a winding stair. The image is traditional enough appearing as it does in

Plato's Symposium, Dante's Purgatorial Mount in Divine Comedy and the mystic ladder of St. John of the Cross in The Dark Night of the Soul. In Symposium, we find the concep­ tion of a ladder, whereby the soul may ascend from human to divine love. The spiritual journey as an ascent appears in religious allegories like Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, where the Christian walks towards the City Celestial or in poems of Donne's, as in the following lines.

On a huge hill

Cragged and steep. Truth stands, and hee that will Reach her, about must and about must go."'"

All these earlier works, however, provide.Eliot only with the skeletal framework for this section. The difficul­ ties or "temptations" faced en route are personal in nature, as they are only suggestively evoked and not clearly out­ lined like "sins" as in a treatise on spiritual life. These temptations mark the stages of the progress of the saint.

220 The first temptation is the devil of the stairs that wears the deceitful face of hope and despair, the devil that lifts one's spirits by opening up before one vistas of infinite possibilities by the law of uncertainty of life and the next moment by the same law and almost with a malicious glee drops one into the 'slough of despondence'. The renewed self of the poet that has learnt renunciation and submission to the Lady looks below and finds his old self struggling with the demon of the stair. The entire description is reminiscent not only of mediaeval religious allegories but also of Gothic romances like The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Castle of Otranto in a general way.

I turned and saw below

The same shape twisted on the banister Under the vapour in the feted air Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears The deceitful face of hope and despair. / q£^^

At the second turning of the second stair the passage is eneveloped in darkness. The images associated with this stage of the ascent are disgust and vain old age.

Damp, jagged, like an old man's mounth, drivelling, beyond repair

Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark./ ^ x

221 These images take one back to The Hollow Men - the broken jaw of our lost kingdoms - stressing perhaps Eliot's vision of the final emptiness.

It is at the next stage, the first turning of the third stair, that the poet meets with the most powerful temptation, as Becket does in the Fourth Tempter in Murder in the Cathedral. The poet sees through a slotted window, itself a highly erotic image, an evocative "pasture scene" recalling to his mind the sensuous experiences of the past. It is the memory of their fascination that is the greatest temptation in his spiritual journey. Memory is the "ague of the skeleton" and "the fever of the bone". Beyond the "pasture scene"

The broad-backed figure drest in blue Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute. (qq\

The "broadbacked figure" looks back to the "broad- backed hippopotamus" that "rests on his belly in the mud" in "The Hippopotamus". The hippo is a symbol of fleshly, sensual pleasures and stands in sharp contrast to the spir­ itual "True Church". Here the broadbacked figure serves as a symbol of the enchanting, sensual experiences. The "antique flute" in a pasture scene has a mediaeval, romantic air about it. The figure also resembles Pan with his

222 flute-Pan, as goat and god of lechery. This scene recalls to the poet's mind some of the haunting, sensuous experi­ ences .

Blown hair is sweet, brown-hair over the mouth blown Lilac and brown hair

Distraction, music of the flute. (^<^«l)

Brown hair "is sweet" is like Keats's "Heard melodies are sweet". "Blown hair" is Eliot's "heard music" or "seen beauty". The image, as Grover Smith points out, may derive from Conrad Aiken's "The Charnel Rose"

Bright hair, tumbled in sunlight and sunlit feet Light hands, lifting in air

They are gone forever, they are no longer sweet ^

Lilacs, as we know from Eliot's early poems like "Portrait of a Lady", are significant, symbolizing intimate relationship. Similarly, "brown hair" is another image that has haunted Eliot's imagination, and it suggests distrac­ tion. In "Prufrock",

Arms that are bracelated and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair) Is it perfume from the dress That makes me so disgress?; ^^A

223 It is only with his new resolve with "strength beyond hope and despair" that the poet can wrestle with these powerful temptations and can continue with "stops and steps of the mind". At the same time he also realizes his native weakness/impotence against such deadly temptations and seeks

divine succor from the words of the "Act of Humility" in the

Mass.

