Eliot's Poetry

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Analysis Context

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Waste Land, I Waste Land, II Waste Land, III Waste Land, IV •Eliot's Poetry Waste Land, V •Your Poetry •Favorite Poets and Four Quartets: Poems "Burnt Norton" •Modernist Poetry "East Coker" "The Dry Salvages" "Little Gidding" SparkNote by Melissa Martin Study Questions How do I cite this study Further Reading guide?

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Related Message Boards Analysis Eliot's Poetry Eliot attributed a great deal of his early style to the French Symbolists--Rimbaud, Your Poetry Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Laforgue--whom he first encountered in college, in a book by Arthur Favorite Poets and Symons called The Symbolist Movement in Literature. It is easy to understand why a young Poems aspiring poet would want to imitate these glamorous bohemian figures, but their ultimate effect on his poetry is perhaps less profound than he claimed. While he took from them their ability to Modernist Poetry infuse poetry with high intellectualism while maintaining a sensuousness of language, Eliot also developed a great deal that was new and original. His early works, like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land, draw on a wide range of cultural reference to depict a modern world that is in ruins yet somehow beautiful and deeply meaningful. Eliot uses techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition to make his points without having to argue them explicitly. As Ezra Pound once famously said, Eliot truly did "modernize himself." In addition to showcasing a variety of poetic innovations, Eliot's early poetry also develops a series of characters who fit the type of the modern man as described by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others of Eliot's contemporaries. The title character of "Prufrock" is a perfect example: solitary, neurasthenic, overly intellectual, and utterly incapable of expressing himself to the outside world.

As Eliot grew older, and particularly after he converted to Christianity, his poetry changed. The later poems emphasize depth of analysis over breadth of allusion; they simultaneously become more hopeful in tone: Thus, a work such as Four Quartets explores more philosophical territory and offers propositions instead of nihilism. The experiences of living in England during World War II inform the Quartets, which address issues of time, experience, mortality, and art. Rather than lamenting the ruin of modern culture and seeking redemption in the cultural past, as The Waste Land does, the quartets offer ways around human limits through art and spirituality. The pastiche of the earlier works is replaced by philosophy and logic, and the formal experiments of his early years are put aside in favor of a new language consciousness, which emphasizes the sounds and other physical properties of words to create musical, dramatic, and other subtle effects.

However, while Eliot's poetry underwent significance transformations over the course of his career, his poems also bear many unifying aspects: all of Eliot's poetry is marked by a conscious desire to bring together the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the emotional in a way that both honors the past and acknowledges the present. Eliot is always conscious of his own efforts, and he frequently comments on his poetic endeavors in the poems themselves. This humility, which often comes across as melancholy, makes Eliot's some of the most personal, as well as the most intellectually satisfying, poetry in the English language.

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Boards Eliot's Poetry Context Your Poetry Favorite Poets and Thomas Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot as he is better known, was born in 1888 in St. Louis. Poems He was the son of a prominent industrialist who came from a well- connected Boston family. Eliot always felt the loss of his family's New England roots and seemed to be somewhat ashamed Modernist Poetry of his father's business success; throughout his life he continually sought to return to the epicenter of Anglo- Saxon culture, first by attending Harvard and then by emigrating to England, where he lived from 1914 until his death. Eliot began graduate study in philosophy at Harvard and completed his dissertation, although the outbreak of World War I prevented him from taking his examinations and receiving the degree. By that time, though, Eliot had already written "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and the War, which kept him in England, led him to decide to pursue poetry full-time.

Eliot met Ezra Pound in 1914, as well, and it was Pound who was his main mentor and editor and who got his poems published and noticed. During a 1921 break from his job as a bank clerk (to recover from a mental breakdown), Eliot finished the work that was to secure him fame, The Waste Land. This poem, heavily edited by Pound and perhaps also by Eliot's wife, Vivien, addressed the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modern culture, making use of these fragments to create a new kind of poetry. It was also around this time that Eliot began to write criticism, partly in an effort to explain his own methods. In 1925, he went to work for the publishing house Faber & Faber. Despite the distraction of his wife's increasingly serious bouts of mental illness, Eliot was from this time until his death the preeminent literary figure in the English-speaking world; indeed, he was so monumental that younger poets often went out of their way to avoid his looming shadow, painstakingly avoiding all similarities of style.

Eliot became interested in religion in the later 1920s and eventually converted to Anglicanism. His poetry from this point onward shows a greater religious bent, although it never becomes dogmatic the way his sometimes controversial cultural criticism does. Four Quartets, his last major poetic work, combines a Christian sensibility with a profound uncertainty resulting from the war's devastation of Europe. Eliot died in 1965 in London.

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"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Summary Related Message Boards This poem, the earliest of Eliot's major works, was completed in 1910 or 1911 but not Eliot's Poetry published until 1915. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man-- Your Poetry overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem's speaker, seems to Favorite Poets and be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to "force the moment to its crisis" by Poems somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to "dare" an approach to the woman: In his mind he hears the comments others make about his inadequacies, Modernist Poetry and he chides himself for "presuming" emotional interaction could be possible at all. The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for Eliot) physical settings--a cityscape (the famous "patient etherised upon a table") and several interiors (women's arms in the lamplight, coffee spoons, fireplaces)--to a series of vague ocean images conveying Prufrock's emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his second-rate status ("I am not Prince Hamlet"). "Prufrock" is powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the vividness of character achieved.

Form

"Prufrock" is a variation on the dramatic monologue, a type of poem popular with Eliot's predecessors. Dramatic monologues are similar to soliloquies in plays. Three things characterize the dramatic monologue, according to M.H. Abrams. First, they are the utterances of a specific individual (not the poet) at a specific moment in time. Secondly, the monologue is specifically directed at a listener or listeners whose presence is not directly referenced but is merely suggested in the speaker's words. Third, the primary focus is the development and revelation of the speaker's character. Eliot modernizes the form by removing the implied listeners and focusing on Prufrock's interiority and isolation. The epigraph to this poem, from Dante's Inferno, describes Prufrock's ideal listener: one who is as lost as the speaker and will never betray to the world the content of Prufrock's present confessions. In the world Prufrock describes, though, no such sympathetic figure exists, and he must, therefore, be content with silent reflection. In its focus on character and its dramatic sensibility, "Prufrock" anticipates Eliot's later, dramatic works.

The rhyme scheme of this poem is irregular but not random. While sections of the poem may resemble free verse, in reality, "Prufrock" is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic forms. The bits and pieces of rhyme become much more apparent when the poem is read aloud. One of the most prominent formal characteristics of this work is the use of refrains. Prufrock's continual return to the "women [who] come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" and his recurrent questionings ("how should I presume?") and pessimistic appraisals ("That is not it, at all.") both reference an earlier poetic tradition and help Eliot describe the consciousness of a modern, neurotic individual. Prufrock's obsessiveness is aesthetic, but it is also a sign of compulsiveness and isolation. Another important formal feature is the use of fragments of sonnet form, particularly at the poem's conclusion. The three three-line stanzas are rhymed as the conclusion http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section1.html (1 of 3)8/27/2004 12:42:17 AM Eliot's Poetry of a Petrarchan sonnet would be, but their pessimistic, anti-romantic content, coupled with the despairing interjection, "I do not think they (the mermaids) would sing to me," creates a contrast that comments bitterly on the bleakness of modernity.

