T. S. Eliot and the Poem Itself

Denis Donoghue

I.

I started reading Eliot’s poems and essays when I went to Dublin in September 1946 to enroll at University College, Dublin and work toward an honors B.A. in Latin and English, with History, Mathematics, and Irish as my minor subjects. There were no courses available to me in modern English and American literature. Professor Jeremiah J. Hogan, who ordained these matters, received his B.Litt. at Oxford and held to the Oxford view that the literature in English that needed study extended from Beowulf to Wordsworth and Coleridge. After that, as C. S. Lewis is supposed to have said, it was just books. Yeats was taught as part of a separate course in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, but not as a figure in the history of modem poetry. Hogan admired Newman and Hopkins, mainly because they were Catholics, but he did not teach them for their bearing on modern literature. When I wanted to read Eliot, Pound, Frost, and Stevens, I was left to my own resources.

I recall that what I mostly felt, reading Eliot’s Selected Poems, was bewilderment. I managed somehow to come to terms with "Prufrock" and the Preludes, but The Waste Land had to be left for further readings. "Ash-Wednesday" was a different problem. The Christian references and the liturgical forms were familiar to me: I knew the Catholic litanies by heart. But I couldn’t see what was going on, or how the secular bits fitted the devotional sequences. I settled for the thrill of yielding to a few unforgettable lines:

The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown

and the gorgeous passage beginning:

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair.

I could not have said why those lines took possession of my mind. I had not yet learnt to note the propriety and certitude of the rhythm, the convincing power of the cadence. Even now, I can’t say why the repetition of "in a white gown" after "to contemplation" is so "right," or explain the effect of Eliot’s changing one letter to get from "blown" to "brown" and back again, making another repetition across the "brown" in the middle. Nor had I any notion of a poetics governing Eliot’s procedures in this or any other poem.

II.

Eliot did not write a Poetics or an Aesthetic: he did not think of himself in competition with Aristotle, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Croce, or Vasconcelos. He did not try for anything as systematic as Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism or Stanley Burnshaw’s The Seamless Web. Whenever he found himself approaching a large question of Theory, he backed off, reminding himself that poets engage in Theory because they are not writing poems. At the end of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, he says: "If, as James Thomson observed, ‘lips only sing when they cannot kiss,’ it may also be that poets only talk when they cannot sing. I am content to leave my theorising about poetry at this point. The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me from the shadows." Besides, Eliot knew that I. A. Richards would always have the advantage of him in the theory of poetry.

The most lasting parts of Eliot’s prose are his appreciations of particular authors, but the timeliest parts, the essays we have reason to recite and to keep going back to, are those in which he emphasized that literature exists and that it is not a mere delivery service for political, religious, or other values. "I have assumed as axiomatic," he wrote in "The Function of Criticism," "that a creation, a work of art, is autotelic; and that criticism, by definition, is about something other than itself." If so much is agreed, it becomes possible to examine the relations between a work of literature and other considerations, metaphysical, moral, and political. If it is not agreed, we find ourselves beset by confusion of categories, as at present when it is difficult to gain a hearing for the claim that a work of literature exists with just as much autonomy as a piece of music, a sculpture, or a painting.

It would be futile to try to deduce a poetics or an aesthetic from Eliot’s essays in the theory of poetry and poetic drama. I am content to refer to certain passages in which he indicates what one’s relation to a work of literature might be -- or rather, passages in which he describes an ideal sequence, starting with the first shock or blow of recognition and culminating in the incorporation of the work of literature as a constituent of one’s life. (Frank Kermode has drawn attention to this sequence in his introduction to Eliot’s Selected Prose.) In May 1935 Eliot wrote to Stephen Spender:

You don’t really criticize any author to whom you have never surrendered yourself. . . .Even just the bewildering minute counts; you have to give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say, before you have wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. Of course the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given.

"The bewildering minute" is a phrase from The Revenger’s Tragedy. Eliot quoted it in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), again the following year in an essay on Massinger, and ten years later in an essay on Tourneur:

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?

A more authoritative text reads: "For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute." Eliot preferred the reading I’ve quoted. We find a similar gesture, but transformed, in the fifth part of The Waste Land:

My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract.

And there is a memorable passage, to place beside those lines, in Eliot’s major essay on Dante:

The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. It is very much like our intenser experiences of other human beings. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror (Ego dominus tuus); a moment which can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience; which survives inside a deeper and a calmer feeling. The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.

The sequence of three moments as Eliot described it is under Dante’s auspices. More than any other poet, Dante suggested to Eliot the possibility of "redeeming the time," transforming mere tempus into aevum in the light of what Eliot in the essay on Dante called "the high dream." There, too, Eliot notes "how skilfully Dante expresses (in Canto XXX of the Purgatorio) the recrudescence of an ancient passion in a new emotion, in a new situation, which comprehends, enlarges, and gives a meaning to it." Conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma. But it is in the essay on Marston that Eliot indicates most clearly the three moments and the pattern they ideally fulfill.

Marston’s plays are mostly bad. Even The Malcontent is a poor thing by comparison with the best of Webster, Tourneur, and Massinger. But Eliot nonetheless feels that there is a quality of genius in Marston that can’t be indicated by quoting a few speeches. He thinks that Marston, especially in Sophonisba, is saying "something else than appears in the literal actions and characters whom he manipulates." Trying to articulate the "something else," Eliot writes:

It is possible that what distinguishes poetic drama from prosaic drama is a kind of doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at once. . . .In poetic drama a certain apparent irrelevance may be the symptom of this doubleness; or the drama has an under-pattern, less manifest than the theatrical one. We sometimes feel, in following the words and behaviour of some of the characters of Dostoevsky, that they are living at once on the plane that we know and on some other plane of reality from which we are shut out: their behaviour does not seem crazy, but rather in conformity with the laws of some world that we cannot perceive. More fitfully, and with less power, this doubleness appears here and there in the work of Chapman, especially in the two Bussy D’Ambois plays. . . . It is not by writing quotable "poetic" passages, but by giving us the sense of something behind, more real than any of his personages and their action, that Marston established himself among the writers of genius.

