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1917: Prufrock and Other Observations

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

• Our modern Hamlet, unable to force anything “to its crisis” or make any decisions; afraid and feeble; wondering if proposing would be “worth while”
  • Worth it: “after” (and then he describes all of the social rounds, marmalade, tea, novels, trailing skirts): is marriage a fitting reward for the monotonous social round?
  • It’s an equation of value: all of the situations and nights versus marriage or at least the drama of proposal. He’s questioning the logic of events, causality. Would the marriage give him the “value” he put in for all his effort? Do preceding events create the context for evaluating action?
  • The other evaluation: would the effort to speak—overcoming the shyness and all—be worth the possibility of rejection?
    • Worried about opacity of communication (“That is not what I mean at all. / That is not it, not at all.”)
    • Could be metaphor for artistic production
  • Eventual realization that he’s a minor actor: again, a solution within art itself. So he ends up affirming the worth of verbal art anyway.
    • Even though the mermaids “will not sing to me,” he has made his Love Song
      • Form of last verses bears this out: like Dante’s own type of verse, which he quotes from earlier, we have 3 verses of three. It’s interrupted after verse 1 by a single line of doubt (“I do not think they will sing to me,”) but this momentary doubt is cast off and the other 2 verses remain, with their neat rhymes.
      • Sure, the human voices wake him and ruin his vision (“we drown”), but he’s got a poem.
• Dante epigraph: does bear out Lukacs’ modernists-about-immutable-man thing
• Bankrupt romanticism of Big City
  • “Let us go then, you and I / when the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherised upon a table”
  • “Evening” taken as length of time/event: Instead of being intoxicated, your evening has been put out of consciousness. Your time for enjoyment is asleep
  • “Evening” taken as a moment of time: Night no longer exciting and full of opportunities. It’s the more radical reading: all nights are gone.
    • Even, say, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood which has grotesque possibilities for the night, is ruled out here. Compare medicine, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, whose “medicine” rings with possibilities of cross-dressing and transgendered identity, with his “dirty speculum” favorably comparing to the sterility of Eliot’s image: for at least one has the opportunity for drama in the form of disease. For Barnes, the unconscious contains endless opportunities that seep out into the “real” at any moment, but for Eliot, the unconscious is blank hygiene.
      • The soot and drain-water aren’t as real as Barnes’ dirty streets and dirty clothes: for Eliot, the dirt is for the cat and even the cat has the refuge of sleep (wheres Barnes’ characters are terrorized by sleep)
• The only possibility? in the silky rhymes and uneven meters, the erstwhile quality of the repetition (“In the rooms women come and go / Talking of Michaelangelo;” the image of the cat nuzzling the window-panes) that give a very oral quality to the poem. It’s in words themselves, and a knowing reassurance to the reader who despite the free verse seems to know where it’s going (compared to the insane caffeination of The Cantos)
• Time
  • There’s too much time: monotony (There will be time, there will be time)
• This is polite modernism, too perfect a product, one of only critique that Eysteinnson sees in modernism. The Wasteland will go one step further.
  • He might be criticizing the romance narrative (the paralysis of popping the question), the drawing room intellectuality (the women coming and going), and the superficial critique of society (the thinning hair)—but it’s still his topic.
    • He gloats lovingly over “My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin”
  • For example, “And indeed there will be time / To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” / Time to turn back and descend the stair”
    • Here, the rhyme itself as well as the repetition of “time” “turns back” and “descends” just like the speaker proposes to do, the repetition like moving up a spiral staircase
      • Reminds me of the “there is time / For the decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”—in which “revision” has already reversed “decision” both in meaning and in sound
    • It gives pleasure in the stylistic echo of the content
• When he goes on, “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair” the continuity of the rhyme makes the disaster (balding) part of the overall artistic scheme: it’s saved by rhyming with “there” and “stair”
  • Just as when he sees himself pinned against a wall, the “wall” is rhymed with “all” and the “pin” with “begin,” driving you past the ugly image, not asking you to linger on it.
• Lukacs note again: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” is a mockery in Lukacs’ face b/c says that one engagement is the equivalent of earth-shattering action. To worry “how to begin” and “presuming” about this action….ugh! Eliot has one-upped the significance of the personal into the personal IS all that matters.
  • “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?” This, Lukacs would say, is truly the limit of the horizon of action for these lame modernists.
• It’s too perfect a product itself
  • Any emotion is kept in line: “Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,” notice how the humility of the insert disrupts the emotion, and one suspects perhaps one of the women coming and going have made their remark about his balding a little too loud, and that is the majority of his suffering.
• What’s the upset about?
  • Being a flaneur isn’t enough: “Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through the narrow streets?” Ellipses indicate the possibility itself dies with a dying fall. And he compares it to what he should have been, “a pair of ragged claws,” perhaps wanting the social action he’s denied.

