THE
HUMAN PREDICAMENT IN
ELIOT’S
EARLY POETRY
DR. GUTTIKONDA NAGESWARA
RAO, M. A., Ph. D.
The
optimism, confidence and assurance of the earlier age are replaced in modern
times by anxiety, insecurity, fear and despair. This change of outlook is
largely due to the high frequency of unprecedented social and intellectual
cataclysms which have occurred during the twentieth century. The thirty-six
year period between 1914 and 1949, the period during which Eliot produced his
best in poetry and criticism, included a decade of world wars, ten years of
world depression–not to mention the Russian, Italian and German revolutions,
the Spanish Civil War and Indian Independence movement. These disturbances and
changes created a widespread revolt against all kinds of traditions. They also
led to an uncertainty about all standards–political, social, moral and
intellectual.
Naturally, this period
has seen the spread of radical doubts about human life and dignity. Though
there is nothing new in determinism in a philosophical or religious sense, to
the follow of scientists of natural evolution, Marx and Freud determinism in
human affairs has given a seemingly scientific basis. As for man’s relation to
environment, the physical universe of science has become increasingly larger
and more incomprehensible to the common people who do not possess a special
knowledge of science mathematics. Marxism showed that human societies, in their
organisations and historical development, are predetermined technological
considerations. Freud advocated that human individuals are predetermined by the
formation or malformation of unconscious parts of their minds during infancy or
early childhood. Finally, the anthropological approach to human ciyilization
and culture revealed that many a cherished belief and institution takes its
significance solely from the cultural framework in which it occurs. Outside
this framework they have neither validity nor meaning.
This many-sided
revolution in all areas of human existence created a tough classical pessimistic
outlook. As Hulme has pointed out, in the light of absolute values, “man
himself is judged to be essentially limited and imperfect. He can accomplish
anything of value by discipline–ethical and political. Order is thus not merely
negative, but creative and liberating. Institutions are necessary.”1
This reassertion of classical values, originally stated by Hulme, was later
popularised by Irving Babbitt, Eliot’s guru. Eliot, nourished in this
climate of ideas, is naturally concerned with the perennial predicament of man.
Therefore, two themes, man’s perpetual metaphysical preoccupation and the
failure of a depraved religion in guiding man through the stresses of life,
occupy a prominent place in Eliot’s work, even in his juvenilia. In his first
poem, A Fable for Feasters, Eliot satirises a band of merry friars given
to heavy feasting. The gluttonous friars are nagged by an invisible spirit, who
once seated their prior
on the steeple
To the astonishment of
all the people, 2
and thus whips them into
their senses.
Another poem called A Lyric shows his
metaphysical enquiry:
If time and space, as
sages say,
Are things which cannot
be,
The Sun which does not
feel decay,
No greater is than we...
3
In his The Boston
Evening Transcript Eliot presents the solid old generation as leading an
orderly but obsolete life. Their life is a sharp contrast to the modern
weariness nodding good-bye to the old wisdom:
I mount the steps and
ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would
turn to nod good-bye to
La Rochefocauld, 4
He presents the last flicker of this
dying vitality before its final extinction to emphasize what humanity was and
what it is becoming. After the death of the maiden aunt in Aunt
Helen, the order she maintained is broken.
And the foottnan sat
upon the dining-table
Holding the second
housemaid on his knees.
Who has always been so
careful while her mistress lived. 5
Traditional sanctity and ethical order, ‘the unalterable
law’, having lost its social validity became silent witnesses of this progressive
deterioration of life. While describing this decay,
Miss
Nancy Ellicott smoked
And
danced all the modern dances;
And
her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it
But
they knew that it was modern. 6
Eliot
quietly directs our attention to the forces of the eternal law silently, witnessing
the process:
Upon
the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew
and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The
army of unalterable law. 7
What is to be noted here is the compelling
presence of the inescapable moral order. Though ignored it makes itself felt
and is there the moment humanity opens its eyes.
Eliot
opened to the world around him not only his eyes but his brains and heart as well–his
whole being as it were. The eye is blind without the brain behind it; what the
brain grasps is lifeless without the whole being which imparts life to what is
seen. A man of unified sensibility feels his thoughts as immediately as the odour
of a rose; every thought becomes an experience for him and it modifies his sensibility.
Eliot conveys this type of immediate experience in his poems on urban setting.
Hence landscape which is always passive becomes active and eloquent in his
poetry. The dull diurnal routine of urban life presented in Preludes communicates
the futility of life devoid of a central moral authority;
The
worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering
fuel in vacant lots. 8
The landscape presents a picture of life that it
can hardly understand: it gives us the intimations of the eternal principle of
life governing the whole flux of existence. It shows us the enduring in the
transient. The light of the transcendental wisdom breaks through the shutters
of ignorance; the lurking principle of rejuvenation hidden in the winter of
forgetfulness announces its existence through the sparrows in the gutters:
And when all the world
came back
And the light crept up
between the shutters
And you heard the
sparrow in the gutters,
You had such a vision of
the street
As the street hardly
understands; 9
Man’s incapacity to ignore this metaphysical
reality is implied even in the instances of his most blatant denial of his
awareness of it. Sweeney, the embodiment of the rebellious flesh seeking
genital gratification, may boast of his downright animalism:
Birth, and copulation,
and death.