Commentary

"Prufrock" displays the two most important characteristics of Eliot's early poetry. First, it is strongly influenced by the French Symbolists, like Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, whom Eliot had been reading almost constantly while writing the poem. From the Symbolists, Eliot takes his sensuous language and eye for unnerving or anti-aesthetic detail that nevertheless contributes to the overall beauty of the poem (the yellow smoke and the hair-covered arms of the women are two good examples of this). The Symbolists, too, privileged the same kind of individual Eliot creates with Prufrock: the moody, urban, isolated-yet-sensitive thinker. However, We want your feedback! whereas the Symbolists would have been more likely to make their speaker himself a poet or Please let us know if you artist, Eliot chooses to make Prufrock an unacknowledged poet, a sort of artist for the common have any comments, man. requests, or if you think The second defining characteristic of this poem is its use of fragmentation and you've found an error. juxtaposition. Eliot sustained his interest in fragmentation and its applications throughout his career, and his use of the technique changes in important ways across his body of work: Here, the subjects undergoing fragmentation (and reassembly) are mental focus and certain sets of imagery; in The Waste Land, it is modern culture that splinters; in the Four Quartets we find the fragments of attempted philosophical systems. Eliot's use of bits and pieces of formal structure suggests that fragmentation, although anxiety-provoking, is nevertheless productive; had he chosen to write in free verse, the poem would have seemed much more nihilistic. The kinds of imagery Eliot uses also suggest that something new can be made from the ruins: The series of hypothetical encounters at the poem's center are iterated and discontinuous but nevertheless lead to a sort of epiphany (albeit a dark one) rather than just leading nowhere. Eliot also introduces an image that will recur in his later poetry, that of the scavenger. Prufrock thinks that he "should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Crabs are scavengers, garbage- eaters who live off refuse that makes its way to the sea floor. Eliot's discussions of his own poetic technique (see especially his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent") suggest that making something beautiful out of the refuse of modern life, as a crab sustains and nourishes itself on garbage, may, in fact, be the highest form of art. At the very least, this notion subverts romantic ideals about art; at best, it suggests that fragments may become reintegrated, that art may be in some way therapeutic for a broken modern world. In The Waste Land, crabs become rats, and the optimism disappears, but here Eliot seems to assert only the limitless potential of scavenging.

"Prufrock" ends with the hero assigning himself a role in one of Shakespeare's plays: While he is no Hamlet, he may yet be useful and important as "an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two…" This implies that there is still a continuity between Shakespeare's world and ours, that Hamlet is still relevant to us and that we are still part of a world that could produce something like Shakespeare's plays. Implicit in this, of course, is the suggestion that Eliot, who has created an "attendant lord," may now go on to create another Hamlet. While "Prufrock" ends with a devaluation of its hero, it exalts its creator. Or does it? The last line of the poem suggests otherwise--that when the world intrudes, when "human voices wake us," the dream is shattered: "we drown." With this single line, Eliot dismantles the romantic notion that poetic genius is all that is needed to triumph over the destructive, impersonal forces of the modern world. In reality, Eliot the poet is little better than his creation: He differs from Prufrock only by retaining a bit of hubris, which shows through from time to time. Eliot's poetic creation, thus, mirrors Prufrock's soliloquy: Both are an expression of aesthetic ability and sensitivity that seems to have no place in the modern world. This realistic, anti-romantic outlook sets the stage for Eliot's later works, including The Waste Land.

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The Waste Land Section I: "The Burial of the Dead"

Summary Related Message Boards The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial Eliot's Poetry service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different Your Poetry speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in Favorite Poets and which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if Poems the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current Modernist Poetry existence ("I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter"). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader "something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust" (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines). The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a "hyacinth girl" and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered through quotations from Wagner's operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet's sins.

Form

Like "Prufrock," this section of The Waste Land can be seen as a modified dramatic monologue. The four speakers in this section are frantic in their need to speak, to find an audience, but they find themselves surrounded by dead people and thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars. Because the sections are so short and the situations so confusing, the effect is not one of an overwhelming impression of a single character; instead, the reader is left with the feeling of being trapped in a crowd, unable to find a familiar face.

Also like "Prufrock," The Waste Land employs only partial rhyme schemes and short bursts of structure. These are meant to reference--but also rework-- the literary past, achieving simultaneously a stabilizing and a defamiliarizing effect. The world of The Waste Land has some parallels to an earlier time, but it cannot be approached in the same way. The inclusion of fragments in languages other than English further complicates matters. The reader is not expected to be able to translate these immediately; rather, they are reminders of the cosmopolitan nature of http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section2.rhtml (1 of 3)8/27/2004 12:42:21 AM Eliot's Poetry twentieth-century Europe and of mankind's fate after the Tower of Babel: We will never be able to perfectly comprehend one another.

Commentary

Not only is The Waste Land Eliot's greatest work, but it may be--along with Joyce's Ulysses--the greatest work of all modernist literature. Most of the poem was written in 1921, and it first appeared in print in 1922. As the poem's dedication indicates, Eliot received a great deal of guidance from Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and to break up the rhyme scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot's wife, Vivien, also had a significant role in the poem's final form. A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe. A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches We want your feedback! his subject is the poem's epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with Please let us know if you prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants have any comments, to die. The Sibyl's predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former requests, or if you think glory. Thus, the underlying plot of The Waste Land, inasmuch as it can be said to have one, you've found an error. revolves around Eliot's reading of two extraordinarily influential contemporary cultural/ anthropological texts, Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazier's The Watch us work! Golden Bough. Both of these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern thought and religion; of particular interest to both authors is the story of the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is the cause of his country becoming a desiccated "waste land." Heal the Fisher King, the legend says, and the land will regain its fertility. According to Weston and Frazier, healing the Fisher King has been the subject of mythic tales from ancient Egypt to Arthurian England. Eliot picks up on the figure of the Fisher King legend's wasteland as an appropriate description of the state of modern society. The important difference, of course, is that in Eliot's world there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all. The legend's imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative (like religion or mythology) in the modern world.

Eliot's poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poem's writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its apex in the Four Quartets. The overall range of allusions in The Waste Land, though, suggests no overarching paradigm but rather a grab bag of broken fragments that must somehow be pieced together to form a coherent whole. While Eliot employs a deliberately difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader and display his own intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the twentieth century.

The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. Marie's childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledding, and coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture.

