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 stem from the Jamesian, drawing-room culture of turn-of-the-century Boston4, which Eliot satirizes in many poems of the
Prufrock and March-hare volumes. The oppressive pseudo-Victorianism that dominates many of these poems eventually wanes in importance; however, it is crucial to the early presentation of eyes. While generally unsuited for Eliot‘s later work, the discourses and disciplines of Michel Foucault‘s philosophy are especially useful for examining the relationship between the Prufrockian shades, their equally ephemeral would-be lovers, and the ever-watching eyes—and metonymically, the disciplines and discourses of society—what Eliot will later, rather satirically, call ―the army of unalterable law‖
(―Cousin Nancy‖ 12). Foucault‘s conceptions, especially the panoptic modality of power, is well suited to the pressure that Eliot felt from the highly structured but shallow (as he saw it) Boston society, a society that a contemporary critic called ―a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities‖ (Chapman qtd. in Gordon 25). While there are numerous examples of this in Eliot‘s early poetry, this study concerns itself with only a few passages which needs must suffice for the whole. The first is Eliot‘s most important early work, ―The Love Song of J. Alfred of Prufrock‖ containing many of the themes of
Eliot‘s later work as well as serving as an exemplar for the occurrence in many of the other poems such as ―Portrait of a Lady,‖ ―Aunt Helen,‖ or ―The Preludes.‖ The oft- neglected ―Cousin Nancy,‖ however, provides an exceptionally clear example of the rebellion against these watching discourses, and the problems that this poses. Finally, in
4
the early poetry, eyes are often depicted as being metonymic of what Fayek Ishak calls the desirous, burning ―eye-consciousness‖ of ―sensual indulgence‖ (Ishak 70). It is in this context that the failure of senses, especially sight, in the early poetry and ―Gerontion‖ is usually understood—as a metonym for sexual failure and impotence. The example that this study employs is ―Whispers of Immortality‖ in which the eyelessness of Webster‘s skeletal visions is a symbol for the lack of sexual power in the dry, metaphysical school.
Ultimately, however, the first chapter serves as a brief survey of the disparate pieces that eventually merge to form the full interpretations found in ―Gerontion‖ and The Waste
Land.
Possibly the clearest expression of this use of eyes in the early poetry, the fourth and fifth strophes (lines 48-61) of ―Gerontion‖ employs all the elements found in The
Waste Land; however, they are presented without many of the difficulties of the latter work. ―Gerontion‖ is closest to The Waste Land both spiritually and chronologically— close enough to be considered by Eliot for printing ―as prelude‖ to the longer poem, an idea which was discouraged by Pound (Eliot Letters 504-505). The second chapter concerns itself with demonstrating how the multifarious interpretations—the biographic sexual reading and the ascetic spiritual reading, each examined in significant detail—may be united in the person of Beatrice. In the fifth stanza of the poem, the speaker experiences a failure of the senses, including the eyes, in response to pressure from a particular figure; however, the identity of this figure is quite ambiguous, producing an interpretive crux. The first school of thought reads the passage biographically as a sexual failure in response to an antagonizing female figure (most likely Vivien Eliot) as in ―A
Game of Chess.‖ The other reading is that the passage is a spiritual rejection of Christ 5
incarnate in the form of a Blakean tiger. Both of these readings account for Eliot‘s current philosophical work on the great divide between human beings; however, to unite these two interpretations in desire of the speaker to flee solipsism is the figure of Beatrice who is both the earthly lover and the figure of Divine Revelation and Love. To this end, the chapter also explains Eliot‘s view on Beatrice and her relevance by examining her appearances in Dante and Eliot‘s reaction to them. Additionally, a work by Matthew
Arnold, ―The Buried Life,‖ is briefly examined as an influence on why Eliot would consider the meeting of eyes as an escape from solipsism.
The final chapter builds upon the Dantean conclusions of ―Gerontion‖ and applies these ideas to the Hyacinth garden episode (lines 31-42) in The Waste Land. While much of the same themes and images occur with regard to the use of eyes, this episode is significantly more difficult to unwind due to the complicated system of allusion and bewildering shifts in both time and space. To the end of understanding these shifts, this study examines and critiques Jewel Brooker and Joseph Bentley‘s idea of the framing structure between the Wagner quotations and the incident in the garden itself before arriving at a conception of the interrelation between these two scenes. With a method of relating the disparate aspects of the scene itself established, the three particularities of the scene itself are examined. First, the allusion to―La Figlia Che Piange‖ is examined to elucidate the nature of the sexual relation between the speaker and the hyacinth girl. With its Virgilian undercurrent, this poem shows the speaker turning from an earthly relationship towards a heavenly one. The second allusion is to Eliot‘s early poem
―Opera‖ which was written shortly after Eliot saw a performance of Wagner‘s Tristan und Isolde in 1909 (Ackroyd 38). The poem critiques violent, passionate emotion as well 6
as expressing an ambivalence toward the relationship that spawns it. The final aspect of the scene requiring examination is the nature of the mystical experience that the failure of the senses, especially the eyes, mediates; however, as in ―Gerontion,‖ the experience fails to produce a revelation of the Absolute, the λογος—the speaker could not meet the eyes of Beatrice.
The end result of the formation of the objective correlative of eyes in the early poetry is a series of successive approximations of the composite construct of Beatrice and the divine revelation found within her eyes. The early poems show fragmented aspects of femininity, spirituality, and sexual desire within the image of eyes. These slowly coalesce until in ―Gerontion‖ and The Waste Land, the image of eyes has nearly all the features of the object of desire—Beatrice, woman and Absolute, fire and rose, the perpetual opposites are unified. Finally, in The Hollow Men, the tenor and the vehicle merge so that eyes themselves become the object of desire. The applicability of this objective- correlative is two-fold. First, when ocular imagery arises, this objective-correlative allows a direct application of Beatrician imagery to the reading at hand without the need for extensive Dantean criticism. Second, the presence of Beatrice in the eyes of The
Hollow Men and The Waste Land is the imagery that eventually becomes the Lady in the sacred poems, especially Ash-Wednesday. These are the critical benefits of the Beatrician objective-correlative.
7
I. PANOPTICALLY PERVERSE
Within the earliest poems of Eliot, the eyes operate as a synecdoche for a particular person, then that person, by metonymy, for society at large. Within the text5, this is the result of a passive fantasy that is not only exhibitionist, but also paranoid. This sort of unconscious fantasy ―may be based upon the memory images of actual experiences, its content corresponds with no external reality; it is merely the output of the creative psychic activity‖ (Jung Basic Writings 248). Thus, the strange repletion of eyes within the early poetry ―belong[s] to the category of psychic ‘automatismes,’‖ a condition in which the subject is, largely, unaware of its presence which ―presupposes the withdrawal of an essential sum of energy from conscious control with a corresponding activation of unconscious material‖ (Jung Basic Writings 249). The result of this fantasy is to abstract the invisible powers that oppress the speakers of these early poems; these forces embody what Frank Kermode calls the ―peculiar blend of fascination and disgust, a mortuary eroticism‖6 present in the early poems of Eliot (Kermode 13). The most famous instance of this variety of sexual seeing is in lines 55-59 of ―Prufrock‖:
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
8
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin (―Prufrock 55-59)
In this passage, the great societal eyes operate panoptically to enforce and categorize—to discipline Prufrock into the social discourse of the upper-class New England society in which Eliot was abiding with increasing rancor and discontent. Moreover, there is a powerful sexual undercurrent to this particular passage as the eyes ―fix‖ the speaker into
―a formulated phrase‖ (―Prufrock‖ 56). This is the paltry discourse of shallow courtship found in the upper-class puritan society in which Eliot moved. For Foucault, disciplinary power ―imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility‖ (Foucault
―Correct Training‖ 199). This discourse of courtship requires that the two actors operate within full view of the eyes of society so that every imperfection can be seen. In
―Prufrock,‖—whose very name is suggestive of an agglutination of the monastic frock and the word prudish or, perhaps, prurient—an indeterminate ―they,‖ emblematic, perhaps, of the watchful eyes of society, which function as part of what Foucault would call ―[t]he panoptic modality of power,‖ whispers in the dark that Prufrock‘s ―arms and legs are thin‖7 (Foucault ―Panopticism‖ 211; ―Prufrock‖ 44). This disciplinary power also exposes the female participant8 as being other than what she seems so that the sensuous
―white and bare‖ arms of the woman pristine and aesthetically inured as if the woman was a marble statue are exposed through ―the lamplight‖ as being ―downed with light brown hair‖—characteristic of a more animal sensuality different than the sterile beauty of the statue as down is a feature of birds rather than humans (―Prufrock‖ 63-64). The discomfort and the reticence of Prufrock are indicative of what Foucault calls the
―policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex 9
through useful and public discourses‖ (Foucault ―Repressive Hypothesis‖ 307). Prufrock is driven from participating in activities that are outside of the prescribed boundaries by ingrained social discourses which are written upon his body so that he responds with revulsion to matters outside of what is deemed proper.9 The emphasis here, of course, must be placed on public—for it is within this kind of panoptic power that this unsteady courtship takes place10. In this passage in ―Prufrock,‖ the eyes function metonymically for this panoptic power, and
[m]ore than the old taboos, this form of power demanded constant,
attentive, and curious presences for its exercise; it presupposed proximities
it proceeded through examination and insistent observation; it required an
exchange of discourses, through questions that extorted admissions, and
confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked. (Foucault
―Repressive Hypothesis‖ 323)
The prescribed sexuality of ―Prufrock‖ circumscribes the courtship of the poet-cleric and beloved into a shallow, scripted thing; however, Prufrock longs to shatter the promethean chains that bind him to the socio-sexual discourse as seen through his musings on how he could ―have bitten off the matter with a smile / […] to roll it towards some overwhelming question‖—in short, to break the bonds of the prescribed discourses and say ―what [he] really means,‖ but, alas, ―[he] is not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be‖
(―Prufrock‖ 91,93,111).
Perhaps, the clearest place where these prescribed socio-sexual discourses are enforced by vision is seen is in the early and oft-neglected poem ―Cousin Nancy‖ in
10
which the errant Nancy Ellicott is in the act of rebelling against these prescribed discourses.
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law. (―Cousin Nancy‖ 7-13)
The seeing in this poem comes from the observing books of Matthew Arnold and Ralph
Waldo Emerson11 who espy Nancy‘s rebellion and, as the aunts, disapprove. These very literal discourses are seen as imposing figures that Nancy rebels against just as Lucifer rebelled against Heaven‘s matchless King according to allusion to George Meredith‘s
―Lucifer in Starlight‖ in the final line. Of course, it is not simply the works of Emerson and Arnold, but also, as Foucault would say, the ―endless possibility of discourse‖ that they have established—the repressive Victorian discourses of the disapproving Aunts
(Foucault ―Author‖ 114). This is evident by the poem‘s metonymy where the books on the shelf are replaced by their authors so that what sits on their shelf is not Emerson‘s essays, but rather Emerson himself. In his book The Early T.S. Eliot and Western
Philosophy, M. A. R. Habib reads this section of the poem as an ironic critique of the
New England Unitarianism in which Eliot was raised and the prevailing Late Victorian
11
humanism (the discourses that Emerson and Arnold had respectively established) and
Nancy‘s rebellion against them (Habib 153). While Habib does not consider the sexual element within the poem,12 much of his discussion is germane to the topic at hand for these same Victorian doctrines are metonymically associated. By establishing these discourses and behaviors as entities that can be rebelled against, the effect becomes something similar to Foucault‘s description of the ―medicalization of the sexually peculiar‖ (Foucault ―Repressive Hypothesis‖ 323). ―An impetus was given to power through its very exercise; an emotion rewarded the overseeing control and carried it further;‖ the powers-that-be prohibit and Nancy rebels against them; it is a ―pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power‖ (Foucault ―Repressive Hypothesis‖ 324).
Moreover, according to the controlling allusion to Meredith‘s ―Lucifer in Starlight,‖ this rebellion against the power is futile. In the poem, after Lucifer had soared unmolested about the whole of the earth,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law. (―Lucifer in Starlight‖ 11-14)
As Habib notes, ―Nancy‘s strident iconoclasm […] hardly has the convictions of
Lucifer‘s defiance of God,‖ especially as in Meredith, Lucifer has scars which ―pricked
[…] / [w]ith memory of the old revolt from Awe‖ while Nancy seems to have suffered no more than some mild gossip and disapproving looks by nosy aunts (Habib 153; ―Lucifer in Starlight‖ 9-10). However, I am not sure that I agree with Habib‘s suggestion the last
12
line of Meredith‘s sonnet ―evokes the ever-lasting nature of Lucifer‘s punishment‖
(Habib 153). It seems more likely that the seeing ―[t]he army of unalterable law‖ represents the futility of attempting to ―subdue / [t]h‘ Omnipotent‖ (―Lucifer in Starlight‖
14; Paradise Lost IV.84-85). It is this rather pathetic rebellion against the mundanities of the New England drawing room culture13 to which the poem‘s satire. This is the powerlessness to escape discourse that Habib arrives at when he says that ―Nancy‘s
‗rebellion‘ is intimately yoked to all the trimmings of frivolity from which she seeks to disentangle herself‖ (Habib 153). However, Eliot‘s satire is not only directed at the
―almost ridiculous‖ Nancy, but also at Arnold and Emerson, the reified discourses. These particular discourses have ―in treating Nancy Ellicott as a rebellious angel, [usurped] the throne of divine authority;‖ however, ―the belittling use of the first names ‗Matthew‘ and
‗Waldo‘ suggests a congeniality quite at odds with their sacred authoritative function to keep watch over the ‗unalterable law‘‖ (Habib 153). Thus, the avatars of the discourse
(and their emissaries, the ambivalent aunts) are treated by Eliot as empty, repressive agents—powerless gods of sexual youth, as in his later poem, Exequy, ―a bloodless shade among the shades / [d]oing no good, but not much harm‖ (―Exequy‖ 13-14). Nancy‘s rebellion against these small bookshelf gods is an example of what Foucault terms ―the solemnity with which one speaks of sex nowadays‖ so that in Nancy‘s iconoclasm there is ―[s]omething that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law‖ which ―slips easily into this discourse of sexual oppression‖ (Foucault
―Other Victorians‖ 295). Eliot is mocking the panoptic power which issues from the eyes of these little idols and Nancy‘s trite rebellions, ―[escaping] from boredom and routine into another type of boredom, another type of pointlessness‖ (Habib 153).
