TS
Eliot – Can parts of poems be more satisfying than the whole?
Poems
explored: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady, Gerontion,
The Waste Land and The Hollow Men
Because of the fragmentary nature of much of T. S.
Eliot’s poetry and the need for concentrated attention to the many and
sometimes disparate fragments that comprise the whole poem, it is perhaps true
to say that the overall satisfaction is diminished in relation to the quality
of understanding and pleasure to be derived from these composite parts. Eliot’s complicated and frequently ambiguous
use of symbolism and eclectic literary allusions, often arrests the attention
and requires careful consideration before these can be fully appreciated. Furthermore, the impressions address the
emotions as well as the mind and the response to these must therefore be both
personal and liable to change.
Eliot uses recurrent themes and preoccupations to
unify his fragments, but these themes frequently merge and become difficult to
identify or isolate, except by minute deconstruction of the poems. The narrative thread is tenuous and often
absent and, as some critics have pointed out, there is a repeated bewildering
shift of times and places; often without unifying central characters, drama, epic,
or lyric. Eliot’s style therefore
creates difficulties for the reader seeking a sense of argument or logical
subject matter.
Although some of Eliot’s earlier poems do contain
central characters (i.e. The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a
Lady and Gerontion), these pose
certain difficulties for the reader, because they are presented more as a
free-floating consciousness or collective mind vacillating and shifting between
ideas rather than a character with any sort of personal identity.
In Preludes,
addressing his consciousness as if it were another person, provided Eliot with
the quality of detachment necessary to explore the conscious and unconscious
workings of the mind, if perhaps at the expense of cohesion and overall
coherence. This is also why the three
protagonists mentioned earlier are largely interchangeable.
The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady both deal with the
emotional and psychological complexities of the relationship between men and
women. Both poems, in fact, have an
overall lyricism and in parts are meticulously euphonic, as might well be
expected from the title of the former.
But a ‘love song’ is not what follows and, as a conventional lover, the
rather comically-named J. Alfred Prufrock fails. His thoughts are a series of fractured images
with no spatial or temporal stability.
Prufrock himself has a tendency to see those around his as fragmentary;
as ‘faces’, ‘hands’, ‘eyes’ etc, as well as contemplating himself in
disconnected parts: ‘I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)/brought in upon
a platter’ and ‘(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)’ and,
most revealingly, in his melancholic fantasy: ‘I should have been a pair of
ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’. This spine-chilling image compacts much
sensory disturbance into so few words.
The narrative thread of the poem is tenuously held
together by negativity: Prufrock’s indecision and inability to rein in his
fractured thoughts and squeeze ‘the universe into a ball/To roll it to some
overwhelming question’. In this failure,
he resembles Gerontion, but Prufrock’s question remains ambiguous and
unarticulated. His self-conscious monologue
frequently dissolves into bathos and he remains a remote, socially inadequate
figure, forever circling around his ‘overwhelming question’, always on the
verge of crisis, but never able to confront the moment because his thoughts
refuse to cohere.
What is unequivocally clear about Prufrock is his
boredom with his trivial social routine:
For I have known them all already,
known them all –
Have known the evenings, mornings,
afternoons
I have measured out my life in
coffee spoons.
This
fragment of detail is enormously informative about Prufrock’s life and social
environment. Similarly:
And I have known the arms already,
known them all –
Arms that are braceleted and white
and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with
light brown hair!)
beautifully
illustrates his sharp visual memory but coupled with a sense of detachment and
even distaste for the urban society in which he is doomed to grow old.
These
fragmentary insights are immensely satisfying, but on the whole, Prufrock’s
unresolved dilemma remains an elusive one.
Without knowing the question, our emotional response remains divided and
the only certainty at the end of the poem is that Prufrock’s isolation can only
ever hope to find relief in the world of fantasy.
The
narrative technique of Portrait of a Lady
is similarly confused, although, as in The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, there is a semblance of meaning and
continuity that, on closer analysis, disintegrates into fragmentary
components. Like Prufrock’s mind, the
mind of this narrator hovers on the verge of moral collapse, which we perceive
through his aimless reflections.
Narrative sequence is approximated as we follow the young man through
December, April and October, on his visits to the Lady’s drawing room, yet
without being able to understand quite wherein lies the attraction or
compulsion of these evidently tortured visits.
Again, like J. Alfred Prufrock, it is not a personality but a mind that
is presented and:
Inside
my brain a dull tom-tom begins
Absurdly
hammering a prelude of its own,
Capricious
monotone
could
quite as well have been uttered by Prufrock.
There is also a similar, precarious holding-in-check of the emotions
which occasions one sudden, subconscious rebellion into absurd fantasy. Although he is the narrator, he remains
remote; his motives are obscure and his sense of responsibility to the Lady is
negligible.
However,
every cadence and nuance of the Lady’s voice has been captured and carefully
exploited to render it not merely plausible, but a perfect composition. The verse is controlled and the modulations
of the voice are taken up in the rhythm and rhyme. The Lady’s convincing repetition of words is
then utilised in the rhyme to denote stress points, as for example:
‘Ah, my friend, you do not know, you
do not know
What life is, you who hold it in
your hands’
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
‘You let it flow from you, you let
it flow!’
The
Lady’s metaphor contrasts with her action to capture both the idiom of her
speech and the anxiety of her mind.
Characteristically, the poem ends on two complicated and unresolved
questions, so that overall, the narrator/composer’s ironic remark: ‘This music
is successful with a “dying fall”’ could be epigrammatically applied to the
poem as a whole composition.
