LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

 THE HOLLOW POEMS: ELIOT EXPLICIT

There was a time, not long after he had written The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, when, in a letter to his brother, Eliot confessed his fear that he might never be able to write poetry again. The feeling must have endured all through his lifetime, this poetic panic that his creative resources might go dry. He did have, indeed, moments of poetic silence. A lyrical dumbness, during which he sometimes wrote criticism, drama or the Choruses from THE ROCK (1934), which we are going to discuss now. They come in between Ash-Wednesday (1930) and the first of the Four Quartets (1935). In another letter to Bonamy Dobrée, (July 1934) he complains again:

‘I don't think my poetry is any good: not The Rock anyway, it isn't; nothing but a brilliant future behind me. What is one to do?’

It is hard, if not impossible, to know for certain what Eliot actually meant by this much too direct statement. Whenever self-disparaging directness is involved in his utterances, that is a sign of his so-called ‘humility’, which hides an exacerbated, though well mastered pride. Eliot was a man with an irreproachable intellectual and moral backbone. Whatever he may have said to the effect of belittling his gifts, he cannot ever have mistrusted his power over his words. If, at times however, these words failed him, he must have been the first to sense it, which is the case with The Rock. It consists of a set of ten poems, meant to accompany a church pageant. It obeys the pre-imposed scenario of church history. In this religious project, Eliot was a mere guest. He was supposed to provide the words for a previously made pattern. What came out of this combination was a set of hollow poems, which look very much like Eliot's own image of The Hollow Men:

‘Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion ...’

The lines look indeed like ‘headpieces’ filled with straw, strewn as they are with unconvincing words. They are uttered by a ‘dried’ voice, which quietly whispers echoes well-known from of old. The adjective ‘meaningless’ can by no means be part of the description, though, because unfortunately these Choruses have (to think that this could become a hindrance for a poet!) too much of a meaning, too obvious a moral in them. Because they have a thesis to impose, because they are so unambiguously moral, these poems are an unexpected (though not solitary) explicit interlude in Eliot's ambiguous poetic creation. Their interest lies rather in their inessentials, especially in the images of the town and its inhabitants as seen by an urban poet. Whatever looked meaningful in The Waste Land, the non-poetic, disgusting images which built up Eliot's peculiar poetic strain are here, with shyness, emptied of all weirdness. In The Rock, Eliot feels obliged to sound traditionally prophetic, and this costs him the life of the lines.

The clear vocabulary of the poem no longer sounds like an orchestra interspersed with most unusual instruments, producing the least pleasing (yet how enthralling) sounds. This vocabulary can easily be divided into a religious (restricted) section, and an urban one. No ambiguity, no dark holes, no precipices of interpretation, which used to make Eliot's poems what he himself intended them to be: an interference area, inside which the meanings of author and readers clash to the point of breaking, and are thus multiplied endlessly. Clarity is not Eliot's stronghold. He used it here because the poems are meant to be largely accessible. He does so to his disadvantage as a poet. There are neither understatements nor over-statements here. All statements are wisely poised. This dutifulness to clarity kills the lyrical thrill. Here is a dull Eliot who, without realizing it, is in fact entering for the first time upon the stage, upon a dramatic career. A very intriguing one, too, since in a drama neither clarity nor ambiguity are of much help. In his five plays, Eliot had few theatrical devices ready at hand. He was bound to resort again to what he knew best, the weird music of his poetry.

The first poem of The Rock opens with a thrilling memory of The Waste Land, that ‘world of spring and autumn, birth and dying’. The recurrence of once loaded images is the only reason why The Rock survives, even though these images are here weak, hardly audible, defaced to the point of losing all Eliotian identity. While reading along, for the first time in Eliot's work, we feel as if we were strolling down a trodden road. An air of familiarity lures us. We keep intercepting echoes of dust, of the desert, of the ‘endless cycle’ which affords no peace, of more and more meaningless noises. Echoes from Gerontion and Ash-Wednesday turn up. Remarkable lines, these (and so true for an artist of etymology like Joyce):

‘Where the word is unspoken

We build with new speech’.  