13
In addition to their function as metonyms for the discipline-enforcing socio-sexual discourse, eyes have a sado-masochistic and sexual aspect as the vehicle of Prufrock‘s
(self)-torture as he lies ―sprawling on a pin‖ (―Prufrock‖ 56). Eliot himself highlights the curious sexuality of this passage by noting a psychological link between this Prufrock and St. Sebastion. In a letter to Conrad Aiken (July 25th 1914), Eliot asks,
why should anyone paint a beautiful youth and stick him full of pins (or
arrows) unless he felt a little as the hero of my verse? Only there‘s nothing
homosexual about this – rather an important difference perhaps – but no
one ever painted a female Sebastian, did they? (Eliot Letters 44)
Interestingly, in Eliot‘s own The Death of St. Narcissus, arrows are used rather than pins.
This unique word choice in the letter seems rather firmly to tie the case of St. Sebastian to
Prufrock. This is one of the few cases where the sexual instance of seeing merges with a dark spiritual violence14. Clearer examples of this grimly sexual use of eyes are seen in the case of ―Whispers of Immortality‖ where the ―breastless creatures under ground‖ are described as having ―[d]affodil bulbs instead of balls‖ which ―[stare] from the sockets of the eyes!‖ (―Whispers of Immortality‖ 42). As this is the only line in the poem with an exclamation mark, it is clearly meant to be either noticeable or shocking. This is one of numerous references to Ariel‘s song from The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
14
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell15 (The Tempest Act I: sc. 2 400-406).
This passage features powerfully in much of Eliot‘s poetry; however, of these only lines
400 and 402 are quoted, which vastly shifts the tone of the allusions towards what Ronald
Schuchard calls ―a spiritual terror brought on and intensified by the compulsions of flesh‖
(Schuchard 124-125). While there is plenty strange about the figures that Webster sees in
―Whispers of Immortality,‖ nothing is rich—everything is desiccate and mocking for he
―cannot help seeing, beneath the desirous breasts and lips, the dry-ribbed skeleton, reclining in a mocking pose of seduction and grinning at the surrender of mind and body to lust‖ (Schuchard 125). The eyeless sockets serve as a symbol for this interconnection.
Thus, eyes become a symbol of sexual power, which the dry ribs cannot possess, a usage reflected in Thomson‘s The City of Dreadful Night, which was a strong influence on the early Eliot. The passage below unites many features of Eliot‘s own usage of eyes in a concise, if cloyingly dramatic, tone. In the fourth section, the wanderer in the desert describes:
Eyes of fire
Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death. (City of Dreadful Night IV.17-20)
While describing desirous eyes as being of fire may not be particularly original, it is nonetheless still used in The Waste Land in ―The Fire Sermon;‖ moreover, the use of
15
throbbing is redolent of Tiresias ―throbbing between two lives‖ as well as the more general erotic suggestion (The Waste Land 218). The descriptor of ―starved desire‖ is less like Grishkin‘s zaftig, ―pneumatic bliss‖ and more suggestive of Volupine‘s ―pthisic hand‖ (―Whispers of Immortality‖ 42, ―Burbank‖ 35). Finally, the jaws and breath are reminiscent of the ―dead mountain mouth of carious teeth‖ (The Waste Land 339).
Ultimately, the passage succinctly demonstrates what Schuchard phrases as ―the terrible chuckle of death‖ that lies ―beneath sexual desire‖ (Schuchard 124). Instead of human eyes, however, only daffodil bulbs, which are vegetal potency alone, reside in the empty skull16, which hearkens to the opening lines of The Waste Land with the lilacs and dead roots being stirred from stony sleep.
The usage of eyes in the earliest poems is multifarious. Under the influence of
Boston society, Eliot‘s ocular imagery was filled with a kind of Foucaultian paranoia, a haunting, panoptic dread. Society‘s watching eyes scrutinized the nervous poet-prophet speakers of much of the Prufrock volume. However, rebellion against these eyes and their discourses was equally satirized in such poems as ―Cousin Nancy.‖ The iconoclasm was a gesture as empty as the discourses. Additionally, these watching eyes were metonyms for the eyes of ravenous desire and sensual appetites. However, these early visions begin to fade the farther Eliot wanders from Boston and its influence. By the time that Eliot is writing ―Gerontion‖ in 1919, eyes no longer serve as an objective correlative for these emotions. Eyes begin to, in this more mature period, convey deeper, more spiritual, but no less desperate emotions.
16
III. IN THE EYES OF BEATRICE
It is not till the publication of ―Gerontion,‖ the flagship and last-born poem of the
1920 volume that the disparate views of eyes begin to coalesce towards the image of
Beatrice. It is in this poem that the clearest and most nuanced example of the nature of seeing in the first two volumes of poetry occurs. The fourth and fifth strophes of
―Gerontion,‖ which notably contain the passage with the reference to the failure of vision, are often regarded as an interpretive crux in the poem. Many interpret the poem in a sacramental light with the speaker rejecting God who appears in the wrathful form of a
Blakean Tiger. While others, especially more modern scholars, often interpret the rejection as that of a lover. As will be demonstrated, the lack of eyes in line 60 symbolizes not only loss of virility, but also the inability to connect with either the lover or God, depending on the interpretive choice. However, there is a means to unite these particular views. In the works of Dante, the person of Beatrice encapsulates both Laura and Madonna—the earthly lover and the figure of Divine Revelation. One of the most striking features of Beatrice, to both Dante and eventually Eliot, is her eyes. Both the
Divine Comedy and the Vita Nuova are littered with references to the power of Beatrice‘s eyes; it is hardly surprising that Eliot would associate the image of eyes with her, especially in situations where both an earthly and divine love could be invoked. If
Beatrice is symbolized by the eyes, then her unique status as both beloved and divine
17
figure allows the convergence of these two interpretations for Beatrice is portrayed in
Dante‘s work as not only an earthly lover, but also as a path to God.17 The failure of eyes in ―Gerontion‖ is, then, the failure to see Beatrice whom the eyes symbolize, and in so doing, to lose the possibility of both sexual and divine communionj. To prove this supposition, it will first be necessary to examine both the sacramental and sexual interpretations of ―Gerontion.‖ Next, it will be necessary to have a brief diversion to the
Matthew Arnold poem ―The Buried Life‖ to see another avenue for the use of eyes as personal interconnection and one with which Eliot was certainly familiar. Finally, a discussion follows of not only what Beatrice means to Dante, but also what she meant to
Eliot, and how this symbolic value is imbued upon her.
The two disparate interpretations of ―Gerontion‖ concern mainly the fourth and the fifth strophes, the center of much of the criticism about the poem as well:
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
18
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact? (Gerontion 48-61).
In this passage, as in the hyacinth garden episode in The Waste Land,18 the poem‘s speaker encounters a woman who is ―peculiarly sexual in the knowledge that she promises‖ (Mays 113). In his book T.S. Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover, Donald Childs notes that this portion of ―Gerontion‖ could be interpreted biographically19 so that
Gerontion‘s withdrawal from his partner [mirrors] Eliot‘s own distaste for
the sexual aspect of his relationship with Vivien and the reference to
passion becoming ‗adulterated‘ [recalls] Vivien‘s flirtation (if not affair)20
with Bertrand Russel. (Childs 240)
This seems particularly promising and the following gloss of the above passage of the poem confirms at least the similar themes, but probably the interconnection with sexual failure as well, both in the personae and in Eliot himself. Gerontion prefaces his tale of separation by expressing his desire for union in line 54. Childs interprets these lines based on the fact that in line 52 ―[t]he phrase ‗to make a show‘ also means ‗to pretend‘‖
(Childs 102). Thus, ―[Gerontion] is confessing his loss of sexual interest in his companion despite what his ‗show‘ or arousal might suggest‖ (Childs 102). This is in firm opposition to the more wistful loss, ―the mixing of ‗memory and desire‘ in present barrenness‖ which F.R Leavis, obviously reading ―Gerontion‖ in light of The Waste Land sees. (Leavis Gerontion 125). I find a reading of sexual failure more convincing than
Leavis‘s gloss of the passage,21 the traditional reading of the passage, as an ―old man in
19
his ‗dry month‘ […] is stirred to envy, then to poignant recollection, by the story of hot- blooded vitality, which contrasts with the squalor of his actual surroundings‖ (Leavis
Gerontion 125). Childs asserts that ―[Gerontion] has performed sexually (‗made this show‘ of stiffening) such that the act of intercourse has ‗reached conclusion‘‖ (Childs
102). The first half of the statement is sound; however, the quotation in full is ―Think at last / We have not reached conclusion, when I / Stiffen in a rented house‖ (Gerontion 48-
50). My reading is that Gerontion is able to be aroused (―stiffen‖), but the sexual experience is abortive (―have not reached conclusion‖). I do not find Child‘s reading as convincing
Returning to the gloss of the passage in question, in line 55-56, Gerontion has been avulsed from knowledge, in both the literal and carnal sense, of the woman. Her beauty or the beauty of their interrelation turned to the terror of physical contact. The phrase ―terror to inquisition‖ is problematic22, but it seems to be his terror and her inquisition. This particular line presages a similar interchange in ―A Game of Chess‖ wherein
'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.' (The Waste Land 111-114)
The hysterical23 wife interrogating her husband about his lack of response in their sexual relationship is transmogrified into a lack of discursive response24—his inability to respond physically now an inability to speak and later see. Interestingly, C.K. Stead notes
20
that ―[h]ere ‗stiffen,‘ like some Elizabethan puns on ‗die,‘ compresses sexual intercourse and death into a single corruption‖ (Stead 153). This particular interrelation likens marital failure to bodily death for which the failure of eyes operates as both synecdoche and microcosm. The direct statement ―I have lost my passion‖ needs little comment other than as an anchor for the metaphors which the speaker will attach to it. Childs interprets this particular passage in the light of the essay ―Beyle and Balzac‖ that Eliot was writing at the same time he was writing ―Gerontion‖ (May 1919). ―The essay speaks of ‗the awful separation between potential passion and any actualization possible in life.‘ Eliot immediately links this separation to ‗the indestructible barriers between one human being and another‘‖ (Eliot qtd. in Childs 103). The result of this loss of passion and a recurring metonym for it is the loss of senses, particularly vision, his eyes failed. If the meeting of eyes is a sign of contact between individuals, then the loss of sight is symbol of the inexorable barriers between individuals. John Crowe Ransom notes that ―[h]e lists [his lost senses] scrupulously as if he were preparing an official document showing all the specifications of his ground for asking to be relieved of a contractual obligation‖
(Ransom 171). The passionate importuning of lovers has become clinical, legal talk, showing the utter divide and loss of passion. Interestingly, this very loss and disconnection is indicated utterly by the pronoun25 in the final line of the passage, ―How should I use them for your closer contact?‖ (―Gerontion‖ 61). The second person is used for the romantic contact instead of the expected ―our,‖ which implies that he will not be in contact, which aligns with the loss of sight equaling loss of connection. I am not certain that I agree with Childs when he asserts that ―[t]he question is rhetorical:
Gerontion is as certain as Eliot that the barrier [between people] is ‗indestructible;‘‖
21
however, Childs is completely correct when he notes that ―[t]he same point is made in
‗Whispers of Immortality:‘ ‗No contact possible to flesh / [a]llayed the fever of the bone‘‖(Childs 103; ―Whispers of Immortality‖ 15-16). The sexual act could not bridge the great divide between them.
On the other hand, Childs comments that what occurs in the fourth and fifth strophes could be a mystical experience, however, one in which ―Gerontion pointedly remains unaware that his rhetorical question [line 61] about himself and his human powers might become a real question to be put to God as a petition for the employment of his powers‖ (Childs 104). This aligns with the traditional way that many critics have read this section of ―Gerontion‖ so that the failure or rejection is not sexual, but spiritual, the failure of the eyes is not a failure of the flesh, but of the soul. Leavis sets the tone for this particular interpretation when he states that ―the emotional intensities evoked by the reference to the Sacrament are contrasted with the stale cosmopolitan depravity‖ (Leavis
Gerontion 125). This sacramental reading is extended by Ransom who reads ―Gerontion‖ as a five-part symphony similar in form to The Waste Land and The Four Quartets in which the passage in question is addressed, not to the lover, but to a very Blakean ―Christ the tiger‖ (Ransom 170). Using the dual image of Christ in his meekness and in his wrath drawn from Blake, Ransom sets the stage for the rejection not of the lover, but of Christ for ―Gerontion has forgotten the lamb‖ so now ―the lamb who came to be devoured has turned into the tiger‖ (Ransom 170). In his book The Overwhelming Question,
Balachandra Rajan notes that the tiger‘s devouring ―looks forward to, yet is completely different from, another devouring in the desert by three white leopards‖ in Ash-
Wednesday (Rajan 10). Leopards occur several times as images of God‘s wrath in the Old 22
Testament, most notably in Jeremiah 5:6 and Hosea 13:7 (Southam 225). The quotation in Jeremiah is more closely related to Dante; however, the verses in Hosea are closer to the usage in ―Gerontion:‖ God speaks to the unrepentant Israelites and says ―So I will come upon them like a lion, like a leopard I will lurk by the path‖ (Hosea 13:7 NIV). God is pictured as a wild animal waiting to devour the unrepentant Israelites, ―for their rebellion is great and their backslidings many,‖ or in this case, the unbelieving Gerontion whom Christ the tiger will devour (Jeremiah 5:6 NIV). Thus, ―stiffen‖ in line 50 is the literal death, rather than arousal or la petit mort, and the dialogue in the stanza is an eleventh hour meeting with the Maker in wrath. Then, in this reading, the unreached conclusion is the unmade decision of faith. However, Gerontion is at pains to note that it is not at these devils‘ behest that he has rejected Christ the tiger. Oddly, instead of attempting to claim his innocence, as Adam by blaming the temptation of Eve, and Eve the temptation of Satan, Gerontion says that ―it is not by any concitation26 / [o]f the backward27 devils‖ that he makes his rejection (Gerontion 52-53). In this reading, it seems reasonable that ―the backwards devils‖ of line 53 ―are probably the evil spirits prompting him to backslide‖ (Ransom 170). In support of such a reading, I believe that
Eliot has Canto XXVII28 of the Inferno in mind. In that Canto, Guido da Montelfeltro explains his damnation to Dante. This scene was certainly familiar to Eliot as it provided the epigraph to ―Prufrock‖ which occurs in the same bolgia as Dante‘s discussion with
Ulysses, whose final voyage appears allusively in the final stanza of ―Gerontion‖
(Manganiello 28). These allusions lend credence to the sacramental reading of this particular rejection.
