DENIS DONOGHUE 23
is "a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts." Any obscu–
rity 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
Anahase
is entirely one of images: it includes
exclamations and rhetorical flourishes:
Fais choix d'un grand chapeau dont on seduit Ie bordo L'oeil reClde
d'un siecle aux provinces de I'ame. Par la porte de craie vive on voit
les chases de la plaine: chases 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 unques–
tioned.
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 trans–
lation. And yet these very movements-untrackable as they per–
haps are, and uninducible as they almost certainly are by any other
words-are the very life of the poem. In these searchings for mean–
ings 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