The second episode contains a troubled religious proposition. The speaker describes a true wasteland of "stony rubbish"; in it, he says, man can recognize only "[a] heap of broken images." Yet the scene seems to offer salvation: shade and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only of nothingness--a handful of dust--which is so profound as to be frightening; yet truth also resides here: No longer a religious phenomenon achieved through Christ, truth is represented by a mere void. The speaker remembers a female figure from his past, with whom he has apparently had some sort of romantic involvement. In contrast to the present http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section2.rhtml (2 of 3)8/27/2004 12:42:21 AM Eliot's Poetry setting in the desert, his memories are lush, full of water and blooming flowers. The vibrancy of the earlier scene, though, leads the speaker to a revelation of the nothingness he now offers to show the reader. Again memory serves to contrast the past with the present, but here it also serves to explode the idea of coherence in either place. In the episode from the past, the "nothingness" is more clearly a sexual failure, a moment of impotence. Despite the overall fecundity and joy of the moment, no reconciliation, and, therefore, no action, is possible. This in turn leads directly to the desert waste of the present. In the final line of the episode attention turns from the desert to the sea. Here, the sea is not a locus for the fear of nothingness, and neither is it the locus for a philosophical interpretation of nothingness; rather, it is the site of true, essential nothingness itself. The line comes from a section of Tristan und Isolde where Tristan waits for Isolde to come heal him. She is supposedly coming by ship but fails to arrive. The ocean is truly empty, devoid of the possibility of healing or revelation.

The third episode explores Eliot's fascination with transformation. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris conducts the most outrageous form of "reading" possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into predictions, many of which will come true in succeeding sections of the poem. Eliot transforms the traditional tarot pack to serve his purposes. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work of magic and transformation in English literature, Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Those are pearls that were his eyes" is a quote from one of Ariel's songs). Transformation in The Tempest, though, is the result of the highest art of humankind. Here, transformation is associated with fraud, vulgarity, and cheap mysticism. That Madame Sosostris will prove to be right in her predictions of death and transformation is a direct commentary on the failed religious mysticism and prophecy of the preceding desert section.

The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland of the poem, the modern city. Eliot's London references Baudelaire's Paris ("Unreal City"), Dickens's London ("the brown fog of a winter dawn") and Dante's hell ("the flowing crowd of the dead"). The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker recognizes, is a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of ghoulish questions about a corpse buried in his garden: again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and fertility. This encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the tremendous slaughter of the first World War; however, it can also be read as an exercise in ultimate futility: as we see in Stetson's failure to respond to the speaker's inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights of history, tradition, and the poet's dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.

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The Waste Land Section II: "A Game of Chess"

Summary Related Message Boards This section takes its title from two plays by the early 17th-century playwright Thomas Eliot's Poetry Middleton, in one of which the moves in a game of chess denote stages in a seduction. This Your Poetry section focuses on two opposing scenes, one of high society and one of the lower classes. The Favorite Poets and first half of the section portrays a wealthy, highly groomed woman surrounded by exquisite Poems furnishings. As she waits for a lover, her neurotic thoughts become frantic, meaningless cries. Her day culminates with plans for an excursion and a game of chess. The second part of this Modernist Poetry section shifts to a London barroom, where two women discuss a third woman. Between the bartender's repeated calls of "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" (the bar is closing for the night) one of the women recounts a conversation with their friend Lil, whose husband has just been discharged from the army. She has chided Lil over her failure to get herself some false teeth, telling her that her husband will seek out the company of other women if she doesn't improve her appearance. Lil claims that the cause of her ravaged looks is the medication she took to induce an abortion; having nearly died giving birth to her fifth child, she had refused to have another, but her husband "won't leave [her] alone." The women leave the bar to a chorus of "good night(s)" reminiscent of Ophelia's farewell speech in Hamlet.

Form

The first part of the section is largely in unrhymed iambic pentameter lines, or blank verse. As the section proceeds, the lines become increasingly irregular in length and meter, giving the feeling of disintegration, of things falling apart. As the woman of the first half begins to give voice to her paranoid thoughts, things do fall apart, at least formally: We read lines of dialogue, then a snippet from a nonsense song. The last four lines of the first half rhyme, although they are irregular in meter, suggesting at least a partial return to stability.

The second half of the section is a dialogue interrupted by the barman's refrain. Rather than following an organized structure of rhyme and meter, this section constitutes a loose series of phrases connected by "I said(s)" and "she said(s)." This is perhaps the most poetically experimental section of the entire poem. Eliot is writing in a lower-class vernacular here that resists poetic treatment. This section refutes the prevalent claim that iambic pentameter mirrors normal English speech patterns: Line length and stresses are consistently irregular. Yet the section sounds like poetry: the repeated use of "I said" and the grounding provided by the barman's chorus allow the woman's speech to flow elegantly, despite her rough phrasing and the coarse content of her story.

Commentary

The two women of this section of the poem represent the two sides of modern sexuality: while one side of this sexuality is a dry, barren interchange inseparable from neurosis and self- http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section3.rhtml (1 of 2)8/27/2004 12:42:25 AM Eliot's Poetry destruction, the other side of this sexuality is a rampant fecundity associated with a lack of culture and rapid aging. The first woman is associated by allusion with Cleopatra, Dido, and even Keats's Lamia, by virtue of the lushness of language surrounding her (although Eliot would never have acknowledged Keats as an influence). She is a frustrated, overly emotional but not terribly intellectual figure, oddly sinister, surrounded by "strange synthetic perfumes" and smoking candles. She can be seen as a counterpart to the title character of Eliot's earlier "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," with whom she shares both a physical setting and a profound sense of isolation. Her association with Dido and Cleopatra, two women who committed suicide out of frustrated love, suggests her fundamental irrationality. Unlike the two queens of myth, however, this woman will never become a cultural touchstone. Her despair is pathetic, rather than moving, as she demands that her lover stay with her and tell her his thoughts. The lover, who seems to be associated with the narrator of this part of the poem, can think only of drowning (again, in a reference to The Tempest) and rats among dead men's bones. The woman is explicitly compared to Philomela, a character out of Ovid's Metamorphoses who is raped by her brother-in-law the We want your feedback! king, who then cuts her tongue out to keep her quiet. She manages to tell her sister, who helps her Please let us know if you avenge herself by murdering the king's son and feeding him to the king. The sisters are then have any comments, changed into birds, Philomela into a nightingale. This comparison suggests something essentially requests, or if you think disappointing about the woman, that she is unable to communicate her interior self to the world. you've found an error. The woman and her surroundings, although aesthetically pleasing, are ultimately sterile and meaningless, as suggested by the nonsense song that she sings (which manages to debase even Watch us work! Shakespeare).

The second scene in this section further diminishes the possibility that sex can bring regeneration--either cultural or personal. This section is remarkably free of the cultural allusions that dominate the rest of the poem; instead, it relies on vernacular speech to make its point. Notice that Eliot is using a British vernacular: By this point he had moved to England permanently and had become a confirmed Anglophile. Although Eliot is able to produce startlingly beautiful poetry from the rough speech of the women in the bar, he nevertheless presents their conversation as further reason for pessimism. Their friend Lil has done everything the right way--married, supported her soldier husband, borne children--yet she is being punished by her body. Interestingly, this section ends with a line echoing Ophelia's suicide speech in Hamlet; this links Lil to the woman in the first section of the poem, who has also been compared to famous female suicides. The comparison between the two is not meant to suggest equality between them or to propose that the first woman's exaggerated sense of high culture is in any way equivalent to the second woman's lack of it; rather, Eliot means to suggest that neither woman's form of sexuality is regenerative.

