Preamble to Solace

Hugging the easy and familiar darkness,
Confidence in the clutched pillow,
The improviser creates anew
His patent solace -- that ancient curio.

And the flickering core of darkness contracts
Gently embracing tighter its success
Till the knot vanishes, till the trick thread is flung
At last to include the coreless nothingness.

What matter who romps that ambiguous arena,
Is it here -- is it there? Will the trapped animal
Forget direction, or the bringer of tenderness
Be understood? Either one; let it be.

For this, Narcissus requires no semblance.
His logic changed, vanity urges now
No bright precision, only genuine shadows,
Only respite from the alien gazers

Whose eyes will relay that other knowledge
Down the bleached corridor, their witless gazing
Caring Arouse the creatures, ugly and evil,
Huddled, to prowl in the heart's shadow.

Odysseus

He was wined and dined and he sat in comfort
Like a great guest of honor with his actual poise
And he heard the winged words of the singer
Telling the terrible wonder of his name,
But even the nearest never half-imagined
Why he bowed his head and hid his face.

Yes, he who was always sure of his pride
And found his name in every part he went,
Bending to anointment with the grace of habit,
Taking or leaving the beauties of the islands --
What most of all brought the big tears
When he writhed with cramp and the choking brine?

Was he knowing something for all those years
That even the handy goddess didn't guess?
And when he managed at last to make the return
And had settled accounts with his wife and neighbors
Did he then go apart and curse his folly
As the sun went down and all the ways were darkened?

Forgetful

Remember again the early morning faith
In her wise and deliberate conspiracy for you,
The fairy godmother plotting a good surprise--
You didn't know what, but something good would come true.

And ponder now the old talent for design
That knew with ear and eye to frame about
Breasts and thighs embellished with freshening darkness
And something which now you cannot quite make out.

For you would recall to the dim and echoing head
The trappings and bustle of that delicious game
Which rang with the accurate phrase that seemed to hold
Indelibly your once familiar name.

But do you remember whether it came to pass,
The good surprise which daily you hoped to own?
And have you no dream to unbury the eyes that saw
That light with which the drifting body shone?

It will do no good to go and ask your mother
Who moves among outworn worries, unaware
You don't remember that really you did tell her
Those forgotten words you imagine you would not dare.

She is spelling the words of a fragment of a story,
And it is beautiful -- if she could only know.
And you are plotting fables for the disenchanted
Who wait in unbelief for what they know.

In the Room

When the bell rings, when footsteps come near,
Let me not hope for my need's allay.
I'll put in no orders, make no reservations,
I won't send applications away.

I won't dress up for the promising stranger,
Sweeten my breath or comb my hair.
I'll push my bed from the window, I'll make
The medicine chest so clean and bare.

If I wake up at night and can't go back to sleep
There'll be nothing to fear by myself in the dark;
I'll just take it easy right where I am.
They can go and hope to meet each other in the park.

They can make confessions, almost how they planned,
Making best-seller versions for themselves and their friends,
But I won't submit and I won't subscribe.
I remember how that sort of thing always ends.

While they call to each other like sleepless dogs
I won't speak up with what I have to say.
I'll plug my ears and draw in the walls
And I'll have my peace and they can go their way.

But what will I do when they're suddenly *where*,
With their curious tears, in the room, around the bed,
Their hands upon me and my voice gone dumb
As they punish the blanket over my head?