23
Lines 56-61 are more difficult through a sacramental lens. Rajan glosses the lines as being ―the imagery of old age [blending] into the sense of withering away from God‖ so that Gerontion ―has moved forward in the act of definition, but he cannot cross the threshold, cannot make that surrender to reality which involves the death of the illusion which is his life‖ (Rajan 10-11). While he is probably correct, this is too vague a reading from which to discern the function that the failure of eyes plays. Childs suggests that in these lines29 ―Gerontion has had the mystical experience,‖ but ―he has missed the meaning, for the meaning is in the terror, not in the inquisition that displaces it‖ (Childs
104). Given the emphasis on aspects of the Divine found in lines 16-20 and 48, I, however, am inclined to read ―[t]o lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition‖ as transition in the aspect of God experienced as Gerontion recoils from the divine experience. The beauty is the beatific vision, the first blush of divine love seen in Beatrice. This gives way to the Terror, God in his might, the Blakean tiger, the ―Son now into terrour chang'd /
[h]is count'nance too severe to be beheld / [a]nd full of wrauth bent on his Enemies‖
(―Lucifer in Starlight‖ 9; Paradise Lost VI.824-826). Finally, the Terror becomes Divine
Inquisition, the transgressed God of Hosea who comes to Job in the whirlwind demanding an account. However, later30, through a careful examination of Dante, all three of these disparate aspects will be found within the person of Beatrice.
Thus, in line 58-59, the passion lost is the passion for God, for the voice of divine revelation, and what is kept is adulterated31 by doubt into only one among ―a thousand small deliberations‖ (Gerontion 62). This terrible, pursuing aspect of the divinity is seen and connected not only with passion, but also with a sexual failure in the final stanza of the rejected ―Elegy‖ fragment from The Waste Land: 24
God, in a rolling ball of fire
Pursues by day my errant feet horror desire
anger The His flames of pity and of ire
passion
a / Approach me with consuming heat. (Eliot Manuscript 117).
In this particular poem, God in a terrible, inhuman majesty, possibly as the sun, chases the errant sinner. The interesting part is the various proffered words that Eliot considered, settling on anger and desire—probably the desire of a jealous God, but still with sexual undertones. Passion is one of the choices that he considered. That Eliot would consider passion a divine attribute rather than an earthly one is indicative of his thoughts being drawn to medieval and renaissance portrayals of God that imbue the Divine love with sexual undertones—Not only in Dante‘s Beatrice, but also Marjorie of Kempe and Eliot‘s beloved Metaphysicals, particularly Donne and Crashaw. Indeed, Eliot had become interested in the sermons especially of Donne in 1919, the year in which Eliot was working on ―Gerontion‖ (Gordon 168). Thus, it is likely that Gerontion‘s loss of passion is emblematic of a loss of connection with the Divine.32 The failure of the senses in line
60 is likened by Lyndall Gordon to the following lines from a sermon by Cardinal
Newman: ―Let us beg and pray him day by day to reveal Himself to our souls more fully, to quicken our sense, to give us sight and hearing, taste and touch of the world to come‖
(Newman qtd. in Gordon 168). This failure is especially the eyes, is, then, a failure of
25
divine revelation, an inability to see the smiling face of Beatrice, which is now adulterated into nothing but a ―chilled delirium‖ (Gerontion 63).
Both of these particular interpretations of ―Gerontion‖ provide insight into the use of eyes in Eliot‘s early poetry, but they seem mutually exclusive. When viewed through the first interpretive lens, eyes seem to embody the physical connection between
Gerontion and his dissatisfied lady, and their loss is the end of personal and sexual communion. On the other hand, the religious viewing implies the loss of eyes symbolizes the loss of connection with God. These two are related in the aforementioned ―Elegy‖ via the formative allusion to Poe‘s in the third stanza.
The sweat transpired from my pores!
I saw the/sepulchral gates, thrown/flung wide,
Reveal (as in a tale by Poe)
The features of the injured bride!
That hand, prophetical and slow
(Once warm, once lovely, often kissed)
Tore the disordered cerements,
Around the head the scorpions hissed (―Elegy‖ 6-13)
The allusion to Poe seems to be a confluence of two stories: ―Ligeia‖ and ―The Fall of the
House of Usher.‖ While the details of the cerements and the injured bride are suggestive of the end of the former story, the scorpions are suggestive of the Furies (who punish those who murder family members,) which tie the allusion more firmly to Roderick and 26
Madeleine from the latter. The stanza that follows is a direct address to this figure whom the speaker asks to ―keep within thy charnel vault‖ (―Elegy‖ 19) Then, the rejected bride merges into the aforementioned pursuant God in the final stanza. This interconnection and transition from Bride to God is consonant with the compound figure of Beatrice in
―Gerontion,‖ but also this failure of connection to both God and woman returns later in
Eliot‘s poetry33 when, in ―East Coker,‖ Eliot states:
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. (East Coker 95-97)
In this statement is found the ―impossible union‖ between the two varieties of seeing that the eyes represent, the connection with another and the connection with God. I contend that this unique combination of meaning assigned to the meeting of eyes which, as has been demonstrated, occurs with ssome frequency in Eliot‘s poetry, is derived from Dante, specifically chapters 1-4 of the Vita Nuova and Canto XXXI of the Purgatorio. Less obviously but also important is the usage by Matthew Arnold in his poem, ―The Buried
Life34.‖
While of lesser influence on Eliot than Dante, Matthew Arnold has a peculiar importance to not only the social and philosophical that Eliot writes in, but also the literary exploits that occur. In his essay ―Eliot and Matthew Arnold,‖ Ian Gregor is primarily concerned with aligning the criticism of Arnold and Eliot; however, he does occasionally concern himself with the poetry of both men. Gregor raises two particular
27
poems for comparison: Arnold‘s ―The Buried Life‖ and Eliot‘s ―Eyes that last I saw in tears,‖ a poem which eventually was reincarnated as part II of The Hollow Men. Arnold‘s poem35 is powerfully conscious and influenced by the same Dantean allusions, but his uses are more similar to the interpersonal usages that the meeting of eyes finds in Eliot‘s pre-conversion poetry. The meeting of eyes in this poem is then a metaphor for communion not with the Beatrice of Divinity, but the earthly one. Arnold‘s poem ―The
Buried Life‖ concerns itself most fully with the barriers between individuals just as
Childs proposes of ―Gerontion.‖ Eliot himself was certainly familiar with this particular poem as he satirized its imagery in ―Portrait of a Lady.‖36 Arnold‘s poem is more hopeful, certainly, but it concerns itself with the same things.
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel? (―The Buried Life‖ 6-15).
28
Gregor asserts that ―[t]he controlled mockery of the war of words conceals a deeper war within, and to listen to that we can only make a gesture […] and be silent‖ (Gregor 271).
The speaker notes that ―even love‖ is ―too weak / [t]o unlock the heart, and let it speak‖
(―The Buried Life‖ 12-13). More interesting is the final two lines of the first stanza where he says ―turn those limpid eyes on mine, [a]nd let me read there, love! thy inmost soul‖
(―The Buried Life‖ 10-11). The adjective limpid is a curious word, usually applied to bodies of water to indicate transparency as if the speaker wants to gaze through the eyes to the soul behind them. Unlike in Dante, the eyes are ―not so much‖ ―gazed upon as read‖ as if the speaker were gleaning the other person for information (Gregor 271).
Additionally, the line 15 is ambiguous. ―Love‖ could be read as vocative, addressing the hearer and identifying them as a loved one, or it could be appositional—love is what is being read and is the nature of the hearer‘s inmost being. While the latter reading is particularly Dantean, the speaker is still attempting the great divide between himself and the beloved. In this particular part of the passage, eyes are functioning more traditionally as windows of the soul; however, near the end of the poem, the function that they perform is the same as the one in Eliot, and the connection that their loss symbolizes is made plain.
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
29
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. (―The Buried Life‖
78-87)
This is the effect that is desired by the meeting of eyes—to know and be known by another, which is exactly what Eliot was struggling against while writing ―Gerontion.‖
For the most part, Arnold‘s meaning is quite clear; though, the bolt is likely discussing a door being thrown open; however, it may also be an allusion to Canto XXXI of the
Purgatorio, describing the effects of Dante‘s meeting with Beatrice37. Under the weight of her accusations,
As an arbalest will snap when string and bow
are drawn too tight by the bowman, and the bolt
will strike the target a diminished blow—
So did I shatter, strengthless and unstrung,
under her charge, pouring out a flood of tears,
while my voice died in me on the way to my tongue (Purgatorio XXXI:16-21).
This communion that stirs the heart, that in the eyes can read and know the heart, is the ideal that Eliot was seeking and the ideal that Gerontion could not attain when his eyes
30
failed. As the speaker in the Hyacinth Garden, he knows nothing—not himself, not another, not Divine Love.
When he was asked what his favorite period was in Italian literature, Eliot answered ―Dante, and then Dante, and then Dante. No one has had a greater influence on me than Dante38‖ (Eliot qtd. in Manganiello 1). In his essay on Dante, Eliot asserted that
[t]he experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a
lifetime. It is very much like our intenser experiences of other human
beings. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, of shock and
surprise, even of terror (Ego dominus tuus); a moment which can never be
forgotten. (Eliot ―Dante‖ 216)
This description of the experience of a poem (by which he means Dante) is likened by means of the allusion to the first poem of the Vita Nuova. In this most memorable scene,
Dante, having been spoken to by Beatrice for the first time, likens the experience, so rapturous and so violent, to having his heart torn out of his chest and fed to her. This is the primal, emotional experience that the poetry of Dante39 had upon Eliot, and it is these emotions that are instilled into the person of Beatrice who is found within ocular imagery.
While Eliot thought that the Vita Nuova ―should be read after the Divine
Comedy,‖ he also felt that ―[w]e cannot understand fully Canto XXX of the Purgatorio,‖ and with it, the meeting with Beatrice ―until we know the Vita Nuova40, […] [b]ut at least we can begin to understand how skillfully Dante expresses the recrudescence of an
31
ancient passion in a new emotion, […] which […] gives a meaning to it‖ (Eliot ―Dante‖
225). The ancient passion of which he speaks is, of course, rapturous love. Dante‘s best friend Guido Cavalcanti says in his response to Dante‘s first sonnet that ―[y]ou saw, I think, all that is powerful, / [a]ll that is joyful, and all human good‖ (Cavalcanti qtd. in
New Life 77). These are the emotions that are found in the first sight of Beatrice; however, there are two more concrete ideas regarding Beatrice that may be drawn from the Vita Nuova. The first is a fuller explanation oft the connection between beauty, terror, and inquisition from ―Gerontion.‖ The second is the cosmic portent of the number nine which permeates Dante and is often borrowed by Eliot for his own purposes.
As previously mentioned, beauty, terror, and inquisition are all emotions (or events) which may be tied to important moments in Dante, but specifically to Beatrice.
Thus, these emotions may be seen as part of the experience that Gerontion loses when his senses (especially his sight) fail. Beauty, of course, is Dante‘s first sight of Beatrice. This is not merely physical beauty, but moral beauty—hJ kalh; ajgaphv. Dante states,
[Love] ordered me to go and look for that young angel, and so while I was
still a child I did go looking for her, and saw that her behavior was so
noble and praiseworthy that one could indeed applying to her those words
of Homer: ―She did not look like the daughter of a mortal man, but of a
god.‖ And although her image, which was always in my mind, gave Love
the confidence to lord it over me, her influence was so good that she never
allowed Love to rule over me without the faithful advice of my reason.