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The Waste Land Section III: "The Fire Sermon"

Summary Related Message Boards The title of this, the longest section of The Waste Land, is taken from a sermon given by Eliot's Poetry Buddha in which he encourages his followers to give up earthly passion (symbolized by fire) and Your Poetry seek freedom from earthly things. A turn away from the earthly does indeed take place in this Favorite Poets and section, as a series of increasingly debased sexual encounters concludes with a river-song and a Poems religious incantation. The section opens with a desolate riverside scene: Rats and garbage surround the speaker, who is fishing and "musing on the king my brother's wreck." The river- Modernist Poetry song begins in this section, with the refrain from Spenser's Prothalamion: "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song." A snippet from a vulgar soldier's ballad follows, then a reference back to Philomela (see the previous section). The speaker is then propositioned by Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris's tarot pack. Eugenides invites the speaker to go with him to a hotel known as a meeting place for homosexual trysts.

The speaker then proclaims himself to be Tiresias, a figure from classical mythology who has both male and female features ("Old man with wrinkled female breasts") and is blind but can "see" into the future. Tiresias/the speaker observes a young typist, at home for tea, who awaits her lover, a dull and slightly arrogant clerk. The woman allows the clerk to have his way with her, and he leaves victorious. Tiresias, who has "foresuffered all," watches the whole thing. After her lover's departure, the typist thinks only that she's glad the encounter is done and over.

A brief interlude begins the river-song in earnest. First, a fisherman's bar is described, then a beautiful church interior, then the Thames itself. These are among the few moments of tranquility in the poem, and they seem to represent some sort of simpler alternative. The Thames- daughters, borrowed from Spenser's poem, chime in with a nonsense chorus ("Weialala leia / Wallala leialala"). The scene shifts again, to Queen Elizabeth I in an amorous encounter with the Earl of Leicester. The queen seems unmoved by her lover's declarations, and she thinks only of her "people humble people who expect / Nothing." The section then comes to an abrupt end with a few lines from St. Augustine's Confessions and a vague reference to the Buddha's Fire Sermon ("burning").

Form

This section of The Waste Land is notable for its inclusion of popular poetic forms, particularly musical ones. The more plot-driven sections are in Eliot's usual assortment of various line lengths, rhymed at random. "The Fire Sermon," however, also includes bits of many musical pieces, including Spenser's wedding song (which becomes the song of the Thames-daughters), a soldier's ballad, a nightingale's chirps, a song from Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, and a mandolin tune (which has no words but is echoed in "a clatter and a chatter from within"). The use of such "low" forms cuts both ways here: In one sense, it provides a critical commentary on the episodes described, the cheap sexual encounters shaped by popular culture (the http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section4.rhtml (1 of 3)8/27/2004 12:42:29 AM Eliot's Poetry gramophone, the men's hotel). But Eliot also uses these bits and pieces to create high art, and some of the fragments he uses (the lines from Spenser in particular) are themselves taken from more exalted forms. In the case of the Prothalamion, in fact, Eliot is placing himself within a tradition stretching back to ancient Greece (classically, "prothalamion" is a generic term for a poem-like song written for a wedding). Again this provides an ironic contrast to the debased goings-on but also provides another form of connection and commentary. Another such reference, generating both ironic distance and proximate parallels, is the inclusion of Elizabeth I: The liaison between Elizabeth and Leicester is traditionally romanticized, and, thus, the reference seems to clash with the otherwise sordid nature of this section. However, Eliot depicts Elizabeth-- and Spenser, for that matter--as a mere fragment, stripped of noble connotations and made to represent just one more piece of cultural rubbish. Again, this is not meant to be a democratizing move but a nihilistic one: Romance is dead. We want your feedback! Commentary Please let us know if you have any comments, The opening two stanzas of this section describe the ultimate "Waste Land" as Eliot sees requests, or if you think it. The wasteland is cold, dry, and barren, covered in garbage. Unlike the desert, which at least burns with heat, this place is static, save for a few scurrying rats. Even the river, normally a you've found an error. symbol of renewal, has been reduced to a "dull canal." The ugliness stands in implicit contrast to Watch us work! the "Sweet Thames" of Spenser's time. The most significant image in these lines, though, is the rat. Like the crabs in Prufrock, rats are scavengers, taking what they can from the refuse of higher-order creatures. The rat could be said to provide a model for Eliot's poetic process: Like the rat, Eliot takes what he can from earlier, grander generations and uses the bits and pieces to sustain (poetic) life. Somehow this is preferable to the more coherent but vulgar existence of the contemporary world, here represented by the sound of horns and motors in the distance, intimating a sexual liaison.

The actual sexual encounters that take place in this section of the poem are infinitely unfruitful. Eugenides proposes a homosexual tryst, which by its very nature thwarts fertility. The impossibility of regeneration by such means is symbolized by the currants in his pocket--the desiccated, deadened version of what were once plump, fertile fruits. The typist and her lover are equally barren in their way, even though reproduction is at least theoretically possible for the two. Living in so impoverished a manner that she does not even own a bed, the typist is certainly not interested in a family. Elizabeth and Leicester are perhaps the most interesting of the three couples, however. For political reasons, Elizabeth was required to represent herself as constantly available for marriage (to royalty from countries with whom England may have wanted an alliance); out of this need came the myth of the "Virgin Queen." This can be read as the opposite of the Fisher King legend: To protect the vitality of the land, Elizabeth had to compromise her own sexuality; whereas in the Fisher King story, the renewal of the land comes with the renewal of the Fisher King's sexual potency. Her tryst with Leicester, therefore, is a consummation that is simultaneously denied, an event that never happened. The twisted logic underlying Elizabeth's public sexuality, or lack thereof, mirrors and distorts the Fisher King plot and further questions the possibility for renewal, especially through sexuality, in the modern world.

Tiresias, thus, becomes an important model for modern existence. Neither man nor woman, and blind yet able to see with ultimate clarity, he is an individual who does not hope or act. He has, like Prufrock, "seen it all," but, unlike Prufrock, he sees no possibility for action. Whereas Prufrock is paralyzed by his neuroses, Tiresias is held motionless by ennui and pragmatism. He is not quite able to escape earthly things, though, for he is forced to sit and watch the sordid deeds of mortals; like the Sibyl in the poem's epigraph, he would like to die but cannot. The brief interlude following the typist's tryst may offer an alternative to escape, by describing a warm, everyday scene of work and companionship; however, the interlude is brief, and Eliot once again tosses us into a world of sex and strife. Tiresias disappears, to be replaced by St. Augustine at the end of the section. Eliot claims in his footnote to have deliberately conflated Augustine and the Buddha, as the representatives of Eastern and Western asceticism. Both seem, in the lines Eliot quotes, to be unable to transcend the world on their own: Augustine must call on God to "pluck [him] out," while Buddha can only repeat the word "burning," unable to break free of its monotonous fascination. The poem's next section, which will relate the story of a death without resurrection, exposes the absurdity of these two figures' faith in external higher powers. That this section ends with only the single word "burning," isolated on the page, reveals the futility of all of man's struggles.