T. S. ELIOT'S ROSE-GARDEN: A PERSISTENT THEME

Leonard Unger

The purpose of this essay is to focus attention upon a specific aspect of continuity in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. I shall attempt to follow what I believe to be an important strand, a basic and persistent theme in Eliot's poetry throughout the course of his career. Consideration of this theme may begin by first taking notice of its appearance in Eliot's prose. In his essay on Dante (1929) he discusses the experience of ecstasy in childhood described in the *Vita Nuova*:

> Now Dante, I believe, had experiences which seemed to him of some importance...important in themselves; and therefore they seemed to him to have some philosophical and impersonal value. I find in it an account of a particular kind of experience: that is, of something which had actual experience (the experience of the "confession" in the modern sense) and intellectual and imaginative experience (the experience of thought and the experience of dream) as its materials; and which became a third kind. It seems to me of importance to grasp the simple fact that the *Vita Nuova* is neither a "confession" nor an "indiscretion" in the modern sense, nor is it a piece of Pre-Raphaelite tapestry. If you have that sense of intellectual and spiritual realities that Dante had, then a form of expression like the *Vita Nuova* cannot be classed either as "truth" or "fiction."

In the first place, the type of sexual experience which Dante describes as occurring to him at the age of nine years is by no means impossible or unique. My only doubt (in which I found myself confirmed by a distinguished psychologist) is whether it could have taken place so late in life as the age of nine years. The psychologist agreed with me that it is more likely to occur at about five or six years of age. It is possible that Dante developed rather late, and it is also possible that he altered the dates to employ some other significance of the number nine. But to me it appears obvious that the *Vita Nuova* could only have been written around a personal experience. If so, the details do not matter: whether the lady was the Portinari or not, I do not care; it is quite likely that she is a blind for some one else, even for a person whose name Dante

may have forgotten or never known. But I cannot find
it incredible that what has happened to others should
have happened to Dante with much greater intensity.

The attitude of Dante to the fundamental experience
of the *Vita Nuove* can only be understood by accustoming
ourselves to find meaning in the *final causes* rather
than in origins. It is not, I believe, meant as a
description of what he *consciously* felt on his meeting
with Beatrice, but rather as a description of what that
meant on mature reflection upon it. The final cause is
the attraction towards God.

Several details of Eliot's comment are of particular interest to us. He ascribes an obscurity and yet peculiar reality to the experience. He regards the experience as one not uncommon among men nor restricted to any single period or kind of period in history. He acknowledges that the experience may be variously interpreted, and he himself finds it significant beyond its phenomenal and experiential details: the experience is for him derivative of a supernatural cause; it represents implicitly and symbolically meanings that are of some intellectual complexity, meanings that are philosophical and religious.

This experience and the interpretation put upon it constitute the theme which we shall observe operating by various uses throughout Eliot's writings, from his earliest poetry to his most recent. I shall try to treat the poetry, as nearly as possible, in chronological order of its appearance. According to this plan, it seems natural and profitable to begin with a consideration of the French poem, "Dans le Restaurant," which appears in *Poems* (1920). This poem is made up, until the final section, of talk made by a snabby old waiter, uncouth and repellent in manners, to a

4.

Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d'etain:
Un courant de sous-mer l'emporta tres loin,
Le repassant aux etapes de sa vie anterieure.
Figurez-vous donc, c'etait un sort penible;
Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille.

Conspicuous in the words of the waiter, obviously central to the poem, is the childhood experience. Its potential significance is suggested by the intensity with which the old waiter is haunted by this experience, so haunted that he must tell of it to an unsympathetic and complete stranger. That Eliot intended the experience portrayed here as of the kind discussed in his essay on Dante is, I believe, beyond any doubt. Its being ascribed to the undignified old man illustrates that its source is basic in human nature and (to follow Eliot) in a nature beyond that. This is further emphasized by the statement of the snobbish patron: "De quel droit payes-tu des experiences comme moi?"

In his fine analysis of *The Waste Land* Mr. Cleanth Brooks has explicated the English version of the passage on the drowned Phoenician, pointing out its symbols and allusions, its several levels of meaning. But we should determine its coherent status in the French poem. To observe that the passage on drowning follows a reference to the waiter's need of a bath seems to me to be more than simply amusing. Here, as elsewhere in Eliot's poetry, water is symbolic of spiritual rebirth--a pre-requisite of return to the obsessive experience. The manner by which the waiter is shown to be in need of water and the shift to the drowned man thus constitute a characteristic irony. And the shift illustrates again the

5.

