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human agency, a criterion embodied in institutions (such as a church, for
example) that give individual identities not only metaphysical density but
meaning as well. What I mean by this is simply that we cannot ascend from
the details of experience in Prufrock to a framing cosmology, as we can,
say, in any of Donne s dramatic lyrics. The Canonization is an instance, no
matter what mutations of tone the speaker performs, of the imperturbability
of the Christian cosmos, not just as doctrine, but as a web of living norms, a
model of thought, feeling, and conduct. The speaker s defiance in defence of a
singular love at the beginning of Donne s poem, in which, at first, separation
from the world is emphasized, slowly dissolves as he finds his way back under
the symbolic canopy of Christian values from which, he discovers, the lovers
have never really escaped. The changing tonalities of the speaking voice signal
the phases of this motion without movement. Donne begins with an angry
outburst which protects the libidinal integrity of the lovers. It ends in the
celebratory calm of their inclusion through the ageless rituals of a historical
community of feeling and belief.
The Hollow Men
The Prufrock world is revisited in The Hollow Men (CP 89 92). Although
it is a poem about the dilemmas of belief, The Hollow Men is also explicit
about language. Whatever it is that has happened to them loss of faith, loss
of belief in themselves their voices have dried up and been made quiet and
meaningless (89). In the broken jaw of our lost kingdom, they avoid
speech (91). The language of the poem lapses into the familiar sounds of
childhood nursery rhymes (as near the end of The Waste Land) and yet they
are strangely menacing. We are not surprised when it concludes in a defeated
stammer:
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the (92)
The Shadow may fall across philosophical abstractions, the idea / And the
reality (91 92), but it also falls across voices, halting them and turning them
into whimpers, at the world s end (92). This is not all. The speaker in The
Hollow Men does perceive a living language elsewhere, somewhere else, over
there, where
56 The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot
. . . voices are
In the wind s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star. (90)
There, language is singing and voices are (my italics). This distant lyricism
cannot be heard in the dead land and neither can the eyes open wide on a
visionary moment, Sunlight on a broken column (90). In anticipation of
aYrmations to come later in the 1920s, the speaker in the poem acknowledges
hope (91) as he trembles with tenderness and yearns for lips that would
kiss and Form prayers (91), the modal would here deferring faith,
suspending belief, for the time being. But for now, in the moment of extreme
doubt, the lines that ask Is it like this / In death s other kingdom (90) seem to
render the visionary moment still more remote as the speaker considers the
thoroughly distressing prospect that even There, no redemptive vision is
possible. The depths of this despair cannot yet be plumbed. He recoils, and in
Section IV he returns to the experiential realities of life in the hollow valley
(91), enumerating those things of which he is sure, painful and unsatisfying as
they are. Subsequently, Ash-Wednesday, Journey of the Magi, Four Quartets,
and a series of verse plays would return to the themes of faith and belief. But
before the religious turn, Eliot would have to continue the journey through
hell begun with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Gerontion
In 1920 Eliot published a slim volume of verse, Poems 1920, in which his
scrutiny of the conditions besetting Prufrock and the hollow men are explored
with a new incisiveness. The first and most important poem in the collection,
Gerontion (CP 39 41), zeros in on themes only partially realized earlier. The
dramatic monologue as a poetic form continues to be of use. We hear a new
voice speaking, Gerontion, but there is very little to speak of, if we are looking
to psychoanalyze him. He really is only a voice and a name, the name merely a
rhetorical convenience or at least a way of conveying an aging subject, a man at
the end of his life, and perhaps, a man, more forebodingly, at the end of his
tether. Language is again a central concern, but now the references to it
converge with a new vocabulary, the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, a
seventeenth-century clergyman whom Eliot had recently begun to read,
and the Bible, the word already resonant of the Word. Eight years later,
Ash-Wednesday will bring these associations into more secure alignment.
Works 57
Gerontion, however, brings to the surface a submerged theme in The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, namely, the status and value of the know-
ledge we gain from experience. The epigraph from Shakespeare s Measure for
Measure (lll.i. 32 34) casts doubt on the value of experience when the speaker
in the play, in this case the Duke, tells a condemned man that life is not worth
keeping because one never has it in reality but merely experiences it as if it
were a dream. In the philosophy of the modern age, from René Descartes to
our own time, experience is the foundation of our knowledge. This is the
basis of the scientific culture of the West and of its principal method of
inquiry, the empirical imperative. What we can see, touch, hear, measure,
weigh, and so forth, forms the ground on which we build the house of
knowledge. Such a theory presupposes an observing subject of some philo-
sophical substance, secure in his or her identity, secure in the validity and
comprehensiveness of personal experience. After Prufrock, such assump-
tions are at best dubious; at worst, if we begin to see through Eliot s eyes, they
are a self-inflicted blindness that obscures true knowledge from our eyes.
Gerontion has arrived at a place where experience will be held up for scrutiny
like a lab specimen but minus the ruling illusions about its validity. Decay,
deracination, delusion, disease are the conditions in which a Blistered and
peeled humanity endures. On the horizon a menacing figure of retribution
or redemption seems ready to spring. The modal grammar We would see a
sign! (39) defers his coming, but we cannot be sure whether this could be
put in Prufrock s idiom Should I say, we would see a sign or whether the
modal now indicates unremitting spiritual distress.
We are oVered characters to ponder, persons of uncertain race and lineage,
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