Lord, I am unworthy Lord, I am unworthy

but speak the word only. (^q<^)

These lines, contain ambiguity: They may mean (1) I am unworthy, but (you) speak the word only or (2) I am unworthy, but (and I) speak the word only. In either case what is stressed is the poet's dire need of some supernatu­ ral aid to fight with the temptations from the past life.

SECTION IV

The fourth section centres around the theme of re­ deeming the time through the Lady. Her nature and benefi­ cent influences is suggested through a set of rhetorical questions.

Who walked between the violet and violet

224 who walked between The various ranks of varied green Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour Talking of trivial things

In ignorance and in knowledge of eternal dolour Who moved among the others as they walked Who then made strong the fountains and made

fresh the spring. Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,

Sovegna vos. Q'sarc')

The answer to all these questions is : it is the Lady. These rhetorical questions have none of the hysteri­ cal note of similar questions in "What the Thunder said : Who is the third who walks always beside you ? But who is that onthe other side of you? Who are those hooded hordes ... ?

In this section, these questions serve to underline the benevolent influence of the Lady. Her benevolence is seen in what she does. She appears to walk between remem­ bered, reality and imaginative vision, betwen Dante and the poet's own experience, between the garden flowers, sugges-

225 tive of erotic happiness and the liturgical colours of the church. The Lady's Beatrice-like nature is seen in a basic paradox about her. She is the one who 'made cool the dry rock' and made firm the slippery sands of the waste land, but she is also the one who moved among "others" "talking of trivial things". Thus she is both a celestial spirit and an ordinary earthly creature. In Vita Nuova, Dante describes his first sight of Beatrice in similar terms. As he says,

"... it happened that the wonderful lady appeared to me dressed all in pure white between two gentle ladies elder than she"PT40PT

This vision of the Lady is similar also to Words­ worth's tribute to the Holy Virgin in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets,

Yet some, I ween.

Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend, As to a visible power, in which did blend All that was mixed and reconciled in Thee Of mother's love with maiden purity

Of high with low, celestial with terrene. ^^

Section II already has shown how the Lady reconciles

226 the opposites in her. In later sections the Lady merges with the Virgin. She, combining both the celestial and terrestrial elements, is both in ignorance - as a creature

of time - and in knowledge - as the agent of redemption - of

the "eternal dolour" of the reality of suffering and the

pain of living.

Memory plays a great part in experience for Eliot as

well as Dante. What is remembered does not remain immune to

change, but is transformed by all that has happened between

the past and the present moment. Accordingly Eliot is moved

to echo what were perhaps the most evocative lines for him

in Dante: the words spoken by Arnaut Daniel at the end of

Canto XXVI in Purgaterio, "Sovegna Vos" - be mindful. It

should be noted that immediately after Daniel's prayer,

follows a vision of the transformed Beatriec. The main

function of the changed/transformed Beatrice is to lead

Dante to reconsider the past aberration and thus, on to the

new state.

Recollection of the past can very well mean "restora­

tion". The past can assume new meaning, new verse can be

added to the ancient rhyme only if time is redeemed.

227 Redeem

The time. Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream

While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse Q\oc)

From these lines it is clear that time can be re­ deemed only if we regain our capacity for "higher dream", only if we read the "unread vision". About Dante's allegor­ ical method, Eliot writes.

We have nothing but dreams and we have forgotten that seeing visions ... was once a more significant, interesting and disciplined kind of dreaming. We take it for granted that our dreams spring from below : possibly the quality of

our dreams suffers in consequence". ^^

Later on, in the same essay Eliot states, that the works like Vita Nuova or the Revelation of St. John belong to "the world of what I call high dream and the modern world seems capable only of, the low dream. "'^•^' The difference

between the 'high' and 'low' dream is that whereas the

228 latter is mere wish-fulfilment or picturization of our terrors, the 'high dream' involves an awareness of a reality beyond time, an ability to see the eternal through the temporal. This recalls Blake's 'To see Eternity in the grain of sand'.