The tone is – unbelievable when we think of Eliot's intellectual agility in being as tolerant as to prevent everyone from opposing him – not only disapproving, but downright reproving. Eliot actually shakes his forefinger at us. He used to delight in mud, the slimy belly of rats and the like. Now, these are totally shunned. His favourite device, however, is still the combination of opposite, reciprocally devouring words such as:

‘Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word’.

Punctuation, which he used so sparingly (to the point of avarice) in his good poems, is exceedingly correct. No comma, no semi-colon or full stop is missing. What is more, exclamations and questions abound. We keep hearing ‘O’'s, ‘where’'s, ‘I say’. The structure of each sentence is flawless. No ellipses, no secret unuttered words, no enigmatical silences. A loud, sour voice endeavours to imitate the dignity of a sermon, and merely manages to intrigue (even irritate) us. The same as in his criticism, Eliot is here in a denying mood. Whatever image or word his mind happens to catch sight of, is followed by an announcement of its wickedness, falsity, uselessness. Here is an example:

‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’

Repetition does lend a certain music to the lines. In his better poems, Eliot never repeated a word without bringing up one more of its senses. Not supported by such variable meanings, repetitions create here quite an empty music, which we are in a hurry to overlook, to ignore.

Maybe it takes a believer to appreciate Eliot's The Rock. He used to say, in some of his critical essays, that a poet like Shelley failed because of his immature beliefs; because he was not able to separate his poetry from what he believed in. Eliot the critic seemed to think that belief (no matter which) is not essential to poetry. Could he have forgotten his own reticence as to moralizing poetry when he placed the usefulness of religion, church and God at the centre of The Rock?

Avoiding the central, moralizing theme (which was after all imposed on Eliot by the Church pageant for which he was asked to write the words), there is still some vigour to be dug out of these ten poems. In the first one, we discover a face of Eliot we hardly knew. The clarity, the sincerity of the lines reveal to us a little of Eliot himself versus the world he lived in. There is no concealing ambiguity or omission. That might be, to a certain extent, one reason for our slight uneasiness when reading The Rock. All of a sudden, Eliot lets fall the numberless laces that veiled his shape, and we see him almost nude. Deafened by the loud monotone of his sermonizing, we cannot fail to sense a certain indecency in his words. His famous theory of concealed personality, of impersonality in art, is ignored. He has forgotten that the more a poet speaks, the less he conveys. Verbal avarice and emotional reticence are essential to a poetry like his, whose excellence lies in its enigmatic understatements, in its ambiguity.

A touching line like

‘Where is the life we have lost in living?’

reminds us of Eliot's power to enthrall a reader. Unfortunately, it is drowned, literally annihilated by what goes before and after. A solitary sparkle cannot redeem the whole first stanza, full as it is of moaning exclamations, rhetorical questions, capitalizations, futile oppositions of words. At least it helps us notice an interesting turning point in Eliot's poetry: a wavering between I and we, a slow passage from painful emotional immediacy to a more poised, a more remote and meditative emotion, that of the Quartets.

‘I journeyed to London’, the ‘I’ of The Rock says, thus beginning his description of the ‘timekept city’. What does he find there? To his taste, far too many restaurants, cars, picnics and people who refuse to have anything to do with churches, bells (where are the ‘reminiscent bells’ tolling in The Waste Land?) and vicars. A character called ‘the Rock’ loudly moans that shrines and churches are neglected. Man's rejection of religion, the speech implies, menaces to drag him back into a formerly known (and crossed) desert which may soon turn up again, in ‘the tube-train next to you’, or even in the human heart. How can we help remembering the stubborn recurrence of these two images, rocks and deserts of sand, in poem after poem? ‘Come in under the shadow of this red rock’, ‘the last desert between the last blue rocks’, and so many other lines. Each slightly different (in colour, shape, context) from the previous, yet all of them firmly related in meaning. A meaning which cannot be rent open, stated in other words than Eliot’s own. A meaning which can be felt but not re-stated.

A chorus of workmen comes in singing:

‘We build the meaning:

A Church for all

And a job for each

Each man to his work’.