The difficulty Eliot felt in expressing this doubleness is at one with the problem he confronted in writing Sweeney Agonistes and the play -- Murder in the Cathedral -- he was working on in 1934 when he wrote the essay on Marston: how to present such characters as Sweeney and the Archbishop living at once on the plane of reality they share with other people and on another plane of higher perception on which they are alone; and how to convey a sense, in those works, of a still more comprehensive pattern in which the particular moments find their meaning and value. He is again thinking of Dante and Beatrice, the lady olive-crowned with a white veil. Near the end of the essay on Marston and still referring to Sophonisba, he tries again: "In spite of the tumultuousness of the action, and the ferocity and horror of certain parts of the play, there is an underlying serenity; and as we familiarize ourselves with the play we perceive a pattern behind the pattern into which the characters deliberately involve themselves; the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment, drowsing in sunlight." Presumably we have already surrendered ourselves to "the bewildering minute," then to the verbal context in which the minute finds itself, and gradually -- the third phase -- we intuit a pattern beyond the overt pattern of the words. At that point the whole episode becomes indistinguishable from ourselves. We have made the play or the poem part of our life.

This concern for the pattern beyond the pattern is characteristic of mythical thinking. In Language and Myth Cassirer maintains that the mythical consciousness differs from other forms of consciousness in the sequence of its attentions:

It seems only natural to us that the world should present itself to our inspection and observation as a pattern of definite forms, each with its own perfectly determinate spatial limits that give it its specific individuality. If we see it as a whole, this whole nevertheless consists of clearly distinguishable units, which do not melt into each other, but preserve their identity that sets them definitely apart from the identity of all the others. But for the mythmaking consciousness these separate elements are not thus separately given, but have to be originally and gradually derived from the whole; the process of culling and sorting out individual forms has yet to be gone through.

It follows that "the forms of mythical invention reflect, not the objective character of things, but the forms of human practices."

This seems to mean that the principle of form, for the mythical consciousness, precedes the recognition of any and all particular forms: it divines the principle of beauty before the disclosure of any beautiful thing. A principle logically precedes its particles. In Eliot’s sequence of three moments, then, a mythmaking consciousness would divine the whole, the pattern beyond the pattern, as if it were already there, in principle, waiting to be fulfilled in practice and intuited by a particular act of reading. The third moment would then in principle be the first. In Eliot, as in Valéry, the principle, the ground of our beseeching, is language. It may therefore be desirable to re-phrase Eliot’s sequence. The first moment is still the original surrender to the words, in my case to the gypsy phrases of "Ash-Wednesday." But the surrender is made to the phrases with a sense that those phrases are individuated forms of a larger whole, Language itself. The second moment is indeed the recognition of a pattern a little apart from the phrases but dependent upon the poem. And in the third moment we apprehend what a mythmaking consciousness has always believed in, the comprehensively enabling character of Language as first principle. Reading then becomes an act by which we arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

III.

None of these considerations occurred to me when I started reading Eliot or even when I got a teaching job at University College, Dublin. I taught several courses -- Shakespeare, Donne, Jacobean Tragedy, Seventeenth-Century Prose, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Blake. My Ph.D. dissertation, revised, became my first book The Third Voice: Modern British and American Verse Drama, largely a study of the plays of Yeats and Eliot. But the context of my reading was not entirely my own. I taught at the old University College building in Earlsfort Terrace, and less than a mile away was Trinity College, where the major figure in the English Department, my more-than-equal and opposite number, was the English poet and critic Donald Davie. He was six years older than me and better established in the profession. For one thing, he was a graduate of Cambridge University and was set, after several years in Dublin, to go back to Cambridge in 1958 as a university lecturer in the English Faculty and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College. We were not intimate friends. He was morally intimidating, with a touch of the commissar about him, and he was severe on those members of the profession who didn’t share his convictions. I noted that he used the word "infidel" more freely and more deliberately than I supposed it had ever been used since the seventeenth century. But he was never frivolous; he was seriously engaged with everything he read -- indeed, grave all the way through. We were friends enough to meet every now and then in his rooms at Trinity to read poems and talk about poetry, and I felt myself honored by his company.

I had no special theory of poetry apart from my sense of the miscellany of poems, brought into some degree of order by the conventions of literary history. Davie had a few favorite notions. One of them was that there were three useful analogies for the understanding of literature in general and modern literature in particular. Poetry was like theater, as in Yeats; like music, as in Pasternak and Eliot; and like sculpture, as in Pound. Davie hadn’t much to say about Yeats or the theater, but he was always ready to talk about Eliot and Pound, especially about Pound. He regarded Yeats and Eliot as major writers but also as forces to be suspected, adepts of different versions of Symbolism. Yeats’s version kept his poems and plays out of the world by preventing him from looking hard at anything in the world. Like Pound and Robert Lowell, Davie maintained that Yeats couldn’t see anything, dazzled as he was by the symbol he held up as a veil or projected as a cloud before it. "Another emblem there!" Eliot’s poems and especially Four Quartets worked to the limit of possibility and decorum the resources of modern French poetry from Laforgue to Valéry, but this attribute made him an equivocal presence in English and American poetry. It was in Valéry’s poems that the Paterian aspiration of the arts toward the condition of music was most arduously pursued. Eliot was Valéry with the difference of being an American from St. Louis. Davie thought that French Symbolism with that emphasis was a beguiling distraction for poets who wrote in English. He hoped that Four Quartets would bring it to an end, so far as it entered the history of English and American poetry. The most acute defect of Symbolism was that it had one preoccupation: itself, its linguistic processes, the charm of fulfilling itself in verbal music. Taking up a phrase of H. M. McLuhan’s, Davie maintained that Eliot’s poems obeyed "the symbolist procedure of ‘juxtaposition without copula,’ the setting down of images side by side with a space between them, a space that does not need to be bridged." Whatever merits might be claimed for the procedure, Davie hoped that it would be superseded by a poetry of "urbane and momentous statement," as he called it in Purity of Diction in English Verse, neo-Augustan rather than neo-Romantic or post-Romantic. Pound was the master to be followed.