Eliot's conception of the Lady as the agent of re­ demption and also as "talking of trivial things" is a part of this capacity for 'high dream'. It is only when we regain this capacity that time can be redeemed. Redeeming the time, thus, does not invovle mere recollection or fond nostalgia but, as Bush points out, recognition and evalua­ tion of the past.^ Consequently, past comes to us with transformed aspect, we, to use Wordsworth's words from 'Tintern Abbey', "see into the life of things." Receming the past, through enlightened recollection, is thus an important poetic strategy both for Eliot and Wordsworth. Jiust as Wordsworth takes stock of his earlier visit to Tintern Abbey and what it has meant for him, Eliot, too, revalues his past and uses the flames of his ancient pas­ sions to new purpose. In other words as stated at the outset of the chapter, the material of the adolescence - the knightly quests - are being put to new use by the ascetic.

229 While time is, thus, redeemed, the past with its 'fiddles and flutes', as we understand it with our limited comprehension, is being carried away by the 'jewelled uni­ corns' in a 'gilded hearse'. The whole image of the hearse, containing the body of the oldself, carried by the bejew­ elled mythical beasts has the look of mediaeval pageantry.

As the old self is being taken away, the Lady gives new life. Vita Nuova. She stands between the yews, symbols of death as well as immortality. The silent sister, veiled in white and blue, standing beluind the garden god, bows her head and makes a sign like the Lady in amour courtois. But she speaks no word. And that is natural enough for she is the Lady of silences, only the intermediary between the poet and the God.She is not the one to speak the Word that will redeem the life of the poet. But the extent of divine benevolence can well be imagined by the Lady's influence. The poet may not have heard the Word, but at her sign,

.... the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down./'>^^,\

230 The 'fountain' and the 'bird' suggest rejunevation of life. The lines that follow reiterate the need to 'redeem the time' and the "dream' by reading the 'unread vision' which will give a new meaning to life. This need will remain, the word remain unspoken till we penetrate into the secrets of life and death, "till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew".

The fragment from the evening prayer Salve Regina And after this our exile stresses the fact that time will be redeemed only when our exile into this world ends. The allusion to the prayer may imply the eternal life which will be offered only when the exile of our temporal existence comes to an end. In the meanwhile, the saint can go on with his task of redeeming the time through the benevolence of the Lady.

SECTION V

In this penultimate section, a plea is made to the Lady to pray for people like the poet who are 'terrified and cannot surrender'.Such people inevitably call upto mind Eliotic protagonists, like Prufrock, the youngman of 'Po-

231 rtrait of a Lady' Gerontion, the lover of the Hyacinth- garden, whom love simply immobilizes or the hollow men, who are frightened at the prospect of losing their selves but who, nonetheless, long intensely for liberation. The incan- tatory rhythm which is most pronounced here can barely conceal the struggle between the conflicting impulses in the minds of such figures, and, and thus, adds a note of frantic urgency to their desperation.

The section opens by stating the relationship between the 'unheard, unspoken word' and the Word.

If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard

The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world. (^\oi')

It is not enough to hear the Word only; it has to be spoken. Unspoken Word is an unheard Word. Thus the begin­ ning states the opposition between the Word, the logos, and the world heedless to it. The contrast is between the ceaseless movement at the surface of things and the intuited

232 still centre. The light of St. John's gospel 'shone in darkness' while, Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word. C\j-x)

Obviously, this anticipates "the still point of the turning world' of Four Quartets. The indifference of tho turning world towards the silent Word draws from the poet the refrain in this section.

O my people, what have I done unto thee. {^\O~L.)

The words can be read as reproach to the spiritually opaque world as well as directed against the poet as self- reproach: Eliot reproaching himself for having done this, for having brought his waste-landers to this pass.

The next verse-paragraph asks and also answers the question: Where shall the word befound, where will the word/Resound? Certainly "not here, not here in this twit­

tering world", for as Four Quartets describes it, this is "a place of disaffection".

.... Not here, there is not enough silence

Not on the sea or on the islands, not

233 On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land^ _^,

The speaker in 'Triumphal March' finds the eyes of the military dictator 'indifferent', devoid of 'light' and cries out in agony in words similar to those used here.

O hidden under the dove's wing, hidden in the turtle's breast. Under the palm tree at noon, under the running water At the still point of the turning world. O hidden.