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Boards Eliot's Poetry The Waste Land Section IV: "Death by Water" Your Poetry Favorite Poets and Summary Poems The shortest section of the poem, "Death by Water" describes a man, Phlebas the Modernist Poetry Phoenician, who has died, apparently by drowning. In death he has forgotten his worldly cares as the creatures of the sea have picked his body apart. The narrator asks his reader to consider

Phlebas and recall his or her own mortality.

Form

While this section appears on the page as a ten-line stanza, in reading, it compresses into eight: four pairs of rhyming couplets. Both visually and audibly, this is one of the most formally organized sections of the poem. It is meant to recall other highly organized forms that often have philosophical or religious import, like aphorisms and parables. The alliteration and the deliberately archaic language ("o you," "a fortnight dead") also contribute to the serious, didactic feel of this section.

Commentary

The major point of this short section is to rebut ideas of renewal and regeneration. Phlebas just dies; that's it. Like Stetson's corpse in the first section, Phlebas's body yields nothing more than products of decay. However, the section's meaning is far from flat; indeed, its ironic layering is twofold. First, this section fulfills one of the prophecies of Madame Sosostris in the poem's first section: "Fear death by water," she says, after pulling the card of the Drowned Sailor. Second, this section, in its language and form, mimics other literary forms (parables, biblical stories, etc.) that are normally rich in meaning. These two features suggest that something of great significance lies here. In reality, though, the only lesson that Phlebas offers is that the physical reality of death and decay triumphs over all. Phlebas is not resurrected or transfigured. Eliot further emphasizes Phlebas's dried-up antiquity and irrelevance by placing this section in the distant past (by making Phlebas a Phoenician).

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The Waste Land Section V: "What the Thunder Said"

Summary Related Message Boards The final section of The Waste Land is dramatic in both its imagery and its events. The Eliot's Poetry first half of the section builds to an apocalyptic climax, as suffering people become "hooded Your Poetry hordes swarming" and the "unreal" cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London Favorite Poets and are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. A decaying chapel is described, which suggests the Poems chapel in the legend of the Holy Grail. Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and the rains come, relieving the drought and bringing life back to the land. Curiously, no heroic figure has appeared Modernist Poetry to claim the Grail; the renewal has come seemingly at random, gratuitously.

The scene then shifts to the Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where thunder rumbles. Eliot draws on the traditional interpretation of "what the thunder says," as taken from the Upanishads (Hindu fables). According to these fables, the thunder "gives," "sympathizes," and "controls" through its "speech"; Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunder's power. The meditations seem to bring about some sort of reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting on the shore preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his imminent death or at least abdication. The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children's song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant of "Shantih shantih shantih"--the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as "the peace which passeth understanding," the expression of ultimate resignation.

Form

Just as the third section of the poem explores popular forms, such as music, the final section of The Waste Land moves away from more typical poetic forms to experiment with structures normally associated with religion and philosophy. The proposition and meditation structure of the last part of this section looks forward to the more philosophically oriented Four Quartets, Eliot's last major work. The reasoned, structured nature of the final stanzas comes as a relief after the obsessively repetitive language and alliteration ("If there were water / And no rock / If there were rock / And also water...") of the apocalyptic opening. The reader's relief at the shift in style mirrors the physical relief brought by the rain midway through the section. Both formally and thematically, then, this final chapter follows a pattern of obsession and resignation. Its patterning reflects the speaker's offer at the end to "fit you," to transform experience into poetry ("fit" is an archaic term for sections of a poem or play; here, "fit" is used as a verb, meaning "to render into a fit," to make into poetry).

Commentary

The initial imagery associated with the apocalypse at this section's opening is taken from the crucifixion of Christ. Significantly, though, Christ is not resurrected here: we are told, "He http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section6.rhtml (1 of 2)8/27/2004 12:42:38 AM Eliot's Poetry who was living is now dead." The rest of the first part, while making reference to contemporary events in Eastern Europe and other more traditional apocalypse narratives, continues to draw on Biblical imagery and symbolism associated with the quest for the Holy Grail. The repetitive language and harsh imagery of this section suggest that the end is perhaps near, that not only will there be no renewal but that there will be no survival either. Cities are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed, mirroring the cyclical downfall of cultures: Jerusalem, Greece, Egypt, and Austria-- among the major empires of the past two millennia--all see their capitals fall. There is something nevertheless insubstantial about this looming disaster: it seems "unreal," as the ghost-filled London did earlier in the poem. It is as if such a profound end would be inappropriate for such a pathetic civilization. Rather, we expect the end to be accompanied by a sense of boredom and surrender.

Release comes not from any heroic act but from the random call of a farmyard bird. The We want your feedback! symbolism surrounding the Grail myth is still extant but it is empty, devoid of people. No one Please let us know if you comes to the ruined chapel, yet it exists regardless of who visits it. This is a horribly sad have any comments, situation: The symbols that have previously held profound meaning still exist, yet they are unused and unusable. A flash of light--a quick glimpse of truth and vitality, perhaps--releases the requests, or if you think rain and lets the poem end. you've found an error.

The meditations upon the Upanishads give Eliot a chance to test the potential of the Watch us work! modern world. Asking, "what have we given?" he finds that the only time people give is in the sexual act and that this gift is ultimately evanescent and destructive: He associates it with spider webs and solicitors reading wills. Just as the poem's speaker fails to find signs of giving, so too does he search in vain for acts of sympathy--the second characteristic of "what the thunder says": He recalls individuals so caught up in his or her own fate--each thinking only of the key to his or her own prison--as to be oblivious to anything but "ethereal rumors" of others. The third idea expressed in the thunder's speech--that of control--holds the most potential, although it implies a series of domineering relationships and surrenders of the self that, ultimately, are never realized.

Finally Eliot turns to the Fisher King himself, still on the shore fishing. The possibility of regeneration for the "arid plain" of society has been long ago discarded. Instead, the king will do his best to put in order what remains of his kingdom, and he will then surrender, although he still fails to understand the true significance of the coming void (as implied by the phrase "peace which passeth understanding"). The burst of allusions at the end can be read as either a final attempt at coherence or as a final dissolution into a world of fragments and rubbish. The king offers some consolation: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," he says, suggesting that it will be possible to continue on despite the failed redemption. It will still be possible for him, and for Eliot, to "fit you," to create art in the face of madness. It is important that the last words of the poem are in a non-Western language: Although the meaning of the words themselves communicates resignation ("peace which passeth understanding"), they invoke an alternative set of paradigms to those of the Western world; they offer a glimpse into a culture and a value system new to us--and, thus, offer some hope for an alternative to our own dead world.