Sculpture was the analogy to be pursued. But there was a distinction to be made between the main impulses of sculpture. Adrian Stokes’s books and Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska clarified for Davie the moral difference between carving and modeling. In modeling, the material to be worked on, indeed the whole world, is deemed to be endlessly malleable, like clay in one’s hands: it has no character, no rights, in itself. But according to Davie, the carver feels that "the form he wants is already present in the marble" and that it is his privilege "to make what is already there reveal itself." Pound was a carver, as Augustan as Swift and Pope. Poetry under the sign of carving "has to do with a reality which is as fully and undeniably out there, as certainly other than us and confronting us, as is the block of marble where it lies in the quarry before the sculptor." In "Two Analogies for Poetry" -- which he regarded as his most far-reaching essay in those days -- Davie urged poets who engaged with the world through its natural and physical forms to think of themselves as exploring "the same reality as the sciences explore, but with different categories and different instruments." When the reality to be engaged was metaphysical, such poets should claim "to be exploring the same reality as religion or ontology." In the same essay Davie attacked the assumption, which he ascribed to Symbolism, that physical or metaphysical reality out there could be turned into "a psychological reality in here, inside the artist’s head." It is only in Prufrock’s mind that fog behaves as a cat behaves or that an evening is like a patient etherized upon a table. Davie didn’t agree that the poem is justified to the extent to which it explores the peculiarities of Prufrock’s mind. Later, he presented the difference between Eliot and Pound as a difference in their sense of language: "As compared with Pound, Eliot presents himself as pre-eminently a rhetorician, a man who serves language, who waits for language to present him with its revelations; Pound by contrast would master language, instead of serving language he would make it serve -- it must serve the shining and sounding world which continually throws up new forms which language must strain itself to register."

I should not give the impression that in the shining and sounding city of Dublin Davie merely kept on reciting the moral superiority of poetry-as-carving over the immorality of poetry-as-modeling or poetry-as-music. But he held to that position, as I recall in an argument with the Australian poet and critic Vincent Buckley in Davy Byrne’s public house. Buckley wanted to talk about the ethics of fornication. Davie insisted on talking about the obligations of poetry. He always had a moral principle by his side. But his literary judgments were not as settled as his morality. If you compare his two books on Pound, you find that in one of them he declared Hugh Selwyn Mauberley a masterpiece; in the other, a mess. Indeed, our friendship came to an end when I remarked, in a review of the later book on Pound, that the relation between Davie’s mind and its contents had always been experimental. He took that to mean: Davie has never been able to think straight. A few weeks later I received a letter from him that I could not bear to answer. Once, about fifteen years later, I diffidently invited him to take part in a radio program I was preparing for the BBC on The Waste Land. He accepted the invitation, and performed trenchantly on the occasion, but our old friendship was gone.

IV.

In Articulate Energy (1955), Davie took up the issue of poetry-as-music. He believed, with Fenollosa and Pound to sustain him, that the crucial factor in poetry is syntax. Purity of diction is a major consideration, but a difference of syntax is a more comprehensive difference because it indicates the way a poet stands toward the world. Modern poetry assumes, he argued -- with Eliot chiefly in mind -- "that syntax in poetry is wholly different from syntax as understood by logicians and grammarians." Davie repudiated this assumption, and spoke up for logicians and grammarians, but he had to admit -- as Empson did -- that good poems had been achieved under its direction. He conceded that poetry-as-music is not merely a modern aberration: it is close to what he called "subjective syntax," which pleases "by the fidelity with which it follows the ‘form of thought’ in the poet’s mind." His main examples were Coleridge’s "Dejection" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison":

How can a bower of lime-trees be a prison? And even as [Coleridge] begins to show how this can be, he proves that it cannot be, since the imagination cannot be imprisoned and the poet goes on to acknowledge, at the end of the poem, that the prison is no prison, and the loss no loss. The syntax, continually finding new stores of energy where it has been affirmed that no more is to be found (the sentence, once the main verb has been introduced, seems ready to draw to a close), mimes, acts out in its own developing structure, the development of feeling behind it.

Syntax-as-music is like subjective syntax: it pleases "by the fidelity with which it follows a ‘form of thought’ through the poet’s mind but without defining that thought" (Davie’s italics).

In a chapter of Articulate Energy, Davie takes into consideration Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. He was impressed by the book, and by Sir Herbert Read’s claims for it. He quoted Langer’s judgment that "what music can actually reflect is only the morphology of feeling": hence some sad and some happy conditions "may have a very similar morphology." Langer continues, in the chapter "On Significance in Music":

Music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol. Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression. The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made.

Davie remarks that in poetry it is not so easy as it is in music "to articulate without asserting; to talk without saying what one is talking about":

But, as is well known, this difficulty was circumvented by the use of the objective correlative, the invention of a fable or an "unreal" landscape, or the arrangement of images, not for their own sakes, but to stand as a correlative for the experience that is thus the true subject of a poem in which it is never named. It is true that Mr. Eliot, who put the expression "objective correlative" into currency, speaks as if the function of the correlative is to define, better than by naming, the experience, the feeling, for which it stands. But in the light of Mrs. Langer’s distinction, we have to say that it defines the morphology of the feeling, not its distinctive nature.