"commonness" of the experience, bringing the lives of the two modern men and the ancient Phoenician within a single category. The Phoenician's death is cryptically, ironically, meant as a rebirth. The under-sea current (symbol of a spiritual force) carries him "aux etapes de sa vie antérieure," presumably to an ecstatic moment in childhood and its final cause. The return by stages suggests a progress according to purification or purgation.

In "Dans le Restaurant" there are certain elements which, we shall notice, repeatedly characterize the theme. These are the images of water, foliage, the little girl and the proffered flowers. Another recurrent element is the waiter's remorse--remembering that he left the girl half-way up the path--for having withdrawn from the situation: "C'est dommage." The more-than-scenic significance of the images is well established in poems earlier even than "Dans le Restaurant." For example, this obtains in "La Figlia Che Piange" where, in addition to the images, there is the peculiar quality of the departure, the "pained surprise" and "resentment" of the girl--conversely related to the man's remorse. The speaker of the poem is, moreover, obviously involved in the scene; his final comment on it is explicit enough:

> I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
> Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
> The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.

Other thematic elements, incidental in the earlier poems but later to be elaborated and defined, occur in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and

6.

"Portrait of a Lady."

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Prufrock's last words are a generalization. We bungle our adventures in the actual world because we are out of our true element, having strayed from the sea-girls and sea-chambers, the dreamworld that is an approach to spiritual reality. A similar hint of the "experience" is found in the "Portrait."

I keep my countenance,
I remain self-possessed
Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other people have desired.
Are these ideas right or wrong?

Here the speaker is distracted from his composure on the "actual" level by a reminder of the experience that is lost and neglected. These observations on "Prufrock" and "Portrait" are perhaps an over-reading of the poems taken singly. But I believe that they are justified in the light of later poems, and that the early passages become increasingly significant of the theme as one finds it more centrally and extensively treated in later compositions.

Indeed, even the later poems will, in a sense, be over-read. Our emphasis is upon the theme, and it is often dominant in the work, but never the exclusive import--neither in "Dans le Restaurant" nor in _The Waste Land_. But on the other hand, with regard to Eliot's work as a whole, the theme is always basic as a point of view, even when there is no direct suggestion of the childhood experience.

In "Gerontion" the dramatic and imagistic details of the
experience or any explicit reference to it are not to be found. To
the extent that this poem is allied with the theme, it is so allied
generally and conceptually. If one recognizes the theme in the poems
where its elements are more openly displayed, one will also see it as
underlying "Gerontion," and consequently find that poem additionally
meaningful. The title and the senility portrayed throughout--the old
man--represent a sense of remoteness from the experience of sexual-
religious ecstasy and its significance. A similar representation (the
aged eagle) is later to be observed in the first section of Ash Wednesday.
"Gerontion" opens with the scene of old age. Next is the statement of the
coming in spring of "Christ the tiger." This, I believe, is equivalent to
the experience. There is then the picture of Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, etc.,
and their adjustment (or maladjustment) to it; and the old man again. The
passage that follows is of special significance, "key" for our purposes:

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear.

As I read the passage, it is a statement of the difficulty of recapturing
the experience, and yet of the need to return to it; of the distractions

8.

which lead away from it. There is from this point of view a
criticism of man's world, a picture of the individual's predica-
ment. What History gives is the experience. And we find here,
as elsewhere, the expression of inadequate response to it, of
inability for a serious and effective attempt to reconstruct it.
Further along in the poem I find the idea of removal, of the _lost
experience_, even more particularized. It seems to me that this
passage is an apostrophe to the girl, the Lady, the partner in the
experience:

I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?

We shall meet again in later poems the "terror" here mentioned, and
the loss of passion and the sensual faculties.

