T. S. ELIOT
26 SEP 1888 TO 04 JAN 1965
T. S. Eliot grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated first at Harvard University and then at Oxford University, with a break at the Sorbonne in Paris between his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Boston. He moved to England and began a strained marriage with Vivian Haigh-Wood in 1915. He supported himself by working at Lloyd's Bank in London from 1917-1925, then joined a publishing firm. In 1927, he became a British citizen and joined the Anglican Church. He was drawn to European fascism in the 1930s, but unlike Pound remained uninvolved in politics. His literary criticism, both on individual poets and on general principles of analysis, heavily influenced the American "New Critical" movement from the 1930s through the 1960s. His more general social criticism was more idiosyncratic; its Christian cultural commitments earned him an audience but its occasional anti-Semitism and severe conservatism isolated him from many readers. Eliot has a career that runs from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” through The Waste Land to Four Quartets. He had notable success with his verse plays, among them Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949).When The Waste Land first appeared in journals on both sides of the ocean in 1922, it evoked for many readers the ruined landscape left to them after the historically unique devastation of trench warfare and mass slaughter of the first world war. Its fragments mirrored a shattered world, and its allusions, however erudite, recalled a civilized culture many felt they had lost. Even its tendency to taunt readers with failed possibilities of spiritual rebirth, along with its glimpses of a religious route to joining the pieces of a dismembered god and a broken socius, struck a chord. Eliot was one of many major modernist writers to yearn for a mythic synthesis remaining out of reach. In a surprisingly short period of time, The Waste Land became the preeminent poem of modernism, the unquestioned symbol of what was actually a much more diverse movement. Eventually, as its shadow came to hide other kinds of modernism—from more decisively vernacular language to poems strongly identified with race or revolution--The Waste Land gathered a set of compensatory ambitions and resentments.
https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/poet/t-s-eliot
26 SEP 1888 TO 04 JAN 1965
T. S. Eliot grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated first at Harvard University and then at Oxford University, with a break at the Sorbonne in Paris between his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Boston. He moved to England and began a strained marriage with Vivian Haigh-Wood in 1915. He supported himself by working at Lloyd's Bank in London from 1917-1925, then joined a publishing firm. In 1927, he became a British citizen and joined the Anglican Church. He was drawn to European fascism in the 1930s, but unlike Pound remained uninvolved in politics. His literary criticism, both on individual poets and on general principles of analysis, heavily influenced the American "New Critical" movement from the 1930s through the 1960s. His more general social criticism was more idiosyncratic; its Christian cultural commitments earned him an audience but its occasional anti-Semitism and severe conservatism isolated him from many readers. Eliot has a career that runs from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” through The Waste Land to Four Quartets. He had notable success with his verse plays, among them Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949).When The Waste Land first appeared in journals on both sides of the ocean in 1922, it evoked for many readers the ruined landscape left to them after the historically unique devastation of trench warfare and mass slaughter of the first world war. Its fragments mirrored a shattered world, and its allusions, however erudite, recalled a civilized culture many felt they had lost. Even its tendency to taunt readers with failed possibilities of spiritual rebirth, along with its glimpses of a religious route to joining the pieces of a dismembered god and a broken socius, struck a chord. Eliot was one of many major modernist writers to yearn for a mythic synthesis remaining out of reach. In a surprisingly short period of time, The Waste Land became the preeminent poem of modernism, the unquestioned symbol of what was actually a much more diverse movement. Eventually, as its shadow came to hide other kinds of modernism—from more decisively vernacular language to poems strongly identified with race or revolution--The Waste Land gathered a set of compensatory ambitions and resentments.
https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/poet/t-s-eliot
T.S Eliot- Faith + Decay + Search for Truth
January 5, 2016~ wutosama
T.S Eliot, one of the eminent literary figures of the Modernist era, captures the exultation and despair of a generation in a modernist response caused by the First World War and the disillusionment of mundane modernity. His profound anxiety is demonstrated in “The Love song of J.Alfred Prufrock”, “The Hollow men”, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Journey of the Magi” through the deliberate subversion of Romantic poetry. The enduring appeal of his poems is the evocation of emotion within the reader, conjuring “a hope which sprang from the renunciation of the world, a hope so different from despair yet different from nihilism.” (A.Moody, 1979) Eliot’s cohesive poems possess a unity of culture, revealing timeless concerns such as the fragility of faith, decay and alienation of humanity and search for truth.
Both “Love Song” and “The Hollow Men” capture the bewildering moment when man transitions from the traditional Romantic period into a world of strangeness and vulnerability. This is acknowledged by Eliot’s metaphor of Prufrock having, “lingered in the chambers of the sea…” The allusion of the ‘chambers’ appropriates the sublime experience of Romantic poetry, in which literature becomes an escapist perception. However, this experience is disrupted by “human voices” that ‘wake us, and we drown.’ The disruption of Prufrock’s “chamber” instils an awakening from a Romantic escape, where the fragility of the human soul seeking relief is brought back to the reality of anguished voices. The recurring low modality evokes enervation as Eliot forces us to confront the material world rather than seeking an escape. The fragility of faith and the universality of confusion is further evident in “The Hollow Men” which highlights the shift of theological traditions to the teleological notion that humans are secluded. The lack of celestial bodies “in this valley of dying stars” alludes to the modernist belief by Nietzsche that “God is dead”. Ambivalence and vulnerability pervaded European civilisation, a civilisation that had lost its faith both in the benevolence of God and the nobility of man. Further reinforced through “there are no eyes here”, the poem elucidates a lost world where we lack guidance and location, where we are responsible for our own sins and decisions. This terror was particularly inherent in Eliot’s society during the devastating effects of the First World War as they were confronted with the idea of bearing the burden of sin. Hence, Eliot’s poems capture the disorientated state of western society as they forsake the beliefs of the past and subversively fall into a state of scepticism.
The loss of faith in the modern man led to psychological decay and paralysis, captured by Eliot’s experimentation of form in “Love Song” and “Rhapsody”. The modernist movement expressed the attitudes of an anxious generation unprepared for the onset of modernity. “The Love Song” is a poem that critiques the stagnation of Eliot’s society. The rhetorical question: “Do I dare eat a peach?” strikes the audience with the absurdity of a persona confounded by a piece of fruit. However, the persona’s reflection evokes the fear of an emasculated middle age man, representative of old traditions subverted into anxiety and scepticism. The peach metaphorically represents forbidden fruit and the dangers of knowledge, in which acknowledgement would lead to displacement and disillusionment; a direct reflection of modernity. “Rhapsody” also accomplishes a vision of desolation and apathy through the free association of twisted images. Eliot’s persona portrays the decay of Europe through fragmented imagery “So the hand of the child, automatic / Slipped out and pocketed a toy / I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.” The ‘automatic’ action of the child metaphorically represents the dehumanising impacts of increasing industrialisation within Eliot’s society in which the presumably innocent child is stripped of free will and morality. The synecdoche in “nothing behind that child’s eye” implies the absence of their soul or humanity, the depersonalisation of the lost child reflecting the sullen apprehension of the early twentieth century. Hence, through experimentation with textual form, Eliot highlights the alienation of humanity in a world dislocated from security and certainty.
The destruction of the old world creates a resonating desire to find a universal truth. Eliot’s particular approach to poetic form encourages us to find meaning within his poems. The experimental nature of Eliot’s poetry can be captured in the juxtaposition of capitalised letters to lower case letters in “Birth or Death? / I had seen birth and death” from “The Journey of the Magi.” The “Birth” and “Death” allude to Jesus’ birth which represented the end of the old civilisation (B.C), and the beginning of the Christian world (A.D). Both the end of the Romantic period and the Birth of Christ bring upon a new era in western civilisation, as we are struck between tradition and innovation, anxiety and impatience in finding new meaning through experimentation and exploration. The inadequacy of speech to demonstrate the search for meaning is elucidated through the fragmented metaphors in the “Hollow Men.” Eliot’s asks us to seek personal meaning “Between the conception And the creation/ Between the desire And the existence” as a result of the abandoned civilisation from God. The anaphora “between” emphasises the poet’s inability to articulate his concerns and his inability to reach beyond the barriers of language as a result of its subjectivity. Eliot’s work is tantalising, forever hinting at but never revealing its full illumination. Therefore, he invites us to interpret his poems which captures the spirit of Modernism in search of the ‘new’ revealing that life is a continual process of seeking personal truth as a result of the disillusionment in Europe.
Eliot’s poems depict the subversion of the Romantic era to Modernism in which his poems confront a material world of alienation and confusion. As a result, Eliot evokes an abiding desire to search for meaning which brings his poetry a cultural and personal unity. Therefore, by analysing Eliot’s particular approach to poetic form, the audience gains a better understanding of the fragility of faith and the subsequent significance of the search for truth.
January 5, 2016~ wutosama
T.S Eliot, one of the eminent literary figures of the Modernist era, captures the exultation and despair of a generation in a modernist response caused by the First World War and the disillusionment of mundane modernity. His profound anxiety is demonstrated in “The Love song of J.Alfred Prufrock”, “The Hollow men”, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Journey of the Magi” through the deliberate subversion of Romantic poetry. The enduring appeal of his poems is the evocation of emotion within the reader, conjuring “a hope which sprang from the renunciation of the world, a hope so different from despair yet different from nihilism.” (A.Moody, 1979) Eliot’s cohesive poems possess a unity of culture, revealing timeless concerns such as the fragility of faith, decay and alienation of humanity and search for truth.
Both “Love Song” and “The Hollow Men” capture the bewildering moment when man transitions from the traditional Romantic period into a world of strangeness and vulnerability. This is acknowledged by Eliot’s metaphor of Prufrock having, “lingered in the chambers of the sea…” The allusion of the ‘chambers’ appropriates the sublime experience of Romantic poetry, in which literature becomes an escapist perception. However, this experience is disrupted by “human voices” that ‘wake us, and we drown.’ The disruption of Prufrock’s “chamber” instils an awakening from a Romantic escape, where the fragility of the human soul seeking relief is brought back to the reality of anguished voices. The recurring low modality evokes enervation as Eliot forces us to confront the material world rather than seeking an escape. The fragility of faith and the universality of confusion is further evident in “The Hollow Men” which highlights the shift of theological traditions to the teleological notion that humans are secluded. The lack of celestial bodies “in this valley of dying stars” alludes to the modernist belief by Nietzsche that “God is dead”. Ambivalence and vulnerability pervaded European civilisation, a civilisation that had lost its faith both in the benevolence of God and the nobility of man. Further reinforced through “there are no eyes here”, the poem elucidates a lost world where we lack guidance and location, where we are responsible for our own sins and decisions. This terror was particularly inherent in Eliot’s society during the devastating effects of the First World War as they were confronted with the idea of bearing the burden of sin. Hence, Eliot’s poems capture the disorientated state of western society as they forsake the beliefs of the past and subversively fall into a state of scepticism.
The loss of faith in the modern man led to psychological decay and paralysis, captured by Eliot’s experimentation of form in “Love Song” and “Rhapsody”. The modernist movement expressed the attitudes of an anxious generation unprepared for the onset of modernity. “The Love Song” is a poem that critiques the stagnation of Eliot’s society. The rhetorical question: “Do I dare eat a peach?” strikes the audience with the absurdity of a persona confounded by a piece of fruit. However, the persona’s reflection evokes the fear of an emasculated middle age man, representative of old traditions subverted into anxiety and scepticism. The peach metaphorically represents forbidden fruit and the dangers of knowledge, in which acknowledgement would lead to displacement and disillusionment; a direct reflection of modernity. “Rhapsody” also accomplishes a vision of desolation and apathy through the free association of twisted images. Eliot’s persona portrays the decay of Europe through fragmented imagery “So the hand of the child, automatic / Slipped out and pocketed a toy / I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.” The ‘automatic’ action of the child metaphorically represents the dehumanising impacts of increasing industrialisation within Eliot’s society in which the presumably innocent child is stripped of free will and morality. The synecdoche in “nothing behind that child’s eye” implies the absence of their soul or humanity, the depersonalisation of the lost child reflecting the sullen apprehension of the early twentieth century. Hence, through experimentation with textual form, Eliot highlights the alienation of humanity in a world dislocated from security and certainty.
The destruction of the old world creates a resonating desire to find a universal truth. Eliot’s particular approach to poetic form encourages us to find meaning within his poems. The experimental nature of Eliot’s poetry can be captured in the juxtaposition of capitalised letters to lower case letters in “Birth or Death? / I had seen birth and death” from “The Journey of the Magi.” The “Birth” and “Death” allude to Jesus’ birth which represented the end of the old civilisation (B.C), and the beginning of the Christian world (A.D). Both the end of the Romantic period and the Birth of Christ bring upon a new era in western civilisation, as we are struck between tradition and innovation, anxiety and impatience in finding new meaning through experimentation and exploration. The inadequacy of speech to demonstrate the search for meaning is elucidated through the fragmented metaphors in the “Hollow Men.” Eliot’s asks us to seek personal meaning “Between the conception And the creation/ Between the desire And the existence” as a result of the abandoned civilisation from God. The anaphora “between” emphasises the poet’s inability to articulate his concerns and his inability to reach beyond the barriers of language as a result of its subjectivity. Eliot’s work is tantalising, forever hinting at but never revealing its full illumination. Therefore, he invites us to interpret his poems which captures the spirit of Modernism in search of the ‘new’ revealing that life is a continual process of seeking personal truth as a result of the disillusionment in Europe.
Eliot’s poems depict the subversion of the Romantic era to Modernism in which his poems confront a material world of alienation and confusion. As a result, Eliot evokes an abiding desire to search for meaning which brings his poetry a cultural and personal unity. Therefore, by analysing Eliot’s particular approach to poetic form, the audience gains a better understanding of the fragility of faith and the subsequent significance of the search for truth.
Excerpts from ‘The Metaphysical Poets’
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (3rd edn., London, 1951)
This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the phrase of some of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language.
(p. 283)
It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go – a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling.
(p. 285)
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
(p. 287)
In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered … The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected.
(p. 288)
We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.
Preludes by T. S. Eliot: Critical Analysis
'Preludes' is one of the prominent work of Eliot written in 1910 and 1911. The then society of Eliot is presented as a waste land where corruption and desolation are dominant in the cycle of meaningless life. The title of the poem holds a special position in terms of analysis. Prelude means an introduction to something, to be specific, in a musical sense, it is a small composition that is played before the main piece of music. In that sense, Preludes is just a small window view of the characteristics of the empty society we are shown. In reality the actual society we live in is a terrible place.
'Preludes' is very effective of Eliot's poems and makes an important contribution to Eliot's development from "Prufrock" to ‘The Waste Land’. Eliot is learning economy, vividness, and the value of impersonality and changes of vision. The mood and tone are vital: these constitute what the poem communicates, and every part of the poem is intended to concentrate the overall impressions of sordid hopelessness, shabbiness, and disenchantment. The gentle comedy of "Prufrock" is gone. Instead of that there is a minor-key poem, an elegy of haunting, tragic intensity, made all the more touching by Eliot's final rejection of his own pity.
Eliot pursues a technique he was very fond of, technique of conveying the dehumanization by fragmenting the human elements of his poem into parts of the body: "muddy feet" and "hands" (Prelude II); hair, the soles of the feet, and "palms of both soiled hands" (Prelude III); "insistent feet", fingers and eyes (Prelude IV). In this way, no complete human soul or human body emerges. All is as mechanical and as dislocated as the action of a robot. It is Eliot's comment in certain moods on human behavior. The technique is greatly developed and expanded in ‘The Waste Land’.
'The Preludes' may appear to be imagistic representations of urban life, recorded without comment, but the objectivity and detachment are illusory. It is difficult to separate the objects of perception from the perceiving consciousness. The lonely cab-horse, the lighting of the lamps, the masquerades that time resumes, are imbued with the emotions of the observer. It is the observer who thinks of weary monotony and sameness of all the hands raising dingy shades, and perceives human beings as dismembered parts of the body—the muddy feet, the hands, the short square fingers, the eyes assured of certain certainties. This fragmentation is a negation of individual identity.
There is a greater complexity of tone and feeling in 'Preludes' III and IV than in I and II. The 'you' of the third 'Prelude' who has `such a vision of the street/ As the street hardly understands' may be a street-walker from Philippe', Marie Donadieu (`Sitting along the bed's edge, where/You curled the papers from your hair') The reader is not given an objective rendering of her perceptions, however. The images are attributed to her consciousness by the controlling voice of the poem. The mind of the 'you' is remorselessly contemplating its own processes and projecting them outwards in the guise of a woman's consciousness. There is a sharper distinction between the perceiving consciousness and the objects of perception in this 'Prelude' than in I and II — between the persona's vision of the street and the street itself. The notion of the soul constituted of a 'thousand sordid images' is a denial of any spiritual dimension to the self.
The opening lines of the fourth 'Prelude' are reminiscent of the evening spread out like a patient etherised upon a table in `Prufrock'. The concept of the soul here is rather different from that in the third `Prelude'. There is a sensation of acute pain and suffering in its being racked across the skies and on the street.
There are religious overtones in the lines, 'The conscience of a blackened street/Impatient to assume the world.' 'Blackness' implies a sense of sin, and 'conscience' of moral discrimination and responsibility. The distinction between subject and object is again blurred whose conscience is it? That of the street, or of the perceiving self? At this, point the poetic voice speaks directly for the first time and admit that it is not detached and impassive. There is a not of compassion and a tentative movement towards religious belief. The notion of some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing is perhaps a compassionate perception of the suffering inherent in the images around which the poet's fancies are curled, and in the souls constituted by these images. It is a reminder also of the suffering of Christ to redeem the sins of humanity. However, there is a change of tone, sad the religious vision is sardonically brushed aside. It is not entirely obliterated, though. The cynicism, perhaps conceals a nostalgia and wistfulness for an absent ideal. The typographical space emphasizes the gap between the ideal and the actual.
Cite this Page!Shrestha, Roma. "Preludes by T. S. Eliot: Critical Analysis." BachelorandMaster, 4 Sep. 2017, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/preludes-critical-analysis.html.
Preludes" is made up of four poems written by the modernist poet T.S. Eliot between 1908 and 1912, when Eliot was in his early 20s. They were later collected in Eliot's debut Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. Broadly speaking, "Preludes" is about the drudgery, waste, and isolation of modern urban life. The unnamed city in which the poem is set is a grimy, dingy place, in which people unthinkingly partake in monotonous daily routines.
- Preludes Summary -The winter evening begins to quiet down, signaled by the smell of steaks cooking, which wafts through side-streets. It's six o'clock. The end of the day is smoky like the burnt-out stubs of used cigarettes. And now the rain and wind blow the dirty scraps of dead leaves around your feet, along with thrown-away newspapers blown through empty, undeveloped plots of land. The rain can be heard beating on broken blinds and chimney pots, and at a street-corner there's a lonely cab-horse steaming in the cold and stamping its hooves. And then gas-powered street lamps are lit.
