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.

Notes on the Modern period - 9: Yeats and modernity

I want to reiterate some of the features of the modern as we attempt to place Yeats in the perspective of the early twentieth century. In many ways “modernism” is a revolutionary response to the crisis of the self’s relation to community. Though the first decade of the twentieth century seemed to offer a picture of peace, wealth, and empire, in truth a profound agitation for change was occurring, indicated by the movement toward women’s suffrage, the inclusion of labor parties in governments, the rise of nationalist movements among the colonies, and even by the increasing decay and self-indulgence of upper-class culture. In my first two posts, I mentioned these matters as well as revolutionary new ideas in physics, psychology, philosophy, painting, music, and literature. With regard to the sense of community, there was an increasing fragmentation of culture beyond Matthew Arnold’s worst nightmares about Victorian puritanism as opposed to the “sweetness and light” of classical Hellenism. The breach grew ever wider between the semi-literate consumption of mass-produced popular media and the increasingly alienated artists with their turn toward experimentation; modern artists concertedly pursued aestheticism, abstraction and an intentionally paradoxical fragmentation of effect, as well as primitivism and a subversively frank truth-telling. The exploration of art’s form and content became the emblem and stage of freedom. All this ferment and breakdown was suddenly plunged into Europe’s Great War, the great upwelling of primitive violence which was the First World War from 1914 to 1918 and the millions of deaths which nothing seemed able to avoid. The proud achievements of wildly growing technology and science yielded the horror of modern armaments. Partly as a result, modern literature took up the task of judging the entire span of western civilization, which was suffering such an apocalyptic breakdown. For example, in 1919, Yeats writes in “The Second Coming” that “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” and later in the poem, there is the “revelation” that “a vast image” of mythic Sphinx-like violence “moves its slow thighs” to assault modernity – “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

From 1910 to 1939, Yeats made his greatest contribution to the flowering of modern art. With the other modernists, he confronted the crisis of how art’s language and consciousness itself can exist in the midst of the chaos of a failed society. What is breathtaking, even overwhelming about Yeats is his capacity under the circumstances to grow into a greater and greater poet, cultivating always new modes and resources of imagination from decade to decade; in this, his true peers are Wordsworth and Milton. Yeats began as a dreamy aesthete and Paterian; his first important imaginative transformation occurred around 1900, at the age of thirty-five. Yeats wrote about this period (in “The Trembling of the Veil”) that Pater’s aestheticism had “taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm.” From the experience of the inevitable fall to earth, Yeats made greater and greater poetry. It is not only that he widened the range of diction beyond conventional “literary” diction, or that he widened the range of tone so that it stretched from personal to public, from formal to vernacular within a phrase, from sorrowful to sarcastic, all the while maintaining a distinctive cadence, a voice. The greatness of that poetic voice also results from its continual laying bare of the power and limits of the imagination; with increasing authority, he probes how the imagination infuses and transforms the reality of that fall to earth. The authority of his voice was earned over decades of writing and living as he opened himself to the aesthetic influence of the French Symbolists and then to the new aesthetic force of a stripped down modernist compression (the first via friendship with Arthur Symons and the second with Ezra Pound; he shared rooms with the former in 1900 and the latter in 1911). Yeats never ceased pitting himself against his weaknesses; from his founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 onward, he was a shy man who projected himself into the public arena, weathering its exposures and questioning its integrity as well as his own. Yeats’ voice as a poet possesses an authority based on self-consciousness and critique; his voice of reckoning and self-reckoning infuses each of the characters he creates as speakers, including himself.