In discussing the theme as it is present in <u>The Waste Land</u>
I shall not review that poem in its entirety, but refer the reader
to Mr. Brooks's analysis. He will find, I believe, that the observa-
tions made here are consistent with Mr. Brooks's conclusions. The
theme is evident in the first section, "The Burial of the Dead."
Following the song quoted from <u>Tristan and Isolde</u> is a passage com-
parable in its descriptive details to the scene in "Dans le Restaurant":

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth girl."

---Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead,* and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.

* "I was neither / Living nor dead" is a translation of <u>Inferno</u>, XXXIV, 25.

9.

The correspondence between the two garden scenes is surely obvious. And here, too, there is the tone of remorse. It may be noticed that the protagonist recalls not the experience in the garden, but his removal from it, his failure to see its meaning. The experience was both *life* and *death*, but its absence is neither.

The theme appears again at the end of the section, in the protagonist's speech to "Stetson." In this passage the experience is attributed to all men of all times, to the man who was on King William Street and in the ships at Mylae, and attributed -- with the quotation from Baudelaire -- even to the reader. In addition to whatever other meanings it may have, I take the "corpse" to be a reference to the sexual-religious experience which has been neglected and repressed -- or buried. (I am struck by the presence of the "Dog" here and the "gros chien" in "Dans le Restaurant," but am not prepared to make anything of it.)

I have already commented upon the section "Death by Water" as it appears in Eliot's French poem, and shown its relationship to the theme. The theme appears conspicuously again at the end of *The Waste Land*, in the passages respectively introduced by *Datta*, *Dayadhvam*, *Damyatta*. There is the first statement of the intensity and persistent importance of the experience: "The awful daring of a moment's surrender." And then it is characterized as an unforgettable and desirable moment of freedom and communion: "I have heard the key / Turn in the door once and turn once only." And finally the experience is again referred to in terms nostalgic and remorseful: especially significant are the words *would have responded*:

10.

The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands.

In a previous number of *The Southern Review* (Spring, 1939)

I have discussed *Ash Wednesday* at some length, indicating that the two ideas basic to the conceptual structure of the poem are the course of purgation prescribed by St. John of the Cross in his *Dark Night of the Soul*, and the principle of spiritual guidance symbolized by the "Lady" who appears prominently throughout the poem. In *Ash Wednesday* the theme which we discuss is more centrally and elaborately employed than in earlier poems, especially with regard to its religious aspect. I shall attend here only to salient points, those most obviously involved in the continuity of the theme.

The first section of *Ash Wednesday* expresses the senility and weakened sensual faculties which represent remoteness from the experience and despair of renewing it:

Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power. . .

The second section is addressed by the bones to the Lady. Among the abundant and complex elements of this section are those which refer to the nature of the experience, especially in the song of the bones to the "Lady of silences":

Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness...
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment

11.

Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied...
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

The *memory* and *forgetfulness* recall Eliot's remark that "Dante may have forgotten or never known" the name of the person represented by Beatrice. This stated obscurity and elusiveness recurs in his subsequent writings. It appears again in the form of questions at the opening of the fourth section of *Ash Wednesday*: "Who walked between the violet and the violet..." A passage from this same section will illustrate the manner in which the theme is dramatically and symbolically developed throughout *Ash Wednesday*, as well as the significance put upon it:

> Here are the years that walk between, bearing
> Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
> One who moves in the time between sleep and waking...

The protagonist speaks from his condition of religious purgation. The present moment is seen as one resulting from and therefore containing the spiritual activity since the initial experience. This idea, it may be observed, is in accord with the co-existence of all times, as expressed elsewhere in *Ash Wednesday*, in *The Waste Land*, *Burnt Norton* and later poems. The experience is regarded as not being subject to temporal flux but as the timeless unchanging reality. It is, nevertheless, sought and approached by temporal means. For until the experience has been recreated one must act in the world of past, present, and future. Thus, intimations of the

12.

experience, the appearance of the Lady, come under special conditions,
"in the time between sleep and waking." It may be noticed that in this
poem and in others such moments are always characterized by a dream-like,
twilight atmosphere, as in the final section:

> In this brief transit where the dreams cross
> The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying...

