CHAPTER II THE EARLY POETRY

In examining the beginnings of Eliot's poetic career, his Poems Written in Early Youth, edited and published by Valerie Eliot's assumes considerable significance. In the first place, it confirms Eliot's own account of his devel­ opment in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism cited in the last chapter. Secondly it clarifies the nature of the seniblity that confronted the world and helps one to identify and see the origins of the quests that run through his entire poetic career. Thirdly,the book provides some of the missing links in the chain. For instance, the begin­ nings of Eliot's later religious poetry can now be traced back to the earlier "Saint - poems'' like "''The Death of St. Narcissus''. And finally, it also clarifies the ways in which Lafargue influenced Eliot as his pre-Laforguian exer­ cises are now available.

Some idea of the type of the sensibility that con­ fronted the world before Eliot came under the influence of Laforgue can be gained through the poems like ""'A Lyric' and ""Song : The moonflower opens to the moth. "'-*•' It is a sensi­ bility nurtured very much on what is popularly known as the Shelley -Keats culture and also possessing a great deal of

24 technical virtuosity. "^A Lyric'' has another version called "Song'', both recalling the rhythm of Ben Jonson's Celia poems. In both the versions, the first stanza is a lyrical meditation on time and space. If time and space are non­ entities,^as sages say', length of time or the size of the living object hardly matter.

The fly that lives a single day Has lived as long as we ( ""Song''Poems Written in Early Youth 1"7) OR The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we ("A Lyric' Poems Written in Early Youth r7 ) Against this backdrop, the lover makes his plea to the beloved in the second stanza.

The flowers I gave thee when the dew

Was trembling on the vine.

Were withered are the wild bee flew To suck the eglantine. So let us haste to pluck anew Nor mourn to see them pine And though our days of love be few

25 Yet let them be divine. (A LYRIC" Poems Written in Early Youth 18)

The only changes that occur in the second stanza of the other version "Song' are (1) the first line where in­ stead "gave" we have "sent" and (2) the penultimate line reads "And though the flowers of life be few'. Apart from these verbal differences, the sentiment that what matters in life is not length but intensity has romantic associations. In "Preludes'", the protagonist speaks of being moved by "something infinitely gentle''. The characteristically romantic diction of "A Lyric'' - ""flowers'', ""wine"', ""dew'', ""eglantine'' and so on concretizes that ""some­ thing infinitely gentle''.

One more important aspect of this early poem is the way it anticipated in the first stanza Eliot's concern with the theme of Time in the subsequent poems like ""Prufrock'', Ash-Wednesday or Four Quartets, especially, in ""For time is time, and runs away". In this early as well as later poetry, Eliot's protagonist whether as the knight or the saint is concerned with the problem of time, as will be seen in due course.

Another significant piece from the juvenilia is ""Song : The moonflower opens to the moth.'' It is short enough to be quoted in full.

26 The moonflower opens to the moth, The mist crauwls in from sea; A great white bird, a snowy owl. Slips from the alder tree

Whiter the flowers, Love, you hold.

Than the white mist on the sea; Have you no brighter tropic flowers With scarlet life, for me? (Poems Written in Early Youth 28 )

The poem is once again a lover's plea for a more exotic life, symbolized by, ^^brighter tropical flowers / with scarlet life.'' The first stanza depicts a white, snowy and misty background. The second stanza records the lover's complaint that the flowers held by the Beloved are ""^Whit- er'' than the wintry background, when he wants tropical flowers. This poetic procedure of a transition from outword nature to inner feeling is in consonance with the poetic strategies of the Romantics.

The lover's wistful question to the beloved in the last two lines is particularly important . If ^A Lyric' starts the quest for divine days of love, this question shows the difficulties in the way of its fulfilment. If thf^

27 lover's passion is tropical, the love that is offered is "arctic"'. Thus, the lover's rueful question points towards the gap between what is sought after and what is offered, between the ideal and the actual. One of the chief causes of disillusionment is this painful awareness of how the actual falls short of the ideal. The gap was to haunt Eliot practi­ cally during his whole career as a poet, whether he be describing the Thames in The Waste Land or be saying how all shall be well, "~When the fire and the rose are one', in Four Quartets. """A Lyric'" or ^"Song : The moonflower opens to the moth.'' thus, clarify the nature of the quest. In so far as it is a quest for divine days of love or tropical flowers symbolizing an exotic mode of life, the questing-figure can be identified with that of the knight.

Had Eliot not seen Symons's book. The Symbolist Movement in Litrature in 1908, on what lines he would have developed is a matter of speculation only. But the influence of French symbolists is evident in the poems that came after Eliot's introduction to the book. In the last chapter, Eliot's dramatization of personal utterance has been com­ mented upon. As a corollary to the dramatic mode of presen­ tation, there is an ironic stance of the persona, suggested by his ambivalent attitude to what is being persented. Even

28 if some emotion is being sought to be conevyed, it is gener-_ ally presented not by direct mention but indirectly by referring to the external surfaces of life.As a result, the poems cease to be romantic confessions and become truly "observations' - Eliot called his first published volume of poetry Prufrock and Other Observations. With the ironic mode of presentation, the reader's attention is deflected from the deeper yearnings of the self to the outward surfaces of life, so that physical objects and setting crowd the poems, blurring the presence of the inner world. Thus, Prufrock's love for the lady, which is clearly out of his reach, is camouflaged by the drawing room, environment or the zigzag streets. In "Portrait of a Lady'', the young man's ironic attitude towards the lady conceals his fear of disposses­ sion. To regard these poems as mere satirical pieces, is to miss the deeper yeanings that do inform them. Irony thus may hold in check the romantic proclivities, but cannot abolish them.

The fact that Eliot's protagonists like Prufrock or the young dandy of "Portrait of a Lady' or Gerontion are all divided souls makes these poems resound with many, often comflicting voices. Prufrock is torn between the desire to declare his passion and the fear of doing so; the young man

29 between emotional involvement and detachment. Consequently, in these poems the reader sees a mind or consciousness in process, as in the novels of Virginia Woolf or Joyce and this is where Eliot has radicalized the Victorian dramatic monologue. Whereas the Duke in Browning's "My Last Duchess' or Ulysses in Tennyson's poem offers explanations/ justifi­ cations of chocies already made or actions already taken, Prufrock or the young man struggles with his own mind. The Uuke is not troubled by the possibility of another interpre­ tation of his or the Duchess' behaviour and though Ulysses ackonwledges the existence of the Telemachus point- of view he does not feel called upon to review his decision. Prufrock, on the other hand, remains almost paralyzed by the other possibilities of his experience.

A consequence of Eliot's inculcation of Laforguian psychic theatrecraft - dramatization, irony and presentation of mind in action - is to render his poems multivoiced, where different themes compete apd overlap with each other. In our paradigmatic terms, though the basic quest-pattern remains common to the poems, the quests for different ideals often interact or overlap. Either several quests may inform a poem or alternatively a single quest may persist through a

series of poems. Thus, in ""Prufrock', there is not only a

30 quest for intimate relationship but also for meaning/signif­ icance in the quotidian world which runs through "Portrait of a Lady', "Preludes' or the earlier """Spleen"'. To regard these separate quests - for beauty, love, meaning or faith - as operating independently, to allocate them atomistically to the poems would be to ignore the psychological and the­ matic complexities of Eliot's poetry. Eliot's poems often achieve unity,like a musical composition through an inter­ play of diverse "themes' and "motifs'. These themes may vary in their dominance in different poems, but as they run through poem after poem, they give Eliot's poetry a kind of subtextual continuity and unity.

Though the individual poems may be congeries of different quests and themes, the questes themselves may be classified into four broad catagories : 1) quest for love/relationship 2) quest - for beauty both in its human and natural forms 3) quest for meaning in life and world 4) quest for religious faith. The knight seeks adventures in the world in the interest of love and beauty. The saint, on the other hand, acutely conscious of the spiritual dimension of life, seeks meaning and faith that will unravel the mystery of life.

As pointed out earlier in the chapter, the lover's

31 disappointment at the end of """Song : the moonflower opens to the moth."' foreshadows in a way the sense of disillu­ sionment in Eliot's subsequent poetry. If the lover's roman­ tic expectations are not fulfilled by the quality of love offered, in Eliot's first celebrated poem "'"'The Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock'' the causes of disappointment lie also in the character of the protagonist. The poem operates on many levels; if one goes strictly by the mention of "love- song' in the title and the obvious situation in the poem, "Prufrock" becomes a quest for love or closer relationship. On the other hand, if one traces Prufrock's genealogy to the dandified youth of "Spleen' the quest in the poem assumes philosophical dimensions.