- II
The morning begins to wakes up, with the stale but not too strong smell of beer from the street, which is covered with sawdust that has been trampled by muddy feet rushing to buy an early coffee. Along with all the other illusions that daily routine makes people go through again, one is also prompted to think about all the hands pulling up dirty blinds in thousands of furnished rooms all over the city.
III
You threw the blanket off of your bed, lay on your back and waited for something to happen. You dozed, and watched the night reveal thousands of perverted, squalid images, images that in fact make up your soul. They could be seen flickering on your bedroom ceiling. And when you woke up and the world became familiar again, you could see light peeking through the window shutters, and hear sparrows tweeting in the gutters outside. But at that moment you experienced a vision of the street, which was so strange that even the street could hardly understand it. At the time, you were sitting on the edge of your bed, curling your hair; or perhaps you were holding your yellowing feet in your hands.
IV
His soul was spread out tightly across the skies, which could be seen fading as the sun set behind a city block. This soul was also trampled by hurrying feet at four, five, and six o'clock. At these times one can also see stubby fingers stuffing pipes with tobacco, evening newspapers on sale, and eyes looking around with expressions of self-assurance. Beneath all this the street has a conscience, which wants eagerly to come forth into the world.
I am moved by the ideas that I've associated with these images, ideas that are difficult to get rid of, above all the vague notion of something that is infinitely gentle, but which is always suffering.
Wipe your hands across your mouth and laugh at the thought of what I've just described. The worlds will go on following their cycles like old women, who can be seen collecting fuel in empty, undeveloped plots of land.
- II
- “Preludes” Themes
- Alienation and Urban Decay“Preludes” critiques the alienating effects of modern urban life—something the poem argues is characterized by drudgery and loneliness. Urban society, the poem suggests, isolates people from one another, ultimately erasing their individuality and even eroding human morality itself.
The city in the poem is presented as a filthy, desolate place. There are “grimy scraps” of “withered” leaves blowing around, newspapers thrown to the sidewalk, and “broken blinds and chimney-pots.” The streets smell of steak, smoke, and stale beer, and the shades in people's homes are "dingy." The most abundant product of urban life, it seems, is waste and decay.
At first the city also seems abandoned; no people are mentioned save for the vague reference to “your feet,” creating an almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere of desertion. And when people do appear, they're just as dirty and dismal as the city they live in: their "muddy feet" trample the ground, their palms are "dirty," and their foot soles are "yellow," implying disease. It's as if the city itself is passing on a contagion to the people who live in it.
Note how the people in "Preludes" also lack any distinguishing features and are instead reduced to their body parts. This underscores the sense of anonymity created by modern life. All these people are living together in this space, but that doesn't make them part of a meaningful community. Instead, the urban world seems to erase their identities, making them into just a bunch of "feet" and "hands."
This use of synecdoche further implies that people are alienated even from controlling their own bodies, which robotically follow the routines required of modern urban living. People are going through the same motions day after day—opening the blinds, getting coffee, trudging off to work—without really thinking about what they're doing. In this way, cities alienate people not just from one another, but also from themselves—that is, from their individual wants, needs, and desires.
While the human beings in "Preludes" lack emotion, identity, or agency, the environment itself is personified. Note how the "evening settles down" and the "morning comes to consciousness." This suggests that the emotions that have been drained from the human characters have been transferred instead to their surroundings. It's as if awareness itself is too heavy a burden for modern people to bear, and so needs to be carried by something larger (that is, by the world itself). In poem IV, this then extends beyond simple "consciousness" to a moral “conscience”—the street seems to possess an awareness of morality that human beings in this world have lost.
This “conscience” is further conceived of in religious terms as a “soul," which is "stretched tight across the sky” and which is also "trampled" by the "insistent feet" of the city's inhabitants. The decaying atmosphere of the city is therefore a moral sin: city-dwellers have "trampled" this universal soul, which encompasses them as part of the sky encompassing the earth. Perhaps this mindless trampling is the reason why, although a new moral conscience is "Impatient to assume the world," the poem ends without any return to morality. Human beings first have to break out of their patterns of behavior, but refuse to do so. Women return to the routine of "gathering fuel," and the poem's reader, addressed in the second person, can only "laugh."
- Alienation and Urban Decay“Preludes” critiques the alienating effects of modern urban life—something the poem argues is characterized by drudgery and loneliness. Urban society, the poem suggests, isolates people from one another, ultimately erasing their individuality and even eroding human morality itself.
- The Nature of Time Each of the poems within “Preludes” relates the routines taking place in a modern city at a specified time of day: first the evening, then the morning, then the night, and finally the afternoon. The poems see modern life as being artificially controlled by the clock, which leads to people following unnatural routines day after day instead of living freely and in the moment.
- Poems I and II are the most focused on daily routine. Poem I is specifically set on a “winter evening” at “Six o’clock” and describes the streets as largely “vacant.” This poem begins and ends by describing events that happen every day: people cooking dinner and the lighting of gas-powered street lamps. By sandwiching the first poem between these repetitive activities, Eliot stresses the control that clock-based routines have over the lives of city-dwellers.
This idea is expanded on in poem II, which details morning routines and has numerous echoes of the first poem, such as “smell of steak”/“smells of beer”; the feet of the cab-horse stamping and the “muddy feet” going to buy coffee; the “lighting of the lamps” in the streets; and people “raising dingy shades” to illuminate rooms. Through these echoes, the speaker stresses the fact that even at different times of day behavior is repetitive and cyclical—an idea that, in turn, stresses people's limited freedom in the modern world.
However the second poem also calls this routine a “masquerade.” A masquerade was originally a formal ball in which guests wore masks and took part in dances, whose steps were learned by heart. The repetition necessary to do this is similar to the repetitive routines of modern life described in the “Preludes.” “Masquerade” can mean a disguise or mask, and as such further implies that the speaker considers clock-time to be merely an illusion. In other words, the modern notion of time is unnatural and false, created arbitrarily to structure people's lives.
This urban routine reaches a peak in poem IV, with “four and five and six o’clock” compressed together in one line, followed by three quick examples of what typically occurs at these times: men stuff their pipes for a late smoke, evening newspapers are published, and the vague statement “eyes / Assured of certain certainties” (which may be a shorthand for the self-assured, self-satisfied looks exchanged by followers of such a clock-based routine).
However alongside this intense depiction of clock-based time is the introduction of Christian imagery: the “soul stretched tight across the skies” is likely an allusion to Jesus's crucifixion, implying that just as the skies enclose the city, urban routine is enclosed within an overarching Christian timeline. The scale of this timeline dwarfs the “masquerade” of urban life: it is “infinit[e],” containing the Fall, Crucifixion, and Last Judgement, and then extending into the afterlife.
However, the poem never explicitly mentions these events. Although the allusion to Jesus implies that the stale routine of earthly life can be redeemed, the poem is ambiguous about such a possibility actually happening. It ends by drawing a comparison between city routine and an infinite timescale: “worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel.” This hints at the possibility that, in its repetitions, modern life is actually not a huge break from past behavior. Instead, time is cyclical, and modern people are actually following ancient universal patterns. This comparison is paired with a bitter “laugh,” however, and the poem leaves it to the reader to conclude whether this is some profound truth about the nature of time or just a cynical joke about the inevitable suffering of humanity
- Poems I and II are the most focused on daily routine. Poem I is specifically set on a “winter evening” at “Six o’clock” and describes the streets as largely “vacant.” This poem begins and ends by describing events that happen every day: people cooking dinner and the lighting of gas-powered street lamps. By sandwiching the first poem between these repetitive activities, Eliot stresses the control that clock-based routines have over the lives of city-dwellers.
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T.S. Eliot: Preludes - Quotes and Analysis February 20, 2018
Context:
Preludes was written during the evolution of Modernism, amidst an interwar period distinct in its instability and magnified by the excessive gentility of Victorianism. In this way, it is a poem which exposes a vexation with modern Victorianism; critiquing its fixation with decorousness and artificiality. Eliot critiques the ability for this form of Victorianism to fuel man's angsty and uncertain existence.
In-keeping with this contextual concern, Eliot formulates a modern Victorian setting in Preludes which epitomises the effect of the urban underbelly upon man's anxiety and fear.
Examples / Techniques / Analysis:
Here are some pieces of evidence which exemplify Eliot's critique of Victorian urbanity and its fostering of man's fearful and uncertain existence.
- Eliot uses continual synaesthesia ”the smell of steak”, “smoky days”, “gusty shower” to layer his receptive imagery and thus encapsulate the sensory decay and disenchantment of the populated urban climate.
- In extension of this, Eliot’s sentiment, “His soul stretched tight across the skies that fade behind the city block” creates a metaphorical image which strains the symbolic human conscience by displacing it behind the enormity of the cityscape. This reflects the ability of the modern environment to perturb and unsettle man's daily human existence.
- Furthermore, Eliot’s quote, “You had such a vision of the street/as the street hardly understands” employs personification to give agency to the destitute streetscape, therefore emphasising the patent lack of symbiosis evident between man and the modern city. Herein, Eliot further enhances man's unrequited and uncertain dwelling within the urban landscape.
Critical Quotes and Ideas
Many literary scholars have echoed the aforementioned concepts regarding Victorianism and its enhancement of man's uncertainty and anxiety. For example, Robert Kaplan argues that it was the "pseudo-gentility of Victorianism" which foster Prufrock's neurosis.
*Please note that while this information is a great starting point for these texts, relying solely on the information in this post will not be enough to get a result in the top bands.
Context:
Preludes was written during the evolution of Modernism, amidst an interwar period distinct in its instability and magnified by the excessive gentility of Victorianism. In this way, it is a poem which exposes a vexation with modern Victorianism; critiquing its fixation with decorousness and artificiality. Eliot critiques the ability for this form of Victorianism to fuel man's angsty and uncertain existence.
In-keeping with this contextual concern, Eliot formulates a modern Victorian setting in Preludes which epitomises the effect of the urban underbelly upon man's anxiety and fear.
Examples / Techniques / Analysis:
Here are some pieces of evidence which exemplify Eliot's critique of Victorian urbanity and its fostering of man's fearful and uncertain existence.
- Eliot uses continual synaesthesia ”the smell of steak”, “smoky days”, “gusty shower” to layer his receptive imagery and thus encapsulate the sensory decay and disenchantment of the populated urban climate.
- In extension of this, Eliot’s sentiment, “His soul stretched tight across the skies that fade behind the city block” creates a metaphorical image which strains the symbolic human conscience by displacing it behind the enormity of the cityscape. This reflects the ability of the modern environment to perturb and unsettle man's daily human existence.
- Furthermore, Eliot’s quote, “You had such a vision of the street/as the street hardly understands” employs personification to give agency to the destitute streetscape, therefore emphasising the patent lack of symbiosis evident between man and the modern city. Herein, Eliot further enhances man's unrequited and uncertain dwelling within the urban landscape.
Critical Quotes and Ideas
Many literary scholars have echoed the aforementioned concepts regarding Victorianism and its enhancement of man's uncertainty and anxiety. For example, Robert Kaplan argues that it was the "pseudo-gentility of Victorianism" which foster Prufrock's neurosis.
*Please note that while this information is a great starting point for these texts, relying solely on the information in this post will not be enough to get a result in the top bands.
USEFUL LINKS FOR PRELUDES
www.the-criterion.com
http://links.jstor.org/sici?=00267937%28196804%2963%3A2%3C329%3ATSE%22US%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U
https://interestingliterature.com/2016/09/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-preludes/
https://owlcation.com/humanities/T-S-Eliots-Preludes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzpWSsxosb8
www.the-criterion.com
http://links.jstor.org/sici?=00267937%28196804%2963%3A2%3C329%3ATSE%22US%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U
https://interestingliterature.com/2016/09/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-preludes/
https://owlcation.com/humanities/T-S-Eliots-Preludes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzpWSsxosb8
"Journey of the Magi"
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Analysis of the Poem "Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot Updated on January 6, 2020
T.S. Eliot and the Theme of Journey of the Magi
Journey of the Magi is a poem that explores the journey the wise men took when following the star to Bethlehem where the Christ child was born. It is a metaphorical poem, representing both birth and death, renewal and spiritual rebirth.
The speaker is a magi whose narrative is split into three stanzas, distinct parts:
Worshipping in church became a crucial part of his routine and directly influenced the creation of Journey of the Magi:
'I had been thinking about it in church and when I got home I opened a half-bottle of Booth's gin, poured myself a drink and began to write. By lunchtime the poem, and the half-bottle of gin, were both finished.'
Eliot had also done his research, using lines from a sermon given by Anglican Bishop Lancelot Andrewes in 1622 to kick-start his own poem. These are the words from that Christmas sermon:
A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, ‘the very dead of winter.’
Eliot the poet used these lines, written three hundred years before by a leading theologian, altering them only a little for his opening five lines.
Journey of the Magi
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Stanza by Stanza Analysis of Journey of the Magi
Journey of the Magi is both monologue and metaphor. Eliot wrote it to substantiate his own conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and to emphasise the profound spiritual and cultural changes that occur when certain events take place.
The speaker's voice is that of a magus, one of the three travelling 'wise men' or Persian priests (or Zoroastrian astrologers) and the narrative is split into three separate sections:
Stanza 1
The first five lines are adapted from an actual sermon given by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes in 1622. Eliot took them and shaped them into this wintry opening, with long vowels, enjambment, some repetition and a feeling of slight dread.
An inauspicious start then. This first stanza is a tale of woe. Just note the language:
cold coming...worst time...such a long journey...The ways deep/weather sharp...The very dead of winter...galled, sorefooted, refractory (stubborn)...we regretted...cursing and grumbling...
On and on through the whole 20 lines. It's interesting to see how Eliot reinforces this idea of difficulty by repeating line openings...And the...And the...And the...this use of anaphora works really well, reflecting the plod of the camels and the monotony of the journey.
A feeling of hardship and challenge emerges as the stanza progresses, but note that the magi had also experienced the high life for a while - relaxing in summer palaces - perhaps at the start of their journey, or back in their homeland, when blue skies and silken girls with sherbet (historically, a Persian soft drink) made life enjoyable.
So the magi had to endure the challenges of real life as they journeyed on. They were tested to the limit and in the end decided to travel at night to avoid the sordid unpleasantries of cities and towns.
Some think this part of the journey a kind of purification, similar to that of the 16th century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross who wrote his poem Dark Night of the Soul, about existential crisis, desolation and fulfilment.
The speaker certainly had doubts about their 'mission' - thinking it foolish (all folly) - and the voices could have been their own, or those from dreams and nightmares.
Stanza 2
This second stanza brings some relief and represents the second stage of the spiritual process. However, these lines also bring into question the idea of time. The magi arrive at dawn, seeking information (on the whereabouts of the birth?) and manage to get there in the evening, not a moment too soon, which is an odd phrase.
In between the speaker describes the various things they come across which are all symbolically related to the future life of the Christ figure.
There is much allusion, from the three trees (crucifixion on Calvary) to the wine-skins (the Parable) the meanings are clear.
It's as if the speaker is having a premonition, yet doesn't know the significance.
And that curious half-line - it was (you may say) satisfactory.- suggests that the speaker wasn't too impressed with the place of birth, was even a little disappointed. Perhaps this also refers to the idea that the place, although important, isn't as crucial to change as the journey itself.
Stanza 3
Here the magi looks back, reflecting on the event itself, and coming to the conclusion that in birth there is always death. They learnt a hard lesson, one that is personal yet also universal.
Note the syntax stretching and narrowing as the speaker puts the experience into perspective and asks that most potent of questions: Birth or Death?
Out of the old comes the new and with it the death in the birth. Spiritual, cultural and psychic processes all undergo change and questioning. What was once familiar now seems alien, which can cause doubt and disorder.
Life is a journey, a struggle, but all humans have to go through it, often reaching moments in their lives when a threshold has to be gotten over. Sometimes new understanding has to take place in order for this spiritual transformation to happen.
Literary Devices - Biblical Allusions - Symbolism in Journey of the Magi
Journey of the Magi is a free verse poem of 43 lines, made up of 3 stanzas. There is no set rhyme scheme or meter (metre in British English) and the lines are of varied length.
Alliteration
When words are close together in a line and start with the same consonant they're said to be alliterative. This adds sound texture and interest for the reader:
cold coming...ways deep and the weather...camel men cursing...Sleeping in snatches...singing in our ears, saying...That this...dawn we came down...snow line, smelling...And an...door dicing...And arriving at...say satisfactory...were we...thought they...
Allusion
There are several examples in the second stanza - references to the life of Christ and the Bible, looking into the future :
The repeated use of a word or phrase to reinforce meaning:
Stanzas 1 and 2 - And the...
Assonance
When words are close together in a line and have similar sounding vowels:
very dead...And the camels...galled, sorefooted...There were...silken girls bringing...Then/men...With/singing in...below the snow...stream/beating...three trees...And an/galloped...hands at...may say...time ago, I...
Enjambment
When a line continues on into the next without punctuation and the sense is maintained. The reader is encouraged to flow into the next line with hardly a hint of a pause.
So look for lines 2, 8, 11,14,19 in the first stanza; lines 29, 30 in the second and lines 33, 34, 35 and 38 in the third. In particular, lines 33-35 are syntactically challenging and the enjambment plays a major role in how those lines are read.
Sources
The Poetry Handbook, John Lennard, OUP, 2005
www.poetryfoundation.org
www.bl.uk
© 2018 Andrew Spacey
A. David Moody: On "The Journey of the Magi"
The first paragraph presents the detail of the journey in a manner which arrives at no vision of experience. The present participles and the paratactic syntax, presenting one thing after another in a simple narrative, hold us to the banalities of romantic travellers. The voice recounting them is tired as if repeating the too well known. Only at the beginning and the end of the paragraph is there something to catch the attention of the modern reader, so far as he knows what the Magi did not know. Their 'cold coming' might suggest the cold coming Christ himself had, as the carols now tell it. Again, 'That this was all folly' becomes a commonplace Christian paradox when we know that they were seeking Christ. We are under some pressure to supply the meaning they missed.
In the rest of the poem that pressure increases. Are the images of the middle paragraph really charged with mysterious significance, some 'Symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer'? They do have a dream-like clarity. At the same time they seem to offer themselves rather readily for allegorical exegesis; the valley of life; the three crosses of Calvary; the White Horse of the Second Coming; the Judas-like world. The immediate mystery of the images evaporates under such interpretation, to be replaced by 'the Christian mystery'. The primary sensory associations give way to an idea, and we find we are involved in a meaning beyond the Magi's actual experience. It is the same in the final paragraph, except that here we are confronted directly with the abstract idea. The Magus is baffled by the apparent contradictions of Birth and Death, and is left simple wanting to die.
From Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet. Copyright © 1994 by Cambridge University Press.
Read more about A. David Moody: On "The Journey of the Magi"
Robert Crawford: On "The Journey of the Magi"
'Journey of the Magi', written in 1927, contains not only material quoted in Eliot's 1926 survey, 'Lancelot Andrewes', and recollections from Eliot's own life (some of which he catalogued when reminiscing inThe Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism). It also looks back towards his engagement with the primitive. Like 'The Hollow Men' and parts of The Waste Land, this poem's setting is a desert one. The traditional landscape, however, is never mentioned, being involved indirectly through the details of 'the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory'. The poem is deliberately unconventional: no mention of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But it is conventional in terms of Eliot's earlier poetry; though less dramatic, its conclusion is as apolcalyptic as before. The reader becomes aware that, Nemi-like, the birth of the new priest-king means the end of 'the old dispensation'-- an entire world order -- as 'this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death'. The 'Kingdoms' mentioned are perfectly sensible in the poem's context, but remind readers of Eliot's work of 'death's other Kingdom' and 'death's dream kingdom'. Though explicitly Christian, 'Journey of the Magi' forms between the earlier and later work a bridge over which the reader (with access to the gospel word) may cross into the release of Christianity, the new birth; but, denied that access, the speaker of the poem can only seek relief in death to escape from having to return to the old way in which he is 'no longer at ease'. This old way, 'With an alien people clutching their gods', looks back to the savage world which Eliot had been exploring, the world trapped in the ritual of 'birth, and copulation, and death'. The word 'clutch' has particularly strong sexual connotations in Eliot's work, as when Saint Narcissus writhes 'in his own clutch'. Eliot had criticized Wundt for ignoring sexuality's part in religion. By 'Journey of the Magi', however, we have birth and death but not copulation. The reader is faced with a renunciation both of the sexuality bound up with primitive rites and, for the moment at least, of modern sexuality. Vickery overemphasizes vegetation references by relating the 'temperate valley ... smelling of vegetation' with its 'running stream' to a particular scene in The Golden Bough, and by insisting that the 'water-mill' is that 'in which Tammuz was ground' and thus functions as 'a reminder that death is the price of rebirth'. General hints at fertility ceremonies may be present, demonstrating another continuity in theme between this and earlier poetry; but it is important to see that, though its death and rebirth are also related, Christianity is presented by Eliot as an escape from Frazerian cycles of fertility (in the way that the Buddhist 'Shantih shantih shantih' hinted at such an escape), not as its mere continuation.
From The Savage and the City in the work of T.S. Eliot. Clarendon Press, 1987. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Read more about Robert Crawford: On "The Journey of the Magi"
Grover Smith: On "The Journey of the Magi"
"Journey of the Magi" is the monologue of a man who has made his own choice, who has achieved belief in the Incarnation, but who is still part of that life which the Redeemer came to sweep away. Like Gerontion, he cannot break loose from the past. Oppressed by a sense of death-in-life (Tiresias' anguish "between two lives"), he is content to submit to "another death" for his final deliverance from the world of old desires and gods, the world of "the silken girls." It is not that the Birth that is also Death has brought him hope of a new life, but that it has revealed to him the hopelessness of the previous life. He is resigned rather than joyous, absorbed in the negation of his former existence but not yet physically liberated from it. Whereas Gerontion is "waiting for rain" in this life, and the hollow men desire the "eyes" in the next life, the speaker here has put behind him both the life of the senses and the affirmative symbol of the Child; he has reached the state of desiring nothing. His negation is partly ignorant, for he does not understand in what way the Birth is a Death; he is not aware of the sacrifice. Instead, he himself has become the sacrifice; he has reached essentially, on a symbolic level true to his emotional, if not to his intellectual, life, the humble, negative stage that in a mystical progress would be prerequisite to union. Although in the literal circumstances his will cannot be fixed upon mystical experience, because of the time and condition of his existence, he corresponds symbolically to the seeker as described by St. John of the Cross in The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Having first approached the affirmative symbol, or rather, for him, the affirmative reality, he has experienced failure; negation is his secondary option.
The quest of the Magi for the Christ child, a long arduous journey against the discouragements of nature and the hostility of man, to find at last, a mystery impenetrable to human wisdom, was described by Eliot in strongly colloquial phrases adapted from one of Lancelot Andrewes' sermons of the Nativity:
A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, "the very dead of winter."
Also in Eliot's thoughts were the vast oriental deserts and the camel caravans and marches described in Anabase, by St.-J. Perse. He himself had begun work in 1926 on an English translation of that poem, publishing it in 1930. Other elements of his tone and imagery may have come from Kipling's "The Explorer" and from Pound's "Exile's Letter." The water mill was recollected from his own past; for in The Use of Poetry, speaking of the way in which "certain images recur, charged with emotion," he was to mention "six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill."
In vivifying the same incident, the fine proleptic symbolism of "three trees on the low sky," a portent of Calvary, with the evocative image of "an old white horse" introduces one of the simplest and most pregnant passages in all of his work:
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
Here are allusions to the Communion (through the tavern "bush"), to the paschal lamb whose blood was smeared on the lintels of Israel, to the blood money of Judas, to the contumely suffered by Christ before the Crucifixion, to the soldiers casting lots at the foot of the Cross, and, perhaps, to the pilgrims at the open tomb in the garden.
The arrival of the Magi at the place of Nativity, whose symbolism has been anticipated by the fresh vegetation and the mill "beating the darkness," is only a "satisfactory" experience. The narrator has seen and yet he does not fully understand; he accepts the fact of Birth but is perplexed by its similarity to a Death, and to death which he has seen before:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
Were they led there for Birth or for Death? or, perhaps, for neither? or to make a choice between Birth and Death? And whose Birth or Death was it? their own, or Another's? Uncertainty leaves him mystified and unaroused to the full splendor of the strange epiphany. So he and his fellows have come back to their own Kingdoms, where,
... no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods
(which are now alien gods), they linger not yet free to receive "the dispensation of the grace of God." The speaker has reached the end of one world, but despite his acceptance of the revelation as valid, he cannot gaze into a world beyond his own.
From T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
Spiritual Realism in Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”
by Julia Powers
January 6, 2016
In the usual sanitized Christmas story, three gold-crowned “wise men” ride camelback toward Bethlehem, faithfully following a bright, guiding star. Certain of their destination, unswerving yet humble, they take their places in the “Silent Night” tableau. In his “Journey of the Magi,” T.S. Eliot challenges this idealized depiction and—while avoiding cynicism—offers a more realistic interpretation of the original Christ-seekers.
According to Eliot scholar John A. Timmerman, the poem’s three stanzas depict a journey toward, an arrival, and a journey away. Each leg of this journey has its difficulties and its value: journeying toward Christ comes not with eager anticipation but frustration, arrival signifies not final perfection but temporary satisfaction, and journeying away is both a birth and a death. In this way, by maintaining a balance of two contrarieties in each stanza, “Journey of the Magi” suggests that Eliot views Christianity as a journey of gradual, difficult discovery rather than sudden, glorious epiphany.
In the poem’s first stanza, Timmerman explains, Eliot’s depiction of a “journey” was particularly influenced by the poem and treatise Dark Night of the Soul written by the sixteenth-century Spanish poet and Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross. In light of this, “Journey of the Magi” can be read as a journey through a dark night of the soul – both the Magi’s journey and Eliot’s own. This journey, for Eliot, is not as easy as traditional Christianity may suggest (just a matter of praying a “sinner’s prayer” or going to confession, for instance). Rather, the journey of “coming” to Christ is a painful process of purification.
The purification process tests the Magi – as well as Eliot and any others journeying through a “dark night” – with temptation and isolation. Thinking back to their “summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, / And the silken girls bringing sherbet,” the Magi feel tempted to long for their former, materialistic way of life and question the purpose of their journey (ll. 9-10). Eliot’s choice of “silken girls” and “sherbet” alludes directly to Dark Night of the Soul, which says that in the early stages of the “dark night” God’s intention for the soul is “that He may quench and purge its sensual desire…allow[ing] it not to find attraction and sweetness in anything whatsoever.” The Magi then experience abandonment as they watch their “camel men cursing and grumbling / And running away, and wanting their liquor and women” (ll. 11-12). As the camel men opt out of the spiritual pilgrimage in favor of the very material things (“liquor and women”) that so tempt the Magi, it takes all the moral fortitude they can muster to persist in their journey. And they must persist by themselves, for, as Timmerman observes, “no longer is there a corporate story of salvation; now only the individual quest remains.” This statement applies more broadly to Eliot’s view that pursuing Christ is an “individual quest” of purifying and persisting in oneself.
What’s more this “individual quest” takes a great length of time, emphasized by Eliot’s repetition of the words “and” and “time” in the first stanza. In the second half of this stanza, he uses the word “and” eleven times with four of those occasions forming an anaphora: “And running away…/ And the night-fires… / And the cities… / And the villages…” (ll. 12-15). This list expresses the Magi’s building exasperation with their journey and with themselves for undertaking it. The word “time,” a key word in “Journey of the Magi” recurs three times in the first stanza, a significant number since there are three Magi and since the number three often represents wholeness or completeness. This threefold repetition suggests that, while pursuing Christ, the journey through the “dark night” might wholly, completely consume one’s time. Each time the word “time” appears in this stanza, it occurs in a blunt line with a nostalgic, melancholic tone. First, it comes embedded in a quote from a Lancelot Andrewes sermon that calls the time of the Magi’s journey “just the worst time of the year” (l. 2). In the next two instances, the Magus says that “there were times we regretted” and “a hard time we had of it” (ll. 8, 16). Enjambment draws a reader’s attention to these lines, suggesting there were times when Eliot, like the Magi, regretted and had a hard time with his own journey toward Christ.
In the second stanza, Eliot explores the concept of time further, as he has the Magi visualize Christ’s death and apocalyptic return before they even visualize his birth. In the middle of this stanza, each line alludes to symbols of Christ’s future: the “running stream” refers to Christ’s description of himself as “living water” (John 4:10), the “three trees” refer to Christ’s crucifixion, the “old white horse” refers to the apocalypse, the “tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel” refers to Christ’s description of himself as the “true vine” (John 15:1), and the “empty wine-skins” refer to the new dispensation Christ brings (Mark 2:22, ll. 23-28). By placing Christ’s entire life, death, and return in the landscape leading up to his birth, Eliot suggests that glimpses of Christ’s ending are visible even in his beginning. As Timmerman puts it, “from the eternal point of view, the incarnation also held in it, at that very moment, the crucifixion and the resurrection. From the temporal point of view, there was only a birth, but also, as adumbrated by the imagery of stanza two, there was the imminence of the prophesied death.” Conceptually, for Eliot, any soul on a spiritual journey can perhaps view glimpses of the past, present, and future, endings and beginnings, life and death.
Although the Magi are witnesses to this biblical imagery, “there was no information” in those images (l. 29). Along the journey through a “dark night,” Eliot suggests, one’s surroundings do not point logically or scientifically to a destination. There are no comprehensible road signs, maps, or Global Positioning Systems. Despite this absence of mental information, there is a presence of spiritual satisfaction. For, upon “Finding the place” of Christ’s incarnation, the Magi nonchalantly remarks that “it was (you may say) satisfactory” (l. 31). Regarding this almost sacrilegious understatement, Timmerman says that “the word satisfactory has been an enigma in Eliot criticism, for it seems so profoundly to understate the event, or even, perhaps, to evidence disappointment with it. That may be. They found a place—merely a rude stable—and not a full understanding of the event captured in that stable.”
Eliot perhaps chose the word “satisfactory” because of its many possible meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary offers four definitions of satisfactory:
In the third and final stanza of “Journey of the Magi,” the Magus reflects on the journey from many years later, indicated by the stanza’s opening line: “All this was a long time ago, I remember” (l. 32). Their reflections further explore the strange satisfaction expressed in the second stanza. First, the Magus says of the journey that he “would do it again,” because, in Timmerman’s words, however painful and long it may be, “the end of the journey is spiritual, the locating of a satisfactory point from which one may begin again” (l. 33). At this point, the Magus speaks in the past tense, saying that for a time “There was a Birth, certainly / We had evidence and no doubt” (ll. 36-37). Traditional Christian doctrine holds that, upon conversion, Christ is ever present for the believer, promising his followers to be “with you always, even unto the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). Through the Magi, however, who return to live among an “alien people clutching their gods,” Eliot argues that humans have the agency to move toward and away from Christ, to set down and pick up spirituality (l. 42). He finds this agency satisfactory, however, concluding that although “this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,” he nonetheless “should be glad of another death” (ll. 38-39, 43). By keeping death, interpreted as both a literal death at the end of life and a spiritual “dying to self” during life, in view even at birth, Eliot believes humans might face life and death with some sense of peace or “satisfaction.”
Regarding life and death, the God of the Bible famously told the Israelites: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…” (Deut. 39:19). But, Eliot, with his unique approach to Christianity, might recommend that the Christian choose life and death, because both are realities and because even Christ himself chose both, as the second stanza of “Journey of the Magi” depicts. How, though, can one be satisfied with life and death? Perhaps the answer lies in the journey toward and away from the manger scene rather than the scene itself. Timmerman confirms: “the paradox consists of the fact that this unsatisfactory place satisfies entirely. It is the event, the quo of the journey, that is significant, not the place itself”. This is the heart of Eliot’s satisfactory spirituality – the ability to journey with a sense of acceptance for the realities of coming and going, of birth and death.
Theology, Uncategorized Eliot, Spirituality, T.S. Eliot
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Analysis of the Poem "Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot Updated on January 6, 2020
T.S. Eliot and the Theme of Journey of the Magi
Journey of the Magi is a poem that explores the journey the wise men took when following the star to Bethlehem where the Christ child was born. It is a metaphorical poem, representing both birth and death, renewal and spiritual rebirth.
The speaker is a magi whose narrative is split into three stanzas, distinct parts:
- the journey to the birthplace and the doubt.
- the arrival, the prefiguring and satisfaction.
- the reflection and acknowledgement of a new faith.
- The focus is more on the process, the inner and outer journeys that a human (and humanity) has to undertake in order to experience spiritual rebirth. Here, the event, the actual birth, which was witnessed by the magi, takes second place to the main theme of change - death of the old dispensation, birth of the new.
Worshipping in church became a crucial part of his routine and directly influenced the creation of Journey of the Magi:
'I had been thinking about it in church and when I got home I opened a half-bottle of Booth's gin, poured myself a drink and began to write. By lunchtime the poem, and the half-bottle of gin, were both finished.'
Eliot had also done his research, using lines from a sermon given by Anglican Bishop Lancelot Andrewes in 1622 to kick-start his own poem. These are the words from that Christmas sermon:
A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, ‘the very dead of winter.’
Eliot the poet used these lines, written three hundred years before by a leading theologian, altering them only a little for his opening five lines.
- What makes Eliot's poem so powerful is the fact that he makes one of the magi, a magus, the speaker and turns the narrative into a psycho-spiritual journey, typical of the pilgrim yet interwoven with that of the esoteric, religious teacher.
- The theme of the poem is the effect of spiritual/cultural events on individual identity and society; the process of renewal, the journey of the human psyche through history.
- Journey of the Magi specifically focuses on the epiphany (Matthew 2. 1-12), despite the lack of named references to this event. The speaker is deeply affected by the birth, the shock waves changing lives for ever, alienating those around him, inviting his own demise.
Journey of the Magi
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Stanza by Stanza Analysis of Journey of the Magi
Journey of the Magi is both monologue and metaphor. Eliot wrote it to substantiate his own conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and to emphasise the profound spiritual and cultural changes that occur when certain events take place.
The speaker's voice is that of a magus, one of the three travelling 'wise men' or Persian priests (or Zoroastrian astrologers) and the narrative is split into three separate sections:
- Stanza 1 - the frustration and doubt of such a journey.
- Stanza 2 - the anticipation and understated satisfaction upon arrival.
- Stanza 3 - the reflection on birth and death and alienation.
Stanza 1
The first five lines are adapted from an actual sermon given by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes in 1622. Eliot took them and shaped them into this wintry opening, with long vowels, enjambment, some repetition and a feeling of slight dread.
An inauspicious start then. This first stanza is a tale of woe. Just note the language:
cold coming...worst time...such a long journey...The ways deep/weather sharp...The very dead of winter...galled, sorefooted, refractory (stubborn)...we regretted...cursing and grumbling...
On and on through the whole 20 lines. It's interesting to see how Eliot reinforces this idea of difficulty by repeating line openings...And the...And the...And the...this use of anaphora works really well, reflecting the plod of the camels and the monotony of the journey.
A feeling of hardship and challenge emerges as the stanza progresses, but note that the magi had also experienced the high life for a while - relaxing in summer palaces - perhaps at the start of their journey, or back in their homeland, when blue skies and silken girls with sherbet (historically, a Persian soft drink) made life enjoyable.
So the magi had to endure the challenges of real life as they journeyed on. They were tested to the limit and in the end decided to travel at night to avoid the sordid unpleasantries of cities and towns.
Some think this part of the journey a kind of purification, similar to that of the 16th century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross who wrote his poem Dark Night of the Soul, about existential crisis, desolation and fulfilment.
The speaker certainly had doubts about their 'mission' - thinking it foolish (all folly) - and the voices could have been their own, or those from dreams and nightmares.
Stanza 2
This second stanza brings some relief and represents the second stage of the spiritual process. However, these lines also bring into question the idea of time. The magi arrive at dawn, seeking information (on the whereabouts of the birth?) and manage to get there in the evening, not a moment too soon, which is an odd phrase.
In between the speaker describes the various things they come across which are all symbolically related to the future life of the Christ figure.
There is much allusion, from the three trees (crucifixion on Calvary) to the wine-skins (the Parable) the meanings are clear.
It's as if the speaker is having a premonition, yet doesn't know the significance.
And that curious half-line - it was (you may say) satisfactory.- suggests that the speaker wasn't too impressed with the place of birth, was even a little disappointed. Perhaps this also refers to the idea that the place, although important, isn't as crucial to change as the journey itself.
Stanza 3
Here the magi looks back, reflecting on the event itself, and coming to the conclusion that in birth there is always death. They learnt a hard lesson, one that is personal yet also universal.
Note the syntax stretching and narrowing as the speaker puts the experience into perspective and asks that most potent of questions: Birth or Death?
Out of the old comes the new and with it the death in the birth. Spiritual, cultural and psychic processes all undergo change and questioning. What was once familiar now seems alien, which can cause doubt and disorder.
Life is a journey, a struggle, but all humans have to go through it, often reaching moments in their lives when a threshold has to be gotten over. Sometimes new understanding has to take place in order for this spiritual transformation to happen.
