Notes on the Modern period - 12: Eliot's Purgatory

T. S. Eliot’s poetry traces one arc of the modern, a development from self-questioning aestheticism, through an often violent, experimental vision of the modern ‘wasteland,’ to a retrenchment or contraction of ambition – whether in adopting neoclassical forms, in focusing on ideological critique (either from the left or the right), or in performing a sort of purgation of the modern waste of spirit. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” exemplifies that retrenchment and contraction. (See Eliot's Four Quartets.)

I’ll concentrate here on “Little Gidding,” which was written at the start of the Nazi bombardment of England, 1940-41. This poem, like the other “Quartets,” speaks above all in the form of oxymoron, in paradoxes which continually take back any assertion of living vitality. In part I, the initial, sensuous image of “midwinter spring” (“Between melting and freezing / The soul’s sap quivers”) is framed by a continuous and stark taking-back: “with frost and fire, / The brief sun flames the ice… / In windless cold that is the heart’s heat.” Or “no wind, but Pentecostal fire / In the dark time of the year.” Trapped inside a sort of machine of negation, all the brilliant energy of Eliot’s characteristic use of rhetorical repetition (threaded together with small, haunting changes and embroidered by random rhymes) here avoids any evocation of the sloppy, grimy struggles of living which simultaneously besmirch and enliven “Prufrock” and “The Wasteland.” In the second stanza, the phrase “if you came” becomes a repeated apposition eloquently leading us down a path into the zone of death’s purgatory at “the world’s end.” The only solace is the yearning language of an abstractly unfolding prayer, and the crucial repeated image is that of purgatorial fire: “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”


In part II of “Little Gidding,” we experience bombed London as the scene of an implacable apocalypse, and onto this cityscape, Eliot leads the ghost of Yeats, who is made to offer Eliot-like advice and self-critique from the beyond the grave. This Yeats is stripped of all his late inspiration: his taking on the Crazy Jane persona in “Word to Music, Perhaps,” or his locating the source of his images in “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” or his monument-building “Under Ben Bulben.” No, Eliot’s Yeats becomes a pale version of Mallarmé: his “concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe” – purified and prayerful language must be purged of the “sting” and “stain” of life and “restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.” The form of that restoration is an ascetic, neo-classical retrieval of Dante’s terza rima – to “move in measure,” though without Dante’s intricate rhyme scheme or the pathos and fecundity of Dante’s images, as Eliot here echoes scenes from Dante’s Purgatorio and particularly Inferno (Canto xv where Dante’s meets with his damned teacher Brunetto Latini).

Part III introduces into the cycle of prayer – the movement toward “detachment” and the “transfigured” – the figure of a fourteenth century mystic, Dame Julia of Norwich, whose repeated incantation that “all shall be well” becomes “a symbol: / A symbol perfected in death.” In this pure, autonomous, and even claustrophobically closed cycle, prayer feeds on itself, becoming the “ground” of prayer. The brief part IV is another eloquent evocation of burning “incandescent terror” descending on both bombed London and the enclosed ascetic spirit; such is the double fire of purgatory and of the burning city. The prayer emerging from “tongues” of flame conveys that implacable purgatorial vision: “We only live, only suspire / Consumed by either fire or fire.” Part V is the poem’s concluding “movement” and uses a public, didactic prosody “where every word is at home…neither diffident nor ostentatious” – Dryden-like and neoclassical in manner – which reminds us that Eliot is affirming not only an idea (and ideology) of purgatorial fire but also, in a moment of peril, his profound Anglophilia: “History is now and England.” The great assurance and authority of Eliot’s voice operate here in tone and diction to proclaim the purgatorial cycling of spirit and of language itself; in this vision (akin to that in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) all writing is rewriting, and “every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph.” The authority of Eliot’s “we” reveals the ultimate tradition he celebrates: “We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them.” England was, of course, victorious by the end of World War II, but Eliot’s “Little Gidding” suggests the claustrophobia and contraction of spirit which beset Eliot’s vision not only of his nation but of Western Civilization, of its failure and self-destruction in its second cataclysmic war to end all wars. In this poem “consumed by either fire or fire,” Eliot envisions – and celebrates – a purgatorial incineration haunting modernity.