Their optimism is interrupted by a bitter image of the ‘unemployed’. That one, at least, brings back some of Eliot's fertile sense of discontent:

‘No man has hired us

With pocketed hands

And lowered faces

We stand about in open places

And shiver in unlit rooms’.

The anger of Gerontion is looming far away, like a lighthouse in the dark of night. It is stifled by the stern indignation of the second poem. The ruined house it describes is here the house of God, forgotten in the era of

‘... imperial expansion

Accompanied by industrial development.

Exporting iron, coal and cotton goods

And intellectual enlightenment

And everything, including capital

And several versions of the Word of God’.

Gerontion's anger was really effective. This one sounds like a foreign idiom to our ears. Eliot may have done his best to plunge into contemporary reality and squeeze it in his lines undisguised. The result of his trying to approximate the reporter's view (so very fashionable in poetry nowadays) is a staggering idiom. We seem to hear someone speaking our own language (we recognize the landscape), but with a wildly comic, definitely unfamiliar accent. It leaves us unmoved. Then, the further we read, the more troubling it gets, in the sense that we feel troubled, ill at ease about our own reaction. The speaker's stern appeals trigger our suppressed laughter.

It may be our fault, in a way, if we fail to get the message of these poems. We are ill prepared to hear someone speak of sins  like sloth, avarice, gluttony, pride, lechery, of repentance, of expiation and all that, in direct relation to ourselves. They sound all right in the literary context of the Bible, but to bring them into present life? Imagine that, like the chosen people of God, Londoners still have to build a ‘Temple’? The feeling of growing solitude, of dispersed families, of each for himself and each one in his car is accurately noticed. Still, the indignant tone Eliot uses in mentioning these motorcars, intimating that they might be the deed of the devil on earth, makes us think of the religious frenzy of his Puritanical ancestors. He complains,

‘O miserable cities of designing men’...

One line of the third part is, however, memorable. God speaks:

‘I have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust’.

It reminds us of Eliot's love for the anticlimax, which he used among other devices to create a sense of humorous surprise. He was fond of those unexpected remarks which bring about laughter. What follows here is unfortunately only unwillingly comic:

‘Many are engaged in writing books and printing them,

Many desire to see their names in print,

Many read nothing but the race reports.

Much is your reading, but not the Word of GOD,

Much is your building, but not the House of GOD’.

The mistake Eliot made in this set of poems is one of words. A lexical mistake, we might say. He is betrayed (as he, himself, the same as Valéry, very often feared) by the quicksands of language. He chose ancient words to address people who no longer reacted to them. The Biblical anger contained in those words nowadays fails to frighten. It is regarded as an ancient historical fact. Eliot based his effects in The Rock on words whose reality had vanished. It amounts in fact to saying that The Rock was written as if English were a dead language. If, instead of relying upon a dull and dated scenario, Eliot had merely given way to his own contorted sensibility, the indignation that would have resulted might have equalled the rage of ageing in Gerontion, Ash-Wednesday, etc. As it is, he worked against the grain, against his own poetic nature. He tried to step aside from the mystery of ambiguity. He tried to force upon his readers a thesis which was far too rigid, too intolerant, too demanding. In short, it is this narrow-minded moralizing that ruined The Rock.

Eliot must have written this set of ten choruses at a time when he was not ready for a real poetic outburst. The proof is that, in writing The Rock, he used his memory (quoting himself, that is) rather than his creative energy. The lines are stuffed with images clearly traceable to his previous poems. For instance, houses are filled with ‘a litter of Sunday newspapers’ (beautiful memory of the ‘sweet Thames’, carrying along the garbage of the town). A goat climbs a street of scattered brick; no moving suggestion here of an entombed living being, over whose head, in Gerontion, a goat keeps coughing in the field at night. ‘Godless’ people do not love one another; ‘My friend, blood shaking my heart’, The Waste Land said. The accusatory enumeration of novelties in all fields makes us shudder (with disgust), as if we were brought in front of the mediaeval Inquisition. Eliot has managed to create an anachronism. At the end of a fragment like the following, we simply feel like saying, ‘E pur si muove’:

‘Binding the earth and the water to your service,

Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,

Dividing the stars into common and preferred,

Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,

Engaged in working out a rational morality,

Engaged in printing as many books as possible,

Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,

Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm

For nation or race or what you call humanity ...’