Literary Devices - Biblical Allusions - Symbolism in Journey of the Magi
Journey of the Magi is a free verse poem of 43 lines, made up of 3 stanzas. There is no set rhyme scheme or meter (metre in British English) and the lines are of varied length.
Alliteration
When words are close together in a line and start with the same consonant they're said to be alliterative. This adds sound texture and interest for the reader:
cold coming...ways deep and the weather...camel men cursing...Sleeping in snatches...singing in our ears, saying...That this...dawn we came down...snow line, smelling...And an...door dicing...And arriving at...say satisfactory...were we...thought they...
Allusion
There are several examples in the second stanza - references to the life of Christ and the Bible, looking into the future :
- line 23 where the running stream is living water (John 4.10)
- line 24 has three trees which relate to the three crosses (Luke 23.32)
- line 25 has an old white horse which relates to the horse of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6.2)
- line 26 with vine-leaves which represent the true vine, Christ (Mark 2.22/23-28)
- line 27 has dicing for pieces of silver which relates to both Judas the traitor and the roman soldiers casting for lots at the crucifixion (John 19.23/24 and Matthew 26.14/15)
- line 28 has empty wine-skins which relates to the parable of the wine-skins (Mark 2.22)
The repeated use of a word or phrase to reinforce meaning:
Stanzas 1 and 2 - And the...
Assonance
When words are close together in a line and have similar sounding vowels:
very dead...And the camels...galled, sorefooted...There were...silken girls bringing...Then/men...With/singing in...below the snow...stream/beating...three trees...And an/galloped...hands at...may say...time ago, I...
Enjambment
When a line continues on into the next without punctuation and the sense is maintained. The reader is encouraged to flow into the next line with hardly a hint of a pause.
So look for lines 2, 8, 11,14,19 in the first stanza; lines 29, 30 in the second and lines 33, 34, 35 and 38 in the third. In particular, lines 33-35 are syntactically challenging and the enjambment plays a major role in how those lines are read.
Sources
The Poetry Handbook, John Lennard, OUP, 2005
www.poetryfoundation.org
www.bl.uk
© 2018 Andrew Spacey
A. David Moody: On "The Journey of the Magi"
The first paragraph presents the detail of the journey in a manner which arrives at no vision of experience. The present participles and the paratactic syntax, presenting one thing after another in a simple narrative, hold us to the banalities of romantic travellers. The voice recounting them is tired as if repeating the too well known. Only at the beginning and the end of the paragraph is there something to catch the attention of the modern reader, so far as he knows what the Magi did not know. Their 'cold coming' might suggest the cold coming Christ himself had, as the carols now tell it. Again, 'That this was all folly' becomes a commonplace Christian paradox when we know that they were seeking Christ. We are under some pressure to supply the meaning they missed.
In the rest of the poem that pressure increases. Are the images of the middle paragraph really charged with mysterious significance, some 'Symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer'? They do have a dream-like clarity. At the same time they seem to offer themselves rather readily for allegorical exegesis; the valley of life; the three crosses of Calvary; the White Horse of the Second Coming; the Judas-like world. The immediate mystery of the images evaporates under such interpretation, to be replaced by 'the Christian mystery'. The primary sensory associations give way to an idea, and we find we are involved in a meaning beyond the Magi's actual experience. It is the same in the final paragraph, except that here we are confronted directly with the abstract idea. The Magus is baffled by the apparent contradictions of Birth and Death, and is left simple wanting to die.
From Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet. Copyright © 1994 by Cambridge University Press.
Read more about A. David Moody: On "The Journey of the Magi"
Robert Crawford: On "The Journey of the Magi"
'Journey of the Magi', written in 1927, contains not only material quoted in Eliot's 1926 survey, 'Lancelot Andrewes', and recollections from Eliot's own life (some of which he catalogued when reminiscing inThe Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism). It also looks back towards his engagement with the primitive. Like 'The Hollow Men' and parts of The Waste Land, this poem's setting is a desert one. The traditional landscape, however, is never mentioned, being involved indirectly through the details of 'the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory'. The poem is deliberately unconventional: no mention of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But it is conventional in terms of Eliot's earlier poetry; though less dramatic, its conclusion is as apolcalyptic as before. The reader becomes aware that, Nemi-like, the birth of the new priest-king means the end of 'the old dispensation'-- an entire world order -- as 'this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death'. The 'Kingdoms' mentioned are perfectly sensible in the poem's context, but remind readers of Eliot's work of 'death's other Kingdom' and 'death's dream kingdom'. Though explicitly Christian, 'Journey of the Magi' forms between the earlier and later work a bridge over which the reader (with access to the gospel word) may cross into the release of Christianity, the new birth; but, denied that access, the speaker of the poem can only seek relief in death to escape from having to return to the old way in which he is 'no longer at ease'. This old way, 'With an alien people clutching their gods', looks back to the savage world which Eliot had been exploring, the world trapped in the ritual of 'birth, and copulation, and death'. The word 'clutch' has particularly strong sexual connotations in Eliot's work, as when Saint Narcissus writhes 'in his own clutch'. Eliot had criticized Wundt for ignoring sexuality's part in religion. By 'Journey of the Magi', however, we have birth and death but not copulation. The reader is faced with a renunciation both of the sexuality bound up with primitive rites and, for the moment at least, of modern sexuality. Vickery overemphasizes vegetation references by relating the 'temperate valley ... smelling of vegetation' with its 'running stream' to a particular scene in The Golden Bough, and by insisting that the 'water-mill' is that 'in which Tammuz was ground' and thus functions as 'a reminder that death is the price of rebirth'. General hints at fertility ceremonies may be present, demonstrating another continuity in theme between this and earlier poetry; but it is important to see that, though its death and rebirth are also related, Christianity is presented by Eliot as an escape from Frazerian cycles of fertility (in the way that the Buddhist 'Shantih shantih shantih' hinted at such an escape), not as its mere continuation.
From The Savage and the City in the work of T.S. Eliot. Clarendon Press, 1987. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Read more about Robert Crawford: On "The Journey of the Magi"
Grover Smith: On "The Journey of the Magi"
"Journey of the Magi" is the monologue of a man who has made his own choice, who has achieved belief in the Incarnation, but who is still part of that life which the Redeemer came to sweep away. Like Gerontion, he cannot break loose from the past. Oppressed by a sense of death-in-life (Tiresias' anguish "between two lives"), he is content to submit to "another death" for his final deliverance from the world of old desires and gods, the world of "the silken girls." It is not that the Birth that is also Death has brought him hope of a new life, but that it has revealed to him the hopelessness of the previous life. He is resigned rather than joyous, absorbed in the negation of his former existence but not yet physically liberated from it. Whereas Gerontion is "waiting for rain" in this life, and the hollow men desire the "eyes" in the next life, the speaker here has put behind him both the life of the senses and the affirmative symbol of the Child; he has reached the state of desiring nothing. His negation is partly ignorant, for he does not understand in what way the Birth is a Death; he is not aware of the sacrifice. Instead, he himself has become the sacrifice; he has reached essentially, on a symbolic level true to his emotional, if not to his intellectual, life, the humble, negative stage that in a mystical progress would be prerequisite to union. Although in the literal circumstances his will cannot be fixed upon mystical experience, because of the time and condition of his existence, he corresponds symbolically to the seeker as described by St. John of the Cross in The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Having first approached the affirmative symbol, or rather, for him, the affirmative reality, he has experienced failure; negation is his secondary option.
The quest of the Magi for the Christ child, a long arduous journey against the discouragements of nature and the hostility of man, to find at last, a mystery impenetrable to human wisdom, was described by Eliot in strongly colloquial phrases adapted from one of Lancelot Andrewes' sermons of the Nativity:
A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, "the very dead of winter."
Also in Eliot's thoughts were the vast oriental deserts and the camel caravans and marches described in Anabase, by St.-J. Perse. He himself had begun work in 1926 on an English translation of that poem, publishing it in 1930. Other elements of his tone and imagery may have come from Kipling's "The Explorer" and from Pound's "Exile's Letter." The water mill was recollected from his own past; for in The Use of Poetry, speaking of the way in which "certain images recur, charged with emotion," he was to mention "six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill."
In vivifying the same incident, the fine proleptic symbolism of "three trees on the low sky," a portent of Calvary, with the evocative image of "an old white horse" introduces one of the simplest and most pregnant passages in all of his work:
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
Here are allusions to the Communion (through the tavern "bush"), to the paschal lamb whose blood was smeared on the lintels of Israel, to the blood money of Judas, to the contumely suffered by Christ before the Crucifixion, to the soldiers casting lots at the foot of the Cross, and, perhaps, to the pilgrims at the open tomb in the garden.
The arrival of the Magi at the place of Nativity, whose symbolism has been anticipated by the fresh vegetation and the mill "beating the darkness," is only a "satisfactory" experience. The narrator has seen and yet he does not fully understand; he accepts the fact of Birth but is perplexed by its similarity to a Death, and to death which he has seen before:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
Were they led there for Birth or for Death? or, perhaps, for neither? or to make a choice between Birth and Death? And whose Birth or Death was it? their own, or Another's? Uncertainty leaves him mystified and unaroused to the full splendor of the strange epiphany. So he and his fellows have come back to their own Kingdoms, where,
... no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods
(which are now alien gods), they linger not yet free to receive "the dispensation of the grace of God." The speaker has reached the end of one world, but despite his acceptance of the revelation as valid, he cannot gaze into a world beyond his own.
From T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
Spiritual Realism in Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”
by Julia Powers
January 6, 2016
In the usual sanitized Christmas story, three gold-crowned “wise men” ride camelback toward Bethlehem, faithfully following a bright, guiding star. Certain of their destination, unswerving yet humble, they take their places in the “Silent Night” tableau. In his “Journey of the Magi,” T.S. Eliot challenges this idealized depiction and—while avoiding cynicism—offers a more realistic interpretation of the original Christ-seekers.
According to Eliot scholar John A. Timmerman, the poem’s three stanzas depict a journey toward, an arrival, and a journey away. Each leg of this journey has its difficulties and its value: journeying toward Christ comes not with eager anticipation but frustration, arrival signifies not final perfection but temporary satisfaction, and journeying away is both a birth and a death. In this way, by maintaining a balance of two contrarieties in each stanza, “Journey of the Magi” suggests that Eliot views Christianity as a journey of gradual, difficult discovery rather than sudden, glorious epiphany.
In the poem’s first stanza, Timmerman explains, Eliot’s depiction of a “journey” was particularly influenced by the poem and treatise Dark Night of the Soul written by the sixteenth-century Spanish poet and Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross. In light of this, “Journey of the Magi” can be read as a journey through a dark night of the soul – both the Magi’s journey and Eliot’s own. This journey, for Eliot, is not as easy as traditional Christianity may suggest (just a matter of praying a “sinner’s prayer” or going to confession, for instance). Rather, the journey of “coming” to Christ is a painful process of purification.
The purification process tests the Magi – as well as Eliot and any others journeying through a “dark night” – with temptation and isolation. Thinking back to their “summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, / And the silken girls bringing sherbet,” the Magi feel tempted to long for their former, materialistic way of life and question the purpose of their journey (ll. 9-10). Eliot’s choice of “silken girls” and “sherbet” alludes directly to Dark Night of the Soul, which says that in the early stages of the “dark night” God’s intention for the soul is “that He may quench and purge its sensual desire…allow[ing] it not to find attraction and sweetness in anything whatsoever.” The Magi then experience abandonment as they watch their “camel men cursing and grumbling / And running away, and wanting their liquor and women” (ll. 11-12). As the camel men opt out of the spiritual pilgrimage in favor of the very material things (“liquor and women”) that so tempt the Magi, it takes all the moral fortitude they can muster to persist in their journey. And they must persist by themselves, for, as Timmerman observes, “no longer is there a corporate story of salvation; now only the individual quest remains.” This statement applies more broadly to Eliot’s view that pursuing Christ is an “individual quest” of purifying and persisting in oneself.
What’s more this “individual quest” takes a great length of time, emphasized by Eliot’s repetition of the words “and” and “time” in the first stanza. In the second half of this stanza, he uses the word “and” eleven times with four of those occasions forming an anaphora: “And running away…/ And the night-fires… / And the cities… / And the villages…” (ll. 12-15). This list expresses the Magi’s building exasperation with their journey and with themselves for undertaking it. The word “time,” a key word in “Journey of the Magi” recurs three times in the first stanza, a significant number since there are three Magi and since the number three often represents wholeness or completeness. This threefold repetition suggests that, while pursuing Christ, the journey through the “dark night” might wholly, completely consume one’s time. Each time the word “time” appears in this stanza, it occurs in a blunt line with a nostalgic, melancholic tone. First, it comes embedded in a quote from a Lancelot Andrewes sermon that calls the time of the Magi’s journey “just the worst time of the year” (l. 2). In the next two instances, the Magus says that “there were times we regretted” and “a hard time we had of it” (ll. 8, 16). Enjambment draws a reader’s attention to these lines, suggesting there were times when Eliot, like the Magi, regretted and had a hard time with his own journey toward Christ.
In the second stanza, Eliot explores the concept of time further, as he has the Magi visualize Christ’s death and apocalyptic return before they even visualize his birth. In the middle of this stanza, each line alludes to symbols of Christ’s future: the “running stream” refers to Christ’s description of himself as “living water” (John 4:10), the “three trees” refer to Christ’s crucifixion, the “old white horse” refers to the apocalypse, the “tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel” refers to Christ’s description of himself as the “true vine” (John 15:1), and the “empty wine-skins” refer to the new dispensation Christ brings (Mark 2:22, ll. 23-28). By placing Christ’s entire life, death, and return in the landscape leading up to his birth, Eliot suggests that glimpses of Christ’s ending are visible even in his beginning. As Timmerman puts it, “from the eternal point of view, the incarnation also held in it, at that very moment, the crucifixion and the resurrection. From the temporal point of view, there was only a birth, but also, as adumbrated by the imagery of stanza two, there was the imminence of the prophesied death.” Conceptually, for Eliot, any soul on a spiritual journey can perhaps view glimpses of the past, present, and future, endings and beginnings, life and death.
Although the Magi are witnesses to this biblical imagery, “there was no information” in those images (l. 29). Along the journey through a “dark night,” Eliot suggests, one’s surroundings do not point logically or scientifically to a destination. There are no comprehensible road signs, maps, or Global Positioning Systems. Despite this absence of mental information, there is a presence of spiritual satisfaction. For, upon “Finding the place” of Christ’s incarnation, the Magi nonchalantly remarks that “it was (you may say) satisfactory” (l. 31). Regarding this almost sacrilegious understatement, Timmerman says that “the word satisfactory has been an enigma in Eliot criticism, for it seems so profoundly to understate the event, or even, perhaps, to evidence disappointment with it. That may be. They found a place—merely a rude stable—and not a full understanding of the event captured in that stable.”
Eliot perhaps chose the word “satisfactory” because of its many possible meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary offers four definitions of satisfactory:
- theologically “serving to make satisfaction or atonement for sin”
- legally “serving to satisfy a debt or obligation”
- rhetorically “serving merely to satisfy the inquirer or objector; merely plausible,”
- logically “sufficient for the needs of the case, adequate”
In the third and final stanza of “Journey of the Magi,” the Magus reflects on the journey from many years later, indicated by the stanza’s opening line: “All this was a long time ago, I remember” (l. 32). Their reflections further explore the strange satisfaction expressed in the second stanza. First, the Magus says of the journey that he “would do it again,” because, in Timmerman’s words, however painful and long it may be, “the end of the journey is spiritual, the locating of a satisfactory point from which one may begin again” (l. 33). At this point, the Magus speaks in the past tense, saying that for a time “There was a Birth, certainly / We had evidence and no doubt” (ll. 36-37). Traditional Christian doctrine holds that, upon conversion, Christ is ever present for the believer, promising his followers to be “with you always, even unto the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). Through the Magi, however, who return to live among an “alien people clutching their gods,” Eliot argues that humans have the agency to move toward and away from Christ, to set down and pick up spirituality (l. 42). He finds this agency satisfactory, however, concluding that although “this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,” he nonetheless “should be glad of another death” (ll. 38-39, 43). By keeping death, interpreted as both a literal death at the end of life and a spiritual “dying to self” during life, in view even at birth, Eliot believes humans might face life and death with some sense of peace or “satisfaction.”
Regarding life and death, the God of the Bible famously told the Israelites: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…” (Deut. 39:19). But, Eliot, with his unique approach to Christianity, might recommend that the Christian choose life and death, because both are realities and because even Christ himself chose both, as the second stanza of “Journey of the Magi” depicts. How, though, can one be satisfied with life and death? Perhaps the answer lies in the journey toward and away from the manger scene rather than the scene itself. Timmerman confirms: “the paradox consists of the fact that this unsatisfactory place satisfies entirely. It is the event, the quo of the journey, that is significant, not the place itself”. This is the heart of Eliot’s satisfactory spirituality – the ability to journey with a sense of acceptance for the realities of coming and going, of birth and death.
Theology, Uncategorized Eliot, Spirituality, T.S. Eliot
Alexander Gonzalez on T. S. Eliot
Literary Criticism for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock lives up to its name, as it expresses its protagonist’s indecision and troubled relations with the opposite sex. Characteristic of Eliot, it does not let the reader determine this easily or early on, but rather leads the reader through a complicated and altogether engrossing verbal maze while revealing bits and pieces of his intent. He begins with an epigram from Dante’s Inferno, which, roughly translated from the original Italian, means that the speaker (a condemned soul) speaks only because he does not believe his audience (Dante) will escape the pit.
Prufrock, the narrator, approaches the women that fascinate him intellectually more than emotionally, which is strange, considering his bizarre sentence structure and certain other aspects of the piece. Imagery is omnipresent, and typically takes the form of simile, such as in the first verse after the epigram: “Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Very frequently, imagery is used to assign to an inanimate object or an abstract concept a range of motion foreign to it, such as in the following line: “[the yellow fog] Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap….” This type of imagery blurs the distinction with personification, and lends a peculiar, animated quality to the entire piece. It is as if the entire world is a thinking, living entity, which Prufrock observes wistfully, wishfully.
The indecision and cynical disgust which characterize Prufrock’s thoughts, and therefore most of the poem, emerge with the fourth verse after the epigram. Here, he utters these lines: “Time for you and time for me, / And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of a toast and tea.” Later in the poem, he expresses his own indecision with lines as obvious as “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant at all.” He has a very cynical view of his own inability to act with haste and drive, and the preponderance of deliberation and slowness in his being, and this cynicism drives the next several verses of the piece. That Prufrock’s expression of his own disgust takes a deliberate, lengthy, and roundabout form only underscores the message his words attempt to articulate—that he resents himself for his inability to act with speed and energy.