(New Life 4)
32
As the above passage indicates, this combination of moral and physical beauty conferred upon Beatrice a semi-divine attribute which transforms into terror on Dante‘s part when
Love descends to speak with him. When Dante first speaks with Beatrice, he first experiences ―the very height of bliss‖ (New Life 4). In fact, the experience is so riveting that Dante flees to his room where the anthropomorphic personification of Love visits him in a vision, bearing Beatrice in his arms (New Life 4-5). The sight of Love is indescribable, ―[his] memory alone fills me with horror‖ (New Life 6). This is exactly the experience to which Eliot is alluding in the aforementioned quotation: ―[t]here is a first, or an early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror (Ego dominus tuus); a moment which can never be forgotten‖ (Eliot ―Dante‖ 216). This experience is described more fully when Dante and Beatrice‘s eyes meet earlier in their life, a cosmic event portended by compounded numerology. He first saw her in their ninth year, an event so rapturous that
his vital spirit, which lives in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to
tremble so violently that its pulsations were felt with terrifying force in the
most remote parts of my body. And as it trembled my vital spirit said:
―Ecce deus fortiori me, qui veniens dominabitur michi.41‖ (New Life 3)
This is the terror induced by Beatrice‘s presence; however, it would not be until after her death that the final emotion can occur. The experience of Inquisition is found in the aforementioned section where Dante and Beatrice meet again in Eden in Purgatorio
XXX and XXXI. When Dante42 sees her, veiled, from afar, ―her eyes / fixed me from across the stream, piercing me through‖ (Purgatorio XXX.65-66). Beatrice turns and
33
reprimands Dante in such a way that ―her stern and regal bearing made [him] dread / her next words, for she spoke as one who saves / the heaviest charge till all the rest are read‖
(Purgatorio XXX.70-72). From lines 97-146, Beatrice lays out her charge against Dante to the angels who had unwisely attempted to intervene on his behalf. Finally, at the start of Canto XXXI, she turns to him and says,
―You, there, who stands upon the other side—―
(turning to me now, who had thought the edge
of her discourse was sharp, the point) she cried
without pause in her flow of eloquence,
―Speak up! Speak up! Is it true? To such a charge,
your own confession must give evidence.‖
I stood as if my spirit had turned numb:
the organ of my speech moved, but my voice
died in my throat before a word could come. (Purgatorio XXXI.1-9)
This passage reinforces the possibility of such Divine inquisition within the person of
Beatrice, and it is the same sort of inquisition as that of Job by God where, at the end of the charge of Deity, there is nothing to be said. This is one of the more memorable scenes of the Purgatorio and one which obviously stuck in Eliot‘s mind (Eliot ―Dante‖ 225). In light of these scenes, that problematic passage in ―Gerontion‖ reads: Gerontion loses the beauty of Beatrice in the terror of the presence of Love, who is brought on by Beatrice.
Then, he loses even that sense of awe in the inquisition of Beatrice. However—and this is very important—it is only after this inquisition that Dante finally sees the eyes of 34
Beatrice without her veil, an event which reveals the mystery of the Incarnation.
Gerontion could not, or would not, see that particular revelation.
Although the numerology of nines is immanent in Dante‘s work, it is never as blatant as in the opening of the Vita Nuova; Eliot also utilizes this numerology in The
Waste Land. At the outset of the final scene of ―The Burial of the Dead‖ with the crowds on London Bridge43 being merged with Dante‘s Hell in lines 61-63, Eliot describes:
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. (The Waste Land 64-68)
In this scene, the hopeless, shuffling damned passing into the financial district44 look at their feet instead of at their fellow sufferers, the mark of the traitors in the icy locker of
Cocytus, a failure of the meeting of eyes, as if in denial of contact (Southam 152). Lines
66-68 are actually an anacoluthon. It would have been simple to end line 65 without a comma and had these lines be a participial phrase; however, Eliot intentionally created a fragment in this otherwise grammatically sound section. As in Tennyson‘s Ulysses, the subject is omitted so it is structurally unclear who or what is flowing, though the crowds are the obvious solution. The effect, then, is that of a camera pan across London‘s hellscape towards the doomed church which was slated for destruction in 1919 (Southam
152). Dante‘s epiphanic meeting with Beatrice, as well as the more obvious death of
Christ, took place precisely at the ninth hour.45 Instead of the life-altering and rapturous
35
meeting with Beatrice precisely at nine, the line and the church bell rings ominous and empty: ―a dead sound on the final stroke of nine‖ (The Waste Land 68). The crowd on
London Bridge will not see the emerald eyes of Beatrice; they will not see divine love; and the word ―final‖ implies that the opportunity for such a revelatory meeting of eyes has passed. Although he does not connect them directly, Dominic Manganiello broaches a particular passage regarding the Divine Love that was discovered in the eyes of
Beatrice in the Vita Nuova and its recurrence in Eliot‘s verse, The line is a quotation from
Dante which Eliot held as a high ideal of love, using it as an epigraph for his Clark lectures: ―The end of my love was once the salutation of this lady whom you appear to mean; and in that dwelt my beatitude which was the end of all my desires‖ (Dante qtd. in
Manganiello 95). This is the self-same exactly ―the mystical ecstasy‖ that Celia in The
Cocktail Party recalls as
like a dream
In which one is exalted by intensity of loving
In the spirit, a vibration of delight
Without desire, for desire is fulfilled
In the delight of loving. (Eliot qtd. in Manganiello 92).
This is Eliot‘s own recreation of the experience of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova, and it is one that is not fully developed until his later poetry as, in his own words, ―Rossetti‘s
Blessed Damozel, first by my rapture and next by my revolt, held up my appreciation of
Beatrice by many years‖ (Eliot ―Dante‖ 225).
36
When Dante finally meets Beatrice once more at the top of the earthly paradise, the numerous references to her eyes,46 at least one in each of the final three cantos of the
Purgatorio, enforce the importance of this image. This obviously made an impression on
Eliot as he even began to notice other places that it occurs, finding the otherwise unremarkable meeting of Sordello the poet noteworthy due to the description of him as
―proud and disdainful, superb and slow in the movement of his eyes‖ (Eliot ―Dante‖
219). Dante‘s Beatrice represented for Eliot ―an attempt ‗to fabricate something permanent and holy out of his personal animal feelings—as in the Vita Nuova,‘‖ and it is this that the image of eyes invokes (Eliot qtd. in Gordon 233). The image of Beatrice that
Dante finally meets in the Purgatorio is more than his ideal love, but rather something supernal. ―In The Figure of Beatrice, a book Eliot commissioned for Faber and Faber,
Charles Williams outlined how the beloved flourished in Dante‘s imagination:‖
The image of Beatrice existed in his thought; it remained there and was
deliberately renewed. The word image is convenient for two reasons. First,
the subjective recollection was an image of an exterior fact and not of an
interior desire. It was sight and not invention. Dante‘s whole assertion was
that he could not have invented Beatrice. Secondly, the outer exterior
shape was understood to be an image of things beyond itself. […] Beatrice
was, in her degree, an image of nobility, or virtue, of the Redeemed Life,
and in some sense of Almighty God himself. But she also remained
Beatrice right to the end. (Williams qtd. in Manganiello 88-89)
37
Meeting Beatrice‘s eyes is something beyond simply seeing eye-to-eye for Dante, and consequently for Eliot himself; however, the gaze of Beatrice is not something that can be described by words. Ciardi notes that when Beatrice removes her veil that he may see the whole of her smiling face, ―Dante makes no effort47 to describe the smile of Divine
Love, but only his rapture at beholding it‖ (Ciardi qtd. in Dante Purgatorio 317). In his own essay on Dante, Eliot notes that to experience the heights of beatitude in the
Paradiso, ―[w]e should begin by thinking of Dante fixing his gaze on Beatrice:‖
Gazing on her, so I became within, as did Glaucus, on tasting of the grass
which made him sea-fellow of the other gods. To transcend humanity may
not be told in words, wherefore let the instance suffice for him for whom
that experience is reserved by Grace. (Dante qtd. in Eliot 227)
For Eliot, the proper response to these visions is to experience the ―states of feeling‖ that these scenes produce (Eliot ―Dante‖ 228). ―[T]he reasoning [behind the scenes] takes only its proper place as a means of reaching these states48‖ (Eliot ―Dante‖ 228). It is important to realize that, for Eliot, these images of Beatrice‘s eyes are ―not merely decorative verbiage‖ so that when Dante writes ―Beatrice looked on me with eyes so divine filled with sparks of love, that my vanquished power turned away, and I became as lost, with downcast eyes,‖ ―this is something that we are meant to feel‖ (Dante qtd. in
Eliot ―Dante‖ 228).
An interesting facet of the above quotation is the association of the state of being lost i.e. damnation with downcast eyes—a trope that Eliot used in all the major poems of the early 1920‘s: ―Gerontion,‖ The Waste Land, The Hollow Men49. Manganiello ties the
38
use of Beatrice‘s eyes to The Hollow Men50, but his discussion is nonetheless germane for the purposes, in both ―Gerontion‖ and in The Waste Land. In the second section of The
Hollow Men, Manganiello asserts that ―Eliot‘s lines recall Dante‘s use of the familiar lyric trope of eyes to signify the windows of the soul;‖ however, as has been demonstrated, this ocular imagery is far more nuanced than Manganiello asserts.
However, he is correct in noting that ―[i]n Purgatorio XXX and XXXI Dante both longs and dreads to behold Beatrice‘s eyes in the garden of Eden because they reflect the human and divine natures of Christ, represented by a griffin drawing a chariot‖
(Manganiello 61). Manganiello does not mention Dante‘s curious commentary on his being astonished by the mystery of the Incarnation only when reflected in the eyes of
Beatrice.
Judge, reader, if I found it passing strange
To see the thing unaltered in itself
Yet in its image working change on change.
And while my soul in wonder and delight
was savoring that food which in itself
both satisfies and quickens the appetite. (Dante Purgatorio XXX.124-129)
The allegory itself is simple—only when reflected in the eyes of Divine Love is the mystery of the Incarnation revealed and satisfying. It is this that Gerontion lacks. He cannot see the eyes of Beatrice and as such cannot comprehend Christ as either Lamb or
Tiger, Lion or Eagle. Paradise may not be in the eyes of Beatrice alone; however, it is reflected by Divine Love that the first vision of the multifoliate, heavenly rose occurs.
39
―The ‗sightless‘ hollow man, who leads the ‗blind life‘ (Inf. III.47) of a neutral, lacks such a vision of Love and does not dare meet these eyes‖ (Manganiello 61) The empty ones of The Hollow Men, unlike the sighing crowd on London Bridge or Gerontion, have the faintest trace of hope. However, ―their vision can only be restored when the beloved‘s eyes ‗reappear / [a]s the perpetual star‘ […] to guide them as she guided ‗[t]hose who have crossed / [w]ith direct eyes, to death‘s other Kingdom‘‖ (Manganiello 65). There are no eyes in The Waste Land or in Gerontion‘s dry thoughts. The stroke of nine has passed and there will be no Beatrice to guide them from their hell to a heaven or even to purgatorial fires.
40
IV. IN THE HYACINTH GARDEN
Although lacking the clarity of the scene in ―Gerontion,‖ the most important and fully-realized incidents of metonymic seeing in the early poetry occur in the first part of
The Waste Land, ―The Burial of the Dead,‖ specifically the hyacinth garden episode.
While ocular imagery occurs in many areas of The Waste Land, this particular episode is the most thorough and intricate usage within the poem51. Though one of the most frequently discussed, this particular incident incurs large variation of critical opinions.
The episode has two very specific parts: the framing quotations from Wagner‘s Tristan und Isolde and the interaction with the hyacinth girl herself. It is necessary, then, to understand not only the incidents of seeing contained in this episode, but how these portions relate to each other to form a cohesive whole to understand the extent of eyes as a symbol.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, 41
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd' und leer das Meer. (The Waste Land 31-42)
The exact interrelation of these two scenes is crucial for understanding the nature of sexual seeing. For instance, is the seeing from the Wagner quotation different than the seeing (or rather the failure to see) found in the hyacinth garden? This is a deceptively complicated question which will require some digression.
The first critic to address the role of the Wagner quotations in the hyacinth garden episode was F.R. Leavis whose seminal essay ―The Poem‘s Unity‖ set the dominant tone for consideration of this scene. He posited that the framing Wagner quotations offer ―a positive in contrast‖ to the ―nameless, ultimate fear‖ of the preceding passages, which then transforms into ―romantic desolation‖ in the final line (Leavis 35-36). Leavis‘s reading is subsumed into the dominant currents of thought during the New Critical Age, which is best expressed by Cowley‘s paraphrasing of The Waste Land‘s message as ―the present is inferior to the past. The past was dignified; the present barren of emotion. The past was a landscape nourished by living fountains; now the fountains of spiritual grace are dry‖ (Cowley 31). This binary arrangement of privileging the past over the present dominated the discourse on The Waste Land for quite some time;52 however, it is, ultimately, insufficient for reading the episode.
42
More contemporary critics tend to read the hyacinth garden episode as an example of sexual failure exemplified. In Reading The Waste Land, Jewel Brooker and Joseph
Bentley discuss the hyacinth girl passage at length. For them, the relation of the Wagner quotations to the hyacinth garden is one of ergon and parergon, i.e. picture and frame, with the hyacinth garden as picture and the opera as frame (Brooker and Bentley 69).
―The radically altered structure (frame instead of juxtaposition) requires the reader to contrive a mode of interpretation that will mediate between the lovers from Wagner‘s opera and the lover‘s framed by the story53‖ (Brooker and Bentley 69). The problem with this scheme is the assertion that ―myth [is] a frame for temporal life‖54 is based on a rather Cowley-esque reading of the episode, which posits that ―[s]uperficially, it appears that the mythic lovers fail in a glorious burst of tragic passion in their titanic love-death, whereas the contemporary lovers merely sputter into paralysis and silence55‖ (Brooker and Bentley 69). The conclusion to which Brooker and Bentley come regarding this passage is that ―no direct communication between any of the lovers is rendered. A sailor sings to Isolde, a messenger speaks to Tristan, the hyacinth girl commemorates the anniversary of an experience in the garden, and her lover recalls‖ an isolating vision
(Brooker and Bentley 74). The ―[i]solation of lovers is presented as central, but this isolation in turn frames a known background which shows not isolation but intense and ecstatic union‖ so that ―[i]f love has failed, it has failed in an awesome way‖ (Brooker and Bentley 74-76). While the reasoning seems sound, this does seem to produce a rather positive reading of the failure in this particular passage for the poem—diametrically opposed to much established thought56. In addition, the statement that the ―sailor sings to
43
Isolde‖ does not quite represent the situation from the opera during the first quotation.
(Dana 275). Something more is at work than mere framing.