Whatever the nature of the quest - romantic or philo­ sophical - Eliot's choice of his protagonist / questing hero by his unconventionality is a bold poetic gambit. His painful self-consciousness about his triviality, is in sharp contrast to the dashing. Byronic heroes of conventional love songs. It is not as if Prufrock lacks emotion; he is torn between an intense desire to ask the question of the lady he is in love with, and the fear that she may reject him, in which case there will be a loss of face. Citing Eliot's interview with Grantite Review in 1962, Lyndall Gordon points out that Prufrock, the middle-aged, timid lover, is a

32 ( 2 ) clever mixture of fiction and autoboigraphy. "" As the ageing lover, conscious of his unlived life, Prufrock is a character that derives from the fiction of Henrj'y James. '^

Eliot, the young Bostonian boy with beauty, wit and grace, may appear to be poles apart from the questing - hero of his poem. But Prufrock shares, with his creator his shyness,his paralyzing self-consciousness and the fear of rejection, his

sartorial fastidiousness and the desire to ask overwhelming

questions to the social ethos around him with its meaning­

less routines. Lyndall Gordon reports an event of Eliot's

life in March 1921.*^^ After a visit to the theatre, during

a taxi-ride through the market gardens of Hammersmith, he

said that the worst thing for him in life was humiliation.

Similarly, Prufcrock's meticulous care about his dress - the

morning coat, the collar, the tie, and the pin-derives from

the Laforguian dandy with his inflexible politeness, which

Eliot himself was^ ^' and which he portrayed in at least two

of his earlier poems. In ""^Spleen", published in January

1910, life is personified as the slightly absurd man of

fashion about town waiting at the doorstep.

And life, a little bald and gray

Languid, fastidious and bland.

Waits, hat and gloves in hand.

Punctilious of tie and suit

33 (Somewhat impatient of delay) On the doorstep of the Absolute. (Poems Written in Early Youth -2.6 )

Similarly, in an unpublished poem "'Suit clownesque', Eliot calls himself the first born child of the Absolute turned out neatly in a flannel suit.^°'

The fate of the quest for love with such an unheroic hero is already sealed. Instead of setting about the task of declaring his passion, the hero starts a debate with himself to declare or not to declare. After going through the wind­ ing streets of his mind he realises that in the drama of his love, he,in spite of his Hamlet - like dilemma, and procras­ tination, has not been the Prince of Denmark but only a comic character like Polonius. He may desire to tell her all, but what if she "settling a pillow by her head should say/ That is not what I meant at all / That is not it at all". this fear of rejection in a sense makes up his mind for himself : he will not delcare. At the end there is a painful realization that the mermaids, symbolizing the world of high romance, will not sing to him, he will remain a permanent alien to the land of Eros.

The situation of Prufrock is romantic, he is in love with a lady of whom he regards himself "unworthy* in the

34 true tradition of courtly love. His quest for love is ham­ pered as much by the inaccessibility of the lady, as by his own paralyzing self-consciousness. As a lover, Prufrock evinces a quality which, according to Irving Babbitt is ono of the central phenomena of Romanticism : that is, nympho- lepsy. It is a state of desire for the unattainable and fear of its consummation. These contrary pulls of fascina­ tion and fear render the hero speehless. Pruforck, like Percival in the legend, grows mute before his Grail. In such a nympholeptic mind, the romantic and the religious lie side by side. Babbitt Characterizes Dante as a religious nympho- lept and Shelley as a secular one. Beatrice is a fine exam­ ple of how Dante's romantic desire merges into religious longing. On the other hand, Shelley often borrows religious imagery to describe his secular, romantic yearning. In "Prufrock' a similar close alliance between the amorous and the ascetic is noticeable. For instance, in the following lines,

Should I, after tea and cakes, and ices. Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed. Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)

brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet - and here's no great matter; (15-16)

35 One notices how the language of love almost impercep­ tibly slides into the language of religion. Prufrock the lover who weeps and fasts and prays for the fulfilment of his desire is an ideal nympholept. His "passion'' is truly ""ascetic''- making him thus both the knight and the saint of love. A similar smooth transition from romance to ritual

is found when Prufrock after taking courage in both the hands expresses his resolution, in the manner of the lover in Andrew Marvell's , "To His Coy Mistress", of squeezing the universe into a ball and thus making a clean breast of everything.

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile. To have squeezed the universe into a ball. To roll it towards some overwhelming question. To say; "I am Lazarus, come from the dead. Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all' (16)

The close link between the erotic and the ascetic becomes more apparent by a piece of what Wimsatt would call intermediate evidence. Lyndall Gordon has drawn attention to a passage which lay at the heart of the poem, after Pru­ frock' s distraught query "How should I begin?' in the origi­ nal draft. The passage is called "Prufrock's Pervigilium",

36 which Eliot reportedly dropped on the advice of Conrad Aiken. It is an account of Prufrock's all-night vigil which ends in a terrifing vision of the end of the world. How the story of Prufrock's nocturnal vigil adds a philosophical dimemsion to his quest will be presently seen but it is worthwhile to note here how the vigil brings out more ex­ plicitly the nympholeptic traits in Prufrock's character.

Prufrock's Pervigilium' helps along with the mention of the figure John, the Baptist and Lazarus, to bring out the religious fervour with which Prufrock conducts his quest for love. What it does in addition is that it makes explicit the philosophical nature of the quest, which, in its absence from the poem as it appears now, remains somewhat muted. Lyndall Gordon says that Eliot identifies more easily with his questing hero as a solitary thinker who through his "over-whelming question' wants to assault the genteel sur­ face of Boston society with an apocalytic truth than as a romantic lover. However, Prufrock's rebelliousness is con­ stantly held in check by his genteel scruples. At the same time, there is in Prufrock a strain of the Emersonian proph­ et who wants to question and denounce the empty, meaningless diversions of his social class. "Prufrock's Pervigilium'' makes it clear that Prufrock wants to ask a metaphysical

37 question, suggested by Bergson about the point of man's accumulated experience. According to Bergson, life is no more than a succession of psychological states, memories and roles," a continual rolling up, like that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us, it swells incessantly with the present that it picks up on its way. . .'' If so, the world will then one day roll up like a ball and fall away. Prufrock, through his question regarding the whole meaning about the round of mechanical social routine, wants to conevy his terrifying vision of the meaninglessness and imminent end of the world to someone, possibly a woman he admires but unfortunately women want only lover's talk "of you and me.' Thus, originally Prufrock's role was two-fold as a lover and as a prophet - though he remains sceptic about both of them. If the past is going to wind up the present mercilessly, as per the Bergsonian scheme of things, neither the consummation of love nor its alterna­ tive, the philosophical postulate, the Absolute, enjoy any durability.

The omission of "Prufrock's Perlvigilium' from the final text has thus dimmed the philosophical dimension of Prufrock's quest making the romantic aspect and the Jamesian social satire more prominent. And yet Prufrock remains in

38 the words of Hugh Kenner, "the generic Eliot consciousness"^^*. He is generic not because he gives rise to others like himself but because he contains within him­ self in embryonic form the questing - heroes and quest patterns that Eliot follows in later poems. For instance, Prufrock's description of social life as an occasion where one has ^^to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet'' points to the tow^ - poetry of Poems, 1920 where Eliot satirizes the essential artificiality and role-play­ ing of social intercourse. Similarly the urban squalor brought out by Prufrock's observation of the fog and the smoke rising from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows look forward to "Preludes" or "Rhap­ sody on a Windy Night". In this context, the epigraph from Dante's Inferno assumes tremendous significance.For it not only draws similarity between Count Montefeltro and Pru- frock in their corrupting the use of reason, but by making Prufrock an inhabitant of the limbo of indecision and scep­ ticism, it makes the urban ethos a veritable modern infer­ no, thus anticipating the urban apocalypse of The Waste Land.

If "Prufrock' locates the bafflement of the quest for love in the character of the hero, some of the other earlier works point to other contributing factors. In fact it would be no exaggeration to say that in Eliot's poetry.