I recall arguing this passage with Davie. It seemed to me that he had got both Langer and Eliot wrong. Morphology is the branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of organisms without consideration of their function. Davie misinterprets Langer: he thinks she said that all symphonies are the same. She didn’t; she said that a symphony doesn’t mime or trace the lineaments of a particular feeling, but articulates its structure. One structure differs from another just as much as one feeling differs from another: morphology is the level of consideration on which the difference is registered. There is no merit in trying to distinguish "the morphology of the feeling" from "its distinctive nature." Its distinctive nature is recognized in its morphology. For similar reasons, Davie writes as if one of Eliot’s poems must be the same as another. But Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative doesn’t entail this: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." A set of objects, a situation, a chain of events isn’t the same as Davie’s "a fable or an ‘unreal’ landscape, or the arrangement of images." I take Eliot’s "formula of that particular emotion" to coincide with Langer’s "morphology." I wish I knew more securely what Eliot means by "which must terminate in sensory experience." Presumably he has in mind a reader’s experience or an audience’s: the chain of events must come home in the form of sensory experience -- not merely in the belatedness of discursive or conceptual terms -- to anyone who pays attention. In the essay on Hamlet and again in the one on Tourneur, Eliot is trying to find a relatively impersonal way of saying that a particular emotion should not be allowed to exceed the situation that provoked it. The idea he arrives at is a triangular one. Instead of trying to express the emotion directly and at once, a poet or a dramatist should turn aside from it and imagine "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" and so forth:

The cynicism, the loathing and disgust of humanity, expressed consummately in The Revenger’s Tragedy, are immature in the respect that they exceed the object. Their objective equivalents are characters practising the grossest vices; characters which seem merely to be spectres projected from the poet’s inner world of nightmare, some horror beyond words.

Not that Tourneur shouldn’t have written The Revenger’s Tragedy as he did. The play is "a document on humanity chiefly because it is a document on one human being, Tourneur; its motive is truly the death motive, for it is the loathing and horror of life itself." Further: "To have realized this motive so well is a triumph; for the hatred of life is an important phase -- even, if you like, a mystical experience -- in life itself." But the triumph is consistent with Tourneur’s immaturity, his failure to submit his feelings to the discipline by which their morphology might be registered. Morphology is the higher perspective in which a feeling, desire, or passion is understood. Tourneur did not put himself to the ethical labor of understanding his feelings; he sought only to express them.

Davie chose, as an example of syntax-as-music, the first lines of "Gerontion":

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.

"In terms of the prose-sense of this passage," as Davie says, there is no need for the second "fought":

The word, coming where it does, has the further effect of acting out through syntax the dwindling and the diminution, the guttering frustration and waste, which is the arc of feeling here being presented. The verb, energetic in meaning, and in the active voice, is held up by the three phrases ("knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, bitten by flies"), and this postponing of the issue builds up a tension which the verb would, in the ordinary way, resolve with all the more vigorous éclat, in a powerful reverberation. But this it cannot do, having been negated from the first by that "nor" from which it is now so far removed. Hence it has the effect almost of parody, of a shrill and cracked vehemence.

But if Gerontion is an imagined character, personage, or persona, rather than T. S. Eliot, the syntax of the passage becomes "dramatic" rather than "subjective" and should escape Davie’s interrogation. "Poetic syntax is dramatic," he says, "when its function is to please us by the fidelity with which it follows the ‘form of thought’ in some mind other than the poet’s, which the poet imagines."

The second example of syntax-as-music that Davie quotes in Articulate Energy is the opening passage of "Ash-Wednesday":

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Davie hadn’t much to say about that passage, except to mark how elaborately the lines are interwoven by end-rhymes and by similarities of grammar and syntax. Syntax works like rhyme to establish a further relation of likeness. For once, Davie isn’t explicit, but he seems to think that an interweaving as pronounced as this is like music because it keeps all the relations within the passage, it doesn’t let any force of reference escape from the lines to a world outside. He didn’t make anything of the displacement of attention, in the poem, from nouns to conjunctions -- "because," "although"; from main to subordinate clauses; the postponement of main verbs -- "strive to strive"; the proliferation of present participles -- "twisting," "turning," "drivelling," "restoring"; or the motif of "between" in the fourth part.

Davie’s brief comment wasn’t much help to me in reading "Ash-Wednesday," and as I was a young man seeking all the help I could get, I looked abroad and found it in I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and Eliot himself. Kenner’s The Invisible Poet had not yet been published.

V.

Richards much admired "Ash-Wednesday" and thought it "better poetry than even the best sections of The Waste Land." His reason for this high valuation was that "Ash-Wednesday" shows "still less ‘dread of the unknown depths’" than The Waste Land does. Richards had in mind, and quoted, the passage in Lord Jim about the wisdom of submitting oneself to the sea, the destructive element. In Coleridge on Imagination he has two pages on "Ash-Wednesday," mainly concerned with the process of reading the poem and avoiding the distraction of settling for a conceptual meaning. He didn’t believe that the meaning of a poem was a statement to be formulated at the end or in addition to the experience of reading it. The meaning and the experience are one and the same. Richards urged on the reader "a receptive submission, which will perhaps be reflected in conjectures but into which inferences among these conjectures do not enter." His attitude was much the same as Eliot’s, in the Preface to his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase: there is "a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts." Any obscurity in Anabase "is due to the suppression of ‘links in the chain,’ of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram." Further:

The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.

Not that the sequence in Anabase is entirely one of images: it includes exclamations and rhetorical flourishes:

Fais choix d’un grand chapeau dont on séduit le bord. L’oeil recule d’un siècle aux provinces de l’âme. Par la porte de craie vive on voit les choses de la plaine: choses vivantes.

But the sequence ought to be received -- this is Eliot’s point -- as if it were a sequence of images, each of them unquestionable and unquestioned.

Richards illustrated his way of reading "Ash-Wednesday" by noting the differences between the opening lines of the first and the last sections of the poem:

"Because I do not hope to turn again" and "Although I do not hope to turn again," in their joint context and their coterminous sub-contexts, will come into full being for very few readers without movements of exploration and resultant ponderings that I should not care to attempt to reflect in even the most distant prose translation. And yet these very movements -- untrackable as they perhaps are, and uninducible as they almost certainly are by any other words -- are the very life of the poem. In these searchings for meanings of a certain sort its being consists. The poem is a quest, and its virtue is not in anything said by it, or in the way in which it is said, or in a meaning which is found, or even in what is passed by in the search. For in this poem -- to quote two lines from Coleridge’s "Constancy to an Ideal Object" which is a meditation on the same theme -- as in so much of the later poetry of Mr. Yeats, "like strangers shelt’ring from a storm, / Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death!" And though from their encounter comes "Strength beyond hope or despair / Climbing the third stair" there is no account, in other terms than those of poetry, to be given of how it comes.