No doubt allowed as to the meaning. No right of appeal. No reply acceptable, unless perhaps a humble profession of guilt, which we may not feel quite ready to utter. But for the happy finding ‘plotting of happiness’ (a faint Shakespearian echo), we are honestly driven to wondering whether the whole thing must indeed be taken seriously. Is this the Eliot who advocated the non-poetic poetry? The one who once exclaimed, ‘Cut off the poetry’? The lover of all city-scapes? The reticent man whose shyness in uttering a thought to its firm end brought such thrilling ambiguity into his poetry?

Something unaccountable happens in The Rock. Eliot's effective words (those with multiple meanings in his previous poems) fly to his aid, but the thing is done against the author's will. Or, at least, without his realizing it, since we find these once sparkling words depressingly impoverished and unconvincing here. There are in the poem the well-known fountain, and a town lying waste because consumed with fire, but their suggestiveness is stifled by a childish recounting of a forgotten religious story:

‘It is hard for those who have never known persecution,

And who have never known a Christian,

To believe these tales of Christian persecution.

It is hard for those who live near a Bank

To doubt the security of their money.

It is hard for those who live near a Police Station

To believe in the triumph of violence.

Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World

And that lions no longer need keepers?’

Everything sounds, indeed, like a church tune, for which Eliot did his best to find suitable words. His fault was that he relied too much upon the effect of the provided tune, and his own lines came out limping. Or, rather, irritatingly uncompromising.

This pattern of The Rock is supposed to re-enact the history of the Church. Yet the poem on the whole does not look like a narrative at all. This may be another of Eliot's failures here, the fact that he was not able (like all his stream-of-consciousness contemporaries) to tell a story properly. His devices are all lyrical. He only suggests the incidents. He makes us peer at their halo, rather than actually see a pageant moving along. The implicit narrative, which was to be guessed at, pieced up from various bits of now and then, here, there or everywhere, does no good to this poem, although it suited perfectly some of the previous ones. Critics have for a long time argued about Eliot's poems having or not a narrative coherence, about their being a unitary sequence or a heap of fragments lacking any logical order. Fact is that all of them where joined together by a peculiar Eliotian mood, which haunted them all. That mood (depressing, retreating, reticent, contorted and so on) is almost absent from The Rock. Emotionally speaking (and emotion is, in Eliot's option, the life of a poem), The Rock was a still-born piece of literature. As for the narrative, having no mood, no lyrical substance to support, it is, of course, safely absent.

The seventh part, for instance, retells the birth of the world. A few resourceful alliterations and assonances support the lines. Before God's creating life, for instance, there was ‘waste and void’, and ‘darkness was upon the face of the deep’. These images have a certain thrilling halo, which is absent from another line with assonances, such as:

‘What does the world say, does the whole world stray in high-powered cars on a by-pass way?’

There are some ‘bells upturned’ in one of the lines, complaining of man's neglecting the Church, and faintly reminding us of The Waste Land, with its

‘And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells’.

Yet a direct rhetorical question such as

‘Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?’

makes us wonder where the exhilarating ambiguity we found in Ash- Wednesday can have vanished to. There is in this seventh part one fragment, a very abstract one, whose effect is based on a kind of prose-like conversational repetition. It foretells the tone of the Quartets, their main concern with emotionalizing the concept of time:

‘Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time,

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call

history: transecting, bisecting the world of time,

a moment in time but not like a moment of time,

A moment in time but time was made through that moment:

for without the meaning there is no time, and that

moment of time gave the meaning’.

The lines come quite close to the relaxed flow of the Quartets. Only the poised mastery of belief, disbelief and make-believe is not ripe yet.

The eighth part voices another accusation against ‘our age’, namely that it is an age of ‘moderate’ virtue and moderate vice. Indifference, no less than adversity to belief, makes Eliot charge at his modern readers in angry, reproving lines. Not even priests are spared. The ninth part (reminding us of The Hippopotamus) chides them for having changed the Church into a ‘House of Sorrow’, where

‘We must go between empty walls, quavering lowly, whispering faintly,

Among a few flickering scattered lights’.

