LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

POETRY

An abject story can be inferred from SWEENEY ERECT. The scene is set in mythological colours: a ‘cavernous waste shore’, ‘yelping seas’, ‘insurgent gales’ stirred by Aeolus, Ariadne's tangled hair. Two contemporary characters, a man and a woman, are elliptically put side by side with ‘Nausicaa and Polypheme’. Sweeney, ‘broad-bottomed, pink from nape to base’, is shaving. A woman tosses in the bed with a ‘gesture of ourang-outang’. The sheets are ‘in steam’. The woman looks remarkably uninviting, a

‘withered root of knots of hair

Slitted below and gashed with eyes’,

an

‘oval O cropped out with teeth’.

She ‘straightens out from heel to hip’, pushes the framework of the bed, claws at the pillow slip. Sweeney pays no attention. He

‘knows the female temperament’,

so he peacefully ‘wipes the suds around his face’. To him, she is the ‘epileptic on the bed’, who shrieks, curves backward and clutches at her sides while he, undisturbed, ‘tests the razor on his leg’. This squalid image of a loveless pair recurs quite often in Eliot's early poetry (Burbank with a Baedeker, Sweeney among the Nightingales, especially The Waste Land). Eliot – would it be fair to him to say so? –  refuses to see the world as beautiful. He directs his poetry towards the shocking effects of disgusting realities. He replaces the poetic romance by the description of trivial details that surround it. He willfully withdraws his sensibility, and leaves his characters alone with their senses. The epileptic's hysteria, reproved by the ‘ladies of the corridor’ and by ‘Mrs. Turner’ herself, who thinks that this ‘lack of taste’ does the ‘house’ no good, is ended by a certain Doris' appearance. She comes into the room ‘towelled from the bath’ and ‘padding on broad feet’, bringing ‘sal volatile’ and brandy to the woman in distress. Doris, the same as Sweeney, is a recurrent character of whom we have not heard the last yet.

The poem is an exercise in creating a disgusting atmosphere. Gentleness and sweetness of approach are withdrawn. Eliot braces himself up, he refuses to commiserate. His early criticism states that his early poetry is in search of that already famous ‘impersonality’ of his. The strategy is in fact a half-successful attempt to hide his vulnerability under an appearance of sniffing detachment.