39 fulfillment of the love-quest is hardly seen. One of the reasons may be, as is clear from ""A Lyric' mentioned earli­ er in the chapter, the painful consciousness regarding the cruel passage of Time. Because Time is Time and always flies, the flowers given to the beloved inevitably wither away. Poems like "Song : when we came home across the hill" and "Before Morning'" develop the same thought. In the former, the lover finds on their return from the hill

But the wild roses in your wreath

Were faded, and the leaves were brown. (Poems Written in Early Youth ) In "Before Morning', bloom and decay are seen as co-existent. This morning's flowers and flowers of yesterday Fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn. "Song : When the came home across the hill', seen in conjunction with "Circe's Palace' and "Song : The Moonflower opens to the moth', reveals the parameters within which the quest of love is conducted. The mention of roses in the wreath of the beloved connects her with the Rose of Memory of Ash-Wednesday through the Hyacinth - girl of The Waste Land. symbolizing purity of love. The aethereal woman sug­ gested by this poem is in sharp contrast to Circe, whoso

40 palace is a place of destruction for men. Here, the flowers cultivated are fanged and red; the fountain flows with the sound of men in pain; panthers rise from their lairs and along the stairs the sluggish python lies. Circe, the arch- temptress, has an emasculating effect on men who come to her palace. As Lyndall Gordon points out, Eliot's portrayal of women seems to veer round the two female stereotypes saint / angel and seductress/enchantress. In the words of Four Quartets, women are divided into those who, symbolize the Rose of Beauty and those who represent the Fire of Passion. Perhaps, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, when the Fire and Rose are one! Such an observation may not appear facetious, if the lover's wistful question in the last two lines of ""Song : the moonflower opens to moth' - quoted earlier in the chapter - is taken into account. The lover in that poem does have regrets for the absence of the Circe spirit in his beloved.

A different version of these two extreme views about women is seen in some other poems. Women are not interested in or are simply incapable of ideas. Even if they acquire intellectual status, they lose their natural charm. In his juvenile poems, Eliot set up an ideal like the philosophical Absolute which was to stand as a bulwark against the tempta-

41 tions of the material world. In a, poem entitled ironically "Conversation Galante'- for the conversation is anything but gallant - the lover calls the beloved - "the eternal enemy of the absolute' Eliot enclosed a copy each of his unpub­ lished poem, "Suppressed Complex' to Ezra Pound and Conrad Aiken in his letters to thejp dated 21 and 25 February 1915 respectively. The poem describes the lover's impressions of his beloved in the morning after a night of love.

"She lay very still in bed with stubborn eyes Holding her breath lest she begin to think." ^ •'-•^' In "Prufrock', through an exquisite use of rhythm and rhyme, the casual attitude and the shallowness of woman's artistic conversation as they flit in and out of the room are shown.

In the room the woman come out and go Talking of Michaelangelo. (13)

The ironic detachment of the young man in "Portrait of a Lady' renders her conversation superficial and, at times almost comically self-pitying, as the following lines show,

Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you hold it in your hands;

42 And youth is cruel and has no more remorse And smile at situations which it cannot see: / !\ I smiles, of course.

And go on drinking tea.

• • •

"But what have I, but what I have my friend. To give you, what can you receive from me? Only the friendship and the sympathy Of one about to reach her journey's end. (19-20) The Fresca passage, which- was omitted finally from The Waste Land at Pound'a instance speaks of what happens if women get ideas.

Women grown intellectual grow dull And lose the wit of natural trull ^^^'

Intelluctual or empty - headed, women are clearly incapable of deep emotion, given to mere physical passion.

For varying forms one definition's right : Unreal emotions and real appetite. 'I-'' Women, therefore, are dangerous, they threaten the possession of self. These poems show a tussle between man's responsiveness to feminine charm and the desire to keep the

43 inviolability of self in tact. In "Portrait of a Lady', despite his irony, the young man constantly feels the danger to his self-possession, as the lady rambles on in her inane conversation as is clear from the following lines.

"I keep my countenance I remain self-possessed. Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired Reiterates some worn-out common song With the smell of hyacinths across the garden Recalling things that other people have desired. • • • My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark" (20-21)

Circe's destructive power, of course, is mythical. In the prose-poem ""Hysteria", the man has a feeling of getting dissolved in the silvery emasculating laughter of the woman.

"As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in the laughter and being a part of it... I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost final­ ly in the dark caverns of her throat .... '' (34)

In some poems, woman is seen as a predatary animal that tears man's flesh and devours him. "Burbank with a

44 Baedeker: Bleistem with a cigar' depicts an encounter between the American tourist Burbank and Princess Volupine - the name carrying inevitable associations of voluptuousness. The result of their meeting is his fall-both physical and moral. In the second stanza the love of Burbank and Princess Volupine is implicitly compared to the story of Antony and Cleopatra.

Defunctive music under sea Passed seaward with the passing bell Slowly : the God Hercules Had left him that had loved him well. (42)

The citizens of Alexandria hear subterranean music on the eve of Antony;s final battle with Octavius, denoting the desertion of Antony by Hercules, the submarine music, as the lovers cruise along in the shuttered barge, which ^^burned on the water all the day'', suggestes a similar fate for Burbank. As Antony by Cleopatra, Burbank by Volupine has been ""unmaanned' . Later on in the poem, the princess is shown ext'ending "a meager, blue-nailed phthisic hand" to climb the waterstair, thus making her into a withered witch with an emaciated claw.

•"Sweeney Among the Nightingales' is ironically en-

45 tilted, for the "nightngales" are the prostitutes. One of the nightngales is , Rachel nee Rabinovitch, who

"Tears at the grapes with murderous paws."(59) Her action itself is indicative enough of her ways with the sons of God. In yet another poem called "Ode', which was published in 1920 in Ara Vos Prac, but later on omitted from Eliot's works, a pseudo-honeymoon' of a young couple is described. The whole situation is filled with a sense of sexual failure and guilt. To the bridegroom his mate appears to he almost a vampire, a "succuba eviscerate".

One way of resoving the conflict between attraction towards woman and the desire for self-possession, that appears in poem after poem, is the death of the object of love either contemplated or carried out. In "'Hysteria', the man concentrates all his attention with careful subtlety on his plan of stopping the shaking of breasts of the laughing woman. The "Nocturne' , a poem in the Laforguian mode, paints a typical romantic situation between Romeo, grande serieux, and Juliet, the only difference being the waiting servant, placed by the poet-/speaker, who stabs the heroine. There follows the macabre comment,

"Blood looks effective on the moonlit ground' (Poems Written in Early Youth )

46 The speaker is relived on Romeo's account for the lover is not now forced to swear elternal love. (No need of "~Love forever?' - " Love next week?' ) (Poems Written in Early Youth )

In the unpublished fragment of The Waste Land, called " The Death of the Duchess'the husband longs for escape from the entrapment of an unsatifactory marriage, even though his absence would mean death -psychological death - for his consort. In "Portrait of a Lady', the young man wonders also how he would feel if the lady were to die suddenly, relin­ quishing thereby her claims on him and setting him free. His report, reflected m the last line - "And should I have the right to smile' - connects him with the later figure like Harry Monchensy in Eliot's most autobiographical play The Family Reunion.

Some poems show the desire for beloved's death take a perverse turn. In the unpublished poem "^Love-song of St. Sebastian', love is represented in a sado-masochistic light.'~^ In the first stanza the lover comes to the woman in a hair shirt, flogs himself and lies bleeding at her doorstep, so as to win her recognition and love. This beha­ viour is reminiscent of a knight-Zcourtly lover suffering agonies in order to win the lady's grace. In the second stanza, the same lover, like Browning's hero in "Porphyria's

47 Lover', contemplates her murder by strangling her with a towel. When she is killed, she will not any longer be beau­ tiful to anyone else but him. In "Sweeney Erect', the brute protagonist runs amok in the brothel with his razor.

Tests the razor on his leg Waiting until the shriek subsides The epileptic on the bed Curves backward, clutching at her sides. (45) Similarly, the dramatic fragment "Sweeney Agonistes' speaks of man's compulsive desire to do a girl in'.

Any man might do a girl in Any man has to, needs to, wants to Once in a life-time, do a girl in (134)

All these instances show how the quest for love is bedevilled by a variety of factors. Eliot's modernity per­ haps lies in the fact that his portrayal of this quest comprehends greater psychological complexity and does not reduce the love-songs to stereotyped situations and senti­ ments. It could be asked if the desire to kill the beloved fits into the knightly tradition of gallantry/chivalry. This quite legitimate querry has possibly two answers. In the

first place, a lover like St. Sebastian does not have a

48 sequel and remains a freak creation as far as his sadistic desires go. Secondly, Sweeney is a character, that is a foil to the recurrent Prufrockian figures, who are torn between intense yearning and detachment. In fact Apeneck Sweeney symbolizes those vulgar, fleshly people, who are unaware of any other dimension of life than the physical. The questing figure in the poems dealing with love can be identified with the knight, not in the literalist sense of his going on an external adventure, but in his awareness of the intensity of his inner feelings and desires of what Ronald Bush has called "the buried self'.-^'* From this viewpoint, ^^ La Figlia Che Piange''- with which Eliot closes Prufrock and Other Observations - remains perhaps the most lyrical ex­ pression, symptomatic of the inner sruggle of the questing- hero.