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Four Quartets: "Burnt Norton"

Summary Related Message Boards The first of the quartets, "Burnt Norton," is named for a ruined country house in Eliot's Poetry Gloucestershire. This quartet is the most explicitly concerned with time as an abstract principle. Your Poetry The first section combines a hypothesis on time--that the past and the future are always contained Favorite Poets and in the present--with a description of a rose garden where children hide, laughing. A bird serves as Poems the poet's guide, bringing him into the garden, showing him around, and saving him from despair at not being able to reach the laughing children. The second section begins with a sort of song, Modernist Poetry filled with abstract images of a vaguely pagan flavor. The poem shifts midway through the section, where it again assumes a more meditative tone in order to sort out the differences between consciousness and living in time: The speaker asserts, "To be conscious is not to be in time," for consciousness implies a fixed perspective while time is characterized by a transient relativity (around the fixed point of the present). However, this statement does not intend to devalue memory and temporal existence, which, according to the poem, allow the moments of greatest beauty. The third section of "Burnt Norton" reads like the bridge section of a song, in which the key changes. In this section, Eliot describes a "place of disaffection"--perhaps the everyday world--which allows neither transcendence ("darkness") nor the beauty of the moment ("daylight"). The fourth, very short section returns to a sort of melody (some of the lines rhyme) to describe the unattainable, fictional point of fixity around which time is organized. This point is described as surrounded by flowers and birds; perhaps it can be found in the rose garden of the first section. The final section of this quartet returns to reality: Despite the apparent vitality of words and music, these must die; the children's laughter in the garden becomes a mocking laughter, scorning our enslavement to time.

Form

Eliot is much less experimental with rhyme and meter here than he is in his earlier works. Instead, he displays a mature language consciousness. Through the repetition of words and the use of structures like chiasmus and pastiche, he creates a rhythm not dependent on previous poetic forms. It is as if the mere meaning of the words is not enough to express the philosophical concepts Eliot wants to explore, as they "decay with imprecision": He must exploit the physical properties of the words themselves. The repetition and circularity of language that are this poem's hallmarks highlight the infinite circularity of time: Just as past, present, and future cannot be separated with any precision, neither can the words used to describe them. Rather than exploiting bizarre combinations of images or intricate formal devices, Eliot uses the gravity of terms like "past" and "present" to create a beautiful monument of ideas.

Commentary

The Four Quartets were written over a period of eight years, from 1935 to 1942. These years span World War II; they also follow Eliot's conversion to the Church of England and his http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section7.rhtml (1 of 2)8/27/2004 12:42:43 AM Eliot's Poetry naturalization as a British subject. These poems are the work of an older, more mature, spiritually attuned poet, facing a world torn by war and increasingly neglectful of the past. Each of the Four Quartets considers spiritual existence, consciousness, and the relationship of the present to the past. Whereas The Waste Land and others of Eliot's early works take an interest in the effects of time on culture, the Quartets are concerned with the conflict between individual mortality and the endless span of human existence. Accordingly, each quartet focuses on a particular place with its own distinctive significance to human history and takes off from that place to propose a series of ideas about spirituality and meaningful experience. Each quartet separates into five sections; Eliot used these divisions and the transitions between them to try to create an effect he described as similar to the musical form of the sonata. The Quartets, thus, display none of the fragmentation or collage-like qualities of Eliot's earlier poetry; instead, Eliot substitutes an elegant measuredness and a new awareness of language: Puns and other forms of wordplay occur with some frequency. We want your feedback! Eliot does not hide the ideas behind the poetry here. His meditations on time and being Please let us know if you are stated fairly explicitly and can be easily traced in the poem. "Burnt Norton" is, however, a have any comments, poem about distraction, and two of the more interesting aspects of the poem are also two of its requests, or if you think most understated moments. The first of these surrounds the garden in which the first section is you've found an error. set. Certainly the garden--"our first world"--references the Garden of Eden: A place of unattainable peace (and in this case insight) that is normally forbidden to mere mortals but that Watch us work! exists in memory and in literature as a standard to which everyday existence must be unfavorably compared. Yet the garden is also a part of the ruined estate from which this quartet takes its name; it bears the marks of human presence and abandonment--empty pools and formal hedges gone wild. The wreck of the garden brings to mind the ruins so prominent in Eliot's earlier poetry, except that, here, ruins are a symbol of the futility of human aspirations and particularly of the futility of trying to alter the natural order.

Ruins also call to mind fragments, especially of the kind that make up Eliot's earlier poetry. The first line of the second section of "Burnt Norton"--"Garlic and sapphires in the mud"-- highlights Eliot's new attitude toward the fragmentary nature of modern culture. This famous line juxtaposes a series of random things, but the effect is not the atmosphere of belatedness and melancholy characteristic of The Waste Land. Rather, the collage-like arrangements of this section form a nearly coherent whole, a meaningless song that sounds traditional but isn't. Again fragments and ruins stand in defiance of human aspirations, only this poem does not lament that things once made sense and have now ceased to do so; rather, it declares that coherence never existed at all--that meaning and human experience are necessarily mutually exclusive.

The second center of interest in this quartet is constructed around the Chinese vase and the ruminations on poetry in the fifth section. This section clearly owes a debt to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," with which it shares some of its thematic concerns and its imagery. The Chinese jar represents the capacity of art to transcend the limitations of the moment, to achieve a kind of victory over, or perspective upon, time. In its form and pattern, in its physical existence, the jar is able to overcome the usual imprecision of human expression. By emphasizing form and pattern, Eliot suggests that poetry, which takes advantage of the linguistic versions of these, may also be able to achieve transcendence. Nevertheless, at the end there still remains the ghostly laughter of children in the garden, mocking "the waste sad time" of the poet and of poetry. The place of poetry and Eliot's own poetic practices will be a subject of scrutiny elsewhere in the Quartets.

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Four Quartets: "East Coker"

Summary Related Message Boards This, the second of the Quartets, appeared in 1940. It takes its name from the village in Eliot's Poetry Somerset, England, that was the home of Eliot's first forebear to leave for America in the 17th Your Poetry century. This poem is most concerned with the place of man in the natural order and with the idea Favorite Poets and of renewal. The most explicitly Christian of the quartets, this is also the one that addresses the Poems War most directly, particularly in its pessimism and visions of destruction. In addition, Eliot here engages in what is perhaps his most extended and direct meditation on his poetic career. Modernist Poetry

The first section of "East Coker" describes the cycle of renewal and decay as Eliot sees it.

Houses and other signs of human habitation become empty fields or freeway overpasses. In the fields on summer nights, if one listens carefully enough, one can hear the sounds of the simple rural life of the past. The language of this section is reminiscent of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, with its emphasis on natural cycles and harmony. Time here, however, is less cyclical than it is linear: "In my beginning is my end." The second section of the poem opens with a lyric on the disturbance of the seasons. Suddenly, the poem reverses itself, and Eliot attacks his own poetic work as "not very satisfactory: / ...worn-out poetical fashion." Eliot rejects "the knowledge derived from experience" as having "only a limited value," and he identifies humility as the only wisdom possible for humans. The section ends with a reminder that the houses and the dancers of the first section have all disappeared. The third section provides a continuation of the string of disappearances, as Eliot catalogues those who have passed into the darkness of death. This recalls the first section of The Waste Land ("I had not thought death had undone so many"), except that it is, of course, much more pessimistic: Here, there are not even the ghosts of former friends with whom to converse. The meditative portion of this section combines an Eastern nihilism and rhetorical structure with a more Christian message, as the poet tells himself to wait patiently and to expect a difficult route to awareness. The fourth section of "East Coker" provides the most explicit reminder of the war. It describes a hospital staffed by a "wounded surgeon" and a "dying nurse" where patients are not healed but are led through painful illness to death and a tenuous salvation. The section ends with a reference to Good Friday, the day of Christ's crucifixion--a reminder that anything worthy must come through suffering, forbearance, and deferral to a higher authority. The final section of the poem again focuses on Eliot's failure as a poet. He has wasted his youth and has only learned how to articulate ideas that are no longer useful. His life is a struggle to "recover what has been lost." Finally, he settles for an unsatisfying earthly existence followed by the promise of darkness and death, in which he will finally find that "[i]n my end is my beginning."