Not sorrow but joy ought to be learned there, he insists. The joy of saints, he adds, which is unknown down here. Another indirect statement about the sadness of life, then? This joy, that is to be learned, cannot be expressed by means of our ‘slimy’ and ‘muddy’ words, or by the ‘sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions’. The merit of the just quoted words is that they foretell East Coker, with Eliot's marvellous trip into the quicksands of language, into the insecurity of words, this fragile and treacherous poetic material. It is a statement of the same obsessive verbal insecurity that haunts Eliot's criticism.

The closing poem is dedicated to an already verbalized Divinity, called ‘Light Invisible’, which again sounds like an introduction to the confident yet beliefless mood of the Four Quartets. We feel the birth in Eliot's mind of a cosmic vision. A broad generosity of thought, which replaces the bickering Biblical words uttered by God. It is the best part of The Rock and, as if it were a sign of Eliot’s recapturing his inspiration, bookish echoes return. The image of our world, ‘confused and dark and disturbed by portents of fear’, reminds us of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach:

‘And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night’.

Another image, of the ‘bottom of the pit of the world’, has an air of both Dante and Milton about it. An ambiguous assonance comes as a pleasant surprise: the fierce snake of destruction (other Biblical associations are growing weaker) is preparing for his ‘hour to devour’. This very Light, although called invisible, is described in quite a number of very visible and vivid images. It is the light reached by church spires at sunrise; the light caressing the houses at sunset; the twilight; the moonlight; the starlight of all things and beings, of ‘stagnant pools’, of bats, owls, moths, glow-worms, grassblades.

No longer explicit, these evocative images are no longer hollow. They come again very close to metaphysical conceits, in which the feeling is blended with a thought that lies concealed at the root of the poem. With the only amendment that, with Eliot (unlike John Donne), the emotional immediacy and the very words that convey it reflect a multiple thought which they enclose. Ambiguity reigns again. Nothing is certain any more. An image may send innumerable waves out at sea. We are told for instance that ‘our gaze is submarine’ (can we help remembering here Prufrock's dreamland, at the bottom of the sea?); that

‘our eyes look upward

And see the light that fractures through unquiet water’.

Excellent description of our imperfect perception of this Light Invisible, and at the same time an image that creates its own atmosphere and which, as Eliot believed, can be enjoyed before it is understood.

Other memorable remarks on human lot can be successfully quoted. For instance, ‘ecstasy is too much pain’: words which bring back Eliot's favourite mood, so well illustrated by the image of painfully wasted love, the hyacinth girl, in The Waste Land. Another one, saying that we are

‘glad to sleep,

Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons’,

brings back the apparent sleepiness of Eliot's best poems. A lethargy which follows his striving to hide unbearable misgivings. An inertness which is in fact an understatement of volcanic unrest. Even Eliot’s favourite device, the paradox, turns up again. The very absence of Light, our ‘darkness’, the poem says, is a sign of its existence. The very fact that it is called ‘invisible’ makes us hope that one day it will certainly be seen:

‘Therefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.

We thank Thee who hast moved us to building, to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.

And when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light, we may set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision is made.

And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.

O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great glory!’

This is how The Rock ends. Paraphrasing Eliot's Hollow Men (where he talks about the end of the world), we might say that these ten Choruses, which began with intolerant, thunderous, storming anger, end softly, sympathetically,

‘not with a bang but a whimper’.

It is a pity that this more mysteriously suggestive air comes too late to redeem the preceding poems, which seem to be bossing the reader to the point of the latter's revolt and rejection of what he reads. They are a blind alley in Eliot's creation, and Eliot realized it himself. It was not for him to cry out calling things by their name and dashing down undisguised thoughts like Whitman. The Rock sounds as if, awkwardly (for both reader and writer), we had caught Eliot off his guard. He is an over-protective author who, when at his best, takes every precaution to conceal his meaning in rainbow words, loaded with ambiguity, alliterations, assonances, imperfectly melodious rhymes. Explicitness empties his lines of their haunting charm. Confronted with daring confessions, the innermost emotion tiptoes out of the words, leaving us and Eliot with a hollow poem in hand.