The inhabitants of this world are "those who walk in darkness/ Both in the day time and in the night time". This eternal darkness in which people walk is reminiscent of Frost's 'correct'neighbour in "Mending the Wall", who ap­ pears to the poet as walking in darkenss carrying stones like a savage in his hands to build a 'friendly' wall be­ tween them. His darkness is double like that of the people here: atmospheric and mental. The inhabitants by their indifference towards the world have built an impassable wall

between God and themselves. For the people, who walk among the noise and deny the voice', 'who avoid the face' there can be no hope of grace.

In the next paragraph, the poet appeals to the Lady,

234 who is now called the 'veiled sister' to pray for these people who walk in darkness. He also shares their condi­ tion, they are men of divided aims, who do not possess the singlemindedness of purpose of Arnold's scholar-gipsy.

Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In Darkness ? Cl"^-^""^)

The saint requests the Lady to pray for the people, whom the knight had earlier in The Waste Land seen as "undone by death". These words recall the precise terms in which Arnold describes the fragmented souls, who wait with­ out hope.

Who fluctuate idly without term or scope. Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives. And each half lives a hundred different lives.

Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope ^^^'

For these people there is hope only if the Lady prays for them. She stands between two yews : one yew standing as a reminder of death and the other as an intimation of im-

235 mort'lity. The divided souls, who are terrified and cannot surrender, "offend" her by choosing and opposing her. They, who are torn on the horns of dilemma, represent figures like Prufrock who have let the moment of their greatness flicker out of fear, out of their inability to force the moment to crisis. One of the injunctions of the thunder in The Waste Land was : Datta (Give).

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this and this alone we have existed. (^7fe)

Because of their lack of the 'awful daring' to sur­ render, the divided souls remain for ever in the limbo of inaction and hesitancy, they 'affirm" in public but "deny" between the rocks. Such wretches, can be saved only through the intercession of the Lady.

The final struggle takes place in the 'last' of the many deserts of 'life' : - a waste land now modified by the

reference to 'blue rocks'that contrast with the 'red rock' of "The Death of Saint Narcissus". If the 'desert' is an ineluctable fact of life, it is clear that, through the Lady, the geography of life is being radically altered. Instead of the 'desert' in the 'garden' of life, now we have

236 a 'garden' in the 'desert' of life. The Lady's function of turning the desert into garden is common both to romantic and religious poetry. if the state of 'drouth' is a reali­ ty, flowering of life is also possible. Even in a state of spiritual aridity and exhaustion, it is possible to assert the positive sources of life by spitting out the withered apple-seed : a reference, no doubt, to the Original sin in the Garden of Eden, but also to Joel, Chapter 1, where the prophet says,

"the pomgranate tree, the palm tree also and the apple tree, even all the trees of the field are withered ....'"

Spitting the apple-seed from the mouth means not only the repudiation/rejection of the temptation of the Original Sin, but also the realization that the apple is 'withered' sin has lost its old, familiar attractive face, it is now

being recognised for what it has always been. Thus the saint realises the futility of the temptations that beckon to him from the world of the knight.

SECTION VI

237 Like a musical composition, the ending of Ash-

Wednesday , through its diction and syntax of the opening lines, and anticipating 'East Coker', makes the reaer 'turn' towards the beginning.

Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn (^^aJ-\)

The change from 'because' of the first section to

'although' here is quite significant in that whereas the

'need' to renounce was articulated forcibly (with an effort

of will) in this last section the difficulties' in the path

of renunciation are acknowledged freely.

Although the poet has resolved to turn his back on

the past he still remains in a state of vacillation. Remind­

ing one of Phlebas, he is "wavering between the profit and

the loss". He is like the confused traveller at the trans­

it, where there is a crossing of trains going, as he thinks,

in opposite directions - towards salvation and the other

sensory joy.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying

2 38 In spite of the note of contrition in "( Bless me father)" though I do not wish to wish these things", the prospest of the slotted window bellied like fig's fruit is too haunting and evocative of memories buried deep in the poet's childhood, especially his Massachusetts experience as is clear from the sea-imagery in the following lines.