For all of this cynicism and unhappiness, and apparently against the usual incomprehensibility of modernist poetry, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock proceeds with a definite elegance and grace. The variations in meter and rhyme between lines complement each other in ways that the regimented verse of other forms cannot match; this is evident in the following verse: “For I have known them all already, known them all— / Have known the evenings mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons / I know the voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a farther room. / So how should I presume?” Many of the verses in Prufrock exhibit a characteristic common with Keats and other romantic, lyric writers, which is the use of a much shorter final line in each verse, which breaks up any metrical patterns found in earlier lines and forces the reader to note the anomalous line more than the conformist ones. While no real pattern exists in Prufrock, the shorter final lines draw attention to themselves nonetheless.
The total effect of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is to describe, in marvelous detail, the complicated mental processes of a terminally shy and uncertain, well-educated and highly observant individual. The cadences of this work of T. S. Eliot course musically, belying the distinctions between verses and allowing the entire disparate piece to flow with unexpected ease, especially when read aloud. Rightly regarded as one of Eliot’s finest works, this piece should be a welcome read for anyone interested in poetry.
Works Cited
Lozano, Amy. The T. S. Eliot Prufrock Page. 07 2002. 03 Mar. 2005 <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5616/prufrock.html>.e to edit.
Literary Criticism for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock lives up to its name, as it expresses its protagonist’s indecision and troubled relations with the opposite sex. Characteristic of Eliot, it does not let the reader determine this easily or early on, but rather leads the reader through a complicated and altogether engrossing verbal maze while revealing bits and pieces of his intent. He begins with an epigram from Dante’s Inferno, which, roughly translated from the original Italian, means that the speaker (a condemned soul) speaks only because he does not believe his audience (Dante) will escape the pit.
Prufrock, the narrator, approaches the women that fascinate him intellectually more than emotionally, which is strange, considering his bizarre sentence structure and certain other aspects of the piece. Imagery is omnipresent, and typically takes the form of simile, such as in the first verse after the epigram: “Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Very frequently, imagery is used to assign to an inanimate object or an abstract concept a range of motion foreign to it, such as in the following line: “[the yellow fog] Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap….” This type of imagery blurs the distinction with personification, and lends a peculiar, animated quality to the entire piece. It is as if the entire world is a thinking, living entity, which Prufrock observes wistfully, wishfully.
The indecision and cynical disgust which characterize Prufrock’s thoughts, and therefore most of the poem, emerge with the fourth verse after the epigram. Here, he utters these lines: “Time for you and time for me, / And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of a toast and tea.” Later in the poem, he expresses his own indecision with lines as obvious as “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant at all.” He has a very cynical view of his own inability to act with haste and drive, and the preponderance of deliberation and slowness in his being, and this cynicism drives the next several verses of the piece. That Prufrock’s expression of his own disgust takes a deliberate, lengthy, and roundabout form only underscores the message his words attempt to articulate—that he resents himself for his inability to act with speed and energy.
For all of this cynicism and unhappiness, and apparently against the usual incomprehensibility of modernist poetry, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock proceeds with a definite elegance and grace. The variations in meter and rhyme between lines complement each other in ways that the regimented verse of other forms cannot match; this is evident in the following verse: “For I have known them all already, known them all— / Have known the evenings mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons / I know the voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a farther room. / So how should I presume?” Many of the verses in Prufrock exhibit a characteristic common with Keats and other romantic, lyric writers, which is the use of a much shorter final line in each verse, which breaks up any metrical patterns found in earlier lines and forces the reader to note the anomalous line more than the conformist ones. While no real pattern exists in Prufrock, the shorter final lines draw attention to themselves nonetheless.
The total effect of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is to describe, in marvelous detail, the complicated mental processes of a terminally shy and uncertain, well-educated and highly observant individual. The cadences of this work of T. S. Eliot course musically, belying the distinctions between verses and allowing the entire disparate piece to flow with unexpected ease, especially when read aloud. Rightly regarded as one of Eliot’s finest works, this piece should be a welcome read for anyone interested in poetry.
Works Cited
Lozano, Amy. The T. S. Eliot Prufrock Page. 07 2002. 03 Mar. 2005 <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5616/prufrock.html>.e to edit.
Imagery in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
By barraging readers with a seemingly disjointed collage of images, T.S. Eliot uses the distinctly modernist style of Imagism to construct his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Imagism, a literary movement closely linked to modernism, is based on the principles that poetry should be constructed of precise descriptions of concrete images. The language used by Imagists is clear and exact. They held that only words that are absolutely necessary to enhancing the description should be used in poetry. Ezra Pound, one of the most influential Imagist poets, defined this movement by saying: “We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous.” Knowing Eliot’s involvement with this movement, his use of imagery and description becomes especially important to the reader. His use of precise language invites readers to examine each word and image closely. In order to understand the meaning behind this poem, the reader must dissect Eliot’s imagery, analyze its symbolic meaning, and find thematic patterns. This site intends to do just that. By highlighting a few dominant images and allusions in the poem, I hope to gain some insight into Eliot’s use of imagery to relate the main themes of this poem. While the explications of the images on this page follow the same disjointed pattern of organization as Eliot’s images themselves, I hope to show that while each image or image cluster are distinct and seemingly unrelated, they are tied together though thematic elements. Through his use of imagery and allusion in this poem, Eliot deals with themes that revolve around the fragile and self-conscious human condition, touching on the ideas of inadequacy, sexual anxiety and fear of mortality.
“Ragged Claws” and Allusions to Hamlet
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas (73-74)
This image of “ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas” reiterates the previously discussed theme of aging and mortality and also can be read as an allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play that is referenced several times in the poem. But before analyzing this line as an allusion in the context of Hamlet, many critics, like Robert Fleissner, argue that the image has an innate meaning that fits well with the ideas woven together in this poem. Fleissner views the use of this crustacean as a symbol of growing old and futile. The use of the crab, especially, conjures images of futility, of moving slowly and with great difficulty- images also associated with the process of aging and approaching death. In a colloquial sense, this image of the crab bring to mind the idea of “crabbiness” or ill-tempered petulance that is also often linked to growing old and senile. While one interpretation of this image is based on its context within the poem, other some believe that it takes on a more fully-developed meaning when read as an allusion to Hamlet. Many critics look to Polonius’s line to Hamlet, “if, like a crab, you could go backward” (2.2.205-206), to interpret Eliot’s mention of “ragged claws scuttling.” In this light, his alignment of Prufrock with the image of a crab ties back to the protagonist’s feelings of self-consciousness and regret and echoes his obsession with “decisions and revisions.” As Prufrock nears the end of his life and begin to grapple with his own mortality, he turns fretfully inward and wishes regretfully the be able to revise his own past. As seen though both interpretations of this image, it furthers Eliot’s theme of aging and death as well as the anxiety and self-consciousness that comes about in response to this process.
Thinning and Baldness
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]…
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!” (40-44)
The reoccurring image of baldness, and furthermore Prufrock’s obsessive anxiety about his own thinning hair, draws the reader’s attention to the theme of self-consciousness in this poem. As mentioned by critic Margaret Blum, Prufrock alludes to his own baldness or thinning hair on four different occasions during his dramatic monologue. Prufrock’s anxiety about his own baldness, and also about the feebleness of his body, can be related to his obsessive fear regarding aging and death. This theme is again echoed as Prufrock proclaims: “I have seen the Eternal footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short I was afraid” (lines 85-86). Here, Prufrock expresses the belief that death itself mocks him in his old age. Through this passage, Eliot again displays Prufrock’s self-consciousness and fear as he nears the end of his life. The protagonist’s constant introspection and anxiety about his own death develops the theme of the mortality and fragility of human life. Prufrock’s apparent concern with his image and the way in which he is perceived by the guests at the party also serves to highlight his difficulties and anxieties regarding human interaction- a theme that is echoed throughout the poem in various other images.
Individual Female Body Parts
And I have known the eyes already, known them all-
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase…
And I have known the arms already, known them all-
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare…
Arms lie along a table, or wrap around a shawl. (55 – 66)
Adding to the theme of sexual anxiety in this poem, literary critic Michelle Tepper also asserts that Prufrock’s self-conciousness and fear of human interaction, especially interaction with women, causes him to “reduce [female] bodies to arms and legs.” As the female attendees of the tea party are described in Prufrock’s monologue it is true that they are often severed into “arms that lie along a table” or “eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.” In a Petrarchan sense, this division of female body parts creates a blazon – a literary device in which the poet praises individual parts of a woman’s body often with flowery, figurative language. Yet this device, while it seems to compliment the female object of the poem, is not entirely an innocent form of flattery. The division of the female body into mere pieces is a means of objectification and the denial of her existence as a whole human being. However, Prufrock’s division and objectification of female body parts does not seem intentional. Rather, due to his anxiety in his relations with others, Prufrock is subconsciously unable to recognize the females he interacts with as whole human beings and instead must view them as individual body parts. Furthermore, Prufrock’s anxiety leads to his own self-objectification, adding more complexity to the effects of his fear of human interaction as reflected in his self-image and the way in which he deals with others. The protagonist’s tendency to regard himself and others as fragmented, objectified beings expresses his sexual anxiety as well as the difficulties of human interaction. The ideas of a disconnect in human interaction and the failures of communication are prevalent among Modernist writers and poets. Eliot uses Prufrock’s dramatic monologue to highlight the characteristically Modernist theme of a rift in human interaction within this poem.
Michelangelo
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo (13-14)
This repeated mention of Michelangelo by the women in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” serves as more than just a representation of the idle chatter of the attendees of the tea party. This allusion highlights the theme of sexual anxiety as suggested by Tepper in her article “Nation and Eros.” Michelangelo, a world-renown painter, sculptor and poet, serves as a model of the quintessential “Renaissance man”, the male ideal for perfection. An image also associated with Michelangelo is his sculpture of David, considered to be the embodiment of male physical perfection. As discussed in terms of Prufrock’s fear of aging and death, he also faces severe sexual anxiety when faced with this idea of this paradigm for the perfect male and his own inadequacy. Unable to compare with Michelangelo’s status as a Renaissance man or David’s standard of physical perfection, Prufrock turns self-consciously inward to obsess over his own “decisions and revisions” and the way in which he appears to members of the opposite sex. In many ways, as this allusion and Prufrock’s reaction demonstrate, this poem deals with the inherent inadequacy we experience and the anxiety we feel as human beings interacting with one another. Adding to the previously discussed themes of mortality and fragility, the allusion to Michelangelo and Prufrock’s inability to compare with the male ideal display the self-consciousness that comes with human interaction.
The Peach
Shall I part my hair from behind? Do I dare eat a peach? (122)
While Eliot only briefly mentions the peach in this poem, it has come to be one of the most critically contested images, in terms of deciphering its meaning. In his book, Ascending the Prufrockian Stair, Robert Fleissner dedicates an entire chapter to offering various interpretations of “Prufrock’s Peach.” Firstly, he considers the idea that the peach, in this context, could be a reference to the Forbidden Fruit of the biblical Creation story. With this interpretation, Prufrock must choose between knowledge and immortality. This struggle fits in closely with Prufrock’s constant grappling with his own mortality. In Prufrock’s eyes, he has already eaten the biblical fruit and must now heed the consequences: a burdensome awareness of the world around him and his own approaching death. Another interpretation by Fleissner also broaches the topic of Prufrock’s fear of aging. He believe that Prufrock’s uneasiness in biting into the peach stems from his fear of losing his teeth while doing so. Much like with his obsession with his thinning hair, Prufrock is plagued by self-consiousness and panic that his body will fail him even in everyday tasks such as eating. Finally, many critics agree on the idea that the peach can be taken as a sexual symbol, representative of Prufrock’s re-occuring feelings of sexual inadequacy and anxiety when faced with human interaction. With the image of the peach representing female sexuality, and especially with his self-doubt in considering whether to eat the peach, Prufrock revisits the feelings of inadequacy that he presents in his inability to compare to Michelangelo’s David. Notably, the peach is used as a means to objectify women and female sexuality. As explained previously with the speaker’s tendency to represent women as mere body parts, this objectification is a result of Prufrock’s anxiety when faced with human interaction. This anxiety, it seems, is only intensified when dealing with the potential of sexual relations. While there is no conclusive agreement as to the meaning of the peach, most critical interpretations are in accord that this image in some way enhances the themes of Prufrock’s fear of aging and death, his feelings of inadequacy and self-deprecation, or his panic when interacting with other humans.
Works Cited:
Blum, Margaret Morton. “The Fool in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 72, No. 6 (Jun., 1957), pp. 424-426
Fleissner, Robert F. Ascending the Prufrockian Stair: Studies in Dissociated Sensibility. Peter Lang: New York, 1988.
Tepper, Michelle. “Nation and eros”. Gender, Desire and Sexuality in T.S. Eliot. Cambridge University Press: New York, 2004.
Photos: https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/files//2018/06/FileDavid_von_Michelangelo.jpg
Notes and Glossary
The following notes and definitions will help you in your detailed study of the poem.
Michelangelo: the great Italian sculptor and painter of grand and heroic subjects (1475 – 1564), a
contrast to Prufrock
And indeed thee will be time: this and the following twenty-five lines echo the words of the Old
testament preacher in Eclesiastes 3 :1 – 8: ‘. . . A time to be born, and a time to die; . . . A
time to kill, and a time to heal. . . ‘
A dying fall: Duke Orsino’s description of a piece of music in Shakeapeare’s Twelfth Night Act1
Sc1. Orsino was also suffering from unrequited love.
Butt-ends: ends of smoked cigarettes
My head . . .brought in upon a platter: as was the head of the prophet John the Baptist, cut off at
the request of Salome as a reward for her dancing (Matthew 14:3 – 11
The Eternal Footman: a personification of death, made socially suggestive, this recalls the
Heavenly Footman in the allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) of John Bunyan (1628 – 88)
Squeezed . . . ball/To roll . . . : recalls ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Abdrew Marvell(1621 – 78), in
which the poet urges his mistress to immediate, passionate love: ‘Let us roll all our strength, and
all / Our sweetness, up into one ball.’
Lazarus: There were two people called Lazarus in the Bible (a) the dead man whom Christ raised to
life again, the brother of Martha and Mary, and (b) the poor man sent to Heaven, who used to sit at
the gate of the rich man Dives. When Dives dies and goes to Hell, he asks Abraham to go back to
earth and warn his brothers to repent. This is refused. In death Lazarus and Dives lives are
reversed. (Luke 16: 19 – 31
tell you all: as Christ promised the Holy Ghost would “teach you all things”. (John 14:26)
sprinkled streets: sprinkled with sawdust, as in the Boston Eliot knew while at Harvard.
Prince Hamlet: Shakespeare’s Hamlet; like Prufrock in his self-awareness and worry about being
indecisive (the line-ending echoes Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be soliloquy), but unlike him in
heroic stature. Prufrock goes on (in imitation Elizabethan style) to liken himself, instead to
Polonius, the talkative, moralising old courtier in Hamlet; or even the court jester (the Fool).
bottoms of my trousers rolled: turned up trouser-ends were then becoming fashionable
part my hair behind: again the latest fashion and/ or a way of covering balding patches
mermaids singing: recalls ‘Teach me to hear mermaids singing’, in a ‘Song’ by John Donne (1572 –
1631); as well as contrasting with the sirens of Greek legend whose singing led
sailors to drown.
anaphora: a rhetorical device involving the repetition of a word or group of words in successive
clauses. It is often used in ballad and song, in oratory and sermon but it is common in many
literary forms.
dramatic monologue: a poem in which there is one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary
audience. In most dramatic monologues, some attempt is made to imitate natural speech.
ennui: a feeling of weariness and discontent resulting from lack of occupation or interest; boredom
epigraph: an apposite quotation at the beginning of a book, chapter etc
incantatory tone: a tone that suggests an incantation, i.e. a formulaic use of words to produce a
magical effect and to create an intensifying emotional feeling.
malaise: a condition of indefinite bodily weakness or discomfort
metomomy: a figure of speech in which a part is used to represent a whole, or the use of one item
to stand for another with which it has become associated. E.g. the crown for the monarchy; the
palace for the royal family and their aids; the bench for the judiciary.
paradox: an apparently self-contradictory (even absurd) statement which, on closer inspection, is
found to contain a truth reconciling the conflicting opposites. “I must be cruel only to be kind.”
quest motif: In stories of "the quest,” heroes are on the brink of a great change. Some heroes are
desperately unhappy and experience their lives as a stultifying world, one that, in its very
orderliness and familiarity, comes to seem sterile and confining: a kind of wasteland. The
environment or something in it keeps the hero from changing, from growing—in short, from living.
All heroes must recognize their worlds for what they are; must realize the need for change; must
have the courage to try. It is possible for heroes to blunder into the quest, to make come sort of
mistake and find themselves quite suddenly embarked on a difficult journey. Generally, though,
something or someone calls the hero to this adventure. The summons can come from any source: a
friend, a relative, a stranger, an alluring object, or an impulse within the heroes themselves. If
the protagonist possesses the necessary courage and resolve, she or he is off on the quest, however
fearful or arduous it may seem.
synecdoche: Synecdoche is a literary device in which a part of something represents the whole or it
may use a whole to represent a part. Synecdoche may also use larger groups to refer to smaller
groups or vice versa. E.g. The word “bread” refers to food or money as in “Writing is my bread and
butter” or “sole breadwinner”; “sails” to refers to a whole ship; “suits” to refer to businessmen
urbanised milieu: city environment.
T S Eliot Poem -- Rhapsody on a Windy Night - Critical Analysis
James Parsons - Feb 9, 2009
T. S. Eliot's poem, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, is full of blunt imagery that evokes the individual's increasing isolation in a depleted, worn-out society. " Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is one of the best-loved poems by T S Eliot and one which is sometimes characterised as lyrical and pensive, and more to do with the function of memory than anything else. This misses the point. The imagery piles up relentlessly to present a picture of a worn-out society in which no one communicates. The first obvious feature of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, and perhaps the key to understanding the poem, is the procession of regular time calls throughout the poem – ‘Twelve o’clock’, ‘Half-past two’, etc. A first reading might suggest that this a picture of someone strolling home after a night out. But then comes the realisation that this ‘stroll’ starts at 12 midnight and doesn’t end till 4 o’clock? A 4 hour ‘stroll’ in the wee small hours is remarkably odd behaviour. This is the first clue that the poem is about isolation and a society of isolates.
The Isolation of the Individual
This ‘stroller’ has no purpose; he is deliberately putting off going home, because home is as empty and lonely as the world in which he has been walking. It is a place where a single ‘toothbrush hangs on the wall’ – he lives alone. His room is up a flight of dimly-lit stairs and has a number on the door: it is very likely a cheap hotel or boarding house, the sort of residence where men who have no one in their lives frequently end up. T.S. Eliot has given the persona or ‘voice’ in this poem the task of representing the isolation and alienation of the human condition. Not only is the persona clearly a loner, but the world his eyes scan for the reader also reeks of loneliness, decay and lack of communication.