In *Ash Wednesday*, more clearly and fully than in earlier poems, restoration of the childhood experience is identified with the goal of religious life, its meaning "on mature reflection upon it. . . the attraction towards God."

Similar to *Ash Wednesday* in its basic meaning, as well as in
its lyrical quality, is the poem "Marina," for which Eliot derived his
"objective correlative" from Shakespeare's *Pericles*. The speaker of
Eliot's poem is Pericles, Prince of Tyre, who, after years of believing
that his daughter Marina is dead, finds to his amazement that she is still
alive. The following passage is from the recognition scene (V,i) between
father and daughter:

> *Pericles:* But are you flesh and blood?
> Have you a working pulse? and are no fairy?
> Motion! Well; speak on. Where were you born?
> And wherefore call'd Marina?

The usefulness of this scene for Eliot's purposes is apparent: the
unusual meeting between father and daughter is made dramatically to
symbolize a restoration of the experience:

> What is this face, less clear and clearer
> The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger--

13.

Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer
than the eye

Whispers and small laughter between leaves and
hurrying feet

Under sleep, where all the waters meet...

Obviously significant here are the dreamlike quality and the telling
reference to the children among the foliage. And Eliot repeats in this
poem the half-remembered character of the experience, the self-conscious
effort for its recreation:

I made this, I have forgotten

And remember...

Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

<u>Burnt Norton</u>, even more than <u>Ash Wednesday</u> -- more than any
other of Eliot's poems -- displays clearly on its surface the spiritual
quest, the constant endeavor to interpret the experience and thus to
re-live it. The poem is a kind of essay, including within its range
scenic description of the <u>garden</u> and philosophic discourse on the ultimate
significance of the experience. In this poem Eliot repeats in effect and
amplifies the passages in his essay on Dante. <u>Burnt Norton</u> opens with a
statement of the co-existence of all times, the ever-presence of past
and future. An implication of this is that the lost experience of the
past and the desired experience of the future are in no way repetitions,
but exist identically in the timeless reality that is possibly available
at any actual moment. As the first section of the poem progresses, it is
granted, perhaps ironically, that the experience may not have actually
occurred, may be only imagined; yet it is significantly implied that the

14.

experience is a goal to which one might return, as if it should have
happened but did not, through a fault of human nature.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Not having had the experience is comparable to a refusal of it; it is real
for each of us, though we may not be awakened to that fact -- just as God
may exist despite the opinion of a world of infidels. In the next passage
a bird speaks, beckoning "Into our first world," leading excitedly to
the experience. But this is the "deception of the thrush," the deception
of phenomenal details which seem by association to recall the experience:
the scene that follows is not genuine, but mechanical and devitalized;
the music is "unheard" and "hidden;" privacy is spoiled by an "unseen
eyebeam" and the roses have the "look of flowers that are looked at."
The details of the situation have been forcibly willed -- "as our guests,
accepted and accepting." For an instant the dry concrete pool is filled,
the lotus rises (with sexual significance). But the pool is "water out
of sunlight," a mirage, and disappears when a cloud passes over. The
effort is thus one of torment, disappointing in its partial and insufficient

15.

revelation. And yet, even in such attenuated form, an intimation of
the hidden experience is an unbearable strain on the limited human
capacity:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

The second section begins with a discourse upon the reconciliation of extremes; all oppositions ("forgotten wars"), all that seems disparate in life and in the universe, are finally discernible in a harmonious pattern which has issued from a single source. And this source is the "still point," describable only in paradoxical terms: "Neither from nor towards. . . neither arrest nor movement." It is comparable to, perhaps derives from, the point in *Paradiso*, XXIX, "where every *where* and every *when* is focused." In Dante's poem the point is at the center of the nine circles representing the angelic orders, and the point itself represents the creative love of God, as it does in Eliot's poem:

> I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot
> say where.