I found Richards’s reference to "Constancy to an Ideal Object" helpful, not because it named a theme the poem shares with "Ash-Wednesday" -- Hope and Despair meeting in the porch of Death -- but because Coleridge equivocates between saying that the ideal object is identical with the beloved woman and that it is not. In the end, trying to answer the question -- is the Ideal Object nothing? -- he shifts the terms altogether to an objective correlative:

And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!

Coleridge says much the same as Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" -- "both what we half-create and what perceive" -- but he looks on the gloomy side of it. In "Dejection" he allows for the brighter side -- "O lady we receive but what we give." The speaker in "Ash-Wednesday" is not an enamoured rustic, but he rejoices, "having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice." He knows he has to make the shadow he pursues.

Leavis thought well of "Ash-Wednesday" for different reasons than Richards. The poet was preoccupied, he said, with the problem of sincerity:

He had to achieve a paradoxical precision-in-vagueness; to persuade the elusive intuition to define itself, without any forcing, among the equivocations of "the dreamcrossed twilight." The warning against crude interpretation, against trying to elicit anything in the nature of prose statement, is there in the unexpected absences of punctuation; and in the repetitive effects, which suggest a kind of delicate tentativeness. The poetry itself is an effort at resolving diverse impulsions, recognitions, and needs.

The ironical function in the self-dramatization of the opening lines I have quoted is, Leavis says, "an insurance against the pride of humility; a self-admonition against the subtle treasons, the refinements, of egotism that beset the quest of sincerity in these regions." The characteristic rhythm of "Ash-Wednesday" has "certain qualities of ritual; it produces in a high degree the frame-effect, establishing apart from the world a special order of experience, dedicated to spiritual exercises."

VI.

That last emphasis was what I needed. "Ash-Wednesday" is in a sense out of this common world, as if it were written within parentheses or seen under glass, but it refuses merely to dissociate itself from the world. Davie was wrong about the poem: its main impulse is to commit itself to the reality it contemplates, without disowning the sensuous memories and desires that officially count as obstacles. Eliot must do what he ascribes to Lancelot Andrewes rather than to the somewhat vulgar Donne:

Andrewes’s emotion is purely contemplative; it is not personal, it is wholly evoked by the object of contemplation, to which it is adequate; his emotion is wholly contained in and explained by its object. . . .Donne is a "personality" in a sense in which Andrewes is not: his sermons, one feels, are a "means of self-expression." He is constantly finding an object which shall be adequate to his feelings; Andrewes is wholly absorbed in the object and therefore responds with the adequate emotion. Andrewes has the goût pour la vie spirituelle, which is not native to Donne.

The question of rhythm, to which Leavis referred, called for further thought: it raised the issue of distance. In Eliot’s poems the experiences invoked are presented not immediately or directly but as if in a later light, a higher perspective, or subject to a final cause. He must bear in mind that they might have to be renounced in favor of larger, more spiritually exacting considerations. The actual pleasure persists only because it can’t in good faith be denied. The solution is to present movements of desire as if they were embodied in a ballet or transformed into a piece of music. In "The Music of Poetry" Eliot says:

I believe that the properties in which music concerns the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure. I think that it might be possible for a poet to work too closely to musical analogies: the result might be an effect of artificiality; but I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image; and I do not believe that this is an experience peculiar to myself. The use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music. There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter. It is in the concert room, rather than in the opera house, that the germ of a poem may be quickened. More than this I cannot say.

It is well documented that many of Eliot’s poems began as hardly more than a fragment of rhythm, perhaps not as fully present as a Wagnerian leitmotif, which he felt impelled to enact if only in a few arbitrary words. Several of these fragments would stay in that condition for months, perhaps years, but gradually a few new words would suggest themselves as companions for the words in place. More gradually still, a structure would suggest itself in which some if not all of the fragments would cohere: not a jigsaw puzzle but a work of gaps and transitions, articulations and silences, repetitions, reconsiderations. The movement of the poem would not aspire to a conclusion, as at the end of a play, but to the resolution of tensions, alert to further tensions always in the vicinity. In "Ash-Wednesday" a difficult sincerity is achieved by grace of musical relations, dissonances and harmonies.

But the music is not the kind that waits to be fulfilled, as a libretto waits on the composer. In "Thinking in Verse" Eliot distinguished two kinds of "music" in verse:

One is that of the lyrics of Shakespeare or Campion, which demand the kindred music of the lute or other instrument; a few songs of Shelley’s, such as "Music, when soft voices die," and many songs of Burns and Heine make the same demand. . . . Donne’s is the second kind of musical verse: the verse which suggests music, but which, so to speak, contains in itself all its possible music; for if set to music, the play of ideas could not be followed. His poems are poems to be read aloud, not sung.

So also with "Ash-Wednesday," which contains in itself all its possible music and would not gain by receiving the attentions of a composer.

VII.

"Ash-Wednesday" was published in London on April 24, 1930 and in the U.S. the following September. Three of its six sections had already been published as separate poems with titles pointing to Dante and Cavalcanti. The first section was published in the spring of 1928 as "Perch ‘io Non Spero," the first words of a ballade by Cavalcanti: the second appeared in December 1927 as "Salutation," probably a reference to La Vita Nuova, iii, where the poet is greeted by the Lady "with a salutation of such virtue that I thought then to see the world of blessedness." The third section was published in the autumn of 1929 as "Som de L’escalina," the words addressed to Dante as he climbs the third part of the stairway on the Mount of Purgatory, at the top of which is the Garden of Eden. Then Eliot evidently sensed, as he did after the publication of "Burnt Norton," that musical analogies would make it possible for him to take the three sections as movements of a poem of larger range by adding three further cognate sections. Eliot sent Leonard Woolf a typescript of the poem which at that point had five sections, each with a title from Dante or Cavalcanti. B. C. Southam’s note gives the available information:

Sections I and III carried the titles they bore as separate poems. Section II had a different title -- "Jausen lo Jorn" -- a phrase spoken by Arnaut Daniel in the same speech from which Eliot had taken the title for Section III; it is italicized here: "And I see with joy the day for which I hope, before me." (Eliot could have seen the words "jauzen lo jorn" in Pound’s "Elizabethan Classicists," The Egoist, November 1917). This change of title suggests that Eliot wanted to draw attention to the purgatorial aspect of the section. Section IV was headed "Vestita di Color di Fiamma" ("clad in the colour of flame"), a phrase which occurs in the description of Beatrice (Purgatorio xxx, 33) at the Divine Pageant. This helps to identify the spiritual nature of the Lady in Eliot’s poem and suggests the basis for the details in line 140. Section V was entitled "La Sua Volontade" ("His Will"), taken from the line "la sua volontade e nostra pace" ("his will is our peace") (Paradiso iii, 85). . . .Why Eliot decided to strip the poem of these titles is an open question. He may have felt that the specific reference of these quotation-titles was limiting and that the sequence would be better understood without the Dantean reminders.