The traditional approach for synthesizing these leaps in time and space is found in
Eliot‘s essay ―Ulysses, Myth, and Order.‖ In the essay, Eliot posits that ―manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,‖ such as in Ulysses, ―is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history‖ (Eliot
―Ulysses‖ 177). This method of shaping is often seen, based on comments by both Eliot and Joyce, to be that which drives The Waste Land57. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be particularly probative to elucidating the poem. Robert Crawford concurs, noting that
―[i]t would be wrong to see The Waste Land‖ as operating with the same historical method (Crawford 137). For Crawford, the poem ―does unite the themes which Eliot sees as paramount in ‗contemporary history‘ and history as a whole,‖ but it ―gives to those themes no firm significance which raises them above futility‖ (Crawford 137).
While I believe that Crawford is correct, there is more at work than merely a lack of signification attached to the images of history. Stephen Spender asserts that in The Waste
Land, ―Eliot has further extended the pastiche method of Gerontion. His fragmentary but extraordinary literary sensibility resembles his sensibility to a fragmentary world which surrounds him‖ (Spender 271). The key word for examination is pastiche58 as it is, at least, superficially, one of the better descriptions of Eliot‘s method in the poem. The
Waste Land is just such a multifarious collage or pastiche;59 however, there is more to this than a mere pastiche of different voices. In her book on Eliot and Baudelaire, Kerry
Weinberg notes that ―[i]n The Waste Land[,] all the great legends of humanity are 44
intermingled, as indicated in the juxtaposition of the typist and Queen Elizabeth, and the merging of Philomela, the Pia of Dante, and the Thames‘ third daughter‖ (Weinberg 50).
According to Weinberg, Eliot‘s work ―is pervaded by the eternal question how [sic] to fit time into the timeless, how to weave the limited pattern of the present into eternity‖
(Weinberg 52). By reading the interrelation between the Wagner quotations and the hyacinth garden very literally and, as such, keeping the distinction between the various speaking voices in this passage and other passages within The Waste Land, M.A.R. Habib demonstrates the sort of problem that ignoring the pastiche nature of the work can create.
Instead of viewing the voices as a fractured, superimposed unity whose message requires listening to all, Habib asserts that ―each voice strives to define ultimate reality, and some voices attempt to contextualize contrasting visions which stubbornly resist categorization‖ (Habib 235). To overcome the problem of this reading, Habib posits that it is Tiresias whose ―consciousness could be viewed as the site where these voices are overheard, mediating between these voices and the reader‖ (Habib 235). This intervention of Tiresias seems unnecessarily complicated.60 It is simpler to believe that the reader has the role of mediating the voices as they appear and disappear into the poem‘s oneiric mist. As these early poems are pastiches of both space and time so that not only locations but also time periods are blended without any signal, it is more appropriate to consider this technique a kind of disparate and chaotic montage.61 An excellent example of this occurs in the passage shortly after the episode in the hyacinth garden.
Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, 45
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
[…]
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! (The Waste Land 61-63,69-70)
In these few short lines, both spacial and temporal aspects of the montage technique are present. The passage begins with a statement of the unheimlich nature of this location, signaling that this is not a normal city and is quickly followed by a very literal description of early 20th century London with fog and crowds passing over London Bridge. Then, the line ―I had not thought that death had undone so many‖ places these crowds in Dante‘s
Hell,62 another shift in location. Cleanth Brooks posits that ―these various allusions, drawn from widely differing sources, enrich the comments on the modern city so that it becomes ‗unreal‘ on a number of levels‖ (Brooks 65). He goes on to posit of the Stetson quotation that the speaker, ―like Dante, sees among the inhabitants of the contemporary waste land one whom he recognizes63‖ and by addressing him ―as one who was with him in the Punic War rather than […] in the World War‖ Eliot is ―making the point that all the wars are one war; all experience, one experience‖ (Brooks 65). However, there is more to this passage than simple unification. By the necessarily temporal act of reading, which must occur in time, the effect is vacillation between time periods or of transformation so that the scene throbs between London and Dante (and Virgil‘s) Hell. In his book T.S.
Eliot: A Virgilian Poet, Gareth Reeves notes that the result of this vacillation is an
―amalgam‖ which ―leaves the impression that the only location for this cityscape,
46
associated with London to be sure, is the consciousness of the unspecified observer‖
(Reeves 39). From the view of interpretation, I think Reeves is correct. By reading the two scenes as an amalgam, the intended reading of the passage is evinced. However, a superior explanation for the product of this effect is not oscillation or transformation that results in amalgamation, but rather superimposition. Thus, the reader of The Waste Land is required to see both the financial workers shuffling across London Bridge and the languishing souls in Limbo simultaneously. This is especially important when considering the infernal imagery here since, for Eliot, Dante‘s Hell, or indeed any Hell, is
―not a place but a state‖ (Eliot ―Dante‖ 215). By superimposing the two scenes, both scenes are present and give their full poetic force simultaneously.
Returning to the episode in the hyacinth garden, a better presentation of the operatic material in the poem occurs in Margaret Dana‘s essay ―Orchestrating The Waste
Land.” Dana notes that the speaker ―experiences a failure similar to Parsifal‘s in the early
Hyacinth garden episode‖ (Dana 269). Her analysis of the scene is remarkably astute and worth examining in detail:
As heard in the opera, [the first Wagner quotation] is a melancholy version
of the forward-thrusting motif of the ship‘s movement toward Cornwall,
already heard contending in the overture with the theme of Isolde‘s love-
longing as she is carried unwillingly away from her own homeland toward
her unwanted marriage to King Mark. Perversely hearing the song as a
mockery of her own feelings, Isolde is aroused to demand her fateful
confrontation with Tristan, whom she reproaches for his betrayal. The
47
young woman—―the hyacinth girl‖—in Eliot‘s poem, although unaware
of the tragic operatic context in which she has been placed, also speaks
words of reproach (II. 35-41). But it is her lover‘s trancelike paralysis that
is most important here. In experiencing a moment of ecstasy that
overwhelms him, he is like Parsifal on his first visit to the Grail castle:
seeing the vision, ―looking into the heart of light,‖ but powerless to
comprehend or respond. (Dana 175).
Based on Dana‘s rendering, the hyacinth girl is not placed in contrast to Isolde, but rather she and Isolde are superimposed upon each other both simultaneously speaking words of reproach, but not to the sailor, as in Wagner, but rather to the unresponsive Parsifal with whom the speaker is superimposed. Then, the scene flickers to the shepherd who speaks to the dying Tristan, effectively superimposing that scene upon the failure of Parsifal.
Thus, the ergon and parergon are not a set of mythic lovers and modern lovers, but rather both parties are actors in their own operatic tragedies—the ergon and parergon are one.
Now, returning at last to the matter of seeing in the poem, the romance implied in these superimposed interactions is partially evinced through eyes and what they see. If the ideas of love expressed are not exactly as Brooker and Bentley suggest, then what is the nature of the romance in the hyacinth garden episode? More to the point, what does the metaphor of eyes within the poem say? The answer seems to be a more complicated version of what occurs in ―Gerontion‖—in The Waste Land, the speaker attempts to turn his eyes from the earthly and gaze into the divine mysteries found within the eyes of
Beatrice. In so doing, however, his eyes fail and he ceases to see the corporal but, in the
48
faithless frame of The Waste Land, does not receive a heavenly vision. This is the complicated ascetic exchange that this meeting and failure of sight mediates. Due to the superimposition of scenes, the failure of eyes within the context of the hyacinth garden episode has three particular facets which must be examined in detail. The first is the controlling allusions to Eliot‘s earlier poem ―La Figlia che Piange‖ 64 which influences the reading of the scene as the hyacinth girl suffers a rejection nearly identical to the weeping girl in the earlier poem and does so for similar reasons. The second is Eliot‘s early poem ―Opera‖ which ties the Wagner superimpositions to the images of youth present and presents a very different reading of the allusions to Tristan and Isolde than is traditionally seen. The final is the ascetic and spiritual aspects of seeing evinced through the Parsifal and Dante allusions within the poem as well as the nature of the speaker‘s vision into the heart of light.
The scene in the hyacinth garden is often compared on a superficial level with the scene in Eliot‘s ―La Figlia che Piange‖ primarily because both scenes are thought to present what Elizabeth Drew calls ―another frustrated love, an arrested spring, a thwarted fulfillment‖ by painting ―the picture of the girl‖ with all the imagery ―of spring and abundance and an exquisite promise‖ (Drew 70). Additionally, the particular details of several lines give this relationship between the poems credence. In ―La Figlia,‖ the girl is described as having ―[h]er hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers‖ (―La Figlia‖
20). In The Waste Land, the speaker sets the scene as ―[w]hen we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden / [y]our arms full, and your hair wet‖ (The Waste Land 37-38). The descriptive resemblance is obvious. The two poems are related in more than mere descriptive details as the association of this particular scene in ―La Figlia‖ with the 49
hyacinth garden is found in another possible allusion ―to August Strindberg‘s The Ghost
Sonata (1907), whose third and final scene is set in the ―Hyacinth Room‖ and dramatizes an abortive (unfulfilled) love scene between ―student‖ and ―girl‖ (the hyacinth girl?), concluding with the death of the girl‖65 (Miller 71-72). Due to the superimposition of scenes, the connotations of this relationship transfer into The Waste Land. Both scenes hinge on a boy rejecting the proffered affections of a girl. The speaker tells the girl to
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used. (―La Figlia‖ 4-12)
While it may not be immediately obvious, ―‗La Figlia Che Piange‘ draws on the estrangement that pervades the relationship of Dido and Aeneas;‖ however, ―[t]he
Virgilian echoes do not elucidate a situation or action, a ‗story,‘ behind [the poem]. [it] resists such explanation‖ (Reeves 11,14). Eliot was, as many, struck by this relationship, particularly the meeting in the underworld, which Eliot calls ―the most telling snub in all poetry‖ and ―one of the most poignant, but one of the most civilized passages in poetry‖
(Eliot ―What is a Classic‖ 123). The most interesting comment by Eliot is the assertion
50
that ―Dido‘s behavior appears almost as a projection of Aeneas‘ own conscience: this
[…] is the way in which Aeneas‘ conscience would expect Dido to behave to him‖ (Eliot
―What is a Classic‖ 123). Most importantly,
Aeneas does not forgive himself—and this, significantly, in spite of the
fact of which he is well aware, that all that he has done has been in
compliance with destiny, or in consequence of the machinations of the
gods who are themselves, we feel, only instruments of a greater
inscrutable power. (Eliot ―What is a Classic‖ 123-124)
This explains the speaker‘s assertion ―[s]o I would have had him leave‖ as though the poet, that greater inscrutable power, has parted these two lovers66 by divine decree, an act of necessity of the kind that will be seen in the hyacinth garden. The man is obedient and turns his eyes from the earthly woman in favor of the divine eyes of Beatrice in whose eyes is paradise—though it is not in hers alone. Eliot, musing on the hapless lovers in another essay, thought that ―Aeneas and Dido had to be united, and had to be separated.
Aeneas did not demur; he was obedient to his fate. But he was certainly very unhappy about it, and I think that he felt that he was behaving shamefully‖ (Eliot qtd. in
Manganiello 85). The mystical divine love is not to be found, and the poem, as well as
Eliot‘s thoughts on that relationship seems to support the rejection of the man as behovely, if unfortunate—Eliot noted that he had ―no doubt that Virgil, when he wrote
[Dido‘s snub of Aeneas in the underworld], was assuming the role of Aeneas and feeling very decidedly a worm‖ (Eliot qtd. in Manganiello 85). Dominic Manganiello is correct67 in asserting that the base, romantic relation of the couple has given way to an amor
51
platonicus. Fayek Ishak reads ―La Figlia‖ similarly so that the relationship in the poem is an―[instance] of particularized rather than generalized [aspect] of love‖—―[i]t is the secular love of created beings, conventional in outlook, possessive in aim, perverted and abortive in media‖ (Ishak 57). ―For Eliot, the romantic ideal fails to transcend the object of desire. Dante, on the other hand, had succeeded in making the transition from earthly to heavenly love‖ (Manganiello 86). Manganiello is correct in his assertion that ―[t]he flowers, the garden urn, the sunlight weaving in her hair, are images which suggest that in his imagination the poet casts the girl in the role of Dante‘s Beatrice68, and hints at their meeting in the earthly paradise‖ (Manganiello 86). This is especially important given the centrality of Beatrice in the imagery of eyes, especially in the spiritual undertones69 to the seeing that occurs in the hyacinth garden. However, the scene appears to be more complicated than Manganiello‘s reading as the departure is driven by necessity. The avulsion of the soul is not only necessary for the soul to journey to God, but the allusions to Virgil inscribe the justified departure of Aeneas from Dido into the weeping girl and the would-be-lover. On similar grounds, I am not wholly convinced by Manganiello‘s assertion that the weeping girl is ―no Beatrice […], not because the poet banishes her, but rather because she fails to point beyond herself, remaining enclosed within the confines of the poet‘s memory and desire instead‖ (Manganiello 87). Rather, I think that in failing to have paradise in her eyes as Beatrice does, the weeping girl serves, within the poem, as
―an allegoric [figure] of tinsel artifice, false emotion, and pathetic nonentity, to be bypassed on the way to the City of God‖—as Lyndall Gordon asserts rather acerbically of women in general in Eliot‘s work (Gordon 40-41).
52
Due to the additional Wagnerian allusions, the episode in the hyacinth garden is influenced by Eliot‘s early poem concerning Tristan and Isolde, ―Opera.‖ The poem itself is worth examining as it presents a similar and yet distinct portrait of love—something more ethereal and wistful than the harsh fatalism of ―La Figlia.‖
Tristan and Isolde
And the fatalistic horns
The passionate violins
And ominous clarinet;
And love70 torturing itself
To emotion for all there is in it
Writhing in and out
Contorted in paroxysms
Flinging itself at the last
Limits of self-expression.