During his trip to Italy, Eliot was told to look for a scene on an antique Italian stele, but unfortunately did not find it. May be, that is the reason why the poem has a title in the Italian - La Figlia Che Piange - which means ""The young girl weeping''. In the first stanza, the girl standing "on the highest pavement of the stair'' and hold­ ing flowers in her hand, is mentioned. The details like the stair and flowers establish her linkage with Dante's Bea-

49 trice and so attractive is this image that the onlookers" attempt at restraining his inner emotions, signified in a phrase like """fugitive resentment'' proves vain and the stanza ends with a lyrical outburst. But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair. (36) The second stanza, tries\check this lyricism by the .-A familiar Laforguian technique of deboublement. The speaker, as in "Prufrock,' shifts himself into "I' { the detached observer) and "he' (the involved lover). The observer would make the lover turn away from the imaginary encounter with the young girl. The contemplated separation of lovers is compared to the separation of soul and body As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised As the mind deserts the body it has used. (36) Though the terms of comparison would indicate that the lover is to be identified with soul/mind and the girl with the deserted body, the syntactic position of ""torn and brusied' leaves it beautifully vague asto who is ""torn and brusied'. And this very ambiguity testifies to the power of inner emotions that defy the Laforguian detachment. A less painful separation would be the socialite way of parting ""simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.''

50 In the third stanza, the imaginary encounter with "la figlia'' was already become a thing of the past but its presence is felt in the way the speaker's imagination is haunted by an image of the girl, which always carries a great emotional charge in Eliot's poetry.

"Her hair over her arms and her arm full of

flowers"(36) The cogitations about how the lover and the girl would have spent life together still trouble the midnight sleep and noon's respose. The ending of the poem, thus, reveals that the speaker has at best achieved a precarious balance between his inner urges and a stance of detachment; the ambivalence in his attitude to the girl is far from being resolved. True, the poem employs also devices like ironic distantiation; but such a defence-mechanism is a testmony to the power of emotions, which the ironic self distrusts. Echoing Aeneas's confused state of mind, on seeing Venus, his mother, in the garb of a shepherdess brought out by the epigraph to the poem, the speaker contin­ ues to ask the girl, """Maiden, how shall I name thee?''. Perhaps, the speaker may not let himself go fully. Yet the fact remains that the image of ""la filia' continues to exert a tremendous emotional appeal. As Bush says,

"She (la figlia) will continue to weep, and weeping.

51 provide an image of his (the speaker's )imprisoned existence

1 C. - a forsaken figure of unfulfilled life.'"

If the knight's quest for love faces so many dangers and pitfalls, his quest for beauty fares no better. As he looks around him for beauty, he finds that the world of nature of which the earlier poets sang has been replaced by the great city bringing along with it squalor and mechaniza­ tion and in the human world, standardization of personality and response have replaced heartfelt and genuine emotions. Naturally, the poems, in which this quest for beauty is conducted , deal almost all,with the town and its way of life. They record the quester's disillusionment, as he perceives the yawning gap between what he was led to expect of the world by the earlier poetic accounts and what he actually finds around him, between the ideal and the actual. Mostly satirical town-poetry, these poems follow Chaucer's method in his satirical portraiture of the ecclesiates, where the ideal is implied and the actual is starkly pre- sneted. The reader is left to himself to find out as to how far the actual deviates from and falls short of the ideal. One consequence of this method has been that while the outward social satire has been appreciated, the inner sense of bitter frustration felt by the sensibility as revealed in the juvenilia has largly escaped attention of the early

52 readers and admirers of Eliot. In other words, while the cynical smile on the face of the satirist has been seen, his bleeding heart has gone unnoticed by and large.

In June, 1919, Virginia Woolf published Eliot's Poems, which contained most of his French poems and the majority of the quatrain poems, with the exception of "Sweeeney Erect'', ^Burbank with a Baedeker : Bleistein with a Cigar ' and "A cooking Egg'. A review of Eliot's Poems (1919) along with J. M. Hurry's The Critic in Judgement appeared in Times Literary Supplement. The anonymous review­ er was quick enough to notice Eliot's stiff self-conscious­ ness, but attributed mistakenly Eliot's fear of emotions, of his overpowering desire to surprise, and advised him to indulge in follies of his own so as to avoid the fate of a negative satirist : The review, is interestingly titled ^Not Here, O Apollo', and, as it sums up the early reaction to Eliot's satirical pieces, deserves quatation in part.

•~"For he is as fastidious of emotions as of cadences. He seems to have a "^^phobia'' of sentimentality like a small schoolboy who would die rather than kiss his sister in public ... He has forgotten his emotions, his values, his sense of beauty, even his commonsense in that one desire to surprise... He is probably reacting against poetry like that

53 of Mr. Murry. But you cannot live on reactions, you must forget them and all the errors which past writers have committed; you must be brave enough to risk some positive follies of your own. Otherwise you will fall more and more into neagative follies; you will bury your talent in a napkin and become an artist who never does anything but giggle faintly.''^^

Unfortunately, the TLS reviewer did not have the benefit of acquaintance with Poems Written in Early Youth, which the later readers enjoy. As such, the poet's engage­ ment with the follies """"which past writers have committed'' is now more apparent. It is now clear that Eliot's satire stems from a frustration of his expectations. As suggested earlier, this frustration derives from the mechanization of life and human personality and the debasement of beauty by the squalid urban ethos.

An early poem like ""Spleen' shows how life escapes from the ritualistic family activities on Sunday. The family goes to church with the self-satisfied air """of definite Sunday faces*', where one sees other """bonnets silk hats and conscious graces'' in endless repetition. In the evening, there are """"lights and tea/children and cats in the alley''.

54 The mind is restless with its helplessness "^to rally against this dull conspiracy'', and throughout all these activities. Life, personified as a dandified gentleman with hat and gloves in hand, waits on the doorstep of the Absolute.

For Prufrock, social intercourse is a kind of mas­ querade, where you prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. The fashionable ladies talking of Michaelangelo re­ flect an ethos of artificial manners and superficiality. The natural self is stifled and to communicate with another person one has to borrow various masks. The young man, who is bored by the lady's rambling, genteel conversation, cries out in desperation

"And I must borrow every changing shape

To find expression ... dance, dance

Like a dancing bear. Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape''(22) Rather than indulge in such roleplaying, the dandy prefers to ""take the air, in a tobacco trance''.

Snobbery is another besetting sin of society. The prim aunts of Miss Nancy Ellicott may not quite approve of her thin rebellion signified by smoking and dancing, but their snobbery would not allow them to speak out.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked

55 And danced ail the modern dances; And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it But they knew it was modern. (32)

In ^""Mr. Apollinax'', Eliot satirized, as Lynadall

1 ~j Gordon says, the academic ethos of Harvard of his time.

When Eliot was a graduate student at Harvard ,Bertrand Rus- sell was there as a visiting professor, Russell found his collegues impossibly pompous and laborious. The poem de­ scribes a scene in country house, where Eliot and Russell A were guests at a tea-party by a snob called Fuller, whom Russell disliked because he and his mother aped English manners. In "Mr. Apollinax', Eliot displays the Dickenesian penchant for grotesque names, when he calls the hosts of Mr. Apollinax, Mrs. Phlaccus and Professor Channing- Cheetah. The hosts all quite bewildered by Mr. Apollinax's attack on gentility but are too genteel themselves and concentrate on slices of lemon and macaroons. In a society of snobbery and frigid, correct manners, life is steamrolled into a mindless uniformity. That is why, in "The Boston Evening Transcript'. The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn. (30) Evening, instead of quickening the appetites of life.

56 brings the newspaper home for some. Cousin Harriet is one of them. Newspapers have become "life' for such people.

In "Aunt Helen', the respectable maiden aunt, after leading a decent life as per the mores of such a society, dies leaving her pets handsomely provided for. Only, the servants, correct so far, forget the occasion.

And the footman sat upon the dining - table Holding the second housemaid on his knees - Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.31

These poems of social satire are inspired by Eliot's experience at St. Louis, his native town, and Boston. The Boston of Eliot's youth was no longer governed by Puritan conscience but by the new, rising commercial corporations. It was a society in transition, with the nouveau riche trying to ape sedulously the "culture" of their erstwhile leaders. That explains the stress on the adherence of the external form in social behaviour. Later on Eliot called the Bostorian milieu ""quite uncivilized but refined beyound the

I 1 Q point of civilization.'

Apart from the artificiality and superficiality in social life, what mars the knight's quest for beauty is the mechanization of life and the urban squalor. The opening

5 7 lines of "Preludes' show the extent to which life has been mechanized. The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o clock. (23) One could, as it were, set one's clock as one smells the same culinary activity going on simultaneously m many homes. In the morning, the same routine goes on.