Many influences fed the poet’s growth. Beyond the high – indeed, tightrope – ideal of “art for art’s sake” and then the French symbolists’ play with silence and subversive nuance, the Nietzschean aesthetic of self-challenging self-creation increasingly shaped his poetry – “whatever flames upon the night / man’s resinous heart has fed.” There was also the Irish independence movement and Yeats’ participation in its imaginative life, celebrating it in his plays (for example, “The Countess Cathleen”) or questioning it in certain poems – the seeming product of “an Irishman enraged by his Irishness.” There was his admiration for and editing of Blake’s poetry with its blend of spiritual yearning and passionate honesty, as well as its mythologizing systems, a taste for which Yeats maintained into his seventies and which yielded many a poem’s imagery as well as his book “A Vision.” And finally there was the fertile influence of revolutionary modernism, not only resulting from Pound’s model of hewn-down concreteness of image, but also from the search to find the language for the experience of Europe at war and the plummet toward independence and civil war in Ireland.

The awareness of how, in the midst of chaos, the imagination shapes language and life never ceases to mark his work. In “Easter 1916,” he casually introduces the rebel leaders – later executed – of the abortive Easter Uprising against British rule in Ireland; he initially uses realistic, deflating phrases about them (“I have passed with a nod of the head / Or polite meaningless words, / Or have lingered awhile and said / Polite meaningless words”). And yet he writes that even the least worthy of the rebels, a “drunken vainglorious lout,…has resigned his part in the casual comedy; / He, too, has been changed in his turn, / Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” Yeats’ imagery for the rebels’ transformation, the “terrible beauty,” describes the nature of the imagination for him: the fanatic “hearts” of the rebels were “enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream” of ordinary life as it changes and lives “minute by minute: / The stone’s in the midst of all” shaping the flux of life. Finally, the stoniness of the verse in the last stanza proclaims that a nation is shaped and lives by such monolithic acts as the rebels’ violent sacrifice. [See Selected Poems And Four Plays of William Butler Yeats.]

Yeats reveals the role of the imagination in shaping society and history, but also in forming the self. In “Among Schoolchildren,” he explores how he – like the children he visits, as an Irish senator – is shaped by the work (the learning and internalization) of images and identities; this is the theme, too, of a late poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” about the need toward the end of life to return to the sources of imagination and identity, “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” The last stanza of “Among Schoolchildren” celebrates the inspired labor of the imagination, potentially uniting life and art, image and reality, drawing together spirit and sense, body and soul: “Labour is blossoming or dancing where / The body is not bruised to pleasure soul…. / O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” And in “Sailing to Byzantium,” the aging persona would be released from the “sensual” music of “the young [i]n one another’s arms,” for “This is no country for old men.” Instead he yearns for the “monuments” and music of the spirit, but he insists that the icons of the spirit be formed from the stuff of life; though “An aged man is but a paltry thing,” his soul can and must “clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.” In “Byzantium,” his deepening of the previous poem’s vision, Yeats evokes the mosaics in the walls of Hagia Sophia, where violent generations of soldiers occupied and slept amid the golden, turquoise, bejeweled mosaics of the basilica. Of these glistening, vibrant artworks he writes: “I hail the superhuman; / I call it death in life and life in death.” As these images of religious passion, of saints and symbolic dolphins loom above the soldiery, “All complexities of fury leave, dying into a dance, an agony of trance, an agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve… / These images that yet fresh images beget, that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.”

One of Yeats’ later celebrations of the power of the imagination is voiced by a persona called Crazy Jane; her voice and understanding embody Yeats’ vision with great vitality and audacity, particularly in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.” As she argues with the latter, a mouthpiece of conventional mores, she uses springing, pithy epigrammatic phrases to celebrate the full cycle of birth, sex, and death, even welcoming her body’s aging, accepting the death of friends, and affirming that she is “learned in bodily lowliness / And in the heart’s pride… / But Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement; / For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.” Yeats’ insight – a source of his power – is to accept the full cycling of life as the matter of the imagination, the material and source of his images. Simultaneously he recognizes ruin, death, and a vanishing nothingness as vital elements of the process, and that makes his understanding of the imagination particularly modern – for Yeats shows that the low and uncontrolled, the irrational heart and excremental part, are vital to the process of our noblest, most transcendent desire, of love, and alternatively that culture’s variously hallowed images can shape, even as they are shaped by, the moments of our animality.

In my next post, I hope to turn to the “modernity” of T. S. Eliot’s poetry.