LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

POETRY

Such is the case of the poem in prose HYSTERIA. A ‘gentleman’ remembers a woman's endless, hysterical fit of laughter. He feels dragged and drowned in it, bruised by her sharp teeth, exhaled and inhaled by her short gasps, smothered by the ‘caverns of her throat’. The image suggests the fear aroused in the speaker by a sudden sense of total solitude. An ‘elderly waiter with trembling hands’ provides an unwelcome contrast with their youth. A warning he is, as well. His presence makes the hero feel in his mouth the sour taste of the powerlessness and humiliation of age. Side by side with the very image of their future (the old man who spreads the cloth over a rusty iron table and is humbly going to wait upon them), the moment of loneliness of the two young people who do not manage to communicate is seen as a dramatic waste. The speaker decides that he must put an end to it, that

‘if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
 the fragments of the afternoon might be collected ...’

He concentrates his attention ‘with careful subtlety to this end’, but the poem gives no intimation of hope. The moment is finally lost, and, after a long line of similar moments, he may find himself an old waiter with shaky hands, waiting upon other people who grow old.