We have the tragic? oh no!
Life departs with a feeble smile
Into the indifferent.
These emotional experiences
Do not hold good at all,
And I feel like the ghost of youth
At the undertakers‘ ball. (Opera 1-17)
53
The particular poem is based upon Eliot having seen a performance of Wagner‘s Tristan und Isolde in 1909, a performance that seems to have endured in his memory (Ackroyd
38). Traditionally, this poem is read as a ―critique of Romanticism‖ which influences
Eliot‘s own distrust of passionate emotion (Ricks qtd. in Eliot Inventions 119). When writing on the prose of Thomas Hardy, Eliot stated that ―extreme emotion seems to me a symptom of decadence; it is a cardinal point of faith in a romantic age, to believe that there is something admirable in violent emotion for its own sake‖ (Eliot Inventions 119).
This active dislike of decadent emotionalism seems to satirize the love of Tristan and
Isolde, which significantly changes the tone of the first Wagner quotation in The Waste
Land (lines 31-34) so the idealism and beautiful optimism of love seems to either be viewed negatively as naïve and vapid, or at least with some measure of ambivalence.71
Gordon asserts that Eliot was ―irritated by the lovers‘ passionate extravagance‖ and felt that their contorted intimacy, ultimately, to be ―so futile‖ (Gordon 38). This colludes with
―La Figlia‖ where the poet divorces the two lovers from each other based on some necessity unknown to the couple. More interesting is the consequence of all this emotional extravagance—the division of their passion is not tragedy, but something infinitely more pathetic. In a letter to Conrad Aiken (30 September, 1914)72, Eliot expressed that ―the great use of suffering, if it‘s tragic suffering—it takes you away from yourself—and petty suffering does exactly the reverse, and kills your inspiration‖ (Eliot
Letters 58). Like the heavenly love found in Beatrice‘s eyes, tragic suffering places thoughts on the supernal rather than the mundane. Thus, the poem states that the induced- love of Tristan and Isolde is not of such a high tragic mode. Such emotional experiences are transient, ephemeral sufferings that end when ―life evaporates into a smile / [s]imple
54
and profound‖ (First Debate between the Body and Soul 44-45). This is analogous to the end of ―La Figlia‖ where the poet speaking as the agent of fate describes his desire to find a way that the separation should be reconciled, unlike Dido and Aeneas in the underworld.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand. (La Figlia 13-16)
The smile in these contexts seems the symbol of the empty dissolution, mirroring what
Eliot later said on Pound, ―[i]t is, in its way, an admirable Hell, ‗without dignity, without tragedy‘‖ (Eliot qtd. in Ricks 119). The entire experience of these two passionate lovers leaves the poet with the immanent but intangible sensation of ―feeling like the ghost of youth / [a]t the undertaker‘s ball,‖ an interesting image encapsulating alienated impotence.
The final aspect necessary to understanding the use of eyes in the hyacinth garden is what is actually seen when the speaker mentions ―the heart of light, the silence‖ (The
Waste Land 41). Hugh Kenner encapsulates the situation that surrounds this vision noting that ―[t]he context is erotic73, the language that of mystical experience: plainly a tainted mysticism‖ (Kenner 16). The language of mystical experience found in these lines, especially in ―the heart of light,‖ is worth discussing in some detail as what is seen there is ultimately the object of the speaker‘s eyes. As previously mentioned, Dana posits that the speaker in the Hyacinth garden is much like Parsifal in Act I ―who fails out of lack of
55
experience to respond to his first Grail vision‖ (Dana 269, 275). The figure of Parsifal also requires a female counterpart74 similar to the hyacinth girl, the weeping girl, or
Beatrice, ―a complex figure who is both seductress and Magdalene‖ for the comprehension of his own mystic vision. (Dana 270). Brooker and Bentley are correct in noting that the phrase ―the heart of light‖ ―is the kind of phrase found frequently in the literature of mysticism to describe moments of ineffable transcendence‖ (Brooker and
Bentley 75). Dana ties this to the Grail legend of Parsifal, noting that―[t]his is the moment that is crucial in the Grail legends, for if the hearer is simply overwhelmed by the numinous presence [of the mystic vision] and fails to interrogate it for its personal significance (as in the hyacinth garden), he will have failed in the quest‖ (Dana 289). The speaker, as Parsifal, cannot respond, only recording the experience a year after the vision
(The Waste Land 35). Brooker and Bentley‘s characterization of the nature of this vision not only relates to the use of eyes in the experience. Brooker and Bentley‘s Bradleian interpretation75 of these lines is particularly germane.
[The speaker] says that his eyes failed and speaks of looking into a
synaesthetic light and silence. The more we consider his report, the more
curious it comes. […] [T]he speaker has an experience of his senses as a
prelude to a synaesthetic fusion of sight and hearing, light and silence.
Like the blind Tiresias, he ―sees.‖76 […] The most likely conclusion on the
experience, however, is that it represents a moment of immediate
experience in the Bradleian sense. (Brooker and Bentley 76)
56
This moment of immediate experience is, in the philosophy of F.H. Bradley, the
―experience in which there is no distinction between [the viewer‘s] awareness and that of which it is aware. There is an immediate feeling, a knowing and being in one, with which knowledge begins‖ (Bradley qtd. in Brooker and Bentley 40). ―By reflecting on the nature of immediate experience and by somehow reclaiming its felt residue and transforming it on a higher plane, one moves beyond it;‖ however, ―[t]he end of all transcendences is the Absolute, an all-comprehensive whole which we are logically forced to project‖ (Brooker and Bentley 41). The coupling of mystic language and Eliot‘s own work on Bradley points towards the hyacinth garden scene being an encounter with this Absolute brought about by the failure of love in the garden. The particular nature of the Absolute in Bradleian philosophy makes the nature of the vision seen in the garden complicated as Bradley himself did not connect the Absolute with God (Bradley qtd. in
Bolgan 154). On the other hand, other philosophers of that era, such as A.E. Taylor, whom Eliot mentioned positively in a footnote, stated that the Absolute is ―precisely that simple, absolutely transcendent, source of all things which the great Christian scholastics call God‖ (Bolgan 154). While the exact connection to Eliot himself is circuitous, this particular idea was in the metaphorical air at the time of The Waste Land‘s writing. Eliot himself, in his dissertation on Bradley, posited that ―[o]nly by the failure of experience to be immediate—by its having broken down into relational experience—do we have time, space, and selves‖ (Brooker and Bentley 76). This moment of unification when two became one, not by consummation but by its lack, did the speaker‘s corporal eyes fail and he glimpses a vision of, perhaps, the Absolute. As Balachandra Rajan poetically states,
―[a]t the heart of light, the hyacinth has become the lotus and the rose‖ (Rajan 21). In his
57
own discussion of the hyacinth garden section, Habib contends that ―even as romantic love fails, [the prophetic voice] asserts that love as an absolute, to present as no less an ultimate goal than spiritual fulfillment and obeisance to God‖ (Habib 235).
The necessity of the failure of romantic love for a vision of the Absolute has already been established philosophically as well as by both the Parsifal allusions and the superimposition of ―La Figlia;‖ however, the Absolute is also seen in the final stanza of
Eliot‘s early poem, ―Conversation Galante‖ where the speaker, addressing a woman, states:
"You, madam, are the eternal humorist
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your air indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute--"
And—"Are we then so serious?" (―Conversation Galante‖ 13-18)
In this poem, ―Eliot caricatured his embarrassing friendship with an emotional older woman‖ (Gordon 38). This somewhat-vapid female figure was previously seen in
―Portrait of a Lady‖ and is identified as Boston hostess Adelene77 Moffatt by Conrad
Aiken who rather memorably referred to her as the ―oh so precious, oh so exquisite,
Madeleine, the Jamesian lady of ladies, the enchantress of the Beacon Hill drawing room—who, like another Circe, had made strange shapes of Wild Michael and Tsetse
(T.S. Eliot) (Conrad qtd. in Gordon 37). The importance to this study is her role as ―[t]he eternal enemy of the absolute,‖ who pulls the thoughts of the errant poet-prophet away 58
from the supernal, confutes his mad poetics, and requires Beatrice to state that paradise is not merely in her eyes. The poet, as in ―La Figlia,‖ needs the earthly female figure, but must, invariably, depart in search of higher things.
Finally, the failure of eyes is a metaphor for the incapacity of the corporal when gazing into the face of the truly divine78 invoked by the failure of earthly sight and speech at the end of the hyacinth garden episode. The use of eyes as revelation is most clearly evinced when ―[t]he [speaker‘s]79 eyes fail as he gazes into the heart of light or heavenly city, just as Dante‘s eyes fail when he encounters Beatrice in the earthly paradise, or when he gazes at the beatific vision‖ (Manganiello 54). For Donald Childs, the speaker‘s
―failure in this relationship [is] important to a success elsewhere‖ (Childs 109). For in his sight of the earthly ―beauty of the hyacinth girl,‖ he receives ―intimations of a perfect beauty beyond her‖ (Childs 109). Manganiello rightly asserts that in these instances,
―speechlessness is a reminder that words are incomplete or limited because they cannot hold the object of desire‖ (Manganiello 54). Childs‘ assertion80 that ―the failure of the human relationship was a necessary prerequisite to whatever divine success was achieved‖ has already been discussed as deriving from the presence of ―La Figlia‖ within the allusive context (Childs 110). Regardless of the derivation, the hyacinth girl ―figures as something fundamentally antithetical to the speaker‘s spiritual fulfillment81. She is made the representative of the material world, calling the speaker to the merely physical passions that can be actualized within it‖ (Childs 111).
Childs‘ assertion that the speaker‘s ―looking into the heart of light, the silence‖ is, as he terms, a mystical moment is wholly correct; however, during this experience, what
59
is actually seen? Childs reads the final line of the episode, ―Öd' und leer das Meer,‖ as being in apposition to the heart of light rather than an independent statement so that the mystical, oriental void is what is seen during the experience82 (Childs 112). I am not sure that he is correct on this matter as, grammatically, there is a period at the end of both of the lines so the final Wagner quotation is not in direct apposition to the previous line.
Rather, this final quotation is another ocular failure. In the flickering voices and scenes, the speaker at the hyacinth garden has become the swain from Wagner. When asked by
Tristan who has, perhaps, replaced the hyacinth girl inquiring what her lover is pondering, the speaker says ―Öd' und leer das Meer,‖ ―waste and empty, the sea‖ i.e. I see nothing. No healing Isolde is visible upon the horizon as Tristan lies dying. Though he has wept and fasted, wept and prayed, the speaker receives no revelation from the vision—his eyes have failed him—he could not see the eyes of Beatrice in the heart of the light. There is no such positive vision in The Waste Land.83
Although there are several other incidents of ocular imagery in The Waste Land, the one in the Hyacinth Garden is the clearest and most distinct example of the Beatrician interconnection between the sexual and spiritual. The loss of that seeing is the failure of connection to both human and divine sources. Unlike in the later poems, there is not even the possibility of restoration.
60
V. CODA: WHERE THERE ARE NO EYES
Eyes as an objective correlative for Beatrice meet its full realization in The
Hollow Men. Already present in utero at the time of the publication of The Waste Land, the poem has as one of its recurring leitmotivs the image of eyes. The Dantean allusions to this recurring image have already been covered by Dominic Manganiello84 whose aforementioned discussion I will only briefly supplement. With these limitations in mind, this study‘s conception of eyes in Eliot‘s poetry reaches its apotheosis in The Hollow Men wherein the person of Beatrice has been condensed to eyes alone. More properly, the object and what it correlates, the tenor and the vehicle, have merged. Communion with another, human or divine, has reached its most utter failure—the poem depicts hellish solipsism where, curiously, there is not even solitude85. All the major elements of the metonym inchoate in the previous poems meet their fullest, if most laconic, expression in this poem: the eyes as metonymic of an earthly love, of a divine love, and the loss of eyes symbolizing the fall into hopeless, faithless solipsism. One such passage where this occurs is in lines 47-51.
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
61
Form prayers to broken stone. (The Hollow Men 47-51)
The earthly love and its failure is particularly evident in this passage.86 As in
―Gerontion,‖ the Hollow Men would meet with the beloved, but they are unable to fulfill their desire. Even though they are ―[t]rembling with tenderness,‖ there is still no ability to respond to the beloved. As in Thomson‘s ―Art,‖ only lips that cannot kiss sing or in this case, pray; however there are no songs in this valley of dying stars as the hollow men
―avoid speech‖ (Southam 213; The Hollow Men 57). As in The Waste Land, the turning from communion with the earthly towards the divine is here an impotent action—prayers are formed, which is in itself suggestive of incompleteness as formed is not the proper verb for prayers but a word that implies a kind of spiritual automatism, and these prayers are directed to not only stone idols, but shattered ones. These broken icons are less than impotent as they are described as ―stone images,‖ which certainly means idols, but imbues them with a measure of phantasmal insubstantiality (The Hollow Men 41). As in
―Gerontion‖ and The Waste Land, the turning away from the earthly love to a heavenly ideal is an empty gesture which provides no salvation as the eyes of Beatrice cannot be found.
A similar place where a situation in the poem is incompletely mirrored by one in Dante is the description of the infernal river in lines 55-58.
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river (The Hollow Men 55-58)
62
As Manganiello asserts ―[t]he ‗tumid river‘ is a concise version of the image Eliot used in
‗The wind sprang up at four o‘clock,‘‖ a minor poem from a group that eventually grew into The Hollow Men (Manganiello 63). The poem represents a halfway point between
The Waste Land and The Hollow Men.
Is it a dream or something else
When the surface of the blackened river
Is a face that sweats with tears?