Lack of Communication
Is there any communication evident in this poem? The street lamp is the only speaker. The woman in the doorway (at this hour, perhaps a prostitute) doesn’t approach; she ‘hesitates towards him’. Even she cannot make the necessary contact for a human act. Normally, children are portrayed in fiction with bright, eager eyes, because they are naïve and open to all, but when this persona remembers a child, he ‘could see nothing behind that child’s eye.’ This is perhaps Eliot’s greatest indictment of society – to suggest that even the children can no longer communicate.
The Imagery of the Barnacled Crab
Eyes are, of course, the ‘windows of the soul’. It is telling that the eyes in this poem ‘peer through the shutters’. They want to pry but not be present in a relationship. The persona’s only ‘communication’ is with a crab in a pool. That communication is at arm’s length – the crab and the man each grasp the end of a stick. Eliot has chosen a hard-shelled, evasive creature to characterise humankind - there are overtones of ‘crusty’ ‘crabby’ and, of course, crabs have the potential to ‘bite’ with that same ‘hand’ of friendship.
A Society decaying – a shell of its former self
Coupled with these striking images of isolation are images that speak of decay and disuse. Does Eliot suggest that our social fabric is disintegrating, needs repair – is perhaps beyond repair? There are certainly no positive images of the persona’s world: “A madman shakes a dead geranium”. The first human the reader encounters is a social outcast – a madman. Most home gardeners would tell you that it’s near impossible to kill a geranium: they live in arid soils and with very little maintenance. Yet this geranium is dead. The woman’s dress is “torn and stained with sand”, and her eye ‘twists like a crooked pin’. There is a’ crowd of twisted things’, including a broken spring (that symbol of resilience), of which he recalls that “rust clings to the form that the strength has left.” That is a most enduring image of a society sapped of moral and physical energy.
No Hope Offered for Society
All else is old, dull, dusty sunless and shuttered. There is no reprieve, no hopeful ending- not a glimmer of hope - to society’s woes. The examiner of all this tawdry world returns home – a word not used as it has too many happy and comforting connotations - and tells himself to “sleep – prepare for life.” This is a final ironic thrust: people are normally told to prepare for death. Thus, Eliot equates this sort of meaningless, non-communicative life with death. He spells it out through his persona. For this man, arriving home is ‘the last twist of the knife.’ There is sufficient evidence here to offer isolation and alienation as a theme analysis.
James Parsons - Feb 9, 2009
T. S. Eliot's poem, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, is full of blunt imagery that evokes the individual's increasing isolation in a depleted, worn-out society. " Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is one of the best-loved poems by T S Eliot and one which is sometimes characterised as lyrical and pensive, and more to do with the function of memory than anything else. This misses the point. The imagery piles up relentlessly to present a picture of a worn-out society in which no one communicates. The first obvious feature of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, and perhaps the key to understanding the poem, is the procession of regular time calls throughout the poem – ‘Twelve o’clock’, ‘Half-past two’, etc. A first reading might suggest that this a picture of someone strolling home after a night out. But then comes the realisation that this ‘stroll’ starts at 12 midnight and doesn’t end till 4 o’clock? A 4 hour ‘stroll’ in the wee small hours is remarkably odd behaviour. This is the first clue that the poem is about isolation and a society of isolates.
The Isolation of the Individual
This ‘stroller’ has no purpose; he is deliberately putting off going home, because home is as empty and lonely as the world in which he has been walking. It is a place where a single ‘toothbrush hangs on the wall’ – he lives alone. His room is up a flight of dimly-lit stairs and has a number on the door: it is very likely a cheap hotel or boarding house, the sort of residence where men who have no one in their lives frequently end up. T.S. Eliot has given the persona or ‘voice’ in this poem the task of representing the isolation and alienation of the human condition. Not only is the persona clearly a loner, but the world his eyes scan for the reader also reeks of loneliness, decay and lack of communication.
Lack of Communication
Is there any communication evident in this poem? The street lamp is the only speaker. The woman in the doorway (at this hour, perhaps a prostitute) doesn’t approach; she ‘hesitates towards him’. Even she cannot make the necessary contact for a human act. Normally, children are portrayed in fiction with bright, eager eyes, because they are naïve and open to all, but when this persona remembers a child, he ‘could see nothing behind that child’s eye.’ This is perhaps Eliot’s greatest indictment of society – to suggest that even the children can no longer communicate.
The Imagery of the Barnacled Crab
Eyes are, of course, the ‘windows of the soul’. It is telling that the eyes in this poem ‘peer through the shutters’. They want to pry but not be present in a relationship. The persona’s only ‘communication’ is with a crab in a pool. That communication is at arm’s length – the crab and the man each grasp the end of a stick. Eliot has chosen a hard-shelled, evasive creature to characterise humankind - there are overtones of ‘crusty’ ‘crabby’ and, of course, crabs have the potential to ‘bite’ with that same ‘hand’ of friendship.
A Society decaying – a shell of its former self
Coupled with these striking images of isolation are images that speak of decay and disuse. Does Eliot suggest that our social fabric is disintegrating, needs repair – is perhaps beyond repair? There are certainly no positive images of the persona’s world: “A madman shakes a dead geranium”. The first human the reader encounters is a social outcast – a madman. Most home gardeners would tell you that it’s near impossible to kill a geranium: they live in arid soils and with very little maintenance. Yet this geranium is dead. The woman’s dress is “torn and stained with sand”, and her eye ‘twists like a crooked pin’. There is a’ crowd of twisted things’, including a broken spring (that symbol of resilience), of which he recalls that “rust clings to the form that the strength has left.” That is a most enduring image of a society sapped of moral and physical energy.
No Hope Offered for Society
All else is old, dull, dusty sunless and shuttered. There is no reprieve, no hopeful ending- not a glimmer of hope - to society’s woes. The examiner of all this tawdry world returns home – a word not used as it has too many happy and comforting connotations - and tells himself to “sleep – prepare for life.” This is a final ironic thrust: people are normally told to prepare for death. Thus, Eliot equates this sort of meaningless, non-communicative life with death. He spells it out through his persona. For this man, arriving home is ‘the last twist of the knife.’ There is sufficient evidence here to offer isolation and alienation as a theme analysis.
"The Hollow Men" (1925) - A Critical Analysis
T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965)
"It would be glib to say that in ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Hollow Men’ Eliot wrote his Inferno and that since then his poems represent various stages of passing through a Purgatorio; still such a remark may possibly illuminate both his aims and achievement…. From that early poem onward, through the much deeper accents of ‘Gerontion’ and ‘The Waste Land,’ the prevailing theme of Eliot’s poems is the emptiness of life without belief, an emptiness that finally resounds with sickening fear and desperation in ‘The Hollow Men’…. Through ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Hollow Men’ resounded the poet’s dread of death and dissolution, a shudder at the thought of bones ‘rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year’…. ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’—the harrowing climax of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, his expression of utter horror, epitomizes in a sentence the very tone of blasphemous hopelessness which issues from ‘The Hollow Men’…."
F. O. Matthiessen
The Achievement of T. S. Eliot
(1935; Oxford/Galaxy 1959) 11, 99, 118, 53
"From a letter Pound wrote to Eliot early in 1922, we know that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was very much in his mind at the time he wrote ‘The Waste Land.’… The only direct influence of the Conrad story is in the first of the songs of the Thames-daughters in Part III…. Psychologically, the experience in ‘The Hollow Men’ is even more despairing than that of the conclusion of ‘The Waste Land.’
The full horror of the situation of spiritual stagnation is experienced, without the actively dramatized revulsion from the contemporary scene, or the actively dramatized inner struggle between compulsion and revulsion towards personal change. The poet sees himself inescapably identified with his environment, and any power of choice or movement towards action of any sort seems utterly paralysed. It is a condition which Jung, as well as Eliot, characterizes symbolically as the meeting with the Shadow. To Jung it is the confronting of our own inner ‘darkness,’ which means ‘bitter shock, though it is the indispensable prerequisite of every renewal of the spirit.’…
He can no longer project his own ‘darkness’ upon all the elements in his environment to which he feels alien, but superior. He can no longer find any release in the exposure of the hollowness and horror of a Sweeney, of a decadent ‘landlord,’ of a Madame Sosostris, of empty, aimless women and young men carbuncular. He himself is a dweller in darkness as deep as that of those he had so surely and cynically displayed, and far deeper than that of those ‘lost violent souls’ in history or imaginative creation, who, if damned, were at least damned for overt action, and not for…passive non-entity….
The symbol of the eyes in ‘The Hollow Men,’ which are the only hope of overcoming the Shadow, cannot belong to any vision of romantic illusion, any more than they can be Kurtz’s ‘wide and immense stare’ [from Heart of Darkness; compare eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg in The Great Gatsby]. In Part I they are the ‘direct eyes’ of those of assured faith, who have died, but later the symbol absorbs much richer implications…. Parts III and IV develop the horror of ‘death’s dream kingdom.’… The water symbol here has no regenerative value. It is the ‘tumid river’ as described in Heart of Darkness… After this torturing picture of hollowness, loneliness, darkness and deadness, we are reminded again of Dante and Beatrice; of how, after his repentance, she bathed him in the river of Lethe, and her stern gaze turned to smiling encouragement, to ‘eyes of light.’…
There is certainly no hope in the conclusion. Instead of any vision, any release, any forward movement, any light or any ‘wind’s singing,’ there is the eternal going round in the cactus land, enclosed in time and place, in a childish nursery-rhyme world of make-believe. Then, passing out of the concrete evocation of
physical parallels, the poet conceives of the Shadow as ‘paralyzed force,’ as that abstract principle of the negation of the will, which either uses the forms of prayer without the substance of action, or evades the issue by a postponement… He is lost in the Shadow, and his ‘world ends’ not in any self-chosen dark night of the soul, but in a sense of tormented, whimpering vacuity."
Elizabeth Drew
T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry
(Scribner’s 1949) 91-97
11
"This poem (1925) is provided with two epigraphs, one pointing to a basic contrast and the other to a basic resemblance. The hollow men are antithetic to ‘Mistah Kurtz’ but like the ‘Old Guy,’ that is, the effigy of Guy Fawkes. The hero of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness enjoys an advantage over the hollow men, not least in the fact that he is dead and they only deadened. Kurtz and Guy Fawkes both were ‘lost violent souls,’ not hollow men. But the effigy of Guy Fawkes is a hollow man, for this epigraph derives from the game of make-believe in which children use a stuffed effigy of Guy Fawkes as a means to beg pennies for fireworks on the fifth of November. The relation of this epigraph to the poem, however, suggests another inference: As children make a game of make-believe out of Guy Fawkes so we make a similar game out of religion. The game ritual of the poem supports this implication.
The first lines bring the title and epigraph into critical relationship. We are like the Old Guy, effigies stuffed with straw. It may be observed that the first and last parts of this poem indicate a church service, and the ritual of effigies is suggested throughout. The action of this part is indicative of the service: ‘Leaning together…whisper together,’ the voices ‘quiet and meaningless’ as the service drones on. Then the paradoxes, in which one term denies the other, turn these effigies into abstractions, devoid of even their arid appearance, self-contradictory even in this realm. The erstwhile worshippers disappear in a blur of shapes, shade, gesture, to which no reality is attached.
Then the crucial orientation is developed, toward ‘death’s other Kingdom.’ Those who have crossed unafraid remember us—except for the ironic qualification—in terms of the basic opposition between Kurtz and the Old Guy, ‘not as lost violent souls,’ but only as the effigies of this service. Now we know where we are in a larger sense, at least that we are in a kingdom of death. And let us observe that the confusing kingdoms of death in the poem are distinguished rather simply: First, the kingdoms of death without relation to God or church have no capital; second, death’s real kingdom finds its similitude in life as the ‘dream’ or ‘twilight’ kingdom.
II
Part II defines the hollow men in relation to the reality which those ‘with direct eyes’ have met, and develops the contrast implied by ‘direct.’ Fortunately, the eyes he dare not meet even in dreams do not appear to ‘death’s dream kingdom.’ There they are only reflected, indirect and broken light; wind is reflected by a swinging tree; voices are another illusion of the wind; all is perceived indirectly, and not without beauty. The images are reminiscent of Biblical imagery, but this kingdom resembles Dante’s limbo of Trimmers.
He too would be no nearer, but would also wear intentional disguises—those proper to the scarecrow, behaving, like the tree, as the wind behaves. He would be no nearer, no more direct, in this twilight kingdom. He fears the ultimate vision. The eyes in this poem evoke a range of feeling dominated by that which the eyes of Charon excite in Dante (Inferno, C.3).
III
Part III defines this similitude of death’s kingdom in relation to the worship of the hollow men. A dead, arid land, like its people, it raises stone images of the spiritual, which are supplicated by the dead. And again the ‘fading star’ establishes a sense of remoteness from reality.
The image of frustrated love which follows is a moment of anguished illumination suspended between the two kingdoms of death. ‘Waking alone’—not quite out of the dream kingdom—at a propitious time, lips that would adore pray instead to a broken image, for the impulse is frozen. The ‘broken stone’ unites the ‘stone images’ and the ‘broken column,’ which bent the sunlight.
IV
Part IV explores this impulse in relation to the land, which now darkens perceptibly as the valley of the shadow of death. Now there are not even similitudes of eyes, and the ‘fading’ becomes the ‘dying’ star. The land as a ‘hollow valley’ carries a ghostly reflection of the human physiognomy in decay, ending as the broke, inarticulate, image of the lost kingdoms of the Old Testament exiles. And with this declination comes the awareness that the indirect meeting found in aspects of beauty must yield to the direct meeting which has been shunned, for this is the last of meeting places.
In action the hollow men now ‘grope together / And avoid speech,’ gathered on the banks of the swollen river which must be crossed to ‘death’s other kingdom.’ The contrast with Part I is clear, and the river suggests that of Dante’s Inferno (C.3). Without any eyes at all they are without any vision unless ‘the eyes’ return as the ‘perpetual,’ not fading or dying, star; as the ‘multi-foliate rose’ of this kingdom. But for empty men this is only a hope. As star becomes rose, so the rose becomes the rose window of the church; the rose as an image of the church, and multi-foliate, appears in Dante’s Paradiso (C.31-32).
V
But Part V develops the reality, not the hope, of empty men; the cactus, not the rose. And it begins with the prickly pear ritual of cactus land; the nursery level of make-believe mocks the hope of empty men. In desire they ‘circumambulate’ the pear, but are frustrated by the pickles. Here we may recall ‘the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness,’ for the poem now develops that frustration of impulse. At various levels, in various aspects of life, between the impulse and its realization there falls the frustrating shadow of fear, the essential shadow of this land. Yet the Shadow is more than fear: It concentrates the valley of the Shadow into a shape of horror, almost a personification of its negative character. The antiphonal division of this part, marked by the type, exhibits the irony which leads ‘round the mulberry bush’ to the last line.
Various stages are interrupted by the interpolation of elements that qualify this thwarting Shadow; after the first, the passage from the Lord’s Prayer relates the Shadow to religion, with irony in the attribution; after the second, the response about the length of life relates it to the burden of life; and after the third, the Lord’s Prayer again relates it to the Kingdom that is so hard. The repetition follows the thwarting of the series that produces life itself, frustrating the essence from descent to being (see Purgatorio, 31: 107). This is the essential irony of their thwarted lives.
Then the rather ambiguous relation of these interrupting elements to the Shadow is made more explicit. This is done by turning these responses…into the main chant, with the result that each completion hesitates between its former complement and the Shadow, and at the same time suggests by its truncation the final interruption. This end comes by way of ironic completion as the nursery rhyme again takes up its repetitive round (‘This is the way we go to church’), and terminates with the line that characterizes the equivocating excuses. They are the whimpers of fear with which the hollow men end, neither the bang of Guy Fawkes Day nor of the ‘lost violent soul.’ The conclusion also transforms the liturgical ‘world without end.’
In Part V the frustration of reality is described by the abstractions introduced in Part I; life is frustrated at every level, and this accounts for the nature of the land and the character of its people. By placing God in a casual relation to this condition, the poem develops an irony which results in the ‘whimper.’ But the most devastating irony is formal: The extension of game ritual into liturgical form.
The ‘Shadow’ derives from Dowson’s most famous poem… Of course it has been transformed, but it is still qualified by the memory. The part to which it most obviously connects earlier in the poem appears in the ‘lips that would kiss’; the desire that is frustrated there preserves this ambiguity in Part V. Other repetitions in Dowson’s poem besides the shadow of Cynara have probably had some effect on Eliot’s
poem. In Dowson, after each lapse in faith, which is followed by the line ‘And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,’ there is a statement of its effect, followed by his declaration of faith. After each lapse, the shadow precipitates these consequences, and this circumstance may have suggested Eliot’s transformation. Some of Dowson’s other lines may lurk behind some of Eliot’s…
Comparison suggests that Eliot’s theme of the frustration of desire by fear still carries oppositions and overtones of the poem from which its ‘shadow’ is derived. And this frustration is finally the reason why the eyes are obscured and the land a realm of shadows. Here Eliot, to use his words on Baudelaire, is ‘looking into the Shadow.’ Thus Dowson’s poem provided the hint by which Part V amalgamated all the others, translating the lack of substance which they described into the thwarting shadow. One reason for considering the possible genesis of Part V is the light it throws on Eliot’s piecemeal mode of composition."
George Williamson
A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis
(1949; Farrar, Straus/Noonday 1957) 155-62
"’The Hollow Men’ is similar in tone and content but much less extensive in treatment [compared to ‘The Waste Land’]. The epigraph is from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, which depicts the contrast between the artificiality of civilization and the elemental but savage power of primitive superstition. The Hollow Men are the citizens of modern Western culture, synthetically stuffed with opinions, ideas, and faiths they cannot feel. The senselessness of the modern man’s daily routine is indicated in the childish nursery rhyme which begins Section V. The fourth stanza of this section (‘Between the desire…’) suggests the impotence of the Prufrock-Gerontion type of figure who is reduced to inaction through the ‘Shadow’ of thought. The chief feature of modern culture is its banality and pettiness; the world ends ‘not with a bang but a whimper’."
Donald Heiney
Recent American Literature 4
(Barron’s Educational Series 1958) 490
"Occupying a position between ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Ash-Wednesday,’ both with respect to content and the order in which the poems were written, ‘The Hollow Men’ begins with references to human paralysis and ends with a juxtaposition of the human world of illusory dreams and the divine Kingdom beyond death. The first four sections of the poem deal respectively with the general sterility of the ‘living dead,’ the particular fear of reality and of the eyes of judgment, the desolation of the world between birth and death, and the faint hope for the appearance of the ‘perpetual star’ and ‘multifoliate rose’; the fifth section recapitulates the themes of the first four in alternation of fragmentary phrases. The ending is ambiguous, both a cry of despair at the emptiness of human life and a simultaneous assertion ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’."