Like
Prufrock, Gerontion also dwells on
life’s missed opportunities. His
memories are fragmentary images or impressions without coherent sequence or
location and with such thematic intermingling as to make them at times
difficult to unravel. Images with
religious, sexual and cultural implications tumble one upon the other to create
a disturbing, non-cohesive whole. At
times Gerontion’s plight appears to be synonymous with the state of post-war
Europe, but—unlike Europe—remains without reference to any specific point of
crisis.
The
memorable paradox of ‘The word within a word, unable to speak a word’,
referring to Christ’s incarnation, is all too soon undermined by the rapid leap
to the contrasting ‘Christ the tiger’ image and ‘depraved May’; and the solemn
Christian ritual of the Eucharist is debased by the incongruous cast of
characters who follow; their names heavy with social and cultural implications
and about whom one could speculate almost endlessly. Indeed, the invitation to do so isolates the
passage into a self-contained charade.
The ambiguities surrounding these characters are clearly deliberate as
becomes evident later. But they are not
as easy for the reader to dismiss as for Gerontion, with his evocative ‘Vacant
shuttles/Weave the wind’.
The
artful punning and literary allusion creates a confused picture of history
having ‘many cunning passages’. With
time, things become lost or distorted and disappointment ensues as the
longed-for miracle of incarnation does not redeem.
Brief
glimpses of a primal truth flash through Gerontion’s fractured thoughts. His despair, I think, lies in his inability
to reconcile carnal and spiritual knowledge, which is possibly why the themes
interpenetrate and would explain why blossoming May is ‘depraved’ and why ‘tears
are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree’ (or the Tree of Knowledge—the cause of
man’s Fall—and especially why Gerontion so poignantly asks: ‘After such
knowledge, what forgiveness?’). Realising
this, however, one cannot help wondering how much import might be lost by an
inadequate recognition of the literary references upon which the poet so
frequently and casually draws; an observation even more pertinent to The Waste Land. Finding a possible key to Gerontion is not reassuring, for
Gerontion’s grim sincerity leaves no room for reassurance or illusion, and the
whole poem is a series of kaleidoscopic impressions, some of which are
immensely disturbing.
We
view the ‘substance’ of The Waste Land
through Tiresias, who is not, as the poet informs us in his notes, a
‘character’. Having been in the past
both male and female, Tiresias is now a prophet—though with limited powers—and
is now blind. All the other characters
‘merge’ in Tiresias, so that he becomes the central consciousness. Despite our previous experiences, this is an
undeniably abstruse concept. What
Tiresias ‘sees’ and experiences is a collage of disparate images and
impressions that have no temporal or geographical location or point of
stability, except in the nebulous mind of Tiresias. Eliot’s poetry both demands and deserves careful
attention and frequently provokes a profoundly personal response that is not
always easily definable.
We
enter into the sterility of The Waste
Land and almost immediately experience perceptible thrills of recognition
in the fragments of conversation: Marie’s recollection of the exhilarating fear
provoked by a recollected childhood experience is rendered poignant by the
contrasting bourgeois monotony of her present life. Even more poignant is the glimpse of the
‘hyacinth girl’. It saturates the senses
with images of wetness, fecundity, vulnerability and the pervasive scent of
hyacinths. It recalls the beautiful myth
of Hyacinthus and the solitary yearnings of the narrator of Portrait of a Lady. This intense experience leads to a moment of
profound insight into the silence that lies ‘at the heart of light’, which is
both exquisite and empty. It is a moment
rendered more beautiful by being framed between the two fragments of Wagner’s
romantic opera.
This
careful positioning of the fragments is utilised to great effect by the
poet. By framing the urgent plea of the
neurotic woman (whose tones of anxious appeal are perfectly captured) between
the decadent boudoir and the fragments leading to the monologue in the pub,
Eliot manages to endow it with extra emotional intensity. The lovelessness of this relationship is
confirmed both in the woman’s plaintive tones and in the evident lack of
response by her partner.
The
whole section of A Game of Chess is
so well-controlled and portrayed as to render it the most satisfying of all
Eliot’s poetry. It illustrates its theme
and captures the claustrophobic atmosphere or failing or failed relationships
which are given universality by the passage’s cultural and historical comprehension
so minutely portrayed.
The
barrenness of The Waste Land is
depicted in so many ways, but surely never with such extraordinary clarity as
in Section 5. There is no water in the
waste land and by this time the desire for water becomes so intense that the
imagination seems almost to create its substance. Short lines, word-repetition and careful
rhythmic control merge to create an hallucinatory state, so critically poised
as to be capable of producing the illusion of the longed-for water:
If
there were water
And
no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock…
This
urgency is maintained until the water is almost realised in the ‘Drip drop drip
drop’ of the hermit-thrush’s song.
A
similar creative achievement appears again in The Hollow Men, where the controlled metrical pattern, short,
unpunctuated lines and repetitive, sibilant consonants unite to evoke both the
dry, rasping voices and a trance-like, or semi-conscious state.
What
appeals to us in the profound intensity of so many of these fragmentary
impressions, is a recognition on a subconscious level, where language is merely
a barrier to communication. T. S.
Eliot’s remarkable achievement has been to explore and exploit his medium to
successfully communicate his experiences.
However, sustained description is difficult to maintain throughout the
entire poems because such fragments of heightened perception must necessarily
be restricted by the limitations of the language. A total appreciation of T. S. Eliot’s poetry
therefore demands a close attention to detail and a willingness to pause and
deconstruct the fragments that make up the whole poems.
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