I saw across the blackened river
The camp fire shake with alien spears
Here, across death‘s other river
The Tartar horsemen shake their spears (―The Wind Sprang Up 6-13)
―The river of death suggests not only the Thames and the Congo of Heart of Darkness, but also the Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood where the violent suffer in Inferno XII
(58-60), across which the Centaurs or Tartar horsemen87 shake their spears at Virgil and
Dante‖ (Manganiello 63). Manganiello suggests that this scene ―telescopes88‖ ―with the one from Inferno III which has the damned huddled on the dark plain between the gates of hell and the Acheron‖ (Manganiello 63). However, I am not certain the relation between these two scenes is as simple as he asserts. Those particular lines from The
Hollow Men (55-58) seem to directly allude to Inferno III rather than through the intermediary step of the poem; however, the connection between Dante‘s violent and the hollow men is maintained, albeit indirectly, by the request to ―[r]emember us—if at all— not as lost / [v]iolent souls, but only / [a]s the hollow men‖ (The Hollow Men 15-17)89.
Manganiello ties this scene to Beatrice by noting that ―‗[t]he face that sweats with tears‘
63
connects the river with ‗Eyes that last I saw in tears,‘ originally the first section of the poem. In [that] version it is impossible to determine, as Ronald Bush observes, whether the eyes and the tears are the speaker‘s or the beloved‘s‖ (Manganiello 63-64).
Manganiello posits that Eliot is merging ―two scenes from the Divine Comedy that involve weeping:‖ ―Dante‘s contrition in Purgatorio XXXI for his betrayal of Beatrice‖ and the scene ―in Inferno II, where both Dante and Beatrice are in tears‖ (Manganiello
64). In this passage, ―Lucy90 pleads with Beatrice to help the pilgrim [Dante] weeping on the banks of the fiumana, a tumid river‖ (Manganiello 64). ―Beatrice responds by turning
‗her bright eyes weeping‘ (‗gli occhi lucenti lagrimando‘; 116) to Virgil, and urges him to rescue Dante‖ (Manganiello 64). The eyes that the hollow men cannot, or will not, see
―reflect, in fact, the glory of the beatific vision‖ and ―were kindled from the lamps of heaven (Manganiello 64; Inferno II.55). However, this is not all that the eyes of Beatrice contain. In Canto II of the Inferno, Beatrice speaks with Lucia ―that soul of light and foe of all cruelty‖ (Inferno II.100-101). According to Ciardi‘s note, ―allegorically, she represents Divine Light. Her name in Italian inevitably suggests luce (light), and she is the patron saint of eyesight‖ (Ciardi qtd. in Inferno II.97). The connection to the eyes is obvious; however, Beatrice also carries this self-same light within her own eyes. In the above quoted Italian text, Beatrice‘s eyes are described as ―occhi lucenti‖ where the latter word, while rendered ―bright‖ and ―shining‖ by Pinsky and Ciardi respectively, is a present participle with luce, light, as its root word. Thus, the features of Lucia are born within Beatrice‘s eyes—and it is this that the hollow men are denied in the following lines.
Sightless, unless
64
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death‘s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men. (The Hollow Men 59-67)
One of the most curious formulations of the poem is the first two lines; however, when considered in the light of the metonym of eyes, the meaning clearly transcends the paradox that a kind of simplistic literalism would instill. As in both ―Gerontion‖ and The
Waste Land, the hollow men, as Parsifal, lose their own vision as a sign of their inability to react to the heavenly eyes and the vision that they contain; however, unlike in The
Waste Land where the speaker sees only an empty sea, the vision here is expressedly connected to the paradise within Beatrice‘s eyes—the stars that form the ―celestial rose made of threefold light‖ (Manganiello 65). As Manganiello notes, ―Beatrice removes the scales from Dante‘s eyes only after he has successfully described the nature of Love or caritas to St John (Par. XXVI. 76-8). The ‗sightless‘ hollow man, who leads the ‗blind life‘ (Inf. III. 47) of a neutral, lacks such a vision of Love and does not dare meet these eyes‖ (Manganiello 61). To know Love is necessary to fully understand Beatrice91.
However, unlike in ―Gerontion‖ and The Waste Land, there is no physical incarnation at all—only the eyes remain92. Regardless of any variances in interpretation, The Hollow
Men contains within its vaporous nightmarescape the apotheosis of the slowly-evolving imagery of eyes within Eliot‘s pre-conversion poetry. In the early poems, the eyes represent any number of varyingly contradicting images including the oppressive
65
watching eyes of Boston society. As his poetry evolves, there is an increasing cogency to the image of eyes and their failure so that in the usages in the 1920 volume, especially in
―Gerontion,‖ have surprising cross-applicability to other poems. Within especially the hyacinth garden scene in The Waste Land, the failure of sight comes to clearly symbolize the inability to respond both to the earthly Beatrice and also to the mystic vision found in the eyes of the heavenly one.
66
NOTES
1 Eliot himself said ―No one has had a greater influence on me than Dante‖ (Eliot qtd. in Manganiello 1).
2 This study is focused on the relation between eyes and the composite figure of Beatrice; however, there may be a connection between this figure and Schuchard‘s conception of the Dark Angel, which is not explored here.
3 Manganiello does discuss the ocular imagery and Beatrice but only in the very limited context of a particular passage in The Hollow Men. He does not expand this concept to other poems as this study does.
4 For an overview of Eliot‘s life during this time period see Lyndall Gordon‘s biography 23-94 or Peter Ackroyd‘s 30-53.
5 The fantasy is that of the speaker, not necessarily the poet.
6 I am indebted to MacDiarmid for highlighting this part of Kermode‘s introduction.
7 See also ―Prufrock ln.40-41, 105
8 This is also seen in ―Portrait of a Lady‖ where the thin, social mores that gild her unhappiness are pierced by the eyes of the observer. In response to the unheard accusation, the lady says ―[f]or indeed, I do not love it…You knew? You are not blind! / [h]ow keen you are!‖ (―Portrait of a Lady‖ 22-23).
9 For some biographical reasons for this, cf. Gordon 38-39.
10 This is not, of course, to imply that someone has to physically be watching. Panoptic power does not actually require an observer.
11 Habib confirms the presence of these allusions.
12 The early lines repeatedly discuss Nancy‘s riding and breaking of the ―barren New England hills.‖ I read these lines as a metaphor for aggressive female sexuality. Additionally, chastity would seem out of place with the smoking and modern dances.
13 Habib noted that Mr. Apollinax is also a similar satire, but with a different twist. Ultimately, though Mr. Apollinax himself is as much an object of irony as Nancy for, as
67
MacDiarmid astutely notes, ―Apollinax is Prufrock reincarnated as a leering satyr‖ and is, like Nancy and Prufrock, ridiculous in the final tally. (MacDiarmid 39).
14 Another example is ―The Little Passion From ‗An Agony in the Garret.‘‖
15 The sea nymphs are reminiscent of not only the mermaids at the end of Prufrock, but also the sirens from the omitted narrative section of ―Death by Water‖ in The Waste Land manuscript.
16 The loss of eyes signaling the loss of sexual power is both exceedingly Oedipal and quite Freudian; however, unlike the Beatrician imagery that develops, this Freudian tie is not consistent across the various late poems. It is certainly present in ―Whispers of Immortality‖ and The Waste Land, but seems absent from ―Gerontion‖ and The Hollow Men. As such, it is a not a developmental feature of ocular imagery in Eliot and is, thus, beyond the scope of this study,
17 This is most easily seen at the opening of the Inferno where it is the mention of Beatrice and her concern for him (not the possibility of a vision of God) that motivates Dante to his journey (Inferno II.130-137).
18 q.v. Chapter III.
19 This biographical reading assumes the referent is Vivien. Lyndall Gordon champions Emily Hale as the referent (402); however, I feel that given the undercurrent of sexual failure in this reading, Vivien is more likely.
20 The most contemporary scholarship (published after Childs‘ book) generally considers the affair reality. See Carol Seymour-Jones 110-129, James Miller‘s T.S. Eliot: Making of an American Poet 232-237.
21 This is not to diminish Leavis‘s critical insight; however, in 1932 the biographical interpretation using Eliot‘s marital difficulties would probably have been critically untoward.
22 q.v. pg. 23, 31.
23 Childs connects the passage of ―Gerontion‖ in question to the early prose-poem ―Hysteria‖ and the applicability is obvious.
24 Contra ―Terror, however, is lost in inquisition, and this is a greater loss than the beauty lost in terror, for Eliot locates the possibility of contact with the Other not in the passion for human beauty or the detachment of inquisition but rather in the abyss of terror‖ (Childs 103). 68
25 J.C.C. Mays notes that ―[t]here is the same careful play with pronouns‖ as in Prufrock; however, he does not elaborate (Mays 113).
26 In response to the erudite diction in lines 51-52, Ransom, rather wryly, asks if ―Gerontion [proposes] not only to tell Christ of his final rejection, but to do it rather bookishly?‖ (Ransom 170). This kind of scorn might not be out of place; however, I am unsure of what interpretive possibilities it presents.
27 The adjective ―backwards‖ in these lines refers to Canto XX of the Inferno wherein the sorcerers and false prophets are punished by having their heads face backwards—having claimed insight and misled others in life, they are forbidden sight (Southam 76).
28 I am indebted to Dominic Manganiello for alerting me to this passage.
29 Given my previous reticence regarding Childs‘ reading of the ―terror‖ in line 58, I remain unconvinced when Childs asserts that ―[Gerontion] has not so much dwelt lovingly upon the Incarnation and the Passion as thought about them‖ so that the fault lies in ―[t]he incapacitatingly ratiocinative dimension of Gerontion‘s character‖ (Childs 104- 105).
30 q.v. pg. 31.
31 The word ―adulterated‖ here is also suggestive of the earlier reference to the story of Hosea wherein the people of Israel are adulterous to God for their lack of repentance.
32 A feature of the damned in Dante, with whom Manganiello associates Gerontion who forever ―pursues the circular thoughts of his dry brain just as Dante‘s non-committal trimmers pursue a wavering banner endlessly in circles‖ (Manganiello 27).
33 I am indebted to Manganiello for reminding me of this section.
34 The connection between Arnold and Dante clearly existed in Eliot‘s mind as he cites Arnold‘s discussion of Dante at one point (Eliot Dante 210).
35 As with Dante, there are certainly undercurrents to Arnold‘s poem, but, for the purpose of this study, a surface analysis of the images will suffice.
36 I am indebted to Dal-Yong Kim‘s work on Eliot‘s Puritanism for informing me of this reference (54).
37 This passage will be studied further. q.v. pg. 32.
38 In his book T.S. Eliot and Dante, Dominic Manganiello describes the relationship between Dante and Eliot at length; however, for the purpose of this study, it is enough to 69
know that theirs was not a formal relationship built on scholarship and biography, but one of visceral experience.
39 When examining the scenes which moved Eliot and formed the allegory that underlay the image of eyes in his poetry, it is important to realize that while there may be undercurrents in these passages, it is the very literal images and words that moved the young Eliot, and on these that I will focus.
40 I will follow Eliot‘s, perhaps idiosyncratic, convention of only translating the article from the book‘s title. My citation, however, fully translates the title.
41 Translated freely: ―Here is a god stronger than I, who in his coming will dominate me.‖
42 Curiously, this scene is the only time in the entirety of the Divine Comedy where Dante‘s name is spoken. The interpretive possibilities for eyes in Dante that this presents are tantalizing; however, they are beyond the scope of this study.
43 q.v. pg. 47.
44 I am indebted to Southam for the geographic references in this passage (Southam 152- 153).
45 Southam is probably correct in asserting that Eliot‘s own note to this line ―may be a derisive joke, a laconic distraction from the line‘s more serious possibilities of meaning‖ (Southam 153).
46 The source for Dante‘s fixation upon eyes is beyond the scope of this study, which only seeks to know what Eliot found in it; however, it is likely his own is an extrapolation of the tropes of courtly love.
47 This is a device that probably evolved out of Dante‘s reticence to give a physical description of Beatrice as well as the focus on his own responses to her in the Vita Nuova.
48 These rapturous states are something that Eliot seems to be describing in The Four Quartets when he speaks of ―music heard so deeply / [t]hat it is not heard at all, but you are the music / [w]hile the music lasts‖ (The Dry Salvages 212-215).
49 e.g. the above mentioned passage of The Waste Land (65).
50 For my treatment of this topic, q.v. the coda of this study.
51 For example, the reference to eyes in lines 125 and 138 are easily explained with the previous discussions on pages 13-16 and 19-21.
70
52 For further examples of this binary in action in early criticism see Cleanth Brooks 70, F.O. Matthiessen 42.
53 Contra Harriet Davidson 128
54 A similar argument, albeit from an entirely different method, is proposed by Jacob Korg in his essay ―Modern Art Techniques in The Waste Land” wherein he says that ―[t]he real and imagined are made to support each other, the real bringing into the work a powerful and unexpected authenticity and the imagined serving to control the significance of the real elements by interpreting them‖ (Korg 92). The arguments against Brooker and Bentley‘s interpretation also adequately address Korg‘s.
55 The discussion of spatiality which follows, while interesting and insightful, is not probative to the argument at hand.
56 For example, Brooks 63, Graham Hough 116, E.M. Forster 15.
57 Cf. Southam 130-131.
58 This term is used, for the time being, in the sense of Spender‘s essay rather than the endless, depthless postmodern pastiche of Frederic Jameson. The difference being that the images here are quite concrete and meaningful. The reader is intended to see each of these scenes and sources both individually and in connection to each other. This is not so with Jameson who, for an example, highlights the art piece where piles of television screens are perpetually playing loops of random images at random intervals (Jameson 31). For Jameson, ―[t]he older aesthetic‖ i.e. the aesthetic of The Waste Land and other modernist pastiches, ―is then practiced by viewers, who, bewildered by this discontinuous variety, decided to concentrate on a single screen, as though the relatively worthless image sequence to be followed there had some organic value in its own right‖ (Jameson 27). For The Waste Land, that image sequence does have organic value in its own right. ―To see all the screens at once‖ as Jameson suggests that the postmodernist viewer is asked results in the response of the earliest critics and responders (for example, E.M. Forster) where all they receive from the poem is a polyphonic, cacophonic shriek of ―The Horror! The Horror!‖ (Jameson 27).