“The Four Quartets” also represent Eliot’s attempt to find in language a parallel form to Beethoven’s four late quartets. These quartets from the 1820s abjure much of the forward thrust of dramatic structure in Beethoven’s previous quartets; those earlier works’ arc of development and their momentum in rhythm and harmony give way in the late works to exfoliating abstruse melodies, which seem sometimes simple and yet continually violate expectations of closure and movement, both harmonically and rhythmically. The slowing of momentum and the interruption of the dramatic arc enable Beethoven to render states of transcendent serenity, spiritual exploration, and sometimes violent fragmentation; the vital, often off-beat, experimental quality of the music breaks new ground in classical music. It does so with a sort of unleashed expressiveness, a creative upwelling which makes Beethoven’s four late quartets one of the great achievements in the history of classical music. Eliot’s ambition (or perhaps his pretention) is to associate his own late poems with the quartets for a variety of reasons, both structural and spiritual, and the most significant of these reasons is that the poems aim to consecrate the state of transcendence associated with Beethoven’s late quartets. That association between the poems and the quartets is questionable, as I hope I’ve shown, for Beethoven’s works are the opposite of a recantation or retrenchment. The music conveys an inspired and generous fertility of feeling, and its constantly exfoliating inventiveness both embraces past musical technique and forecasts future technique. Beethoven’s late quartets do not mark a withdrawal into the circle of purgatorial fire, which constitutes the curtailed vision of Eliot’s ascetic late poems.

Notes on the Modern Period - 11 - Eliot and Death

In my earlier posts (on Yeats, on Keats and on Mallarmé, etc.), one theme has involved these poets’ engagement with death. The theme is, of course, a frequent one in poetry; for example, a powerful Renaissance confrontation with death is Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 with its last line: “Death, thou shalt die.” For nineteenth and early twentieth century poets, the reach toward transcendent possibility often involves the paradoxical death of the ordinary self. For Yeats, the power of the image is to transmute the passion and suffering of lived life into art – of the “fall to earth,” and that fall involves an awareness of how death and life are intertwined; for example in “Byzantium,” the “gold mosaic” images from the walls of Hagia Sophia are hailed as “death-in-life and life-in-death. / …Those images that yet / Fresh images beget, / That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” Even in this poem set far from Ireland, there is an affirmation of art’s turbulent connection to life, which makes sense perhaps especially in the context of a newly postcolonial culture. In contrast, the recognition of death’s role for Eliot’s imagination is another matter altogether. The difference is suggested by the opening of Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” which is an epigram from Petronius reporting, in the Greek, what the Cumaean Sibyl said: ‘I want to die.’ Eliot’s work gives form not only to the experience of death as a part of life, but also to the yearning for death.

The Sibyl’s desire to die is one part of the many layers of allusion which characterize Eliot’s poem (here we are given the Sibyl’s original Greek, which is embedded within Petronius’ Latin narrative). Eliot’s strategy – constant allusions, often in their original languages – is not simply to impede immediate comprehension; nor is the poet merely challenging the reader to join Eliot as an elitist adept in the arcana of “the mind of Europe” and beyond (by the end of “The Wasteland” we are reading the original Sanskrit words of a prayer calling for humans to “give, sympathize, and control”). Such defensive harboring of past culture is not quite the point, for Eliot does provide footnotes to elucidate his poem’s allusions, and his strategy promotes a sort of delayed comprehension, so that one experiences the shock of confusion and then the decoding clarification. Yet the elucidation give little comfort, for the sensation produced is of an echoing emptiness. It is as if a desperate force is grasping rather hopelessly for pieces of the literary past, and the reader is made to participate with the poet in struggling with the fragmentation of that past, the defeat of inherited culture in the face of the emptiness of the urban present.