The "experience" is, thus, allied with the point and partakes of its
quality:

> a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
> Erhebung without motion, concentration
> Without elimination, both a new world
> And the old made explicit, understood
> In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
> The resolution of its partial horror.

This recalls the "terror" that follows the experience in "Gerontion."

16.

And here again are the hardly bearable reality and the circumstantial details of the temporal world by which it can be approached:

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smoke-fall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

The third section presents a picture of the barrier to the conquest of time and a means by which this barrier may be overcome.

The barrier is the spiritual desolation of the world; it is to be overcome by the purgational system of St. John of the Cross -- the descent into darkness and "perpetual solitude" -- stated in compressed form at the end of the section.

A symbolic expression of St. John's *Dark Night* opens the fourth section: the day has been buried and the sun obscured. There follows then an eager questioning, "Will the sunflower turn to us," asking in effect whether life, rebirth, will come to one who waits in the prescribed passivity of purgation. And the section ends with an answer:

After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the
light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

The "kingfisher" I associate with the Fisher King of the *waste land*, which will be redeemed by a divine act. The passage thus means that there will be a rebirth when, through grace, the world is restored to contact with the "still point."

18.

play -- the action-plot and the family relationships -- are distinguishable
Harry's many remarks upon time, experience, and a special kind of con-
sciousness, remarks which all the family but Agatha consider nonsense and
insanity. As the play develops it becomes more and more apparent that
Harry's problem is not whether or not he murdered his wife, a moral problem,
but a spiritual problem of longer standing to which the murder is only
incidental. And this is what Harry finally discovers for himself. He is
beset by a peculiar need, one which his family and the world do not under-
stand. This need is the "experience," the advance toward spiritual rebirth
and the peace of religious love -- variously represented throughout Eliot's
poetry and described in _Burnt Norton_ as the "inner freedom from the prac-
tical desire."

I shall take notice of several instances in the play which
clearly echo the theme in terms which we have seen to be its most specific
representation. The first of these is in the long conversation between
Harry and Mary. They discuss their childhood, their most intimate attitudes;
and to Harry's question -- "Is the spring not an evil time, that excites
us with lying voices?" -- Mary responds with surprising sympathy and under-
standing:

Pain is the opposite of joy
But joy is a kind of pain
I believe the moment of birth
Is when we have knowledge of death
I believe the season of birth
Is the season of sacrifice...

19.

And thus for a moment the "experience" is suggested to Harry:

You bring me news
Of a door that opens at the end of a corridor,
Sunlight and singing; when I had felt sure
That every corridor only led to another,
Or to a blank wall...

But Mary's brief communion with Harry soon fails, and it remains for his
aunt Agatha to lead him to the door of the rose-garden.

The climactic scene of the play is the long dialogue of Harry
and Agatha, in which she tells him of the loveless and bitter relation-
ship of his father and mother, of her own love for his father whom she
prevented from killing his mother, and of her emotional attachment to
Harry himself. Just before giving this information Agatha introduces
the motif of the "experience":

There are hours when there seems to be no past or
future,
Only a present moment of pointed light
When you want to burn. When you stretch out your
hand
To the flames. They only come once,
Thank God, that kind. Perhaps there is another kind,
I believe, across a whole Thibet of broken stones
That lie, fang up, a lifetime's march. I have
believed this.

And after Agatha's account, Harry exclaims --

Look, I do not know why,
I feel happy for a moment, as if I had come home.
It is quite irrational, but now
I feel quite happy, as if happiness
Did not consist in getting what one wanted
Or in getting rid of what can't be rid of
But in a different vision. This is like an end.