Form

In this Quartet, Eliot continues to reject previous poetic forms in favor of an experiment with language. Terms like "end" and "beginning" take on multiple meanings and shadings as they are reused and juxtaposed. Eliot here displays a certain cleverness with words (the "receipt for http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section8.rhtml (1 of 2)8/27/2004 12:42:48 AM Eliot's Poetry deceit" that our forebears leave us, for example) that suggests frustration with trying to communicate via his normal tone of high seriousness. The fourth section of "East Coker" is written in perfect ababb rhyme and is one of the few works in which Eliot uses a sustained formal structure. Perhaps in this submission to the authority of tradition, Eliot mirrors his thematic submission to the authority of God in this section, which ends with the reference to Good Friday. Perhaps Eliot resorts to a more formal structure in the feeling that many of his previous poetic efforts seem futile. Either way, "East Coker" represents a continued shift away from the highly fragmented style that characterizes The Waste Land and the other early works.

Commentary

In "East Coker," Eliot continues to work with a set of images that have appeared in his poetry since The Waste Land. Encounters with "shades," or ghosts, come to represent the poet's We want your feedback! own mortality. They also come to represent a level of understanding that is always within sight, Please let us know if you yet forever unattainable. In this quartet, the children in the garden from "Burnt Norton" and the have any comments, shades on London Bridge from The Waste Land have been replaced by villagers on the green, requests, or if you think dancing in celebration of a wedding. The poem even shifts into archaic English at this point, as if to assert that the apparitions are momentarily speaking through the poet. The villagers reappear at you've found an error. other moments in the poem, often just when Eliot remarks that they have disappeared, and are supplemented by the shades of section three, who represent literally the citizens of London Watch us work! descending into subway tunnels to escape World War II air raids but who also seem to denote the masses of humanity who have lived and died without making a mark on the world. Everything cycles endlessly but without meaning: What could it possibly mean to be a part of something the whole of which no one will ever have sufficient perspective to see?

Even Eliot's take on Christianity is colored by despair. The rebirth he describes as resulting from Christ's crucifixion is no rebirth at all but a terrifying stay at a hospital staffed by corpses. The best we can hope for is to "die of the absolute paternal care." Eliot emphasizes not Easter Sunday--the day of the Resurrection--but instead Good Friday: the day of Christ's death, for which humans bear responsibility. The hospital imagery and the emphasis on human malignity are obvious references to the European war raging while Eliot was writing. They also, though, represent his realization that human folly and the inability to see the larger designs behind history doom any human endeavors to failure.

Particularly doomed to failure are Eliot's own attempts at poetry. This is by far the poet at his most pessimistic. The beautiful, if confusing and despairing, lyric that opens the second section is erased by the harsh assessment of poetry that follows it. Here words not only fail to signify completely but indeed actively falsify, for they fail to appreciate the pattern rendered anew "in every moment" for what it truly is: "a new and shocking valuation of all we have been." This is the same assessment of time and perspective that Eliot had made in his earlier essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," except that here, the destruction and renovation brought about by time does not enable poetry or enrich the cultural tradition--rather, it is merely crippling. The contemporary world in this poem is made up not of the fragments of past glories that were featured in The Waste Land, but of disconnected, entirely new and culturally blank features: overpasses and subway tunnels. Thus, "East Coker" offers little hope for either humanity or poetry.

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Four Quartets: "The Dry Salvages"

Summary Related Message Boards The third of the Quartets, "The Dry Salvages" appeared in 1941. The word "salvages" in Eliot's Poetry the title should be pronounced, as Eliot mentions in a note to the poem, to rhyme with "assuages," Your Poetry with the emphasis on the penultimate syllable. The Dry Salvages are a group of small, rocky Favorite Poets and islands with a lighthouse off the coast of Massachusetts. Eliot presumably visited them or at least Poems knew of them as a boy. This quartet departs from the pessimism and human ruins of the other three to consider humanity as a whole, as an entity with a unified subconscious and memory that Modernist Poetry produce mythic structures. Humanity is, thus, placed on a level with the natural world as something with a history and with cycles of rebirth and renewal.

The first section of "The Dry Salvages" makes an explicit comparison between a river and the sea as models for the unknowable. A river, while it may figure prominently in human mythologies, is something that can eventually be crossed and conquered, while the sea represents an endless reserve of depths and mysteries: Man can live with the ocean but he will never master it. The second section of the poem seems to signify a reconciliation with the human lot. The sea will never be either a blank slate or an easily circumscribed pond; "there is no end of it," and man must always keep working in good faith. Time destroys but it also preserves, and just as there is no mastery there is also no escape. The third section of the poem ruminates on words attributed to Krishna, advising humanity not to "fare well" but to "fare forward." This is an exhortation to give up aspirations--to stop seeking to do "well"--and to be satisfied with mere existence. Again Eliot uses a ghostly figure, in this case a voice from high in a ship's rigging, to represent a level of awareness unattainable for the series of travelers he describes here. The fourth section is a prayer to the Virgin Mary, figured as a statue watching over the sea, asking her to pray for those who voyage on the sea and those who wait for them at home. Both the sailors and their loved ones stand in for all of humanity, faced with uncertain conditions and a lack of knowledge. The final section of "The Dry Salvages" at last offers something akin to hope. While man will always strive in vain to "apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time," everyday existence nevertheless contains moments of only half-noticed grace--moments at which "you are the music / While the music lasts." Moreover, "right action," while it will never be entirely successful, is nevertheless almost the only way available to man to subvert the "daemonic" forces that drive him.

Form

This quartet returns to some of the same easy music of "Burnt Norton." Again, Eliot plays with words ("womb, or tomb"), and, particularly in the second section, there are moments in which the gravity of the ideas forces the poetry into a somber, prose-like mode. In general, though, Eliot uses far less repetition and circular language in this section, effectively lightening the tone. The poem also makes use of extended "landscapes"--the river and the sea-- that allow Eliot to engage in flights of descriptive language free from the philosophical seriousness of the http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section9.rhtml (1 of 2)8/27/2004 12:42:52 AM Eliot's Poetry rest of the Quartets. Again, too, formal structures are borrowed from religious and philosophical sources, as in the prayer of section four and the Krishna material in the third section. In a way, Eliot is associating his poetic efforts with the other struggles for knowledge listed in the final section--astrology, palm-reading, animal sacrifices--and this leads him to take himself far less seriously, to look instead for the moments of hidden beauty in his language.

