DENIS DONOGHUE
15
three moments, then, a myth making 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 Valery, the principle, the ground of our beseeching, is lan–
guage.
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 recog–
nition 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, Seven–
teenth-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 [958 as a university lecturer in the
English Faculty and a fellow of Conville 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 pro–
fession 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