At this point I wish to refer to the penetrating study of _The Family Reunion_ (The Southern Review, Autumn, 1940) made by Mr. C. L. Barber, whose

20.

critical judgments I accept in large part. Mr. Barber presents an extremely
interesting and persuasive criticism of the play from the psychoanalytic
point of view. Yet I differ with his attitude that the play cannot be
meaningfully interpreted except by this approach, which is illustrated by
his comment on the verses just quoted:

> Just because statements like this cannot be otherwise
> understood, one must employ psychoanalytic inter-
> pretation to get at their content--interpretation,
> that is, appropriate to non-communicative, asocial
> psychic products. In pursuing the meaning of the play,
> gaps appear which cannot be bridged except by follow-
> ing out unconscious symbolic associations.

Mr. Barber's application of the psychoanalytic terms may be wholly
accurate. But I think it is evident that passages such as the one on
which he comments here **are** otherwise meaningful, and meaningful as the
author consciously intended. It is true that one could hardly expect an
audience or reader to grasp this meaning without a special preparation,
a familiarity with its repeated occurrence throughout Eliot's work. If,
however, one considers the play in the light of the already established
continuity, the theme is no less understandable here than elsewhere. One
so prepared would surely recognize the significance of the passage that
comes toward the end of the dialogue between Harry and Agatha:

**Agatha:** I only looked through the little door
When the sun was shining on the rose-garden:
And heard in the distance tiny voices
And then a black raven flew over.
And then I was only my own feet walking
Away, down a concrete corridor
In a dead air...

**Harry:** In and out, in an endless drift
Of shrieking forms in a circular desert...

21.

**Agatha:** Up and down, through the stone passages
Of an immense and empty hospital...

**Harry:** To and fro, dragging my feet
Among inner shadows in the smoky wilderness...
I was not there, you were not there, only our
phantasms
And what did not happen is as true as what did
happen,
O my dear, and you walked through the little door
And I ran to meet you in the rose-garden.

**Agatha:** This is the next moment. This is the
beginning.
We do not pass twice through the same door
Or return to the door through which we did not
pass.
I have seen the first stage: relief from what
happened
Is also relief from that unfulfilled craving
Flattered in sleep and deceived in waking.

You have a long journey.

The picture of agonized effort which is portrayed in the trance-like
speeches of Harry and Agatha is that put upon one by the experience,
the spiritual quest in an unsympathetic world. After the revelation
by Agatha Harry is suddenly changed. Now he welcomes the presence of
the Eumenides. Now it is clear to him that he "must go," that he must
follow the "bright angels," which formerly he fled in horror. And thus
once again Eliot invokes the paradoxical discipline of St. John's
*Dark Night of the Soul*. We recall that the way to salvation begins in
*Ash Wednesday* with spiritual and sensual debility, in *Burnt Norton* with
the descent into darkness; and toward the end of the play it is stated
in Harry's decisive words:

Where does one go from a world of insanity?
Somewhere on the other side of despair.
To the worship in the desert, the thirst and de-
privation,
A stony sanctuary and a primitive altar,
The heat of the sun and the icy vigil

22.

A care over lives of humble people,
The lesson of ignorance, of incurable diseases.
Such things are possible. It is love and terror
Of what waits and wants me, and will not let me fall.

As I have said, I agree with Mr. Barber's critical judgments.
The play has serious failings. Most important among these, it seems to
me, is the degree of obscurity in which Eliot keeps his most important
symbols; and also, his failure to integrate fully action and motivation
with the dominant theme. Except for Harry and Agatha, none of the
characters realizes what is happening. The central character's existence
in a world of his own, though he admits it, prevents a true dramatic
situation. The other characters do not know this world and refuse to
know it. The nearest they come to it is their impersonal statement in
the final Chorus: "We do not like the maze in the garden, because it too
closely resembles the maze in the brain." But Eliot's experiment was a
bold one.