“Portrait of a Lady”

• Similar deal as Prufrock: romance and topical aesthetic references with a dash of disappointment
• Makes me think Eliot in this stage is doing to poetry what James did in novels
• Makes routine out of apparently profound and intimate conversation
  • But there is doubt whether the conversation might not actually have value after all: the narrator isn’t up to it, and perhaps that’s the problem, not problem with her
  • He worries that answering it will make him a performing bear
  • He’s upset that she keeps demanding that he understand her
• Why haven’t we been friends? even though all have thought it’d be perfect? she asks, as Mrs Kerr asks Sydney about Sydney and her son Ronald (Bowen Hotel)

“Preludes”

• The routines of city life; everyone doing same thing
• Someone falling asleep: “watched the night revealing / The thousand sordid images / Of which your soul was constituted”
  • Same topics as Woolf, but diff attitude, so despondent (cf Dalloway when Clarissa runs up to bedroom during party)
• Alternately empathizing and ridiculing others
• Same images as rest of Eliot: newspapers, X stretched against the sky, muddy streets, coffee, blinds

“Rhapsody on a Windy Night”

• A walk from midnight to four a. m.
• Memory: “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium”
• More cats! and their tongues!
• Moon or unnamed woman he sees on street: “washed-out smallpox cracks her face”
  • Memory NOT happy for Eliot

“Morning at the Window”

• “Damp souls of housemaids” and the breakfast plates: he sniffs at everything, is offended by all, so fastidious
  • It’s an inversion of decadence, with sensitivity and sensuousness supposed to give you heights of ecstasy: he say’s it’ll only leave you sordid stuff
• Again, he’s emptying out the value, romanticism of the flaneur

“The Boston Evening Transcript”

• A choice for the night: either you read the paper or you have the night “wakening the appetites”

“Aunt Helen”

• How death isn’t significant but commonplace
• Betrays more old-maidenly fear of servants when he mentions the footman “holding the second housemaid on his knees”

“Cousin Nancy”

• Nancy the modern girl, smoking and riding, beside the watchful disapproving disciplinary eyes of her aunts and the “watching” mantel ornaments

“Mr Apollinax”

• Narrator’s imagination runs wild at the thought of a foreign visitor who shocks the natives—to Greek myth, to coral islands, to decapitation—but the lasting memory is: “I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.”
• The poem doesn’t do much: it just presents the two types of folks and the two ways you remember them. And then gone.

“Hysteria”

• Prose poem
• Eliot is afraid of a woman’s body: her teeth being seen as she laughs (“squad-drill”) and the “shaking of her breasts” that he wants to stop
• The choice of a woman making a public spectacle as madness…what a choice

“Conversation Galante”

• The narrator tries to talk with charm and whimsy and imagination but is cut off by the woman listener, who complains that he is digressive, too serious, and assumes he’s talking about her personally.

