The Columbia History of British Poetry (146 page)

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Page 574
ted window bellied like the fig's fruit"). What arrests him is "unheard, unspoken." Is he, then, reattached to the maternal principle or, on the contrary, does he seek to transcend it? His ambivalence is somehow at once persistent and mild.
Much the same ambivalence separates "The Journey of the Magi" from "Marina" (both part of
Ariel Poems
). The first perhaps rejoices more in "a temperate valley, / Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation," than in Christ's birth, ''this Birth . . . / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death." But "Marina" (as an
Ariel
poem) is ethereal. Although the speaker enumerates (like one stuck to the stuff of this world) seas, shores, rocks, islands, "scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog," he calls these "images"they are filmy things stripped of matter and floating about in memory. They constitute a place in which "grace" is "dissolved." Eliot's poem hovers at the point of total etherealization. It is the beautiful as the sublime, a contradictory condition:
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Drawn like spiritual air from Shakespeare's more solid Pericles, the speaker recovers his daughter, Marina, who is herself less flesh than a metaphor of the marine and feminine essence of memory and continuity. She is thus both near (inexplicably intimate and familiar) and distant (inexpressible). She allegorizes the speaker's more-than-Pericleian hope for new life after this our exile, one that will recover something inestimably precious (hence the suitability, here, of the New World landscape along which Eliot sailed as a youth):
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
This poetry of the noun is Eliot's stylistic approximation to impersonal grace. Even as it articulates a hope blessed by the feminine, the language denies itself a feminine texture.
Eliot's last masterwork, or series of them,
Four Quartets
(1943), prods the possibility of a Death that is Birth, but favorsor falls down onthe desiccated approach of "The Journey of the Magi," not the
 
Page 575
exquisite aeration of "Marina." Nonetheless, the first
Quartet
, "Burnt Norton," begins with this last: Eliot was with Emily Hale at the abandoned estate of Burnt Norton when a dry pool "was filled with water out of sunlight" and "The surface glittered out of heart of light." Unlike the hyacinth girl in
The Waste Land
, demanding that she be heaped with signs of fertility and devotion, the new female companion is the sidelong muse of a "reality'' beyond human affections. But many of the following passages in the
Quartets
cultivate, as hinted, a humbling desolation that is acridly, then odorlessly, male. Eliot chooses redemption from love over a redeeming love.
Again, not for Eliot "The backward look behind the assurance / Of recorded history, the backward half-look / Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror." He could not join Yeats and Lawrence in a renewing atavism (the originally pagan fertility myth of the Fisher King in
The Waste Land
is just a feint, a foldable structure). The "moments of happiness" are "not the sense of well-being, / Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection . . . but the sudden illumination" for which "agony" prepares. The "time of death is every moment"; death is the frontier. "Fare forward, travellers!" ("The Dry Salvages"). Eliot pressed the human to inhuman limits on the ethereal, not the material, side.
Instead of the mimesis of a dissolving grace, as in "Marina," what predominates here is a fallen
arrangement
, the more conspicuous for being repeated four times in its larger outline. The grand design of the
Quartets
has significance chiefly as the frame, occasion, and support of meditations that, although it is much to say that they are richly varied, are also frequently compelling and beautiful, if occasionally too much the exercise, a performance, or too prosy ("I have said before / That the past experience revived in the meaning / Is not the experience of one life only / But of many generations," etc.) This marks a great difference from
The Waste Land
, which is at once a seeming Brownian motion and a total action.
Four Quartets
recalls Eliot's announcement in "Ash-Wednesday" that he must "construct something / Upon which to rejoice." The lack of an engaged and complex dramatic movement leaves the poem open to a connoisseur's pick-and-choose operations. And it allows the poet's diction to skitter, skirt the donnish. Eliot is immeasurably more self-conscious in the
Quartets
than in
The Waste Land
.
Like Yeats and Lawrence, Eliot was great not least in allowing his imagination to go to the limits of conceiving a deity that, given his private torments and the want of a fertilizing intensity in the age, he
 
Page 576
thought it was of the utmost importance to summon. All three poets drew themselves up to full height to oppose the godless secularism inherited from the nineteenth century, and whatever corpses of Christianity it bore in its current. All three were explorers, pioneers of continuity. But Eliotlargely because he repudiated as unregenerate the "whole personality" favored by Yeats and Lawrencehad no single style, was not at home in a living man's speech. Speech hurt him into poetry. He ventriloquized (
The Waste Land
); he litanized ("Ash-Wednesday"); he stripped the language down ("Marina"). Finally, like a John Ashberywithout, as yet, the historical provocation to be edgily flippant, almost cheerfully deprived of the great beliefshe practiced in
Four Quartets
a heterogeneity of verse manner and forms that, unlike those in
The Waste Land
, are not so much reinvented or deconstructed as quoteddonned and discarded. It was late in Eliot's career, late in modernism, late for new faith that could move poetry in new ways.
Further Reading
Donoghue, Denis, ed.
The Integrity of Yeats
. Cork: Mercier, 1964. Reprinted Folcroft, Penn.: Folcroft, 1971.
Donoghue, Denis.
William Butler Yeats
. New York, Ecco Press, 1989.
Gilbert, Sandra.
Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence
. 2d ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.
Gordon, Lyndall.
Eliot's Early Years
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Gordon, Lyndall.
Eliot's New Life
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
MacNeice, Louis.
The Poetry of W. B. Yeats
. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
Marshall, Tom.
The Psychic Mariner: A Reading of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence
. New York: Viking, 1970.
Moody, Anthony David.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
, Poet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
North, Michael.
The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Stead, Christian Karlson.
Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement
. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985.
Whitaker, Thomas R.
Swan and Shadow: Yeats's Dialogue with History
. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964.

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