From the wide window towards the granite shore The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying Unbroken wings. (^\t,>4)

From the earliest poems onward the sea-imagery in Eliot's has always been associated with moments of happi­ ness. Prufrock evokes an erotic picture of mermaids riding the waves, and "sea-girls wreathed with sea-weed red and brown". He seeks release from the overwhelming questions in the floors of the silent seas. The power of these marine- fancies can be seen in the phrase "unbroken wings", which stands in piquant contrast to the drooping wings of the aged

eagle which are mere vans to beat the air in the opening section. At the recollection of these memories there is the uplifting of the heart.

239 The lost heart stiffens and rejoices In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices. ^\ai^'\

But at the mention of ascetic renunciation the "weak spirit" rebels because what looked straight once now ap­ pears to the ascetic crooked, the natural desire appears 'distration*'temptation'. The struggle between desire and control, flesh and spirit memory and new resolve is all too apparent here. Though the flesh remembers its past joys, the spirit reminds that they are but 'empty forms' created by the 'blind eye'. Indeed, this is the time of tension precisely because the heart, bent on a new course, recalls, cannot forget the sensory joys of the past. The hope of recovering the past, in the sense of reliving it is gone but the desire tears at the entrails. This is the agony not only of the death of the past self but also of the birth of the new one. The words recall the Magus's ".... this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death".

The poet's soul in transition has become "the place of solitude where three dreams cross" - the three dreams are sensual, religious and aesthetic. It is almost a battle ground where the lines are clearly drawn between a sweet, haunting past and the newly chosen path of asceticism. The sweet past will retreat only with the realization that memories are like the voices from the yew-tree, subject to

240 mortality. When those voices fade away, the voices from the other yew, symbolizing immortality, and rebirth will reply.

At this point in the section, the Lady, as the spir­ itual guide of the poet, appears. She now merges with the Holy Virgin; for she is both the "blessed sister and holy mother". Her life-giving quality has already been noticed in section IV. Here she combines both the Christian and pagan elements. She is not only the Holy Mother but also the spirit of the fountain, of the garden, of the river and the sea. In short the Lady is presented here as the pagan goddess of fertility and plenitude. It is only with her help that the poet can ensure his safety from an alluring past. It is again only through her that the lesson of at­ tachment and non-attachment can be learnt. She will teach how to sit still "even among these rocks". It is only when we shed our "egotistical sublimes" and surrender to her and, thus, to god that we can attain to a state of peace that passseth all understanding. Like Cavalcanti languishing in

separation from his beloved, and desiring reunion, the poet also prays to the Lady in the words of Anima Christi, Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto thee. (^\o^)

241 The close alliance between the romantic and religious strains in Eliot's temper, commented on earlier in this study, comes to the fore again. The cri de coeur in the last two lines of the poem can be seen as coming from both the knight and the saint. The religious context in which these lines occur barely conceals the romantic origin of the sentiment. As earlier stated in the chapter, in his search for "new form and style", Eliot is closely following the example of Dante, who showed him the way of transforming and not discarding, of putting to new use the experience of adolescene. After The Waste Land, the poetry of Eliot displays this process of sublimation, whereby the figure of the knight begins to put on the robes of the saint.

2 42 Notes and References

(1) Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 69. (2) Valerie Eliot, The Letters of T.S.Eliot Vol.1 1898-1922, 596 (3) Ronald Bush, T.S.Eliott A Study in Character and Style, 82-86. The discussion of this point here derives largely from 9ush's comments and the quota­ tions in this part of the thesis are from the afore­ mentioned pages of his book.