Max J. Herzberg & staff
The Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature
(Crowell 1962)
"Eliot said in an interview that ‘The Hollow Men’ originated ‘out of separate poems… That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have evolved through the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of focusing them together, altering them, making a kind of whole of them.’ The first four sections had all appeared separately before the publication of the whole, in 1925. Some of the material was originally in ‘The Waste Land.’ The Hollow Men are like the city crowds of ‘The Waste Land,’ the damned who are so because of a lack of spiritual reality, even their sins lacking violence and conviction. The first references are, then, Dantean. There is a contrast with the blessed; their ‘direct eyes’ are avoided in II, where the hollowness of the Hollow Men begets scarecrow imagery. The landscape is a stony desert of privation; despair and a consciousness of the necessary imperfection of a life which resembles that of the faint-hearted damned are the other themes developed. For the title see Julius Caesar IV.ii.23, where the word means ‘insincere’; Conrad uses ‘hollow’ several times in Heart of Darkness."
Frank Kermode & John Hollander, eds.
Modern British Literature
(Oxford 1973) 490
Michael Hollister (2015)
T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965)
"It would be glib to say that in ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Hollow Men’ Eliot wrote his Inferno and that since then his poems represent various stages of passing through a Purgatorio; still such a remark may possibly illuminate both his aims and achievement…. From that early poem onward, through the much deeper accents of ‘Gerontion’ and ‘The Waste Land,’ the prevailing theme of Eliot’s poems is the emptiness of life without belief, an emptiness that finally resounds with sickening fear and desperation in ‘The Hollow Men’…. Through ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Hollow Men’ resounded the poet’s dread of death and dissolution, a shudder at the thought of bones ‘rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year’…. ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’—the harrowing climax of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, his expression of utter horror, epitomizes in a sentence the very tone of blasphemous hopelessness which issues from ‘The Hollow Men’…."
F. O. Matthiessen
The Achievement of T. S. Eliot
(1935; Oxford/Galaxy 1959) 11, 99, 118, 53
"From a letter Pound wrote to Eliot early in 1922, we know that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was very much in his mind at the time he wrote ‘The Waste Land.’… The only direct influence of the Conrad story is in the first of the songs of the Thames-daughters in Part III…. Psychologically, the experience in ‘The Hollow Men’ is even more despairing than that of the conclusion of ‘The Waste Land.’
The full horror of the situation of spiritual stagnation is experienced, without the actively dramatized revulsion from the contemporary scene, or the actively dramatized inner struggle between compulsion and revulsion towards personal change. The poet sees himself inescapably identified with his environment, and any power of choice or movement towards action of any sort seems utterly paralysed. It is a condition which Jung, as well as Eliot, characterizes symbolically as the meeting with the Shadow. To Jung it is the confronting of our own inner ‘darkness,’ which means ‘bitter shock, though it is the indispensable prerequisite of every renewal of the spirit.’…
He can no longer project his own ‘darkness’ upon all the elements in his environment to which he feels alien, but superior. He can no longer find any release in the exposure of the hollowness and horror of a Sweeney, of a decadent ‘landlord,’ of a Madame Sosostris, of empty, aimless women and young men carbuncular. He himself is a dweller in darkness as deep as that of those he had so surely and cynically displayed, and far deeper than that of those ‘lost violent souls’ in history or imaginative creation, who, if damned, were at least damned for overt action, and not for…passive non-entity….
The symbol of the eyes in ‘The Hollow Men,’ which are the only hope of overcoming the Shadow, cannot belong to any vision of romantic illusion, any more than they can be Kurtz’s ‘wide and immense stare’ [from Heart of Darkness; compare eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg in The Great Gatsby]. In Part I they are the ‘direct eyes’ of those of assured faith, who have died, but later the symbol absorbs much richer implications…. Parts III and IV develop the horror of ‘death’s dream kingdom.’… The water symbol here has no regenerative value. It is the ‘tumid river’ as described in Heart of Darkness… After this torturing picture of hollowness, loneliness, darkness and deadness, we are reminded again of Dante and Beatrice; of how, after his repentance, she bathed him in the river of Lethe, and her stern gaze turned to smiling encouragement, to ‘eyes of light.’…
There is certainly no hope in the conclusion. Instead of any vision, any release, any forward movement, any light or any ‘wind’s singing,’ there is the eternal going round in the cactus land, enclosed in time and place, in a childish nursery-rhyme world of make-believe. Then, passing out of the concrete evocation of
physical parallels, the poet conceives of the Shadow as ‘paralyzed force,’ as that abstract principle of the negation of the will, which either uses the forms of prayer without the substance of action, or evades the issue by a postponement… He is lost in the Shadow, and his ‘world ends’ not in any self-chosen dark night of the soul, but in a sense of tormented, whimpering vacuity."
Elizabeth Drew
T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry
(Scribner’s 1949) 91-97
11
"This poem (1925) is provided with two epigraphs, one pointing to a basic contrast and the other to a basic resemblance. The hollow men are antithetic to ‘Mistah Kurtz’ but like the ‘Old Guy,’ that is, the effigy of Guy Fawkes. The hero of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness enjoys an advantage over the hollow men, not least in the fact that he is dead and they only deadened. Kurtz and Guy Fawkes both were ‘lost violent souls,’ not hollow men. But the effigy of Guy Fawkes is a hollow man, for this epigraph derives from the game of make-believe in which children use a stuffed effigy of Guy Fawkes as a means to beg pennies for fireworks on the fifth of November. The relation of this epigraph to the poem, however, suggests another inference: As children make a game of make-believe out of Guy Fawkes so we make a similar game out of religion. The game ritual of the poem supports this implication.
The first lines bring the title and epigraph into critical relationship. We are like the Old Guy, effigies stuffed with straw. It may be observed that the first and last parts of this poem indicate a church service, and the ritual of effigies is suggested throughout. The action of this part is indicative of the service: ‘Leaning together…whisper together,’ the voices ‘quiet and meaningless’ as the service drones on. Then the paradoxes, in which one term denies the other, turn these effigies into abstractions, devoid of even their arid appearance, self-contradictory even in this realm. The erstwhile worshippers disappear in a blur of shapes, shade, gesture, to which no reality is attached.
Then the crucial orientation is developed, toward ‘death’s other Kingdom.’ Those who have crossed unafraid remember us—except for the ironic qualification—in terms of the basic opposition between Kurtz and the Old Guy, ‘not as lost violent souls,’ but only as the effigies of this service. Now we know where we are in a larger sense, at least that we are in a kingdom of death. And let us observe that the confusing kingdoms of death in the poem are distinguished rather simply: First, the kingdoms of death without relation to God or church have no capital; second, death’s real kingdom finds its similitude in life as the ‘dream’ or ‘twilight’ kingdom.
II
Part II defines the hollow men in relation to the reality which those ‘with direct eyes’ have met, and develops the contrast implied by ‘direct.’ Fortunately, the eyes he dare not meet even in dreams do not appear to ‘death’s dream kingdom.’ There they are only reflected, indirect and broken light; wind is reflected by a swinging tree; voices are another illusion of the wind; all is perceived indirectly, and not without beauty. The images are reminiscent of Biblical imagery, but this kingdom resembles Dante’s limbo of Trimmers.
He too would be no nearer, but would also wear intentional disguises—those proper to the scarecrow, behaving, like the tree, as the wind behaves. He would be no nearer, no more direct, in this twilight kingdom. He fears the ultimate vision. The eyes in this poem evoke a range of feeling dominated by that which the eyes of Charon excite in Dante (Inferno, C.3).
III
Part III defines this similitude of death’s kingdom in relation to the worship of the hollow men. A dead, arid land, like its people, it raises stone images of the spiritual, which are supplicated by the dead. And again the ‘fading star’ establishes a sense of remoteness from reality.
The image of frustrated love which follows is a moment of anguished illumination suspended between the two kingdoms of death. ‘Waking alone’—not quite out of the dream kingdom—at a propitious time, lips that would adore pray instead to a broken image, for the impulse is frozen. The ‘broken stone’ unites the ‘stone images’ and the ‘broken column,’ which bent the sunlight.
IV
Part IV explores this impulse in relation to the land, which now darkens perceptibly as the valley of the shadow of death. Now there are not even similitudes of eyes, and the ‘fading’ becomes the ‘dying’ star. The land as a ‘hollow valley’ carries a ghostly reflection of the human physiognomy in decay, ending as the broke, inarticulate, image of the lost kingdoms of the Old Testament exiles. And with this declination comes the awareness that the indirect meeting found in aspects of beauty must yield to the direct meeting which has been shunned, for this is the last of meeting places.
In action the hollow men now ‘grope together / And avoid speech,’ gathered on the banks of the swollen river which must be crossed to ‘death’s other kingdom.’ The contrast with Part I is clear, and the river suggests that of Dante’s Inferno (C.3). Without any eyes at all they are without any vision unless ‘the eyes’ return as the ‘perpetual,’ not fading or dying, star; as the ‘multi-foliate rose’ of this kingdom. But for empty men this is only a hope. As star becomes rose, so the rose becomes the rose window of the church; the rose as an image of the church, and multi-foliate, appears in Dante’s Paradiso (C.31-32).
V
But Part V develops the reality, not the hope, of empty men; the cactus, not the rose. And it begins with the prickly pear ritual of cactus land; the nursery level of make-believe mocks the hope of empty men. In desire they ‘circumambulate’ the pear, but are frustrated by the pickles. Here we may recall ‘the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness,’ for the poem now develops that frustration of impulse. At various levels, in various aspects of life, between the impulse and its realization there falls the frustrating shadow of fear, the essential shadow of this land. Yet the Shadow is more than fear: It concentrates the valley of the Shadow into a shape of horror, almost a personification of its negative character. The antiphonal division of this part, marked by the type, exhibits the irony which leads ‘round the mulberry bush’ to the last line.
Various stages are interrupted by the interpolation of elements that qualify this thwarting Shadow; after the first, the passage from the Lord’s Prayer relates the Shadow to religion, with irony in the attribution; after the second, the response about the length of life relates it to the burden of life; and after the third, the Lord’s Prayer again relates it to the Kingdom that is so hard. The repetition follows the thwarting of the series that produces life itself, frustrating the essence from descent to being (see Purgatorio, 31: 107). This is the essential irony of their thwarted lives.
Then the rather ambiguous relation of these interrupting elements to the Shadow is made more explicit. This is done by turning these responses…into the main chant, with the result that each completion hesitates between its former complement and the Shadow, and at the same time suggests by its truncation the final interruption. This end comes by way of ironic completion as the nursery rhyme again takes up its repetitive round (‘This is the way we go to church’), and terminates with the line that characterizes the equivocating excuses. They are the whimpers of fear with which the hollow men end, neither the bang of Guy Fawkes Day nor of the ‘lost violent soul.’ The conclusion also transforms the liturgical ‘world without end.’
In Part V the frustration of reality is described by the abstractions introduced in Part I; life is frustrated at every level, and this accounts for the nature of the land and the character of its people. By placing God in a casual relation to this condition, the poem develops an irony which results in the ‘whimper.’ But the most devastating irony is formal: The extension of game ritual into liturgical form.
The ‘Shadow’ derives from Dowson’s most famous poem… Of course it has been transformed, but it is still qualified by the memory. The part to which it most obviously connects earlier in the poem appears in the ‘lips that would kiss’; the desire that is frustrated there preserves this ambiguity in Part V. Other repetitions in Dowson’s poem besides the shadow of Cynara have probably had some effect on Eliot’s
poem. In Dowson, after each lapse in faith, which is followed by the line ‘And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,’ there is a statement of its effect, followed by his declaration of faith. After each lapse, the shadow precipitates these consequences, and this circumstance may have suggested Eliot’s transformation. Some of Dowson’s other lines may lurk behind some of Eliot’s…
Comparison suggests that Eliot’s theme of the frustration of desire by fear still carries oppositions and overtones of the poem from which its ‘shadow’ is derived. And this frustration is finally the reason why the eyes are obscured and the land a realm of shadows. Here Eliot, to use his words on Baudelaire, is ‘looking into the Shadow.’ Thus Dowson’s poem provided the hint by which Part V amalgamated all the others, translating the lack of substance which they described into the thwarting shadow. One reason for considering the possible genesis of Part V is the light it throws on Eliot’s piecemeal mode of composition."
George Williamson
A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis
(1949; Farrar, Straus/Noonday 1957) 155-62
"’The Hollow Men’ is similar in tone and content but much less extensive in treatment [compared to ‘The Waste Land’]. The epigraph is from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, which depicts the contrast between the artificiality of civilization and the elemental but savage power of primitive superstition. The Hollow Men are the citizens of modern Western culture, synthetically stuffed with opinions, ideas, and faiths they cannot feel. The senselessness of the modern man’s daily routine is indicated in the childish nursery rhyme which begins Section V. The fourth stanza of this section (‘Between the desire…’) suggests the impotence of the Prufrock-Gerontion type of figure who is reduced to inaction through the ‘Shadow’ of thought. The chief feature of modern culture is its banality and pettiness; the world ends ‘not with a bang but a whimper’."
Donald Heiney
Recent American Literature 4
(Barron’s Educational Series 1958) 490
"Occupying a position between ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Ash-Wednesday,’ both with respect to content and the order in which the poems were written, ‘The Hollow Men’ begins with references to human paralysis and ends with a juxtaposition of the human world of illusory dreams and the divine Kingdom beyond death. The first four sections of the poem deal respectively with the general sterility of the ‘living dead,’ the particular fear of reality and of the eyes of judgment, the desolation of the world between birth and death, and the faint hope for the appearance of the ‘perpetual star’ and ‘multifoliate rose’; the fifth section recapitulates the themes of the first four in alternation of fragmentary phrases. The ending is ambiguous, both a cry of despair at the emptiness of human life and a simultaneous assertion ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’."
Max J. Herzberg & staff
The Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature
(Crowell 1962)
"Eliot said in an interview that ‘The Hollow Men’ originated ‘out of separate poems… That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have evolved through the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of focusing them together, altering them, making a kind of whole of them.’ The first four sections had all appeared separately before the publication of the whole, in 1925. Some of the material was originally in ‘The Waste Land.’ The Hollow Men are like the city crowds of ‘The Waste Land,’ the damned who are so because of a lack of spiritual reality, even their sins lacking violence and conviction. The first references are, then, Dantean. There is a contrast with the blessed; their ‘direct eyes’ are avoided in II, where the hollowness of the Hollow Men begets scarecrow imagery. The landscape is a stony desert of privation; despair and a consciousness of the necessary imperfection of a life which resembles that of the faint-hearted damned are the other themes developed. For the title see Julius Caesar IV.ii.23, where the word means ‘insincere’; Conrad uses ‘hollow’ several times in Heart of Darkness."
Frank Kermode & John Hollander, eds.
Modern British Literature
(Oxford 1973) 490
Michael Hollister (2015)
LINKS
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/10/from-tom-to-ts-eliot-world-poet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?V=04079x4n0sg
http://thecriticalpoet.tripod.com/modernism.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi./tseliot.htm
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/366554.pdf?seq=1
https://www.google.com/search?q=analysis+of+preludes+by+ts+eliot&rlz=1C1GCEA_enAU899AU899&ei=yCuxXvfoL42D4-EPh5CKsAU&start=10&sa=N&ved=2ahUKEwj37OHSrpzpAhWNwTgGHQeIAlYQ8NMDegQIEhA-&biw=1366&bih=657
http://www.nida.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/54856/May-Seminar-2019.pdf
www.matrix.edu.au/hsc-english-module-b-study-guide-t-s-eliot-part-1/
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section1/
http://s699163057.websitehome.co.uk/works-by-tseliot
https://www.bl.uk/people/t-s-eliot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXkLgtusza4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCVnuEWXQcg
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/461761.pdf?ab_segments=0%252Fbasic_SYC-5152%252Ftest&refreqid=excelsior%3A150107b1b1ec684194af0c9f319b1cbf
https://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/EliotTS.htm
https://www.davidpublisher.com/Public/uploads/Contribute/59f006641e6d2.pdf
Journal Article
T. S. Eliot and Modernity
Louis Menand
The New England Quarterly
Vol. 69, No. 4 (Dec., 1996), pp. 554-579
Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.
DOI: 10.2307/366554
Eliot books you might wish to borrow from RBSC Library
"Prufrock", "Gerontion", Ash Wednesday And Other Shorter poems by B C Southam NF821:912 ELI:D
York Notes Notes on Selected poems T.S. Eliot by Michael Herbert NF821.912 ELI:H
The Invisible Poet T.S. Eliot by Hugh Kenner NF821.912 ELI:K
The Complete Poems and Plays of T S Eliot Faber and Faber NF821.912 ELI
Log In To Questia to view the books referenced below
References
Chinitz, D. E. (Ed.). (2014). A Companion to T.S. Eliot (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture). Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell. Retrieved from Questia School.
Cuddy, L. A. (2000). T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Evolution: Sub/Versions of Classicism, Culture, and Progress. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Retrieved from Questia School.
Faltejskova, M. (2010). Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot and the Gender Dynamics of Modernism: Tracing Nightwood (Studies in Major Literary Authors). New York: Routledge. Retrieved from Questia School.
Grant, M. (Ed.). (1997). T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage (Vol. 2). London: Routledge. Retrieved from Questia School.
Kirk, R. (2008). Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books. Retrieved from Questia School.
Maxwell, D. E. (1960). The Poetry of T. S. Eliot. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Retrieved from Questia School.
Musgrove, S. (1952). T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. Wellington: New Zealand University Press. Retrieved from Questia School.
"Prufrock", "Gerontion", Ash Wednesday And Other Shorter poems by B C Southam NF821:912 ELI:D
York Notes Notes on Selected poems T.S. Eliot by Michael Herbert NF821.912 ELI:H
The Invisible Poet T.S. Eliot by Hugh Kenner NF821.912 ELI:K
The Complete Poems and Plays of T S Eliot Faber and Faber NF821.912 ELI
Log In To Questia to view the books referenced below
References
Chinitz, D. E. (Ed.). (2014). A Companion to T.S. Eliot (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture). Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell. Retrieved from Questia School.
Cuddy, L. A. (2000). T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Evolution: Sub/Versions of Classicism, Culture, and Progress. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Retrieved from Questia School.
Faltejskova, M. (2010). Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot and the Gender Dynamics of Modernism: Tracing Nightwood (Studies in Major Literary Authors). New York: Routledge. Retrieved from Questia School.
Grant, M. (Ed.). (1997). T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage (Vol. 2). London: Routledge. Retrieved from Questia School.
Kirk, R. (2008). Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books. Retrieved from Questia School.
Maxwell, D. E. (1960). The Poetry of T. S. Eliot. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Retrieved from Questia School.
Musgrove, S. (1952). T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. Wellington: New Zealand University Press. Retrieved from Questia School.