“La Figlia Che Piange”

• Anaphora makes it song-like
• Image of woman with sunlight in her hair and flowers in her arms: still taken by the romantic images of Victorian realism

Poems 1920

“Gerontion”

• Old man: rehearsal for Tiresius in Waste Land, I assume
• Has missed the formative experiences of life (war) and thus “I have no ghosts,” only a “draughty house;” but still old
• “Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’ / The word within a word, unable to speak a word” (and what does come is “Christ the tiger” cf Yeats)
  • This sounds like what Lukacs would say about modernism and metaphor
  • Except a few lines down, an Adornian reply: “Think now / History has many cunning passages… Think now / She gives when our attention is distracted”
    • Also, when you get what you asked for, historical meaning, it takes away your appetite b/c it’s too confusing (“supple confusions,” ie, hard to interpret) (“the giving famishes the craving”), it “gives to late” for it to help you believe in anything (your belief is now gone, it’s too late), “gives to soon” (“into weak hands” – that is people who think it can be “dispensed with” until there’s a crisis; it’s put away unreflected upon)
    • So where is Gerontian in the Lukacs/Adorno fight? Both are right: we do silly things w/metaphors but no fear b/c meaning will out! However, he doubts that historical meaning will matter or be what you want, and the need for historical understanding—reconnex the individual with power for action—can be dangerous: “Unnatural vices / Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues / Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.”
      • He sees the dialectical aspect of action (action never easy to understand), and he doubts that historical knowledge is straightforward or desirable: and this is what Lukacs never asked.
      • That’s why the “sign” so wanted for becomes “Christ the tiger” (violence the savior)
      • This is why modernism outlasts Lukacs’ attacks: L never asks about conditions of knowledge that can either underwrite or invalidate the historical action he so desires. And style is a reflection of those conditions of knowledge.
• “depraved May:” only Eliot would see that!
• About Limits of Knowledge
  • “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
  • “We have not reached conclusion” despite him being old
  • “I have not made this show purposelessly.” and “I would meet you upon this honestly.” he’s not being facetious or difficult or consciously irreverent by asking these questions
• Here the condition of a Prufrock—impotence—is seen as the product of old age, and we’re inching towards a reason why we can critique our civilization.

“Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”

• abab ballad stanza
• Humorously uses enjambment that connects between stanzas

“Sweeney Erect”

• Allusions reversed
  • Beginning to inject the classical references INTO the poem, not just epigraph
  • Like the above poem, uses English epigraph!
• Sweeney wants to be “painted” and “displayed” into Greek mythology
• Sweeney naked shaving discounts Emerson’s comment that a man’s shadow is like history: deflation!
• In a brothel: new meaning to the title, eh?

“A Cooking Egg”

• About easy solutions
• Imagination and the world to come are good enough without actually having Honor, Capital, Society, and the Wife/Mistress
• Modern world, instead of “the eagles and the trumpets,” you get the multitudes hunkered down over “buttered scones and crumpets” in A B C teashops

“Le Directeur”

• Four-syllable rhyming lines in French
• Little girl “starving” for love, whose only hope is the “reactionary shareholders.”
• Begins: Unhappy Thames!
• Repetition consistently links conservatism, spectatorship, and capital.
• Two other French poems, “Lune de Miel,” “Melange Adultere de Tout” but geez it’s hard to care

“The Hippopotamus”

• Part of his agreement with Pound to combat the looseness of free verse with some “tighter” meters and rhyming
• Farcical comparison of the limitations of “flesh and blood” with the eternal Church which never fails; in the end the hippo will be perfected in Heaven
• Hilarious: “The Church can sleep and feed at once.” “While the True Church need never stir / To gather in its dividends.” The Church is greedy, perhaps @ empire: “But fruits and pomegranate and peach / Refresh the Church from over sea.”
• Final dialectical reversal: but the hippo will eventually be perfect by dying; Church too human I guess

“Dans le Restaurant”

• Another French poem
• Waiter tells a racy anecdote, spits in soup.
• Last verse translated into English for Waste Land (see “Death by Water”): much better there.

