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Meis Oculis: Eyes in the Early Poetry of T.S

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Meis Oculis: Eyes in the Early Poetry of T.S MEIS OCULIS: EYES IN THE EARLY POETRY OF T.S. ELIOT By Joshua Richards A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida August 2009 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to express his thanks for the support of his parents during his tenure at the university. Additionally, the author wishes to thank Dr. Scroggins, Dr. Blakemore, and Dr. Berlatsky for their support in the production of this thesis. iii ABSTRACT Author: Joshua Richards Title: Meis Oculis: Eyes in the Early Poetry of T.S. Eliot Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Mark Scroggins Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2009 This study is an examination of ocular imagery in the secular poetry of T.S. Eliot. As a symbol, eyes begin as a metonym for the panoptic vision of society. In the earliest poems, Michel Foucault‘s conceptions of discipline illuminate the acerbic paranoia attached to ocular imagery and its source in the culture of turn-of-the-century Boston. Towards 1919, the image of eyes becomes an objective correlative for the figure of Dante‘s Beatrice who represents both earthly and divine love. The loss of sight by the various speakers in both ―Gerontion‖ and The Waste Land is then the loss of connection to both the earthly woman and God. Finally, in The Hollow Men, the tenor and vehicle merge completely so the eyes themselves become the object of desire. iv EYES IN THE EARLY POETRY OF T.S. ELIOT Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter I: Panoptically Perverse ..........................................................................................8 Rebellion in ―Cousin Nancy‖ ......................................................................................10 Eyes as Symbols of Sexual Desire ..............................................................................14 Chapter II: In the Eyes of Beatrice ....................................................................................17 A Sexual Reading of ―Gerontion‖ ...............................................................................19 A Sacramental Reading of ―Gerontion‖ ......................................................................22 An Analysis of Eyes in Arnold‘s ―The Buried Life‖ ...................................................27 Eyes in Dante ...............................................................................................................30 Chapter III: In the Hyacinth Garden ..................................................................................41 The Role of the Framing Wagner Quotations ..............................................................42 The Allusions in the Garden Scene ..............................................................................48 ―La Figlia che Piange‖ ..........................................................................................49 ―Opera‖ .................................................................................................................52 The Absolute .........................................................................................................55 Coda: Where There Are No Eyes ....................................................................................61 Notes ................................................................................................................................67 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................75 v I. INTRODUCTION This study is an examination of the recurring image of eyes, especially their failure and meeting, in T.S. Eliot‘s early poetry. The poems examined range from the juvenilia in Inventions of the March Hare to the opus of his secular work The Waste Land. Like one of Wagner‘s leitmotivs, this ocular imagery is caught in ephemeral snatches in various contexts throughout the early poetry; however, a clear and consistent usage of the image begins to emerge as Eliot matures. John Xiros Cooper in his book, T.S. Eliot and the Politics of Voice, describes Eliot‘s imagery as a kind ―typifying metonymy‖ which ―allows the text to offer concrete experience in the immediate form, and at the same time, harbor a rational argument implicitly through the metonymic ‗logic‘ of typificatory representations‖ (Cooper 14-15). In short, the figures in Eliot‘s poetry are indeed concrete figures, the women really are speaking of Michelangelo in Prufrock; however, they are also operating as a kind of metonym for a certain social milieu and its assorted occupants. To use Eliot‘s own terminology, the purpose of this study is to define for what the eyes in their meetings and failures are an objective correlative i.e. in this case, eyes are the ―set of objects, [the] situation, [the] chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion‖ (Eliot Hamlet 48). The purpose of this study is to uncover not only the nature of that particular emotion, but the vehicle of its portrayal. Now, this is not to say that Eliot wrote his poems with the knowledge that the reader would insert a particular formulaic meaning into the interpretation. Rather, at the beginning of his poetic 1 career, there are a number of different meanings ascribed to eyes that gradually coalesce into a complex but unified image by the time that Eliot was writing The Hollow Men. This image is not found in a single specific emotion, but rather the almost ineffable emotion embodied by a constructed personage—Dante‘s Beatrice with all her multitudinous symbolic value. Why Beatrice? There is, perhaps, no other poet so necessary, so fundamental, to the study of Eliot than Dante,1 and there is, perhaps, no single person, character, or image more important to Dante and his work than Beatrice. There is no more powerful aspect of Beatrice than her eyes which ―were kindled from the lamps of heaven‖ and the sight of which is apotheosis (Inferno II.55; Dante qtd. in Eliot ―Dante‖ 227). Beatrice‘s eyes had power for more than Dante—Eliot cited one of the instances in which Dante met her eyes and said that ―this is something that we are meant to feel, not merely decorative verbiage‖ (Eliot ―Dante‖ 228). By the use of the plural first person, Eliot clearly felt that this was not merely an idiosyncratic effect, but one that could be universal. It is this experience, the totality of what meeting Beatrice‘s eyes entails for which eyes come to be an objective correlative. The methodology of this study is, for the most part, traditional. Rather than attempt to account for every instance of eyes in Eliot‘s early poetry, the method espoused here is one of representative exercise i.e. how eyes work in ―Prufrock‖ is not far removed from how they work in ―Portrait of a Lady.‖ As the two poems were composed at nearly the same time, the emotions attached to the image of eyes would not have deviated significantly from other poems that are chronologically close. In order to determine the function of the eyes in a poem, the basic method is intensive close reading of the passage surrounding the occurrence to, as it were, isolate that particular image so that the exact 2 nature and function of the element of eyes might be determined within the limited context of the strophe or stanza. This particular method is dependent upon having exacting readings of the passages. Thus, much of the research and the study itself is devoted to producing these readings in order to discover the most accurate assessment possible. In the early poems, Eliot‘s usage was less complicated so less detail is required; however, the usage in ―Gerontion,‖ the most forward-looking portion of the 1920 volume, is significantly more complicated and contains the first truly coherent use of eyes as an objective correlative for the figure of Beatrice. As this is a largely subconscious creation, the presentation is manifold and surpasses mere allusion—Eliot may have had something different in mind when he wrote his poems; however, based upon the themes and images present in the passage, the eyes are clearly an objective correlative for the pleroma of Beatrice2—the sum of her character across the works of Dante from the crimson-clad girl of the Vita Nuova to the incarnation of Divine Love and Revelation in whose eyes Dante sees the totality of the mystery of the Incarnation in the Divine Comedy. Unlike Dominic Manganiello‘s book on Eliot and Dante, this study is focused only on the overlap of ocular imagery3 between these two poets. Rather than a focus on Eliot‘s allusions to Dante as Manganiello does, this study is more focused on a kind of psychological influence that pervades Eliot‘s use of eyes based upon his reading of Dante whether or not he intended allusion or not. Additionally, unlike Lyndall Gordon‘s biography, this study does not address the sociopolitical angle of Eliot‘s conception of Beatrice and women in general. The emphasis of this study is only the development of ocular imagery in Eliot‘s early poetry and its tie to Dante‘s Beatrice which is both unique and ripe with interpretive possibilities when applied elsewhere in Eliot‘s poems. 3 In the early poetry written during Eliot‘s time at Harvard, the metonym of eyes acquires a particularly irritated, acerbic paranoia to which the first chapter of this study is devoted. This particular undercurrent seems to
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