With the other masquerades That time resumes.

One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades s In a thousands furnished rooms. (23) The street is trampled """by insistent feet' regularly " at four and five and six o clock.'' This mechanization of life is "~^the conscience of a blackened, street.'' The words of the speaker in the rejected London passage in ""The Fire Sermon' aptly describe such a life. The speaker, in an apostrophe to London there, says, London, the swarming life you kill and breed, London, your people is bound upon the wheel! Phantasmal gnomes, burrowing in brick and stone and steel 1^^

58 The child's hand that pockets the toy in dream in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night'' and the hand of the typist that smooths her hair after her encounter with her boy­ friend are both ""automatic', in keeping with their mode of life. Talking about his early town-poetry, Eliot acknowl­ edged his debt to ,^two Scots, who impressed him deeply in his formative years, in bringing out the pathos of the modern urban existence - James Thomson and John Davidson. Denying that his obligation to Davidson's "Thirty Bob a week'' was merely for technical hints Eliot said,

"""But I am sure that I found inspiration in the content of the poem and in the complete fitness of content and idiom, for I also had a good many dingy urban images to reveal. Davidson had a great theme, and also found an idiom which elicited the greatness of theme ... The personage that Davidson created in this poem has haunted me all my life, and the poem is to me a great poem for ever.'''^

In Davidson's clerk in "Thirty Bob a week', Eliot perhaps found the perfect ""objective correlative' for the miserable life in the modern metropolis : a character who combines a pathetic resignation and pent - up inner fury.

59 As mentioned already in the chapter squalor makes its / qppearance earlier on in "Prufrock'', when the yellow fog rubs its back, like a cat, upon the window - panes; licks its tongue into the corners of the evening, lingers upon the pools that stand in drains and lets fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys. Prufrock wonders what won­ derful tales of his adventures he can relate to his lady­ love as he makes his declaration.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow sheets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of win­ dows ?•'(15) In ""Preludes'", morning does not bring in freshness and hope.

The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddzy feet that press To early coffee-stands.(23)

For the slum-dweller, as she dozed, the night re­ vealed ""the thousand sordid images'' of which her soul is

60 colstituted. As the morning comes.

And the light crept up between the shutters, And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,'^' (24) She curled the papers from her hair and clasped the yellow soles of feet in the palms of both soiled hands.

"Rhapsody on a windy Night'', remains perhaps Eli­ ot's finest city-poem, painting the urban life in all its garish, nightmarish detail. It is his City of the Dreadful Niqht - the atmosphere in Thomson's poem definitely affect­ ing Eliot's portrayal of life, as the speaker noctambulates through the city. For example, the following stanza from Thomson's poem which describes the "necropolis' seems to lie at the heart of Eliot's depiction of night-life.

""The city is of Night, but not of sleep There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain The pitliess hours like years and ages creep A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain Of thought and consciousness, which never ceases. Or, which some moment's stupor but increases, This worse than woe makes wretches there insane.' Employing the logic of psychological association and the dream imagery, anticipating the Surrealists, the poem brings out the urban squalor, mechanization and joylessness

61 of city - life. In the midnight street, held in a lunar synthesis the floors of memory are dissolved, so that tho images from the past and present can now mingle with one another freely. Every street-lamp, spreading its baleful light, ""^ beats like a fatalistic drum.'' The speaker, like Kubla Khan in Coleridge's poem, hears prophecies in tho beatings of these fatalistic drums. The street- lamp guides his nocturnal journey. It shows the speaker first a prosti­ tute whose eye ""'twists like a crooked pin''. The speaker's memory brings before him ""a crowd of twisted things' : a twisted, withered branch, and a twisted, rusty spring in a factory yard. The next image symbolizing the squalid life of the city is that of a cat that "'slips out its tongue/ And devours a morsel of rancid butter'. The cat's mechanical action reminds the speaker of the child's automatic hand pocketing a toy in sleep and of a crab gripping the speak­ er's stick. In such an ethos, even the moon is no longer a thing of beauty, but "'a washed - out small - pox cracks her face'. His nocturnal peregrinations over, the street lamp directs the speaker to his home and bed. In the last three lines, the poem brings out all the drabness of life by mentioning the items of daily routine.

The bed is open, the tooth-brush hangs on the wall

Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.

62 The last twist of the knife.

It is quite ironic that sleep is seen as a prepara­ tion for life. But what kind of life is in store? After a journey through the nightmarish city, preparing for life, in a restless sleep, is, indeed " the last twist of the knife', in the human heart.

An interesting feature of """Rhapsody on a Windy Night'' is the way it gathers around itself the properties, figures or tropes of Romantic poetry and transforms or disfigures them through parodic use, so as to highlight the predicament of a romantic sensibility in a modern ethos. As Langbaum points out,

""The Laforguian "Rhapsody on a Windy Night' reads like a parody of Wordsworth in that it opens up, under tho transforming influence of moonlight, the flow of memory and association.''

The very title of the poem seems to declare its genealogy with such romantic poems like 'Ode to the West- Wind' or "Eolian Harp'. But it can be interpreted in at least two ways. Either, the poem, a rhapsody, is sung on a windy night or, it is ""about'' a windy night. Many Roman­

tic poems announce first their status as a form, usually an

63 ode, and then their subject an urn, a mental state, a nightngale or a skylark. Eliot's poem, however, announces itself as an intensified, an ultra-Romantic musical form, a rhapsody, about/on a windy night. But as one goes through the poem, one finds that the speaker, unlike the speakers in the Romantic poems is passive in that it is not he who "sings'" the rhapsody but the street-lamp and secondly he is hardly ""rhapsodic"' about what he sees/ is shown.

The poem also mentions details and images often found in close association in Romantic poetry : wind, night, moon, musical instrument, flower, the child, memory, and sea. Such a cluster of images is found, for instance, in Shelley's ""Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.''

Thy light alone-like mist o'er mountains driven

Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some still-instrument. Or moonlight on a midnight stream. Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream."" ^^

In these five lines, Shelley mentions music, night- wind, midnight and a stringed instrument - possibly the Eolian Harp? All these elements are present m ""Rhapsody on a Windy Night'" except perhaps the wind-instrument. The synaesthesia in the lamp's beating like a drum is analogous

6-1 to the synaesthetic experience which Coleridge describes in "The Eolian Harp''. There in the opening stanza, the sound of the lute played by the wind leads to Coleridge's percep­ tion of "A light in sound, a sound-like power in light.'' In Eliot's poem, the light that comes from the lamp is not a luminous source of poetic inspiration located either in imagination or in a divine source. The street-lamp, "rhap­ sodizes'' through feeble mutterings and splutterings, while being buffeted by the midnight wind. Similarly, the child, mentioned in stanza four, has nothing Wordsworthian about him. Instead, the speaker sees nothing behind the child's eye, the visionary gleam has gone from his eyes. The madman shaking a dead geranium, mentioned in the first stanza, combines and parodies the Romantic images of poet as lunatic and poet as meditating on nature. In ""^Dejection : An Ode'', Coleridge listens to the midnight wind which he calls "'Mad Lutanist' and ''mighty poet''. As for the gei/ranium, it is neither Shelley's ^"sensitive plant'' nor Wordsworth's meanest flower that blows'' that can give the poet "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'' The scent is faded from this geranium.

It is misleading to see the parodic use to which Eliot puts these Romantic tropes as his rejection of the Romantic poetic practice. On the other hand, the satire

65 implicit in the parody underscores the plight of a Shelley- Keats sensibility - as seen in the juvenilia - in the modern world.Through the parody of these tropes, the knight quest­ ing for beauty, expresses his frustration and agony that the urban ethos, with all its squalor and mechanization, hardly gives - to use Shelley's words- "grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.''

In talking about Dante's most comprehensive and ordered presentation of human emotions, Eliot says,

""The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or dis­ gusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse towards the pursuit of beauty. But not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the complete scale from negative to positive. The negative is the more importunate.''

Perhaps Eliot too tried to pass from the negative to the positive in his peregrinations through the urban squa­ lor. Not finding, "life' in his own social class, full of snobbbery and frigidity of manners, Eliot sought it in the Roxbury slums and North Cambridge. The first three ""Pre­ ludes'' were first called ""Roxbury Preludes'' and North Cambridge was the scene of the unpublished ""Caprices''. ^^

In these slums, Eliot deliberately courted squalor, but he

66 was repelled by the stinking smells and dirt of the slums. These slums were as ^^lifeless'' as his own snobbish class. Unlike Dante, Eliot did not succeed in passing from the negative to the positive, from the urban squalor to the beatific vision. In his ^"Caprices in North Cambridge'' he described bottles, broken glass, dirty window panes, broken barrows and tatty sparrows scratching in the gutter. It is perhaps, in the vacant lots filled with city's debris that Eliot had his first glimpse of metropolitan inferno of the waste land.