59 The original title of the poem, ―He Do the Police in Different Voices,‖ hearkens to this fact (Southam 128).
60 This consideration of Tiresias and others like it are generally born from Eliot‘s note to line 218 of the poem, which should be viewed with no small amount of skepticism.
71
61 This seems highly compatible with Eliot‘s own statement in ―Tradition and the Individual Talent‖ that ―the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order‖ (Eliot ―Tradition‖ 38).
62 Cf. Southam 150-152.
63 I agree with Brooks‘ assertion that no real meaning should be assigned to the name Stetson. I am unconvinced by the variety of views posed in Southam 153-154.
64 The presence of these allusions is well-documented, although they are not mentioned in many of the broadest annotations.
65 While I find this particular allusion exceedingly enlightening, I am not convinced by the rest of Miller‘s analysis of this particular scene.
66 Contra Reeves 15. Manganiello says something very similar (85), though a touch more assertively, and with different passages supporting his assertion—Our mutual conclusions were reached independently.
67 The only matter of his analysis that I cannot quite understand is his initial statement that ―Eliot‘s observation of the statue of a weeping girl prompts him to consider art‘s relation to memory and desire‖ (84). Within the context of the poem, there is no clear textual evidence that the poem is ekphrasis, though this could be my own ignorance.
68 Cf. Praz 311-312.
69 ―To remember the experience of an ecstatic moment in the garden is to be haunted by the specter of its removal‖ (Manganiello 86).
70 This word is unclear in the extant copy. It could also be ―life‖ (Ricks qtd. in Eliot Inventions 17).
71 Contra much traditional scholarship. See Brooks 63, Traversi 28, Hargrove 65.
72 I am indebted to Ricks for reminding me of this letter (122). Much else on this poem is included in Ricks‘ notes.
73 The erotic context is the immanent allusions to ―La Figlia‖ and ―Opera‖ as well as the Wagner quotations themselves.
74 The biographical reading of Emily Hale as the hyacinth-girl proffered by Lyndall Gordon is not considered here. See Donald Childs T.S. Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover 107- 108 for a thorough critique of this particular reading. 72
75 However, I believe that Brooker and Bentley may proceed too far in interpreting the vision in view Hegelian philosophy.
76 Cf. Ward 84-85.
77 There is a curious difference in spelling between Gordon and Southam. Adeleine is Gordon‘s spelling. For the sake of convenience, I will use Southam‘s.
78 Childs‘ discussion of the mystic aspect of the hyacinth garden episode is elucidative and thorough, and my analysis will only supplement Childs‘ where appropriate. However, Childs is not the only discussion of mysticism in the hyacinth garden cf. Skaff 21.
79 Manganiello uses protagonist, which may not be wholly justified; however, the rest of his discussion is completely germane.
80 Childs‘ discussion on the allusion to Dante‘s experience with Satan is not necessary to the argumentation; however, it is absolutely accurate (110-111).
81In T.S. Eliot’s Negative Way, Eloise Hay posits that these lines are an example of ―the movement of desire toward silence, negation, and emptiness,‖ exemplified by the silence that accompanies the heart of light (Hay 54). Childs phrases this as the speaker‘s ―contemplation of the void at the center of all human relations‖ (Childs 112).
82 This is a relatively common formulation which seems to originate with Hugh Kenner (18).
83 The missing AUM, the λογος, from the benediction that composes the final line of the poem attests to this fact (Southam 199).
84 Neither Manganiello‘s discussion nor my additions consider the facet of eyes stemming from Conrad—an influence that is heretofore in Eliot‘s poems not been as strongly present and is beyond the scope of this study.
85 Cf. The Waste Land 343.
86 Manganiello‘s reading of this passage is unconvincing (62-63).
87 Curiously, Manganiello does not connect this instance of a river sweating with the pertinent instance in ―The Fire Sermon‖ where the ―[t]he river sweats / oil and tar‖ which is similar to the punishment of the barrators in Canto XXI who are tormented by the Malebranche (The Waste Land 266-267).
88 I would describe this as superimposition similar to that in The Waste Land. 73
89 Manganiello‘s allusion to these lines, their connection to Dante, and the ensuing interpretation are unconvincing (Manganiello 63)
90 Manganiello is following Robert Pinsky in anglicizing Lucia‘s name.
91 Manganiello concurs with this particular reading; however, he reads the possibility of hope into the final lines, which is, to some degree, questionable.
92 It is quite possible that Robert Crawford is correct in his assertion that The Hollow Men is an example of religious entropy (Crawford 150-158). In this way, the reduction of Beatrice to eyes is not synecdoche but ―the dying embers of rites reduced to meaninglessness‖ (Crawford 153).
74
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno (Signet Classics). Trans. John Ciardi. New York: Signet Classics, 2001.
---. New Life (Hesperus Classics). Trans. J. G. Nichols. New York: Hesperus P, 2003.
---. The Purgatorio (Signet Classics). Trans. John Ciardi. New York: Signet Classics, 2001.
Akroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot: a Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
Asher, Kenneth. T.S. Eliot and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Bloom, Harold. ―Introduction‖. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: A Critical Casebook. Bloom, Harold, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Bolgan, Anne C. What the Thunder Really Said. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1973.
Brooker, Jewel, and Bentley, Joseph. Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1990.
Brooks, Cleanth. "The Beliefs Embodied in the Work." Storm Over the Waste Land. Comp. Robert E. Knolls. Chicago: Scott Foreman & Company, 1964. 58-87.
Childs, Donald J. T.S. Eliot: Mystic, Son, and Lover. New York: St. Martin's P, 1997.
Cooper, John X. T. S. Eliot and the Politics of Voice: The Argument of the Waste Land. New York: Books on Demand.
Cowley, Malcolm. T. S. Eliot: a Selected Critique. Comp. Leonard Unger. NW York: Rinehart & Company, 1948. 30-33.
Craig, David. "The Defeatism of the Waste Land." Storm Over the Waste Land. Comp. Robert E. Knolls. Chicago: Scott Foreman & Company, 1964. 122-135.
Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
75
Dana, Margaret. ―Orchestrating The Waste Land: Wagner, Leitmotiv, and the Play of Passion‖.T.S. Eliot's Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music. Cooper, John X., ed. New York: Garland Pub., 2000.
Davidson, Harriet. ―Improper Desire: Reading The Waste Land‖. The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. Moody, A. David. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Dick, Bernard. ―The Waste Land and the Descensus ad Inferos‖. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: A Critical Casebook. Bloom, Harold, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet, T.S. Eliot. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.
Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: the Design of His Poetry. New York: Charles Scribner‘s Sons, 1949.
Eliot, T. S. The Annotated Wasteland with Eliot's Contemporary Prose. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.
---. Collected Poems: 1909-1962. London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1963.
---. ―Dante‖. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
---. ―From Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry”. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
---. ―The Function of Criticism‖. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
---. ―Hamlet‖. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
---. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917. Ed. Christopher Ricks. New York: Harvest Books, 1998.
---. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Valerie Eliot. Vol. I. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.
---. The Waste Land. Ed. Michael North. Norton Critical Edition New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
---. The Waste Land: a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Harcourt, 1971.
76
---. ―What is a Classic?‖ Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
---. Ulysses, Order, and Myth. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
---. ―From The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism‖ Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Forster, E. M. T. S. Eliot: a Selected Critique. Comp. Leonard Unger. NW York: Rinehart & Company, 1948. 11-17.
Foucault, Michel. ―The Means of Correct Training‖. Foucault reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
---. ―Panopticism‖. Foucault reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
---. ―The Repressive Hypothesis‖. Foucault reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
---. ―We ‗Other Victorians‘‖. Foucault reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
---. ―What is an Author?‖ Foucault reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Gish, Nancy K. The Waste Land: a Poem of Memory and Desire. Boston: Twayne, 1988.
Gordon, Lyndall. T.S. Eliot: an Imperfect Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
Gregor, Ian. "Eliot and Matthew Arnold." Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium. Ed. Graham Martin. New York: Humanities P, 1970.
Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. Landscape as symbol in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Jackson: University P of Mississippi, 1978.
Headings, Philip R. T. S. Eliot. New York: Twayne, 1964.
Habib, M.A.R. The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Hay, Eloise Knapp. T.S. Eliot's Negative Way. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1982.
77
Hough, Graham. "Imagism and Its Consequences." Storm Over the Waste Land. Comp. Robert E. Knoll. Chicago: Scott Foreman & Company, 1964. 98-121.
Ishak, Fayek M. The Mystical Philosophy of T.S. Eliot. New Haven: College & UP, 1970.
Jameson, Frederick. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Kenner, Hugh. ―The Death of Europe‖. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: A Critical Casebook. Bloom, Harold, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Kim, Dal-Yong. Puritan Sensibility in T. S. Eliot's Poetry. Grand Rapids: Peter Lang, Incorporated, 1994.
Korg, Jacob. "Modern Art Techniques in The Waste Land." A Collection of Critical Essays on The Waste Land. Ed. Jay Martin. Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Leavis, F.R. ―‗Prufrock,‘ ‗Portrait of a Lady,‘ ‗Gerontion,‘‖. T. S. Eliot, "Prufrock", "Gerontion", Ash Wednesday and other shorter poems a casebook. Ed. B.C. Southam. London: Macmillan, 1978.
MacDiarmid, Laurie J. T. S. Eliot's Civilized Savage : Religious Eroticism and Poetics. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Malamud, Randy. "Shakespeare/Dante and Water/Music in The Waste Land." T.S. Eliot and Our Turning World. Ed. Jewel S. Brooker. New York: St. Martin's P, 2001.
Manganiello, Dominic. T. S. Eliot and Dante. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989.
Mathiessen, F. O. "The System of Allusion." Storm Over the Waste Land. Comp. Robert E. Knolls. Chicago: Scott Foreman & Company, 1964. 39-57.
Mays, J.C.C. ―Early poems: from ―Prufrock‖ to ―Gerontion‖. The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. Moody, A. David. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Meredith, George. "Lucifer in Starlight." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online. 18 Mar. 2009
Miller, James E. T.S. Eliot: the Making of an American Poet. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2005.
78
---. T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: exorcism of the demons. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1977.
Milton, John, and Roy Flannagan. Paradise Lost. The Riverside Milton. Ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.
Moynihan, James. A Collection of Critical Essays on The Waste Land. Ed. Jay Martin. Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Murray, Paul. T.S. Eliot and mysticism the secret history of Four quartets. New York: St. Martin's P, 1991.
Neale, J. E. Queen Elizabeth I. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934.
Nuhn, Ferner. T.S. Eliot: a Selected Critique. Comp. Leonard Unger. NW York: Rinehart & Company, 1948. 120-137.
Perl, Jeffrey M. Skepticism and Modern Enmity before and after Eliot. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
Pinion, F. B. A T. S. Eliot Companion. Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1986.
Pound, Ezra. ―Confound it, the Fellow Can Write‖. T. S. Eliot, "Prufrock", "Gerontion", Ash Wednesday and other shorter poems a casebook. Ed. B.C. Southam. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Praz, Mario. T. S. Eliot: a Selected Critique. Comp. Leonard Unger. NW York: Rinehart & Company, 1948.
Rainey, Lawrence. Revisiting the Waste Land. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.
Rajan, Balachandra. The Overwhelming Question: a study of the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 1976.
Ransom, John Crowe. ―‘Gerontion‘‖. T. S. Eliot, "Prufrock", "Gerontion", Ash Wednesday and other shorter poems a casebook. Ed. B.C. Southam. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Reeves, Gareth. T.S. Eliot: a Virgilian poet. New York: St. Martin's P, 1989.
Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
79
Schwartz, Delmore. "T. S. Eliot as the International Hero." Storm Over the Waste Land. Comp. Robert E. Knolls. Chicago: Scott Foreman & Company, 1964. 88-95.
Schwarz, Robert L. Broken Images: a study of The Waste Land. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, Associated UPes, 1988.
Selby, Nick, ed. The Waste Land : Essays, Articles and Reviews. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.
Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: the Life of Vivienne Eliot. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.
Sicker, Phillip. ―The Belladonna: Eliot‘s Female Archetype in the Waste Land.‖ Twentieth Century Literature 30 (1984): 420-431.
Sigg, Eric W. The American T.S. Eliot: a study of the early writings. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Skaff, William. The Philosophy of T.S. Eliot. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1986.
Southam, B. C. A Guide to the Selected Poems to T. S. Eliot. 6th ed. London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.
Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot: a Selected Critique. Comp. Leonard Unger. NW York: Rinehart & Company, 1948.
Stead, C.K. ―‘Gerontion‘‖. T. S. Eliot, "Prufrock", "Gerontion", Ash Wednesday and other shorter poems a casebook. Ed. B.C. Southam. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Thomson, James. The City of Dreadful Night. Dodo P, 1880.
Traversi, Derek A. T. S. Eliot, The Longer Poems : The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday, Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
Trosman, Harry. ―T. S. Eliot and the Waste Land.‖ Archives of General Psychiatry 30 (1974): 709-717.
Unger, Leonard. Eliot‘s Compound Ghost. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1981.
---. T. S. Eliot: a Selected Critique. Comp. Leonard Unger. NW York: Rinehart & Company, 1948. 349-394. 80
---. T. S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis P, 1956.
Vickery, John B. A Collection of Critical Essays on The Waste Land. Ed. Jay Martin. Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Ward, David. T. S. Eliot Between Two Worlds: a reading of T. S. Eliot's poetry and plays. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
Weinberg, Kerry. T.S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire. The Hague: Mouton, 1969.
Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005.
Williamson, George. A Reader‘s Guide to T. S. Eliot. New York: The Noonday P, 1953.
81