“Whispers of Immortality”

• Deathly Thought v Fleshly Life
• Again, we’re reaching towards the Waste Land: “skull beneath skin,” “daffodil bulbs” rather than eyeballs
• We’ve got Webster and Donne pondered on (they actually knew what death meant), then juxta w/Grishka:
• “And even the Abstract Entities / Circumambulate her charm / But our lot crawls between dry ribs / To keep our metaphysics warm.”
  • Thinking = death; “not substitute for sense”
    • Can’t have life and thinking at the same time: thinking more aligned with death than with life
    • Attracted to death; it seems safer than, say, Grishkin
  • Human compared to animal: Grishkin to jaguar
    • Narrator scared of the woman, feels hunted

“Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”

• Awesome wordplay: crazy archaicisms and unusual words
• Polyphiloprogenitive (“prolific of offspring;” also in Arnold Culture and Anarchy); epicene: loss of gender distinction (cf effiminacy, aexuality, or androgyny); superfetation: you can get pregnant while already pregnant: can gestate 2 diff creatures each at a diff moment of development; Paraclete = “lawyer,” “comforter” or “The Holy Ghost”
  • Church created lots o diff doctrines
  • Mentions Origen, believer in reincarnation until you reach God (neo-Platonic; Plotinus); self-castrated to avoid bodily temptation (!)
• Bees with bellies and Sweeney in his bath… what do they have to do with all this religious stuff? Perhaps the ultimate multiplicity of belief systems…?
• Church is parasitic (like the friars mentioned in epigraph of Jew of Malta)

“Sweeney Among the Nightingales”

• Apeneck, has zebra stripes
• Another loose woman “tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees” but ends up knocking stuff over (coffee-cup); and women are “in league” against a man who “leaves the room”
• Might be a good poem for leisure space (restaurant? bringing fruit)
• The birds that sing at this place are the ones near “The Convent of the Sacred Heart” (women alone…hence scary?) and near Agamemnon’s death (another mean woman, eh?)
• And Rachel nee Rabinovitch “tears at the grapes with murderous paws”
• Easiest interp: misogynist

The Waste Land 1922

The Burial of the Dead

• Epigraph: the Sibyl has been given immortality; all she wants is death; also “For Ezra Pound, the greater craftsman”
• April is the cruellest month
  • Spring is cruel! Dead: we want to be dead; our land cannot support growth
  • Warm = winter = forgetful
• No relief, dry stone, dead tree; only shadow is here for us for relief
• “Neither / Living nor dead”
• Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant
  • Alternative wisdoms we are trying out in death of Christianity
  • Wise but “has a bad cold:” mixing of mortal and immortal: perhaps that’s the real indignity Eliot is against!!
• Style: leitmotifs like Wagner (a succession of notes suggests the coming of a character)
• “Unreal City” for the first time
  • Image of people flocking to financial district across London Bridge
  • Narrator sees someone he knows, from Mylae: Sicilian seaport, Rome wins against Carthage 260 B C
    • The fact that this person has corpses buried, perhaps sprouting: goes back to first couple of lines; suggests how History isn’t linear

A Game of Chess

• Woman in a chair before her vanity: jewels, satin cases, cupid-etched mirror, throne, ivory, perfumes; carved mantel over fire
  • Whiff of decadence in description
• Philomel: princess of Athens; by King Tereus, who was married to her sister, was raped; threatens to tell so cuts out her tongue; she weaves it into tapestry and sends it to the man’s wife (who is her sister), Procne; she kills their son and feeds him to him; both Procne and Philomel turned into birds
• The woman, brushing her chair, tries to force the man watching her into talk (apparently wife/husband)
  • His silent responses show that his mind is ONLY allusions: Shakespeare (Tempest), turned by his characterization of it in the words of a music hall song into music hall song
• “What shall we do?” / The hot water at ten. Habit replaces her nervous worrying: it’s the other side of Prufrock, where the deadliness of counting your life by coffee-spoons keeps you from becoming unhinged!
• Then changes to voice of lower class woman at bar closing: tells her friend (whose husband is coming home after war) women must make themselves attractive for men or they’ll cheat, implying that SHE HERSELF will please the returning soldier
  • Abortion pills made her look old at 31. Already five kids. Violence of sex: you must have sex, says our speaker.