Mention has been made already of the close alliance of the romantic and the religious in Eliot's poetry. the questing figure, frustrated in his search for love and beauty in the material world, looked to the world beyond for meaning and significance. This hankering after a dimension of life beyound the physical, this yearning for some mysti­ cal experience is seen quite early in Eliot. For instance, as early as June 1910, Eliot wrote a poem called """Si­ lence"', which remains unpublished in which he describes his first experience of a moment out of time. Still a gradu­ ate student at Harvard, as he walked in Boston one day, he saw the streets suddenly shrink and dissolve. Everything— his preoccupations in the quotidian world, his past and his future expectations - simply fell away and he was enfolded

67 in a great silence. Eliot later on described such an intima- tion of the world beyound, such an experience of the time­ less moment which many have just once or twice in life and which perhaps remains inexpressible. As he said on another occasion,

""You may call it communion with the Divine or you may call it temporary crystallisation of the mind.''

For Eliot the experience of bliss he had in such a moment was to remain throughout his carrer a tantalizing reminder of an area of experience, just beyound his grasp for which contemporary images of life were hardly a satisfy­ ing substitute. The quest for such a timeless moment is found in various forms in Eliot's later poetry and plays especially in the Hyacinth-garden episode in The Waste Land, in "Burnt Norton', The Family Reunion and The Confidential Clerk.

In the summer of 1910, Eliot started collecting his unpublished poems in a note-book to which he gave a title in decorated capitals ""INVENTION OF THE MARCH HARE''. In this Notebook, he recorded the private habits of mind and early religious preoccupations. As Lyndall Gordon points out,

"...many of the earlier poems, particularly the unpublished pieces record an underground phase of religious

68 searching, a slow incubation and maturing of motives.'' 27

Although some definTte^"iclea about the^role of the martyr emerges at the end of Eliot's student years in poems like "The Love Song of Saint Sebastian' or, "The Death of Saint Narcissus', it appears from the """March Hare'' poems that he was struggling towards some religious position and choice right through his juvenilia. For instance in "First Debate between the Body and Soul,' Eliot records his sense of disgust not only with the outer social life but also with the facts of his own physical life, and seeks refuge from life in the idea of the Absolute. Lyndall Gordon and John Mayer offer divergent readings about whether the poem sets up an unbridgeable dichotomy between body and soul. Still Eliot's dissatisfaction with the mere physical dimension of life is brought out by their discussion of the poem. ^° Regarded as a religious quest, the poem expresses a yearning towards a plane of existence free from all the unpleasant aspects of material life. Alternatively, regarded as a philosophical quest as Mayer does ""First Debate between the Body and Soul' spells out the limitations of a strictly empiricist view of life.

The inadequacy of empiricism as an account of life is once again brought out in ""Easter : Sensations of April''.

69 which is like "^Silence" and "First Debate' an unpublished poem and which belongs to the same year. i.e. 1910. Consisting of two parts, the poem records two experiences dealing with different sensations associated with spring. In the first part, the speaker sees a black child bringing geraniums home from church and is reminded of other gerani­ ums, now dried up and laid aside in his memory. In the second, a newly cleaned room smelling of daffodils and earth after a rain shower proves irritating rather than pleasing. Employing the technique of juxtaposition, oft - used in Eliot's early poetry, the poem asks the question whether life is what the empiricist sees, mere matter and sensation or what the eyes of faith see, body and soul, matter and spirit. The geraniums are associated first with the child's simple faith, then with sheer sensation - their scent - and then with withered flowers that symbolize the seeker's early faith now faded and lost. The seeker in a sense envies the child's simple faith, which betrays his nostalgia for a mental framework which has access to a world beyond physical sensations.

The second part, by making the stimulus-response theory stand on its head, exposes the inadequacy of a purely empirical analysis of experience. In a wholly material world responses should be predictable. But here the stimulus of

70 daffodils in a newly cleaned room and an earth refreshed by sweet showers of April produce only irritation. This disso­ nance between stimulus and response can be seen as Eliot's way of asserting the freedom of the human will against simplistic behaviourism: the most pleasant sensations may irritate some people's nerves. This disjuncture between stimulus and response is reflected in the title of the poem where the empiricist sensations are set against the reli­ gious perspective of Easter. For a believer like the child, spring brings Easter, for an empiricist spring is only a matter of sensations, but for someone like the questing- figure, struggling with his faith, spring is a usual remind­ er of the child-like faith, and the Easter of memory, and therefore, produces irritations. The poem can, thus, be seen almost as a dress rehearsal for the celebrated opening line of The Waste Land, where April is the cruellest month to those for whom faith is only memory and desire.

Eliot once considered forming a longer sequence-poem out of his city-poems, which was to be called ""An Agony in the Garret''. One of the poems from this sequence is o n "Little Passion."-^" The overtly Christian symbolism of the

poem suggests that the questing-figure regards his urban existence as analogous to Christ's agony,Passion and Cruci­ fixion, although compared to the Saviour, the seeker's

71 preoccupations are ^"little''. The poem describes a lost soul in a Paris bar, a man of undoubted religious gifts but unable to utilize them in the service of humanity. For instance, he knows that his soul has been dead for quite some time and yet wastes his time and energies in seeking enlightnment in the dark retreats of Paris streets. Further, he knows that the street lights lead finally to a "^cross'' on which souls are pinned-rdiminutive of ^"nailed"', as Mayer suggests - and bleed out, but the lost, drunk person does not do anything to save the bleeding souls, instead he lets them spin around in a meaningless whirl of city-life. It is remarkable that the streets, that are so winding and lead to different termini in poems like ""^Pruf rock' ' or "'"'Rhapso- dy'', should lead in this poem, to Christian destination. "Little Passion'', Eliot's most explicit attempt at por­ traying an imitatio Christi is also a kind of prefiguration for some of his great themes and heroes. The lost soul in a Parisian bar anticipates later wanderers of the city- streets, heroes of wasted passion like Prufrock and Geron- tion. Moreover, the poem points directly to the martyr-poems of 1914 and to the meaninglessness of the spinning world in ""Preludes.''

Before Eliot left Harvard, he wrote a group of in­

tense religious poems which he never published : ""After the

72 turning...', "I am the Resurrection ...". "So through the evening ..." and "The Burnt Dancer". The first three became later on The Waste Land fragments, and the last one is still not commonly available. The Waste Land fragments are dis­ cussed in some detail in the next chapter But here it should be noted that these fragmentary poems express a dissatisfac­ tion with the neat categories of philosophy and a willing­ ness to try out non-rational modes of perception. For in­ stance in ^^ After the turning ...', the speaker refers to ""frosty vigil kept in withered gardens,'' to "the life and death of lonely places'", "the turning of inspired nights'", and says that after the end of this inspiration,

"The world seemed futile like Sunday outing."' ^^ "I am the Resurrection...' combines Christianity and Hinduism.,/ I am the Resurrection and the life I am the things that stay, and those that flow And the victim and the sacrificial knife I am the fire and the butter also.

Among these poems, the most definite pointer to the "saint" poems of 1914, is perhaps "The Burnt Dancer".-^^ In this poem, the speaker, in his night long vigil, sees a moth hovering on the edge of a bright ring of light coming from a flame. For the speaker, the moth"s deliberate singeing of

7 3 its wings in the flame is an act of martyrdom. This winged martyr who achieves martyrdom through his dance around the flame is an interesting figure not only because he looks forward to St. Narcissus, the dancer to God, who welcomes the burning arrows piercing his body, but also because the way it once again underscores the close affinity between the romantic and the religious in Eliot. In Persian poetry with which Eliot was familiar through Omar Khayyam in English translation, the moth and the flame symbolize the lover and the beloved respectively. Shelley comes near this concep­ tion when he describes love as ^the desire of the moth for the star', in "One Word is Too Often Profan'd''Eliot's burnt dancer thus combines in him both the lover and the martyr.