That’s all the facts
when you come to brass tacks
Birth, and copulation,
and death. 10
But his very exclusive emphasis on the physical
betrays his inner vulnerability. Unable to ignore the enveloping boredom
proceeding from his want of a guiding ethical force he wishes to escape to an
Utopian savage island free from the paraphernalia of modern civilization:
Well that’s life on a
crocodile isle.
There’s no telephones
There’s no gramophones
There’s no motor cars
No two-seators, no
six-seators,
No Citroens, no
Rolls-Royce.
Nothing to eat but the
fruit as it grows. 11
Sweeney’s attempts to nullify his gnawing inner
vacuum by sensual indulgence and deliberate gloating over the brutal sadism of
sex murders, land him only in a more disturbing dilemma of life and death. He
tells, with an implied generalization about hidden brutal impulses of human
beings, of his friend who did a girl in:
I know a man once did a
girl in
Any man might do a girl
in
Any man has to, needs to,
wants to
Once in a lifetime, do a
girl in.
Well he kept her there
in a bath
With a gallon of lysol
in a bath. 12
This friend of sweeney cheats all, society as
well as law, but succumbs to his own invisible self:
He didn’t know if he was
alive
and the girl was dead
He didn’t know if the
girl was alive
and he was dead
He didn’t know if they
both were alive
or both were dead
If he was alive the
milkman wasn’t
and the rent collector
wasn’t
And if they were alive
then he was dead. 13
The unrecognised inner
desire of humanity to go beyond the immediate is reflected in the attempts of
the fallen women in Sweeny Agonistes to read their destinies through
playing cards. Doris and Dusty, the gay prostitutes, try to guess their custom
and luck by the cards they draw. A group of people arrive exactly at that
moment proving what the cards foretold:
Dusty:
Wasn’t I saying I always
draw court cards?
The Knave of Hearts!
(A whistle outside of
the window.)
Well I never
What a coincidence!
Cards are queer!
(Whistle again.)
Doris:
Of course, the Knave of
Hearts is Sam! 14
In this incident, what
looks like a mere superstitious and superficial indulgence of humanity betrays
the inner concern (in disguise) to know the destiny guiding human affairs.
Thus, Eliot shows the profound significance of apparently futile and trivial
aspects of common life. He believed that any life “if accurately and profoundly
penetrated, is interesting and always strange.” 15
Even at the present day,
the craving for the spiritual and metaphysical is there. In fact, the
frustration of modern humanity follows from its failure to satisfy this
craving. It is in its failure to give guidance to this inner urge of man to go
beyond himself that Eliot finds fault with the established church. Without
making a naive direct attack on church and religion, he shows its putrid
corruption by ironically juxtaposing its activity with the continuous rhythm of
life in nature. Church as it stands is much worse than an existence of ‘mere
flesh and blood’ because it is not troubled by the common spiritual struggles
which the flesh is liable to. It has not given up its rhythm of life: hunting,
mating and sleeping at the proper time, but the ways of the church are as
mysterious as the ways of its God:
At mating time the hippo’s
voice
Betrays inflexions
hoarse and odd,
The hippopotamus’s day.
Is passed in sleep; at
night he hunts;
God works in a
mysterious way
The church can sleep and
feed at once. 16
The hippo lives a rhythmic life uninterrupted
and after death ascends from its damp savannas into divine presence while the
quiring angels are singing in loud hosanna. But the church remains below wrapt
in the old miasmal mist. Religion instead of being a beacon light turned into a
caterpillar. The same idea of nature carrying out its inherent functions
undeviated whereas religion and philosophy are immersed in linguistic pedantry
and subtle but futile controversies is depicted in Mr. Eliot’s Sunday
Morning Service:
With hairy bellies pass
between
The staminate and
pistillate,
Blest office of the
epicene.
The masters of the
subtle schools
Are controversial,
polymath. 17
Eliot for a moment seems
to prefer child’s paradise (not a childish vision) to the doctrinal
perambulations of spirituality, devoid of the touch of life, promising heaven.
His childhood joys with pipit are gone: all the doctrines cannot get them back.
In A Cooking Egg he says:
I shall not want pipit
in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will
instruct me
In the Seven Sacred
Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will
conduct me.
But where is the penny
world I brought
To eat with pipit behind
the screen? 18
It is not by shirking
from things earthly, physical and of flesh and blood and by deliberately cultivating
abstract entities that man can evolve a living system of belief. On the
contrary, one has to live through the experiences of flesh and blood and
transcend them to arrive at a live metaphysical awareness. Donne could be so
metaphysical because he was so physical:
Donne, I suppose, was
such another
Who found no substitute
for sense,
To seize and clutch and
penetrate;
Expert beyond
experience,
He knew the anguish of
the marrow
The augue of the
skeleton;
No contact possible to
flesh
Allayed the fever of the
bone. 19
It is only when one goes
beyond the physical experience through experiencing it that one realizes the
whispers of immortality, the anguish and augue of the inner-being which cannot
be quenched by ‘any contact possible to flesh’, the mundane pleasures.