(4) Though the final version was published in 1925, The Hollow Men had its origins in an earlier piece "Song for the Opherion", a fragment of The Waste Land, which Eliot dropped at Pound's instance. A slightly modified version of it - "Song to the Ophe- rian" was published in Tyro of April 1921, under the pseudonym Gas Krutzsch. In 1924, the "song" was again revised as "The wind sprang up at four o'clock" the second of the suite of poems known as "Doris's Dream Songs'; published in the Chapbook of Novem­ ber 1924; the other two pieces being "Eyes that I last saw in tears" and "This is the dead land". In its Winter issue of 1924-25, the French periodical Comemrce published "We are the hollow men" as pdems inedit". In January 1925," "Three Poems" by Thomas Eliot appeared in the Criterion - Eyes I dare not meet in dreams", "Eyes that I last saw in tears" and "The eyes are not there". In the Dial for March 1925, Eliot published a three-part verison that consisted of an opening choral chant ("We are the hollow men") and the two dramatic episodes ("Eyes that I dare not meet in dreams" and "The eyes are not there"). In November 1925 Eliot introduced a third dramatic episode ("This is the dead land") and framed the suite by the addition of a concluding choral chant ("Here we go round the prickly pear"). The last act was to append the epigraph, "Mista Kurtz- he dead". / (5) A Wallon Litz, Eliot in His Time. (6) F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry

243 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex : Penguin Books,1963)," F.O.Mattheissen, The Achieveroent of T.S.Eliot: An Eaaay on the Nature of Poetry (1935. Oxford: Oxford Unviersity Press, 1972) ; Grover Smith, T.S.Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Soruces and Meaning,104.

(7) Stephen Spender, Eliot (Glasgow: Fontana, 1975)120.

(8) Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S.Eliot, 105.

(9) T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays, 429

(10) Translation of Dante's Divine Comedy by Henry Francis Gary (U.S.: Doubleday, 1946) 12.

(11) Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S.Eliot, 113

(12) Ronald Bush, T.S.Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, 100.

(13) Ibid. 124-29.

(14) T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 148.

(15) Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot : A Study in Character and Style, 128.

(16) Letter of 5 March 1933, in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, quoted by Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot : A Study in Character and Style, 128. (17) T.S. Eliot, "The' Three Voices of Poetry", On Poetry and Poets, 103. (18) Matthew Arnold, Poetical Works, 227

(19) Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London : Faber and Faber, 1978) 39.

(20) From the postscript of a letter to Sir Michael Sadler dated 9 May 1930, quoted by Richard Abel "The Influe­ nce of St. John Perse on T.S.Eliot", Contemporary Literature XIV. 2 (Spring 1973), 235; as quoted by Bush, T.S.Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, 167.

(21) Carleton Brown (ed); Religious Lyrics of the Fif-

244 teenth Century. (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1939), 76-77. (22) C.S.Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936. London : Oxford University Press, 1977), 22-23. (23) Ronald Bush, T.S.Eliott A Study in Character and Style; 134-36. (24) "A Sceptical Patrician", Athenaeum 4647 (23 May 1919), 362; as quoted by Bush, 137. (25) Translation of the Bhagawad Gita by R.C.Zaehner, Hindu Scriptures (1938. London : J.M.Dent and Sons 1982), 260.

(26) Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 130-31.

(27) Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S.Eliot, 117. (28) Derek Traversi, T.S.Eliot : The Longer Poems. London : Bodley Head, 1978), 64. (29) T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays, 262. (30) Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's New Life, 11. (31) Ibid. 12. (32) T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays, 263. (33) Lynall Gordon, Eliot's New Life, 12.

(34) Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot : A Study in Character and Style, 142. (35) Ibid.

(36) Grover Smith, T.S.Eliot : A Study in Sources and Meaning, 144.

(37) Ibid. 319. Also mentioned by W.Y.Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature 1885-1946 (New York : 1947) 271.

(38) John Donne, "Satire 3" in John Donne ed. John Carey (Oxford : Oxford University Press,1990) 30

245 (39) Grover Smith, T.S.Eliot : A Study in Sources and Meaning, 319. (40) Translation of Dante's Vita Nuova by D.G.Rossetti in The Portable Dante ed. Paolo Milano (1947. Harmondsworth, Middlesex : Penguin Books,1977)549. (41) William Wordsworth, "The Virgin" The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Vol. VII, ed. William Knight (London : Macmillan and Co. Ltd. 1896), 54-55.

(42) T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 243. (43) Ibid. 262. (44) Ronald Bush, T.S.Eliot; A Study in Character and Style, 146.

(45) Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar - Gipsy", Poetical Works, 278.

246