In 1914, as the saints-poems suggested, Eliot was interested in the motives and behaviour of saints. During his last years at Harvard, he studied the lives of saints and mystics like St. Theresa, Dame Julian of Norwich, St. John of the Cross Jacob Bohme and St. Bernard. He also took copious notes from Evelyn Underbill's Mysticism. Her three classic identities - pilgrim, lover, ascetic - all appear in poems like "Love Song of St. Sebastian' and "The Death of St. Narcissus'. During his tour of Europe in 1914, Eliot came across paintings of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian- the Mantegna in Palazzo della Ca' d'Oro in Venice, a Memling in

74 Brussels and one in Bergamo attributed to Antonello de Messina. Eliot was fascinated by the combination of eroti­ cism and martyrdom reflected in the paintings of a youthful firm- fleshed body exposed to penetrant arrows. Eliot's Sebastain is different from the historical one, who was shot by way of punishment with arrows, but was rescued by a woman who nursed his wounds in her lodgings. In the poem, tho first stanza depicts exhibitionistic masochism. Sebastian's self-flagellation becomes a way of winning the love of tho woman. He comes to her "in" a shirt of hair,'' flogs himself / at her doorstep till he bleeds. It is only then that she accepts him, hideous and dying, as her ^"'neophyte''. The diction of the poem shows how the religous and the romantic elements coalesce into an artistic unity. As a lover, Sebas­ tian,, shares with Prufrock the "ascetic' nature of his "passion'.

"The Death of Saint Narcissus" is another tale of martyrdom. Narcissus here is a composite figure who inludes the figure of self-love from Greek mythology, the masochis­ tic Sebastian and the historical St. Narcissus, a second century Bishop of Jerusalem who withdrew from the world into the desert. Lydnall Gordon regards Narcissus as a failed saint and his death a masochistic self-indulgence.^^ Nar­ cissistic self-aborption makes martyrdom am impossible prospect. In fact "saint Narcissus' is a contradiction in

75 terms. But John Mayer makes quite a persuasive case for a successful martyrdom of Narcissus by arguing that the poem shows how "extreme self-absorption may be profoundly redi- rected more positively, as a way to salvation.'

Entrapped in the love of his own beautiful body, Narcissus finds that he cannot love "^men's ways'' His acute sensual awareness makes it impossible for him to see peo­ ple, as he walks the streets, as anything else but "'^convul- sive thighs and knees: So he withdraws into the desert like the prophets of the old days, and becomes a dancer before God. In the desert. Narcissus is as it were, left to his own devices. The retreat into the desert leads to only an inten­ sification of self-absorption. Here Narcissus undergoes three metamorphoses - tree, fish and a young girl that epitomize the stages of evolution from the vegetable to human life. These three transfoormations also reflect the range of sexul gratification. The first two intensify his self - absorption. The branches of the tree are twisted and roots tangled into each other, seeking no nourishment from without. As a fish. Narcissus writhes "in his own clutch'', in masturbatory frenzy, "with slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers''. The last change Narcissus expe­ riences is that of a young girl raped by a drunken old man.

76 Unlike the first two experiences, this one does not contain autoeroticism. The sexual intercourse is doubly painful for Narcissus: firstly because it challafnges the self- sufficiency of autoeroticism and, in the second, the rape is experienced from both the points of view, the rapist and his victim. Narcissus not only has a ""taste of his own white­ ness' ', of the drunkenness and old age of the man. According to Mayer, in the very act of understanding the old man's viewpoint. Narcissus wins his freedom from the prisonhouse of his self, and thus his salvation. He dances to God and not before him, and, like Sebastian, embraces the burning arrows. As is clear from the facsimile edition of The Waste Land, this poem has two versions. In the first version, the arrows are ""penetrant'', which carries sexual implications. But in the final version,, the arrows become ""burning'' which makes them purgatorial, the fire of arrows redeems the fire of self-love of Narcissus. In dying, as Mayer points out, he remains Narcissus but escapes narcissism.

"The Death of Saint Narcissus' marks an important stage in Eliot's development, not because its opening lines were later on adapted into The Waste Land, but because the figure of the desert-prophet anticipates the speaker in ""What the Thunder Said'', and Harry in The Family Reunion.

77 Besides, lire as an agenr or purirication IOOKS rorwara to "The Fire Sermon' and backward to "The Burnt Dancer.'

The Death of Saint Narcissus along with other unpub­ lished fragments make it clear that right from the early period there was a distinct religious strain in Eliot's poetry. This strain was not something that surfaced quite unexpectedly in Ash-Wednesday. In 1915, Pound submitted ""The Death of Saint Narcissus to Harriet - Monroe for publication in Poetry. But Eliot "" killed'' the poem in the galley itself. May be, he felt the poem to be too confes­ sional. According to Lyndall Gordon, the conditions of his life, bound up as he was at the time with Pound and Vi- vienne, made a firm religious commitment impossible. That is why he started underplaying the overtly religious preoc­ cupations in his poetry.

In his letter to John Quinn dated 9th July 1919, Eliot enclosed the MSS of the first four poems that appear in the volume Poems 1920 and wanted them to be published in

that order. ^^ The first, among the four which head this volume, is ""Gerontion'', which already shows that Eliot was not able to keep his mind away from religious matters and attached a lot of significance to them. Actually, though the quatrain poems, satirizing the metropolitan life, were written earlier, they follow ""Gerontion"' in this volume of

78 verse.

Although in "Gerontion", no saint-figure appears as in "Love-Song of Saint Sebastian' ' or "The Death of Saint Narcissus'', Eliot expresses through his persona of an old roan his concern with the increasing secularization of life in the modern world and the resultant spiritual aridity not only in individual life but also on an almost universal scale. The term Gerontion is a diminutive form of the Greek word "geron'. The title of the poem at once distances the young poet from the persona of a little old man. The fact that Gerontion is not even a proper name as was Prufrock but a generic one indicates a greater distantiation achieved between the poet and the protagonist. Elizabeth Drew sug­ gests that in this poem perhaps we are meant to compare Gerontion with the hero of Newman's " "The Dream of Gerontius'. -^^ Newman's poem depicts the journey of the hero's soul from old age through death and purgation to love eternal. He looks forward to the moment of dissolution with joy, faith and a calm acceptance of purgation. On the other hand, the dream of Gerontion is literally a nightmare of spititual drouth both within and around himself. He dismiss­ es the vision of cosmic disintegration, in fact all his cogitations as """thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.'' Eliot suggests perhaps this contrast between Gerontion and

79 Gerontius through the use of the diminutive form of the Greek word. Gerontion may lack the almost cheerful sense of purposive, purgatorial suffering of Newman's hero, but he shares many characteristics of Eliot's earlier hero, J. Alfred Prufrock. He is an extension of Prufrock, he is Prufrock grown old. Gerontion like Prufrock cannot boast of any heroic stature

I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass Bitten by flies, fought. (39) The lines indirectly express Eliot's own sense of frustration at not being able to take part in the cataclys­ mic event of his time: the First World War. Gerontion's unheroic stature comes out if he is compared with Tennyson's Ulysses. Ulysses complains of dull, uneventful domestic life. He is surrounded by "an aged wife,'' barren craggy mountains, and his subjects who feed, hoard, sleep and know him not. Similarly, Gerontion is surrounded by. scenes of equal drabness and boredom.

The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea

Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.(39)

80 The only difference between Ulysses and Gerontion is that whereas the former is all rearing to go out and escape his environment, the latter is totally absorbed with his surroundings. If Ulysses is a compulsive adventurer, Geron­ tion is only ""an old man/ A dull head among windy spaces''. The opening lines of the poem neatly summarize Gerontioion's situation in life.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. (39) The image of an old man in a dry season waiting for rain was to be enlarged on a universal scale in The Waste Land within a couple of years. The character of Gerontion also derives from the hero of a book Eliot reviewed around the same time as he wrote the poem : The Education of Henry Adams : An Autobiography. Adams, like Eliot, was a Bostonian whom he called in his review "A Sceptical Patri­ cian'.^^ Henry Adams, according to Eliot, is representative of the sort of person who "dogged by the shadow of self- conscious incompetence' is a predestined failure. Trapped between conscience and doubt he could belive in nothing. His search for education and culture failed to make him realize that the education of a person is largely the result of his being passionately absorbed, interested in things around him. But unfortunately with Adams, his scepticism prevented

81 him from being passionately interested in things, resulting in the desiccation of his spirit. He was also upset at the general loss of faith in society, at the replacement of tho Virgin by the Dynamo. Gerontion too displays the same inca­ pacity to believe in anything. In his review Eliot charac- trised such a scepticism as ^^The Boston doubt''. Eliot's affinity to both Adams and through him to Gerontion may bo seen when he says that this brand of scepticism is ""diffi­ cult to explain to those ...not born to it.'' This Boston doubt renders the individual particularly vulnerable "to all suggestions which dampen enthusiasn or dispel convic­ tion'' . Gerontion's loss of passion, thus, is analogous to his loss of faith. Both are the two sides of the same coin.