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent in the Christian calendar; it marks a period of prayer, fasting, and penance -- "dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return" -- that ends with Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. The Lenten weeks are a period of atonement, mindful of the forty days and nights that Christ spent in the desert. It is also the period during which, as I recall from my early years in Warrenpoint and Dublin, we Roman Catholics are under obligation to make a good Confession -- that adjective having on the lips of my teachers, Christian Brothers, nearly as much emphasis as the sacramental noun -- in preparation for the taking of Holy Communion: "Bless me father."

In this context, and with Leavis’s commentary close by, there is no merit in trying to name the germ, the embryo, from which "Ash-Wednesday" or any of its constituent poems emerged. Eliot went out of his way to articulate the rhythm without asserting anything. The best he could hope for might be, in words from "Little Gidding," to arrive where he started "and know the place for the first time." The first impulse, the rhythm or germ, is his private business and must remain so. But I’ll risk the indelicacy of saying this. Suppose a man, recently converted to Christianity, wished on Ash-Wednesday to join with his fellow Christians in the ceremonies of Lent. Suppose, too, that he felt a scrupulous hesitation, however vague or diffused: there is the fear of duplicity, of false humility, of appearing to deny the world in ways he can’t bring himself to. He might find himself separating body and soul to a degree merely officious. I assume that when Eliot spoke of the rhythm or the germ, he meant what F. H. Bradley meant by "feeling," the first inner stir, which is felt long before it has reached any of the stages we call an emotion or an idea. From the moment of "firstness" it begins to nudge itself toward articulation, however rudimentary. In Eliot’s case, a few arbitrary words, long before the orders of grammar or syntax came into play, seem to have encouraged development. The ethical correlative of this stirring, I imagine, is the possibility of achieving difficult sincerity, so that the soul may take part in the rituals and sacraments of the Christian community in good faith.

Appropriately, then, Eliot’s poem resorts to three fields of diction: (1) religious texts: the Old and New Testaments, rituals of Catholic devotion, sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, the litany of the Blessed Virgin, the "Hail Mary," and especially the Reproaches ("Improperia") of Good Friday -- "Ash-Wednesday" is in communion with Herbert’s "The Sacrifice" and with Pascal ("Teach us to sit still"); (2) texts from European literature, especially Dante, Cavalcanti, and Shakespeare; and (3) the common worldly language of reference and appreciation, but inclined toward generalization and away from specification or singularity -- "the vanished power of the usual reign." The speaker is free to resort to any of these three for critique, irony, or acknowledgment.

The poem is a dramatic monologue, but not in Browning’s manner. Eliot’s implied speaker is a figure placed between being and absence, "between dying and birth," more than a wraith but less than a person, a voice to which we are discouraged from attaching further bodily attributes. We can’t even be sure that he’s old, despite "Why should the agèd eagle stretch his wings?" The voice may be entirely textual, an emanation from the English language in the Christian and Latin phase of its history. As in an examination of conscience, the speaker is not working toward a spiritual conclusion: ideally, there is no end to such an analysis, least of all the felicity of having reached a self-edifying conclusion. But the examination differs in this respect from the one prescribed by the Christian Church for its members: to achieve difficult sincerity, the speaker can’t be content to divide himself into body and soul and deny the body’s appeal. He must act justly toward the world, body, desire, and time; not only toward God, the Church, spirit, soul, and eternity. He is in the confessional, speaking to a priest in darkness:

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

According to Northrop Frye, the dreams are "the dreams of waking consciousness, memory, and dream proper, all of them animated by desire, all of them having no end but death." Well, yes, I suppose so; but in the dark of the confessional the speaker must tell as much truth as he knows and can bring himself to say, including the secular truth of pleasure and memory. The clause "though I do not wish to wish these things" indicates that the things must be irresistible if they survive the discouragement of the repeated verbs: it is far more difficult to rid oneself of those never-to-be-forgotten pleasures than the gift and scope disavowed in the first section by another doubled verb -- "I no longer strive to strive towards such things." And so it should be, else the spiritual voiding achieved in the Confessional is spurious. It is the compelling quality of the sensory experiences, forcing themselves upon the penitent’s examination of conscience and being acknowledged there, that makes "Ash-Wednesday" a telling as well as a confessing poem. The poem ends, as it should, with the prayer: "And let my cry come unto Thee." But in the meantime there are the cries of other occasions, as in "The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying." Davie might find this last phrase unnecessary, and it would be if semantics were king, but here the perception turning back upon itself becomes a caress of acknowledgment and exhilaration, with energy propelled from "towards" in the previous line: "From the wide window towards the granite shore." A similar gesture in the third poem gives us "Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown," and in the fourth poem "White light folded, sheathed about her, folded." The certitude of the cadence in these lines is an acknowledgment of values the penitent is not obliged to renounce, unless renunciation must be so drastic as to include life itself.