The sense of multiple voices haunting at the edge of death is implicit in the initial title Eliot gave the manuscript of the poem: “He do the police in different voices,” with the deadening vulgarity of its knowing self-mockery. Part I of “The Wasteland” is made up of “different voices” or interrelated sections, all of them focused in one way or another on symptoms of spiritual death; the title itself of this part is “The Burial of the Dead,” after the funeral service in the English Book of Common Prayer. The first voice is a bitter and literate voice which takes back Chaucer’s opening pastoral image of regeneration (“When that April with its sweet showers…”): in Eliot’s vision, “April is the cruelest month…” The second series of ten lines offers a trivial, gossipy voice recounting seasons spent in aristocratic leisure. Then, abruptly, the biblical prosody of a third series of lines preaches against the stony deadness and desiccation of modern life. Stoniness here is a symptom of spiritual self-blindness and is rather the opposite of Yeats’ metaphor for the “terrible beauty” of imaginative transformation. Eliot's poetry is never more eloquent than when it inhabits a zone of deadness, whether a lifeless desert or a ring of hell or purgatory. The next fifteen lines return us to the “social” aristocratic voice of the second sequence, but now the speaker is complaining of an abortive sexual liaison (and her complaints are framed by allusions to Wagner’s “Tristan.” Then the penultimate sequence introduces a “famous clairvoyante” with her bad cold, who evokes the mythic Tarot images of death and rebirth, but debased by their modern purveyor. In the final sequence of “The Burial of the Dead,” a new voice emerges, not biblical, but bitterly apocalyptic in evoking the “Unreal City” as a hellish vision (accompanied by an allusion to Dante witnessing the limbo of souls at the entrance of Inferno): here death pervades the “crowd [which] flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” The section ends with an allusion to Baudelaire, a quotation of the last line of “To the Reader,” which bitterly indicts the ultimate symptom of the bourgeois reader’s spiritual torpor: “It’s Boredom! Tears have glued its eyes together. / You know it well, my Reader. This obscene / beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine – / you – hypocrite Reader – my double – my brother!” The poem’s subsequent Parts II through V imagine just this “yawning” for death.

In Part II, images of sex without love encompass both past and present, the “withered stumps of time;” this “Game of Chess” first takes back the mythic adoration of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (of her, and also her own of Antony), then it dissects upper-class ennui (“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag”), and finally it deflates proletarian squalor and puts Ophelia’s “Good night, sweet ladies” into the demeaning mouth of the bartender at closing time. Part III is “The Fire Sermon,” in which disgust provides an ineffective refuge from the burning flames which are shown to constitute modern life; here the ugly vision of the Thames becomes a rescinding, through disgusted allusions, of the promise of Spenser’s “river” vision of love and Shakespeare’s “island” vision in “The Tempest;” finally the voice of Tiresias, dead and ‘foresuffering,’ takes over the vision of the loveless city, and the lines of the poem break down into short fragments which enact the poem’s statement: “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” Part IV, the short “Death by Water,” presents the false promise of regenerative water as the instrument of drowning and despair. Finally, in Part V, “What the Thunder Said,” there is a counterpoint between images of death (“Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”) and a tentative vision of regeneration and refuge in a sort of noble asceticism (there are the Sanskrit words of Hindu prayer as well as allusions to the myth of the Fisher King). However, the healing vision of water gives little relief. The fourth line from the end of the poem proclaims that these images are the “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The next line is a quotation from Kyd’s Renaissance Revenge Tragedy, an upwelling of mad bloodshed and death. The penultimate line contains the aforementioned Hindu prayer, and the final line invokes three times the Sanskrit word for “the peace which passes understanding.”

Eliot’s reader hears “The Wasteland’s” piteous call for refuge, for our honoring of those fragments, both their content and their brilliant form, so influential and infectious for modern ears. Simultaneously, the reader is acutely aware of the equally piteous voice of a yearning for death, for an end to the torment of modern time. We are left to experience the tension between the two, between the call for refuge and the voice of death, and we are left wondering whether the image of that “peace which passes understanding” can endure, or is ‘achieved,’ in the poem, or whether it too is murdered by the relentless deadness, by both the desiccation and the drowning. Such is the paradox of Eliot’s poem. With great power and ambition, it enacts the dilemma of modernity, its yearning to affirm (even to affirm an ascetic or curtailed spirituality) in conflict with its awareness of the pervasiveness of death – of the self, of decadent and alienated society, of the ten million ‘Great War’ dead, and of entire structures of knowledge and community.

I hope next to post some commentary on one of Eliot's "Four Quartets" and particularly one in which he imagines a meeting with the ghost of Yeats.