Gerontion's failure of spirit is set in a broader socio-historical perspective. His spiritual dryness is matched by the distortion and cheapening of religious faith. ""Sings are taken for wonders'*. As Mayer points out percep­ tively signs and wonders are antithetical in nature : Signs exude meaning centrifugally wheras wonders, by their dazzle, attract attention centripetally to themeselves. To turn sign into wonder not only perverts the sign but precludes any communication, calling attention to the sign that should normally lead to the signified. When the sign came in the

82 form of the Word, it was converted into a wonder, and by so doing, humanity frustrated the signified by keeping the sign locked up into itself ^"the word within a word unable to speak a word/swaddled with darkness."' The demand of the Pharisees to Christ - ""^We would see a sign'' - to prove his divinity echoes in a sense the demand of hubristic humanity in every age that the divine signs fit their own expectations. The chosen ones rejected the Word, because it came as a sign and not as the dazzling miracle they sought. Christians accepted the Word diachroni- cally, but distorted it into a wonder, which reflected their own egotism. For Gerontion, the failure of Christianity lies in its inability to revitalize the institutions of Western culture; its "~house'is therefore a "decayed' one. He sees the coming of Christ as it is affected by the historical rejection and contemporary perversions : Christ comes, to use Blakean terms, not as the Lamb of Innocence but as the Tiger of Experience.

The transformation of the sign of the Word into a wonderful event, which in itself constitutes a betrayal, is recalled/ reenacted every year in spring - time, for the Judas impulse blooms perenially. May therefore, is depraved. The cosmopolitan names in the follwing lines suggest how this depravity is an international phenomenon.

by. Mr. Silvero

83 with caressaing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room. By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles, Fraulein von Kulp Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. (39-40) These international characters distort and pervert the sign of the Eucharist in their own ways. The names like Silvero and Fraulein Kulp are reminiscent of the silver of betrayal and the orginal culpa. Silvero appreciatively caresses porcelain but gets no peace of mind, pacing his room all night. Like Arnold, Hakagawa, turns to art as the religion of the future, wheras with Mme. Tornquist, religion has degenerated into the seance of a medium. Gerontion sees the essential emptiness, in these international scenes, of such surrogate forms of religous faith : Vacant shuttles/weave the wind."'

If the contemporary religious practice is a perver­ sion, the knowledge gained from history is equally unhelpful in our quest for wisdom. For as Gerontion sees. History is a tantalizing enchantress, who leads us on by whispering amibitions into our ears, as the jungle did to Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness• She gives us knowledge, but gives in ""such supple confusions'", her knowledge comes.

84 when our attention is distracted, or it comes too soon and is given to those who do not realize its value or it comes so late that by that time, our faith in her is at best an emotion recollected in tranquillity. Naturally her very "giving famishes the craving''. Historical events like the world wars or like Inquisition show how our unnatural vices lead to deeds of heroism and how our impudent crimes force virtuous behaviour in us. The image of History as the enchanting femme fatale underscores once again the close alliance of the romantic and the religious in Eliot's poetry. Gerontions' failure is both spiritual and erotic - one is presented in terms of the other. In "Gerontion', a close connection exists between historical and carnal knowledge, between religious and erotic experience. Gerontion in this passage refers as much to the cunning of history as to the duplicities of passion at the hands of the tantalizing femme fatale and to the consequent difficulties of belief. Carnal knowledge without love parallels knowledge without religious faith. When Gerontion mourns the loss of his passion, he also mourns the loss of his ability to believe in anything.

Gerontion does not have the "awful daring of a moment's surrender'' either to passion or to belief, because

85 both the experiences are terrifying for him. They threaten the poise and possession of his sceptical self. Terror was an important constituent of religious belief for Eliot, as opposed to the bland Chirstianity advocated by liberal theologians who wanted religion to be easy for the believer. In The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot wrote, ""^We need to recover the sesne of religious fear so that it may be overcome by religious hope.''

Gerontion shrinks from religious terror and therefore remains without religious hope, a permanent denizen of the spiritual desert. In the end, he envisions universal disin­ tegration. The fate of those, sick with spiritual desicca­ tion, is fragmentation De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shulddering Bear In fractured atoms. (41) The names of those destroyed inevitably call to mind the earlier depraved sophisticates : their rootlessness, perversity and drift in life are their destruction. The apocalyptic vision in the final lines climaxes the motions of emptiness and sterility in the poem. Gerontion in a sense remains the unstill point of this distintegrating world. As Eliot says in his review of Adams's autobiography, whenever the well-bred Bostonian sceptic steps, the moral ground does not simply give way, it fragments. The cosmic fragmetation

86 imagined by Gerontion, as it were, radiates from his own patrician scepticism "Gerontion" occupies a significant place in Eliot's course of development, for here he brought back the figure of the religious quester in garb of a contemporary, post-war character. As earlier stated, Gerontion is an extension of Prufrock. If "Prufrock' warns of the personal meaningless- ness and sterility that follows upon the failure to act, the inability to dare, "'Gerontion', through its scepticism about passion and belief, creates a picture of general sterility in the society at large. Besides, the symbolism of drought and rain points forward to The Waste Land. In fact Eliot once comtemplated the idea of affixing ""Gerontion"' as a prologue to The Waste Land. Gerontion not only extends Prufrock but anticipates Tiresias in his historical con­ sciousness, and the Fisher King in his sterility, who also waits for the life-giving rain. Although Eliot dropped the idea at the instance of Pound, the fact remains that "Geron­ tion' extends the religious quests of the early "saint'- poems, reflects the close affinity of the romantic and the religious m the poems like ""Prufrock'', but also looks forward to the general malaise of spiritual drouth depicted in The Waste Land, which is the concern of the next chapter.

87 Notes and References

1. T. S. Eliot, Poems Written in Early Youth ed. Valerie Eliot (London : Faber and Faber, 1967) . All subsequent references to Eliot's poems except from the juvenilia are from Collected Poems (1909 - 1962) (1963. London : Faber and Faber 1970) and are indicated at the end of the quotation by their page numbers in paranthesis. Similarly all the quota­ tions from Eliot's plays are taken from Collected Plays (London : Faber and Faber 1962) and are indicated in the same way.

2. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 45 3. Ibid. 46 4. Ibid., 84 5. Ibid., 31 6. Ibid. 7. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, 180-84 8. Lyndall Gordon, Eliots Early years, 45-47. 9. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet; T_. S^ Eliot (1965 ; London : Methuen 1985) 35. 10. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 25-28 11. Valerie Eliot, ed. The Letters of T_. S_. Eliot, Vol 1. 1898-1922, 12. Valerie Eliot, ed. The Waste Land : A Facsimile and Transcript, 41 13. Ibid. 14. Ronald Bush, T_. S_. Eliot : A Study in Character and Style, 15. Ibid., 14. 16. Times Literary Supplement, 12 June, 1919. 17. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 19-20. 18. T. S. Eliot, •'"Henry James : The Hawthrone Aspect'', Little Review (Aug. 1918), rpt. in The Shock of Recognition, ed. Edmund Wilson (London : W. H. Allen, 1956), 860, as quoted by Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 18. 19. Valerie Eliot, The Waste Land : A Facsimile and Transcript 31. y 20. T. S. Eliot, ""Preface'' to John Davidson : A Selec­ tion of His Poems, ed. Maurice Lindsay ( London : Hutchin­ son, 1961 ) Xl-Xii.

88 21. James Thomson, ""The City of the Dreadful Night'', Oxford Book of Nineteenth Century English Verse, ed. John Hayward (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1964) 758. 22. Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity, 23. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred., Wood , 169. 24. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 18-19. Informa­ tion on unpublished poems is also available in John Mayer's Tj Sj Eliot's Silent Voices. 25. Ibid. 15. 26. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 27. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 23 28. Ibid, 23-24. Also John T. Mayer, T_. S_. Eliot's Silent Voices, 52-55. Lyndall Gordon views the poem as a religious quest, whereas for Mayer, it is a philosophical quest. 29. John T. Mayer, T_. S_. Eliot's Silent Voices, 55-50. 30. Ibid, 93-96. 31. Valerie Eliot, The Waste Land : A Facsimile and Transcript 109. 32. Ibid; 111. 33. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 59. Also in John T. Mayer, T. S. Eliot's Silent Voices, 147-49. 34. It is interesting to note that Tennessee Williams also uses the same image in A Street - car Named Desire. 35. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 93. 36. John T. Mayer, T_. S^ Eliot's Silent Voices. 152. 37. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years.

38. Valerie Eliot, The Letters of T_. S_. Eliot Vol 1 1898-1922, 312-15. 39. Elizabeth Drew, T_. S_. Eliot : The Design of His Poetry

40. T. S. Eliot, ""A Sceptical Patrician', Athenaeum (28 May 1919), 361-62 as quoted by Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, 100-04.

41. John T. Mayer, T_. S_. Eliot's Silent Voices, 229.

42. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society.

89