The three dictions I have isolated work, in the poem, to achieve a critical perspective beyond any one of them, just as a symphony or a string quartet as an achieved form is beyond the workings of the individual instruments it accommodates. The perspective can hardly be called anything but Language, a force of expressiveness prior to any particular expression it allows. Reading "Ash-Wednesday," we need to have such an abstraction in mind, if only to account for the distinctive style that exerts critical pressure upon the intimations of worldly gratification in the passages I have quoted. It is the style that, more than any other factor, makes it possible to think of "Ash-Wednesday" as the redemption of The Waste Land and "The Hollow Men." How to describe it? It is as if the first two dictions -- the liturgical and the literary -- were combined in one, and in that guise stood aside from the worldly pleasures, not to shame them but to submit them to more exacting discriminations. The style I refer to is judicial, hieratic, responsive to the sundry of the world but free of its blandishments:

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

The tone of this passage corresponds to absolution. If the poem is an examination of conscience leading to a good Confession, absolution can only take the form of a distinctively poised presence within language itself.

VIII.

I may be able to clarify this by quoting a passage from Valéry’s "La Pythie" and a comment on it by Elizabeth Sewell:

Honneur des hommes, Saint LANGAGE,
Discours prophétique et paré,
Belles chaînes en qui s’engage
Le dieu dans la chair égaré,
Illumination, largesse!
Voici parler une Sagesse
Et sonner cette auguste Voix
Qui se connaît quand elle sonne
N’être plus la voix de personne
Tant que des ondes et des bois!

We are to imagine Language, an abstraction to begin with, become a god in the flesh. Sewell translates the lines into prose:

Honour of men, sainted LANGUAGE, discourse prophetic and adorned, fair chains in which the god lost in the flesh is content to be taken, illuminations, bounty! There speaks a Wisdom, here sounds that august voice which, when it sounds, knows itself to be not more the voice of a person than that of the waters and the woods.

In her commentary, Sewell says:

At first sight it seems almost an irrelevance; but when one looks into it, it is clearly the only answer Valéry could give -- though not perhaps the only one that could be given. Words are the mind’s one defence against possession by thought or dreams; even Jacob kept trying to find out the name of the angel he wrestled with. Words made into poetry, the prophetic ornamented discourse, carefully chained lest too much freedom should let in the powers of darkness -- these will effect such resolution as can be achieved between the logical and the irrational functions of the mind. . . .But apart from this, see how curiously this verse runs: there is the word, sanctified, a god in the flesh, the true light and glory, coming into the world -- it is impossible to set it down like that and not be instantly reminded of the opening of St. John’s Gospel. . . .This time it is "Au commencement était le verbe," in the beginning was the word, and it is Valéry quoting it and saying "But the word is nothing else than one of the most precise names for that which I have called mind" (esprit). Mind and word are almost synonymous in a great many uses.

Words and mind, synonymous: it is a bias congenial not only to Valéry but to Eliot. I think Eliot allowed words a slight degree of priority and therefore of privilege before assenting to a relation amounting on the happiest occasions to identity. Lost in the flesh, he is content to be taken in the chains of language; or if not content -- since he often complains that the words are not right or not sufficient -- he can’t think of any other chains in which to be held. His poems let the ordinary world in only because, language being discursive, it can’t be kept out. Leavis’s phrasing -- "establishing apart from the world a special order of experience, dedicated to spiritual exercises" -- applies to nearly all of Eliot’s poems, not only to "Ash-Wednesday." This prejudice of Eliot’s sensibility did not satisfy the Poundian Davie: he wanted to think of the self in anyone as a distinct configuration of energies, not entirely verbal; then of language as an instrument, a means, and in that respect as a gift of God; and likewise of the world, external, palpable, sounding and shining.

IX.

I quote the opening of the second poem:

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.

Exegesis is not required, though it may be supplied by reference to the Purgatorio, Grimm’s fairy-tales "The Juniper" and "The Singing Bone," the Book of Ezekiel, and other sources. These allusions have force -- to cite R. P. Blackmur -- as "a constant reminder of the presence of the barbaric, of other and partial creations within our own creation." But we may have the reminder without the sources. Taken as it stands, the passage is like a tapestry of strangely imperturbable presences or a painting by Delvaux. Kenner describes it as "dreamily static like an invention of the Douanier Rousseau’s." The lines have patience enough for local precisions -- "the bones (which were already dry)" -- but they don’t find further singularities necessary. Two lines have between them "because" three times, rehearsing a motif from the opening poem: "Because I do not hope to turn." The verbs stand remote from immediacy: "dissembled," "proffer," "recovers," "withdrawn." It is poetry-as-music in Davie’s sense, because it pleases by the fidelity with which it follows a "form of thought" through the speaker’s mind but without defining that thought. What we meet is a mind saying things, the saying and the thinking being identical: it is a mind thinking rather than thoughts being uttered. The poetry is also poetry-as-music in Langer’s sense, because the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each constituent is not explicitly made. Opacity is not in question; we move without hesitation or distress from one indeterminacy to the next, not stopping to ask what precisely the posterity of the desert is or the fruit of the gourd. But the passage is not mellifluous, nor does it make undue concessions to the Christian readers it may be supposed mainly to address. Anglican einfühlung is not appealed to. The propriety of the passage is in the cadence, the distinctive movement of a mind conscious of itself and conscious, too, of its obligation to the Lady, the Beatrice-figure, and of the Virgin to be approached indirectly through the Lady who honours her in meditation.

X.

Not surprisingly, the attribute of Eliot’s work that Davie regarded as most reprehensible was its susceptibility to incantation and the "auditory imagination." We avoided quarreling about it only because I couldn’t think of any arguments that would persuade him. He was exasperated by this part of the ninth chorus from The Rock:

Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.

Davie thought it a scandal that lines that recognized the evil of verbal imprecisions and approximations should end by recommending the beauty of incantation. He hated talk of verbal magic or Pure Poetry. So he was appalled to find Eliot appearing to take Poe’s poetry seriously and letting it get away with a cult of pure sound. It has the effect, Eliot said in "From Poe to Valéry," of "an incantation which, because of its very crudity, stirs the feelings at a deep and almost primitive level." Almost primitive, maybe; but "deep" and "because of its very crudity"? Surely not. Any mind that recognizes the crudity is immune to Poe’s magic. Eliot went on to insist that "in even the most purely incantatory poem, the dictionary meaning of words cannot be disregarded with impunity," but Davie thought the harm was already done. It is true that in the remainder of "From Poe to Valéry" Eliot gave a damaging account of Poe’s poetry and his theory of poetic composition: the only merit Poe had, apparently, was that he somehow inspired Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, and permitted Valéry to regard the act of composition as more interesting than the poem that results from it.