Commentary

"The Dry Salvages" is interrupted at least twice by the ringing of a bell. In both cases it is a bell at sea, either on a ship or on a buoy. The bell is a human intervention that is meant to illuminate the vastness both of the sea and of mere existence and to point out the futility of trying to master it with anything as ineffectual as a bell. In both cases, the bell goes unheard: In the first mention, it is a bell on a buoy out to sea, which will be heard most likely only by those about to We want your feedback! be wrecked on the rocks the buoy is supposed to mark. Placed there by man, the bell has Please let us know if you nevertheless come under the control of the sea and has become irrelevant as a marker of human have any comments, intention. The second bell is rung for the dead, for those lost at sea. They are where the sound of the bell cannot reach them; the bell, therefore, tolls not for them but for those left behind. This requests, or if you think bell is mentioned in the exhortation to the Virgin Mary to pray for those lost and those still here. you've found an error. Like prayer, the bell represents an attempt to appeal to a higher power, to admit one's own mortal limits. The bell directly refutes poetic endeavor, too: human-made, a bell's ring is an attempt to Watch us work! communicate without words, an admission that words have failed.

Perhaps the most famous part of this poem is its opening, with the description of the river as "a strong brown god." These lines are often coopted and used to describe the Mississippi and to talk about the mythological importance of rivers. Curiously, though, Eliot is actually demoting the river to the status of a false god, by pointing out its inferiority to the sea as an object for contemplation. Popular culture's glorification of these lines indeed illustrates the very inanity of human action that Eliot describes later in the poem: Dazzled by the lines' rhetorical force, we tend to attribute greater meaning to the language than is really there, while we ignore what is actually being said. In the second section of the poem, the river becomes a conduit for refuse and unpleasant memories, a shallow channel rather than a "strong brown god." Just as we can neither escape nor romanticize the river, nor can we master the past.

The final lines of "The Dry Salvages" combine a resigned pessimism with a suggestion of hope. Couched in the beauty of the lines is a dark meaning: "our temporal reversion" is death, which is beneficial only if we can become "significant soil" that might nourish a tree. By hiding behind such flights of language, Eliot once again retreats into the refuge of the poet. He may not be able to master time and experience but he is master of the world that he writes into being. Futility does not diminish beauty.

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Four Quartets: "Little Gidding"

Summary Related Message Boards "Little Gidding" was the last of the Quartets to be written. It appeared in print in 1942; in Eliot's Poetry 1943, the four pieces were collected and published together. "Little Gidding," named after a 17th- Your Poetry century Anglican monastery renowned for its devotion, is the place where the problems of time Favorite Poets and and human fallibility are more or less resolved. The first section describes a sunny winter's day, Poems where everything is dead yet blazing with the sun's fire. The poem considers those who have come to the monastery, who come only "to kneel / Where prayer has been valid." It is here that Modernist Poetry man can encounter the "intersection of the timeless" with the present moment, often by heeding the words of the dead, whose speech is given a vitality by a burning fire. The second section opens with a lyric on the death of the four elements (air, earth, water, and fire) that have figured so prominently in the previous quartets. The scene then shifts to the poet walking at dawn. He meets the ghost of some former master, whom he does not quite recognize. The two speak, and the ghost gives the poet the burdens of wisdom: awareness of folly, a loss of perception of beauty, and shame at one's past deeds. The spirit tells him that only if he is "restored by ...refining fire" will he escape these curses. The spirit then leaves him with a benediction, and a horn blows, which may be an air-raid siren. The third section is more propositional in nature. The poet declares that attachment, detachment, and indifference are all related; all three look alike but indifference comes only through the exercise of memory to create abstractions. The second part of this section asserts that, despite this, "all shall be well." As the poet thinks on the people who have come to Little Gidding seeking spiritual renewal and peace, he realizes that the dead have left us only "a symbol," one that has been perfected but is nevertheless still only a representation or an abstraction. The fourth section is a formal two-stanza piece describing first a dove with a tongue of fire, which both purifies and destroys; the second stanza then considers love as the chief torment of man, which can redeem as well as torture. Either way, we are caught between two kinds of fire. The final section of the poem, and of the whole of the Quartets, brings the spiritual and the aesthetic together in a final reconciliation. Perfect language results in poetry in which every word and every phrase is "an end and a beginning." The timeless and the time-bound are interchangeable and in the moment, if one is in the right place, like the chapel at Little Gidding. All will be well when the fires that both destroy and redeem come together to form a knot and "the fire and the rose"--divine wrath and mercy--become one.

Form

This is the most dramatic of the Four Quartets, in that it is here that the language most closely approaches the rhythms of everyday speech. The diction is measured, intellectual, but always self-conscious in its repetitiveness and in the palpable presence of the speaker. Certain sections of "Little Gidding" ("And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well") borrow from liturgical language to create the effect of attending an ideal religious service. The fourth section, like the fourth sections of the other quartets, is a sustained formal piece that serves as a sort of contrapuntal melody to the rest of the poem. Although not as elegant as "Burnt http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section10.rhtml (1 of 2)8/27/2004 12:42:58 AM Eliot's Poetry

Norton" or as musical as "East Coker," "Little Gidding" is perhaps the most balanced of the quartets in its attention to imagery and language.

Commentary

Fire and roses are the main images of this poem. Both have a double meaning. Roses, a traditional symbol of English royalty, represent all of England, but they also are made to stand for divine love, mercy, and the garden where the children in "Burnt Norton" hide (they reappear at the end of this poem). Fire is both the flame of divine harshness and the spiritual ether capable of purifying the human soul and bringing understanding. The series of double images creates a strong sense of paradox: Just as one seemingly cannot exist both in and out of time, one cannot be simultaneously both purified and destroyed. We want your feedback! This sense of paradox leads to the creation of an alternative world, rendered through Please let us know if you spiritual retreat and supernatural figures. The dead, with their words "tongued with fire," offer an have any comments, alternative set of possibilities for the poet seeking to escape the fetters of reality. By going to a requests, or if you think place "where prayer has been valid," Eliot proposes that imagination and a little faith can conquer the strictures placed upon man by time and history; as the ghost in the third section reminds the you've found an error. poet, escape is always possible. This is particularly significant when we notice that the ghost's words are actually generated by the speaker (who "assumed a double part"), actually engaged in a Watch us work! dialogue with himself. While the dead can offer us only a "symbol," symbols nevertheless give us an opportunity for interpretation and exercise of the imagination. By allowing us a way to bypass the realities of our world, they open up a spiritual freedom.

This poem, finally, celebrates the ability of human vision to transcend the apparent limitations of human mortality. In a place set away from the world, one can hear, if one chooses, the children laughing in the garden. War, suffering, and the modern condition have provided Eliot with an opportunity for spiritual reflection that ultimately transcends external events and the burden of history. While not an overtly optimistic work, "Little Gidding" and Four Quartets as a whole offer a reasoned sense of hope. Poetry may suffer from language's inherent lack of precision, but it provides the aesthetic faculty with an opportunity to disregard human limitations, if only for a moment.

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