Though we have taken
long strides on the plane of material progress, we have yet to learn to live
well. The real purpose of life, progress or no progress, is to live well. The
plethoric growth of knowledge in the modern age resulted, it appears, in a
simultaneous stunting of wisdom. The development and progress of scientific
knowledge and the power it gave is unquestionably good.
5,800,000 rifles and
carbines,
102,000 machine guns,
28,000 trench mortars,
53,000 field and heavy
guns,
I cannot tell how many
projectiles, mines and fuses,
13,000 aeroplanes,
24,000 aeroplane
engines,
50,000 ammunition
waggons,
Now 55,000
army waggons,
11,000 field kitchens,
1,150 field bakeries.
20
But the questions,
whether these things are made for man and life and what for they are made, land
us in a horror too deep for human tears. Ironically enough, all modern attempts
of social reform and upliftment seem to take into account everything except a
sense of direction, the idea of values and the necessity of a significant goal.
In a haste to progress and develop, it looks as though humanity lost its
intelligence, memory and moral purpose. Has life become better after perpetual
committee formation? That is the dilemma of Eliot’s statesman and to see the
significance of his difficulty. In The Difficulties of a Statesman, the
statesman realises that the real need is something that puts an end to all this
futile activity and sets the humanity on its real purpose.
The purpose of life is
to find a purpose that transcends it, not to cling to one that engulfs it. The
whole business of living becomes wasteful when it is not guided by such
a purpose beyond life. It is the lack of such an enduring ideal that makes life
weary and burdensome. Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night, Portrait of a Lady and
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock present such a state of life.
Prufrock is a representative of the devitalised young man. The predicament of
Prufrock is universalized by making it a situation that serves as a common
denominator for all such states of existence. It is made eternal by linking it
with the state of Dante’s Guido. Both Guido and Prufrock are made spiritual
non-entities by their lack of animating faith. As they are not sure of what
they really are, they are paralysed by the fear of the world’s judgment. The
poem opens with a captivating image of living death that is modern life, a
vivid picture that conveys a whole climate of feeling of the speaker as well as
of his time. The image exercises such a strong impact on the reader and sticks
to his mind because it communicates an important truth. The touch of truth is
the touch of life. When Prufrock said:
Let us go then, you and
I,
When the evening is
spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised
upon a table. 21
He is recounting his age while recounting
himself. He is not so much an individual as a state of live-consciousness and a
refined sensibility. Here the poet is presenting a state of the mind and a
mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience and absorb
various fugitive and intermingled sense-impressions and crystallise them into
new wholes of meaning. By this method a meaningful unity is imparted to such
diverse thoughts, feelings and experiences as the digressing perfume from the
dress, sensuous feelings evoked by white and bare hands that are braceleted,
the singing of the mermaids sensuous feelings evoked bt the movements of the
yellow fog, the smoke that rises from the pipes of the lonely man in shirt
sleeves, the thoughts of squeezing the universe into a ball, ideas of
impotency, death and eternity, all leading to a single judgment. So a single
image accompanied by an eclact of syntactic gesture, the eloquent tone and a
meaningful nudge conveys experience too complex to state and communicates
depths of feeling too profound to plumb. In these few words Prufrock makes his
reader feel the emptiness, futility and purposelessness of the life he lives:
For I have known them
all already, known them all
Have known the evenings,
mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my
life with coffee spoons; 22
He might look like
saying an absurd lie if we judge his words by the canons of logic. But it is a
lie that tells the whole truth.
1 T. E. Hulme, Speculations quoted from
Eliot’s Selected Essays. Faber and Faber. p. 431.
2 The Sewanee Review Vol. LXXIV No. 1. p.
377.
3 Ibid p. 376
4 Boston Evening Transcript Collected Poems
1909-1962 New York. P. 20.
5 Ibid p. 21
6 Ibid p. 22
7 Ibid
8 Ibid, Preludes, iv, p. 15
9 Ibid iii, p. 14
10 Ibid. Fragment of an Agoo, p. 119.
11 Ibid p. 118
12 Ibid p. 122.
13 Ibid p. 123
14 Ibid. Sweeny Agonistes p. 115
15 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood. 1928. p.
31.
16 Collected Poems ‘The Hippopotamus’ p.
41.
17 Ibid. Mr. Elliot’s Sunday Morning Service. p. 48
18 Ibid. A Cooking Egg. p. 36.
19 Whispers of Immortality. p. 45
20 Ibid, Coriolon ‘Triumphal March’ p. 125.
21 Ibid. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ p. 3.
22 Ibid. p. 4.