On the question of the auditory imagination, I never tried to clarify my position with Davie. Many of the poems I most cared for were products of that imagination, and were intimate with verbal magic, the caress of syllables, the echoes and recesses of words. Now that it’s too late, I’ll try to put together a few considerations that might have modified his impatience. I could have quoted this passage from Eliot’s "Note sur Mallarmé et Poe":

Chez Poe et Mallarmé la philosophie est en partie remplacée par un élément d'incantation. Dans "Ulalume" par exemple, et dans "Un Coup de Dés," cette incantation, qui insiste sur la puissance primitive du Mot (Fatum), est manifeste. En ce sens le vers de Mallarmé, qui s’applique si bien à lui-même, constitue une brillante critique de Poe: donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu. L’effort pour restituer la puissance du Mot, qui inspire la syntaxe de l’un et de l’autre et leur fait écarter le sonore pur ou le pur mélodieux (qu’ils pourraient, tous les deux, s’ils le voulaient, si bien exploiter), cet effort, qui empêche le lecteur d’avaler d’un coup leur phrase ou leur vers, est une des qualités qui rapprochent le mieux les deux poètes. Il y a aussi la fermeté de leur pas lorsqu’ils passent du monde tangible au monde des fantômes.

But I’m not sure that Davie would have been open to persuasion on the primitive power of the Word, even with the addition of the parenthetical Fatum. Eliot evidently had in mind the Word in an entirely secular sense, not the Word of God as it was to be invoked three years later in "Ash-Wednesday." What else can that be but verbal magic, the resources of charms and runes? The firmness of step with which Poe and Mallarmé moved from the tangible world to the world of phantoms is an odd assertion, unless Eliot has in view the abeyance of will, a poet’s trust -- short of confidence or certitude -- in the power of language rather than the power of the self. Or a poet’s conviction that language is the most reliable source of authority, because the most impersonal. When he became an Anglican, Eliot construed the Word in its religious sense, and resorted to it as prayer, ritual and liturgical observance, all the more vital for its traditional and sacramental repetition. But he did not abandon his sense of the power of the Word even in its secular manifestations. Presumably he felt no contradiction between the Word in both its secular and its religious senses.

I continue to wonder why Davie did not include "Ash-Wednesday" in the New Oxford Book of Christian Verse.

XI.

I should have argued about "Ash-Wednesday" with another friend I greatly admired and admire, Frank Kermode, but I was distracted by his commentary on Yeats in Romantic Image. It seemed to me that his description of the dancer in Yeats’s plays and poems was too narrowly Symbolist, predicated entirely on Jane Avril and Loie Fuller. In the dance-plays, I wanted to think of Martha Graham and to acknowledge the earthiness of Yeats’s dancer rather than the ethereality, the Liberty silks and chiffons. But I should have paid more attention to the last pages of Romantic Image, where Kermode says that he could have put Eliot rather than Yeats at the center of the book --

and some points might have been more forcibly made by a discussion of the disposition of symbols in a work like "Ash-Wednesday": if the whole work is an image, how is it, to paraphrase Mrs. Langer, "articulated"? But Eliot’s relationship with discourse is less easy than that of Yeats. The problem is the same, and it is magnificently solved: it is the problem of giving symbolic value to the "sense", of identifying dancer and dance. But "Ash-Wednesday" is, so to say, verbless, making no propositions and openly defying the intellect (though, not being illiterate, we all try to explicate what is by definition inexplicable). It is an arrangement of images, or an articulated image, requiring to be looked at "spatially". At the linguistic level Mr. Eliot has that precision of strange outline that all Symbolists require; nothing is more memorable in his verse than the immediate sense of exactness communicated, the impression of great resources of language delicately employed, and infinite flexibility of rhythm. And all this conveys the vitality of the Image, the movement in stillness and the life in death, without Yeats’s concessions to the reader less privileged. Mallarmé would doubtless have been better pleased.

Doubtless; but Kermode’s attempt to associate "Ash-Wednesday" with "the Image" should be resisted. It is true that the poem is, "so to say, verbless," and that it postpones main verbs by brooding on conjunctions, prepositions, and participles -- "because" and "although," "between," "if," "against," "about," "restoring," "wavering," "flying," and more. But it is not true that the poem is one image, or that the Lady is yet another version of Kermode’s romantic Image, sister to Keats’s Moneta, "bright-blanch’d / By an immortal sickness which kills not." The origins of the romantic Image are in Pater’s Monna Lisa, Marius the Epicurean, and "Emerald Uthwart"; Symons’s "Ballet, Pantomime and Poetic Drama"; Rossetti’s Lilith; and the Salomes of Maeterlinck, Flaubert, Moreau, Wilde, and Yeats. But the Lady in "Ash-Wednesday," withdrawn to contemplation as she is, is not, like Rossetti’s Lilith, "subtly of herself contemplative." She "honours the Virgin in meditation." It would be vulgar to say of her, as Kermode justly says of Lilith, that "it is the Image, unimpassioned, wise in its whole body, that attracts unbounded passion." Between the Lady and the Virgin, and surrounding them, there are Christianity, the Church, the sacraments, and the laity, faithful and sinful: we are not merely observing "the Image," occult, self-possessed; "some Herodiade," as Yeats wrote in one of his Symbolist moments, "dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle."

In fact, Davie was closer to being right about Eliot than Kermode is. The proper analogy is indeed with music, not with sculpture or the image. We should also hold to Susanne Langer’s presentation of music as virtual time, a mode of being, offered only to be perceived and not otherwise to be lived in. More than Yeats, more than any other modern poet with the possible exception of Mallarmé, Eliot observes the procedures of a composer, and his words are discursive only so far as, being words with diverse histories and obligations, they can’t avoid being discursive. They would exist as pure sound if they could.