PRACTICE QUESTIONS
Extract Based Questions:
“You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
Q1. In your view, how does Eliot’s portrayal of the complex nature of personal experience contribute to the enduring value of his poetry?
In your response, make detailed reference to Preludes and at least ONE other poem set for study.
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”
Q2. It is the inherent tension between desire and fear that creates interest in Eliot’s poetry. To what extent are such ideas reflected in the extract from The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock and TWO other poems set for study?
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.”
Q3. Intertextuality plays an essential part in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Based on your personal response, account for the importance of intertextuality to the poems, making detailed reference to Journey Of The Magi and TWO other poems set for study.
“The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.”
Q4. How does your reading of Rhapsody on a Windy Night affect your reading of the rest of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make close reference to the extract provided and at least TWO other poems set for study.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.”
Q5. How does a critical analysis of the above extract reflect your understanding and appreciation of Eliot’s poetry as a whole? Evaluate the language, content and construction of The Hollow Men and at least TWO other poems to demonstrate your understanding and appreciation of the prescribed text.
Theme Specific Questions:
Q6. Through its portrayal of human experience, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the significance of desire. To what extent does your interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q7. How is your personal response to the poetry of Eliot shaped by a perception of voice in your poems? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q8. TS Eliot’s poems are about the quest for individual agency. To what extent does your own interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q9. “[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves” – T.S. Eliot
What has Eliot’s poetry made you more aware of? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q10. How is the enduring appeal of Eliot’s poetry enhanced by his adaptation of the dramatic monologue form across his work? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q11. Through its portrayal of relationships, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the significance of desire. To what extent does your interpretation of Eliot support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to TWO poems.
Q12. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its representation of the complexities of the human condition. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q13. Explore how time and place are used in Eliot’s poetry to shape the audience’s understanding of isolation. In your response, make detailed reference to Rhapsody On A Windy Night and at least ONE other poem.
Q14. “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity” – Sigmund Freud. In light of the quote, consider how at least TWO of Eliot’s poems explore the challenges associated with the uncertainties of the modern world.
Q15. Eliot’s poetry can be clearly seen as a reaction to his relationship with the modern world in which he lived; yet his works continue to speak to us. In your opinion, how is the modernist focus of Eliot’s poetry granted universal appeal? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q16. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in his use of unique imagery, using contemporary objects and vernacular to challenge his audience’s perceptions. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q17. Eliot’s poetry is marked by an existential questioning of an individual’s place within the order of society. Explore this statement in relation to Journey of the Magi and at least ONE other poem set for study.
Q18. Through its use of powerful images, Eliot’s poetry explores the significance of truth. To what extent does your own interpretation of TWO of Eliot’s poems support this view?
Q19. ‘Eliot’s poetry continues to engage audiences through its poetic treatment of struggle and disillusionment.’
In light of your critical study, does this statement resonate with your own interpretation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems?
Q20. “A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read”. In light of the quote, account for the enduring relevance of Eliot’s poetry. In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems set for study.
Q21. Evaluate the effectiveness of Eliot’s exploration of the relationship between
individuals and their world within his poetry. In your response discuss ‘The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ONE other poem set for study.
Q22. “Through its portrayal of human experience, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the value of the individual”. To what extent does your interpretation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems support this view?
Q23. To what extent is your personal response to Eliot’s exploration of isolation shaped by the composer’s use of poetic techniques? In your response, make detailed reference to TWO poems set for study.
Q24. Eliot’s poetry is valued because it explores challenging ideas of uncertainty and alienation. Discuss this statement in light of your understanding of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q25. “Tension between an individual and society is what creates interest in poetry”. To what extent does this statement reflect your personal response to Hollow Men and ONE other poem.
Q26. Ultimately, in Eliot’s poetry, it is the representation of challenging ideas that captivates audiences. Explore the representation of at least ONE challenging idea, evaluating its significance to at least TWO of the poems.
Q27. Explore how time and place are used in Eliot's poetry to shape the reader’s understanding of man's isolation. In your response, make detailed referent to at least TWO of the poems set for study.
Q28. How is your personal response to the poetry of TS Eliot shaped by a perception of the individual in the poems? In your answer, refer to THREE of the poems set for study.
General Essay Questions:
Q29. In what ways has your critical study generated compelling and provocative insights into your text? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q30. How have the form and features of Eliot’s poetry informed your understanding of his work?
Q31. “The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its ability to transcend time and context.” To what extent does your own interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view?
Q32. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its representation of the complexities of the human condition. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of Eliot’s poetry.
Q33. Eliot's poetry was deeply concerned with the techniques and aesthetics of poetry writing. How is this evident in TWO of the poems set for study?
Q34. A key aspect of the poetry’s ongoing appeal is Eliot’s use of meaningful structure. In your view, to what extent does the structure contribute to the appeal of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q35. Eliot’s poetry remains important through the questions it provokes, not the answers it provides. Discuss the extent to which you agree with this statement and with close reference to at least two poems.
Q36. What do you see as the most enduring aspects of Eliot’s poetry? In your response make detailed reference to at least TWO poems.
Q37. A text has value if it creates opportunities for change, while maintaining its core values. Explore this in relation to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q38. It is how individuals react to the world around them that reveals the most interesting insights into a text. Explore this in relation to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q39. Write a critical essay that demonstrates how your response to Eliot’s poetry changed and developed during the process of your critical study.
Q40. Texts on their own are interesting but when you compare them to other texts they become illuminating and dynamic. Discuss how a cumulative study of at least THREE of Eliot’s poems have allowed for a more illuminating and dynamic insight into his work.
Q41. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”. How has your study of Eliot’s poetry allowed for you to develop a true understanding of the value of his work? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q42. “Each decision made by the poet in the construction of their poem will ultimately impact the meaning individuals gain from the text.” In light of this, analyse how the language and structure of Eliot’s poetry has influenced your understanding of at least TWO of his poems.
Q43. “Despite differing responses to texts over time, ultimately it is the structure and features of a text that is most significant in evaluating its success”. Explore the effectiveness of the poetic style of T. S. Eliot’s when evaluating his success as a poet. Refer to at least TWO of the prescribed poems set for study.
Q44. Explore the effectiveness of the poetic style of T. S. Eliot’s when evaluating his success as a poet. Refer to at least TWO of the prescribed poems set for study.
Q45. A key aspect of the poetry’s ongoing appeal is Eliot's rejection of structure. In your view, to what extent does the lack of structure contribute to the appeal of Eliot's poetry? Support your evaluation with detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems prescribed for study.
Q46. In your view, how have poetic techniques been used to reveal memorable ideas in Eliot’s poetry? Support your view with detailed reference to TWO poems.
Q47. Your class has been exploring the question, ‘What will continue to make Eliot’s poetry worthy of critical study?’ Your personal response has been challenged by another student. Defend your response through a critical evaluation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems, analysing the construction, content and language of the texts.
Q48. ‘Interpretations of texts can shift and change with time and place.’
Considering your time and place, reflect on the ways in which context has shaped your critical interpretation of the prescribed text. In your response, refer to TWO poems.
Q49. Compose an argument for or against the topic: ‘That every text has its use-by date.’ Consider your prescribed text’s ideas, language and form, and its reception in different contexts. In your response, refer to at least TWO poems.
Q50. It has been suggested that a key aspect of Eliot’s enduring relevance to audiences is his poetry’s examination of human flaws. To what extent does your personal understanding concur with this view? In your response you should critically analyse and evaluate the techniques, themes and structure of at least TWO poems set for study.
Q51. “An admirable text does not define or exhaust its possibilities”. What possibilities do you see in Eliot’s poetry? Discuss your ideas with close reference to at least TWO poems.
Q52. Anyone can have a good idea. Effective communication of ideas is an art form. Offer an evaluation of the strengths of Eliot’s poetry as an effective vehicle for ideas. In your response, refer to at least TWO poems.
Q53. “Considering a text from different perspectives develops an appreciation of its textual integrity“. Do you agree? Respond to this question through detailed reference to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q54. Write a series of three or four reflections that demonstrate how your response to Eliot’s poetry has changed and developed during the process of your critical study. Base your reflections on detailed reference to at least TWO poems.
Q55. The value of great texts is that they continue to speak to us. How do such notions account for the value of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q56. To what extent has your personal response to Eliot’s poetry been shaped by the enduring power of its intellectual and artistic qualities? Support your evaluation with close reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q57. Analyse the ways T.S. Eliot has prompted you to understand and respond to great and provocative ideas in his poetry. In your response make detailed reference to TWO poems.
Critical Response Questions:
Q58. How has considering other interpretations of Eliot's poetry helped you develop your own appreciation of the textual integrity of the poetry? In your response you should consider the ideas, poetic techniques and structure of at least TWO poems prescribed for study.
Q59. For almost a century, critical studies of Eliot’s poetry have challenged us with a range of perspectives from which we can read and understand the intense exploration of the humanity which lie at the core of the poems. What have you come to understand about humanity from Eliot’s poems? How has this understanding been affected by the perspective of others?
A valuable text has something to say and says it well. How valid is this claim, considering the different contexts in which a text can be received? In your answer, compare your personal evaluation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems with one other perspective on the poetry.
Hurled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
Q60. In your view, how does Eliot’s portrayal of the complex nature of personal experience contribute to the enduring value of his poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to Preludes and at least ONE other poem set for study.
Extract Based Questions:
“You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
Q1. In your view, how does Eliot’s portrayal of the complex nature of personal experience contribute to the enduring value of his poetry?
In your response, make detailed reference to Preludes and at least ONE other poem set for study.
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”
Q2. It is the inherent tension between desire and fear that creates interest in Eliot’s poetry. To what extent are such ideas reflected in the extract from The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock and TWO other poems set for study?
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.”
Q3. Intertextuality plays an essential part in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Based on your personal response, account for the importance of intertextuality to the poems, making detailed reference to Journey Of The Magi and TWO other poems set for study.
“The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.”
Q4. How does your reading of Rhapsody on a Windy Night affect your reading of the rest of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make close reference to the extract provided and at least TWO other poems set for study.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.”
Q5. How does a critical analysis of the above extract reflect your understanding and appreciation of Eliot’s poetry as a whole? Evaluate the language, content and construction of The Hollow Men and at least TWO other poems to demonstrate your understanding and appreciation of the prescribed text.
Theme Specific Questions:
Q6. Through its portrayal of human experience, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the significance of desire. To what extent does your interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q7. How is your personal response to the poetry of Eliot shaped by a perception of voice in your poems? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q8. TS Eliot’s poems are about the quest for individual agency. To what extent does your own interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q9. “[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves” – T.S. Eliot
What has Eliot’s poetry made you more aware of? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q10. How is the enduring appeal of Eliot’s poetry enhanced by his adaptation of the dramatic monologue form across his work? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q11. Through its portrayal of relationships, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the significance of desire. To what extent does your interpretation of Eliot support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to TWO poems.
Q12. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its representation of the complexities of the human condition. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q13. Explore how time and place are used in Eliot’s poetry to shape the audience’s understanding of isolation. In your response, make detailed reference to Rhapsody On A Windy Night and at least ONE other poem.
Q14. “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity” – Sigmund Freud. In light of the quote, consider how at least TWO of Eliot’s poems explore the challenges associated with the uncertainties of the modern world.
Q15. Eliot’s poetry can be clearly seen as a reaction to his relationship with the modern world in which he lived; yet his works continue to speak to us. In your opinion, how is the modernist focus of Eliot’s poetry granted universal appeal? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q16. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in his use of unique imagery, using contemporary objects and vernacular to challenge his audience’s perceptions. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q17. Eliot’s poetry is marked by an existential questioning of an individual’s place within the order of society. Explore this statement in relation to Journey of the Magi and at least ONE other poem set for study.
Q18. Through its use of powerful images, Eliot’s poetry explores the significance of truth. To what extent does your own interpretation of TWO of Eliot’s poems support this view?
Q19. ‘Eliot’s poetry continues to engage audiences through its poetic treatment of struggle and disillusionment.’
In light of your critical study, does this statement resonate with your own interpretation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems?
Q20. “A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read”. In light of the quote, account for the enduring relevance of Eliot’s poetry. In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems set for study.
Q21. Evaluate the effectiveness of Eliot’s exploration of the relationship between
individuals and their world within his poetry. In your response discuss ‘The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ONE other poem set for study.
Q22. “Through its portrayal of human experience, Eliot’s poetry reinforces the value of the individual”. To what extent does your interpretation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems support this view?
Q23. To what extent is your personal response to Eliot’s exploration of isolation shaped by the composer’s use of poetic techniques? In your response, make detailed reference to TWO poems set for study.
Q24. Eliot’s poetry is valued because it explores challenging ideas of uncertainty and alienation. Discuss this statement in light of your understanding of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q25. “Tension between an individual and society is what creates interest in poetry”. To what extent does this statement reflect your personal response to Hollow Men and ONE other poem.
Q26. Ultimately, in Eliot’s poetry, it is the representation of challenging ideas that captivates audiences. Explore the representation of at least ONE challenging idea, evaluating its significance to at least TWO of the poems.
Q27. Explore how time and place are used in Eliot's poetry to shape the reader’s understanding of man's isolation. In your response, make detailed referent to at least TWO of the poems set for study.
Q28. How is your personal response to the poetry of TS Eliot shaped by a perception of the individual in the poems? In your answer, refer to THREE of the poems set for study.
General Essay Questions:
Q29. In what ways has your critical study generated compelling and provocative insights into your text? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q30. How have the form and features of Eliot’s poetry informed your understanding of his work?
Q31. “The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its ability to transcend time and context.” To what extent does your own interpretation of Eliot’s poetry support this view?
Q32. The power of Eliot’s poetry lies in its representation of the complexities of the human condition. Discuss this view in relation to your own reading of Eliot’s poetry.
Q33. Eliot's poetry was deeply concerned with the techniques and aesthetics of poetry writing. How is this evident in TWO of the poems set for study?
Q34. A key aspect of the poetry’s ongoing appeal is Eliot’s use of meaningful structure. In your view, to what extent does the structure contribute to the appeal of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q35. Eliot’s poetry remains important through the questions it provokes, not the answers it provides. Discuss the extent to which you agree with this statement and with close reference to at least two poems.
Q36. What do you see as the most enduring aspects of Eliot’s poetry? In your response make detailed reference to at least TWO poems.
Q37. A text has value if it creates opportunities for change, while maintaining its core values. Explore this in relation to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q38. It is how individuals react to the world around them that reveals the most interesting insights into a text. Explore this in relation to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q39. Write a critical essay that demonstrates how your response to Eliot’s poetry changed and developed during the process of your critical study.
Q40. Texts on their own are interesting but when you compare them to other texts they become illuminating and dynamic. Discuss how a cumulative study of at least THREE of Eliot’s poems have allowed for a more illuminating and dynamic insight into his work.
Q41. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”. How has your study of Eliot’s poetry allowed for you to develop a true understanding of the value of his work? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q42. “Each decision made by the poet in the construction of their poem will ultimately impact the meaning individuals gain from the text.” In light of this, analyse how the language and structure of Eliot’s poetry has influenced your understanding of at least TWO of his poems.
Q43. “Despite differing responses to texts over time, ultimately it is the structure and features of a text that is most significant in evaluating its success”. Explore the effectiveness of the poetic style of T. S. Eliot’s when evaluating his success as a poet. Refer to at least TWO of the prescribed poems set for study.
Q44. Explore the effectiveness of the poetic style of T. S. Eliot’s when evaluating his success as a poet. Refer to at least TWO of the prescribed poems set for study.
Q45. A key aspect of the poetry’s ongoing appeal is Eliot's rejection of structure. In your view, to what extent does the lack of structure contribute to the appeal of Eliot's poetry? Support your evaluation with detailed reference to at least TWO of the poems prescribed for study.
Q46. In your view, how have poetic techniques been used to reveal memorable ideas in Eliot’s poetry? Support your view with detailed reference to TWO poems.
Q47. Your class has been exploring the question, ‘What will continue to make Eliot’s poetry worthy of critical study?’ Your personal response has been challenged by another student. Defend your response through a critical evaluation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems, analysing the construction, content and language of the texts.
Q48. ‘Interpretations of texts can shift and change with time and place.’
Considering your time and place, reflect on the ways in which context has shaped your critical interpretation of the prescribed text. In your response, refer to TWO poems.
Q49. Compose an argument for or against the topic: ‘That every text has its use-by date.’ Consider your prescribed text’s ideas, language and form, and its reception in different contexts. In your response, refer to at least TWO poems.
Q50. It has been suggested that a key aspect of Eliot’s enduring relevance to audiences is his poetry’s examination of human flaws. To what extent does your personal understanding concur with this view? In your response you should critically analyse and evaluate the techniques, themes and structure of at least TWO poems set for study.
Q51. “An admirable text does not define or exhaust its possibilities”. What possibilities do you see in Eliot’s poetry? Discuss your ideas with close reference to at least TWO poems.
Q52. Anyone can have a good idea. Effective communication of ideas is an art form. Offer an evaluation of the strengths of Eliot’s poetry as an effective vehicle for ideas. In your response, refer to at least TWO poems.
Q53. “Considering a text from different perspectives develops an appreciation of its textual integrity“. Do you agree? Respond to this question through detailed reference to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q54. Write a series of three or four reflections that demonstrate how your response to Eliot’s poetry has changed and developed during the process of your critical study. Base your reflections on detailed reference to at least TWO poems.
Q55. The value of great texts is that they continue to speak to us. How do such notions account for the value of Eliot’s poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to at least TWO of Eliot’s poems.
Q56. To what extent has your personal response to Eliot’s poetry been shaped by the enduring power of its intellectual and artistic qualities? Support your evaluation with close reference to at least TWO poems set for study.
Q57. Analyse the ways T.S. Eliot has prompted you to understand and respond to great and provocative ideas in his poetry. In your response make detailed reference to TWO poems.
Critical Response Questions:
Q58. How has considering other interpretations of Eliot's poetry helped you develop your own appreciation of the textual integrity of the poetry? In your response you should consider the ideas, poetic techniques and structure of at least TWO poems prescribed for study.
Q59. For almost a century, critical studies of Eliot’s poetry have challenged us with a range of perspectives from which we can read and understand the intense exploration of the humanity which lie at the core of the poems. What have you come to understand about humanity from Eliot’s poems? How has this understanding been affected by the perspective of others?
A valuable text has something to say and says it well. How valid is this claim, considering the different contexts in which a text can be received? In your answer, compare your personal evaluation of at least TWO of Eliot’s poems with one other perspective on the poetry.
Hurled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
Q60. In your view, how does Eliot’s portrayal of the complex nature of personal experience contribute to the enduring value of his poetry? In your response, make detailed reference to Preludes and at least ONE other poem set for study.