The Fire Sermon

• Thames in autumn; quotes from Spenser’s marriage poem which features an inspirational Thames, but now just sordid
• Nymphs = prostitutes
  • Mr. Eugenides coming for sexual tourism (gay; tries to proffer sex to speaker): this is what cosmo has brought us!
• Where Tiresius comes in: “While I was fishing in the dull canal”
  • Has been both man and woman
• Urban landscape has no choice for regrowth; unlike colonial and pastoral spaces
• Philomel comes back: leitmotif
• Unreal City comes back
• More unwanted sex: the typist and the young man carbuncular
  • Tiresius: “Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest” (ah we already know unwanted sex is a theme)
  • “assaults” “makes a welcome of indifference”
  • She sees it as duty: “Well now that’s done: and i’m glad it’s over” which speaker says is the “one half-formed thought” the brain “allows…to pass”
• Strangely moves to a positive moment: the woman turns on the gramophone, and then speaker quotes Tempest on music and goes to a sociable scene in a bar: chattering; where beauty lies near (Eliot’s favorite church, Christopher Wren’s Magnus Martyr)
• Vast changes in style, voice, meter, form
• About boats, sailors from the “fishmen” in the bar, finds another scene of unwanted sex (“on a narrow canoe”
• “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.”
  • From Lear
  • Condition of fragmentation
    • Either can mean you can’t connect, or that you connect two things, both of which are nothing
      • Connex is all that’s left: the fragments mean nothing, but perhaps juxta CAN mean something?

Death by Water

*

• Translation of one of his 1920 French phase poems
• Cautionary tale of the dead Phoenician sailor: the body physically degenerating after death
• Recalls the Tempest quotes as well as Sosostris’ cards as well as the other sailors

What the Thunder Said

• Anaphora: After… / After… / After…
  • He did this in Prufrock and Portrait too
  • Cumulative memory
• Reverses Resurrection: “He who was living is now dead,” instead of the “He who was dead is now living”
  • Which was also how the poem started: dead awakening
• No water, only rock
• Empty iteration: there is no water; without rain; etc; with the obsessed variation (“And no rock / If there were rock / and also water…”)
• Empires dying, what of UK empire?
  • “Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”
  • Origins of Western civ falling
  • Must turn to the East: we must “Give, Sympathize, Control.”
    • Give: give yourself, surrender
    • Sympathize: think of other people; deny isolation; parallels the form of the book b/c visits other people and you have Tiresius showing you how to react (he’s the model of sympathy)
    • Control: Two Kinds: You should let yourself be controlled, like the boat controlled by the oars; just respond “gaily” AND: You should “set [your] lands in order”
      • London bridge is falling down = image of purifying fire = you must let go, let things be destroyed, before you can control yourself; destruction is the first step?
• “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
  • Are these fragments a part of the burning?
  • The oscillating final images of gaining and losing control, of giving up and taking back up, make a dizzying last gasp
• Ends w/repeating: Shantih, shanti, shanti (“the peace with surpasses understanding”) (sounds like shhh shh shh)
• Eliot, like Tiresius, fishing in a literary sea
  • It’s like a literary hell, the aftermath of literature, the flattened plane of Hades for literature
  • Early on, in Burial of the Dead, “Son of man / you cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images”
    • Seems to limit the power of the poet
    • Maybe you have to precipitate the falling down to start anew; you have to surrender the tradition in a new way, rather than keeping it intact
      • If we reference Tradish and the Ind Talent: Waste Land does I supposed reinterpret: is reinterpreting the way to find water?
• “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender:” “By this, and this only, we have existed”
  • Rather than “prudence,” rather than covering up memories, rather than lawyers and laws and wills and seals (the legal code)