The theme, as we have followed it so far, appears in a
peculiarly personal application, not related -- except negatively, by
exclusiveness -- to subjects that are public and historical in the most
common sense. In the earlier work the experience is simply portrayed,
referred to, or reflected fragmentarily. And then in _Ash Wednesday_,
_Burnt Norton_, and _The Family Reunion_ it is developed conceptually and
dramatically. In Eliot's most recent work, _East Coker_ and _The Dry
Salvages_ (Partisan Review, May-June, 1940, and May-June, 1941), we find
the theme no less personal in its significance, but also recognizably and

23.

directly related to the social scene, the World Wars and present chaos;
that is, the meaning of the theme is extended from the individual to
society.

The first poem, East Coker, has been discussed with illumina-
ting information and sound comment in an article by Mr. James Johnson
Sweeney (The Southern Review, Spring, 1941). As a brief supplement to Mr.
Sweeney's interpretation I shall indicate the presence of the "experience"
in East Coker. The first two sections of the poem are a commentary on
the cycle of history, the Renaissance and the world today, with the con-
clusion that there is "only a limited value / In the knowledge derived
from experience," that the only wisdom is humility. In Section III the
darkness of the modern scene is equated with the spiritual darkness
defined by St. John of the Cross: "let the darkness come upon you / Which
shall be the darkness of God." Thus the darkness is a prefiguring of
redemption: "the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
dancing." And the redemption, the restoration to which purgation by
humility and abjectness leads, is again represented by the "experience
guided by the light of faith."

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstacy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it here and now? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.

The fourth section represents the spiritual suffering by which Christian

24.

salvation is to be attained. The last section of East Coker is a
personal statement of the effort for discipline that has been made,
of the meager and humble result, and yet of determination to continue,
despite the increasing difficulty of the times. And now, not the
"experience" alone is seen as significant of the essential reality in
which beginning and end are identical, but all life, all history:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

So far as I know, a close and thorough "reading" of The Dry Salvages has not yet been published; and I am not prepared to make one here. Though it may contain the typical uncited allusions and quotations, the poem seems sufficiently understandable for my purpose of indicating the "persistent theme." The Dry Salvages, a sequel to East Coker, continues the discourse on history and its relation to the "experience" and spiritual reality. As in East Coker, the meaning of reality is extended beyond the experience:

The moments of happiness -- not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfillment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination--
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations -- not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:

25.

The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

The "primitive terror" is represented in the poem by three principle symbols: the river, the ocean, and the rocks, all of which seem to be controlled by secular civilization but which continue actually as menacing and destructive. I have not space here to dwell upon the full meaning of the ocean, except to indicate that, in its immense shapelessness, it represents history as other than "sequence" and "development." It is thus already symbolical at the end of East Coker:

> We must be still and still moving...
> Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
> The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters...

In _The Dry Salvages_ the symbolism is continued with the representation as "seamen" of those who are to live into the future, and with the exclamation to them, "Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers."

The final section of the poem repeats that the spiritual reality is approachable not alone in the ecstatic moment, but by a way of life:

> Men's curiosity searches past and future
> And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
> The point of intersection of the timeless
> With time, is an occupation for the saint --
> No occupation either, but something given
> And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
> Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
> For most of us there is only the unattended
> Moment, the moment in and out of time,
> The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
> The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
> Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
> That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
> While the music lasts.

And the poem ends affirming that life, even though it is short of
saintliness and lacks the given ecstatic moment, may be meaningful and
purposeful:

And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us this is the aim
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew tree)
The life of significant soil.

I am aware that serious extra-literary questions arise from
the subject. But it has not been my intention here either to give assent
or dissent or to make qualifications in that respect. My purpose has
been to call attention to an important element in the conceptual and
symbolic continuity of Eliot's poetry, perhaps to make more apprehensible
the nature of the continuity and to clarify further the individual poems.
I believe that a realization of the theme brings a fuller appreciation to
Eliot's reader, and that it is necessary to the critic for a consideration
of Eliot's technical effort and achievement.