T.S. Eliot's Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other zImpossible Unionsy 9781137479129, 1137479124

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T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0001

Also by G. Douglas Atkins THE FAITH OF JOHN DRYDEN: Change and Continuity READING DECONSTRUCTION/DECONSTRUCTIVE READING WRITING AND READING DIFFERENTLY: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (co-edited with Michael L. Johnson) QUESTS OF DIFFERENCE: Reading Pope’s Poems SHAKESPEARE AND DECONSTRUCTION (co-edited with David M. Bergeron) CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY (co-edited with Laura Morrow) GEOFFREY HARTMAN: Criticism as Answerable Style ESTRANGING THE FAMILIAR: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing TRACING THE ESSAY: Through Experience to Truth READING ESSAYS: An Invitation ON THE FAMILIAR ESSAY: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies LITERARY PATHS TO RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White T.S. ELIOT AND THE ESSAY: From The Sacred Wood to Four Quartets READING T.S. ELIOT: Four Quartets and the Journey toward Understanding E.B. WHITE: The Essayist as First-Class Writer T.S. ELIOT MATERIALIZED: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth SWIFT’S SATIRES ON MODERNISM: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing ALEXANDER POPE’S CATHOLIC VISION: “Slave to no sect” T.S. ELIOT AND THE FAILURE TO CONNECT: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings T.S. ELIOT, LANCELOT ANDREWES, AND THE WORD: Intersections of Literature and Christianity Swift, Joyce, and the Flight from Home: Quests of Transcendence and the Sin of Separation T.S. ELIOT: The Poet as Christian T.S. ELIOT AND THE FULFILLMENT OF CHRISTIAN POETICS

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0001

T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions” G. Douglas Atkins

Professor Emeritus of English, University of Kansas, USA

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0001

t.s. eliot’s christmas poems Copyright © G. Douglas Atkins, 2014. All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–1–137–47915–0 EPUB ISBN: 978–1–137–47912–9 PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–48570–0 Hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Atkins, G. Douglas (George Douglas), 1943– author.      T. S. Eliot’s Christmas poems: an essay in writing-as-reading and other “impossible unions” / G. Douglas Atkins, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Kansas, USA.        pages cm      Includes bibliographical references.      ISBN 978–1–137–48570–0 (hardback)      1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965. Ariel poems. 3. Christmas in literature. I. Title. PS3509.L43Z5997 2014 821.912—dc23 2014030394 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. First edition: 2014 www.palgrave.com/pivot doi: 10.1057/9781137479129

Contents Preface 1 Challenging Critical Orthodoxies, Confronting Binary Oppositions: The Commentator par lui-même

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2 The Gift Half Understood, or Eliot’s Ariel Poems: Beyond the Old Dispensation

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3 Triumphal March: The Problem Lies in Our Perceiving

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4 The Cultivation of Christmas Trees: Through the Eyes of Children (and the Child-like)

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5 Journey of the Magi: A Fable of Commentary: With a Second Coming to the Inexhaustible

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6 Animula: What the Simple Soul Knows, or “Living first in the silence after the viaticum” 54 7 A Song for Simeon: The Difference the Letter Makes: Prayer, Self-Criticism, Validity

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8 Marina: “Living to live in a world of time beyond me”: Recognizing, Perceiving, and Understanding

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Bibliography

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Index

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Preface You do not usually associate Thomas Stearns Eliot with “the Christmas spirit.” Even though he did write the joyous Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, from which came the phenomenally successful and popular London and Broadway musical, a book of verse that was made for his friend Geoffrey Faber’s kids. You may know that Old Possum liked Groucho Marx and admired the music hall, but you are still likely to think of him, as his friend Virginia Woolf did: dressed in a “four-piece” suit, stiffening him more than the collar of his morning coat did J. Alfred Prufrock, often thought to be Eliot’s alter ego. But as the author of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, with its embrace of the angel atop? “The child wonders at the Christmas Tree,” writes the author of The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” “Let him continue in the wonder,” never losing delight in the surprises, the “new possessions,” as well as “The expectation of the goose or the turkey / And the expected awe on its appearance.” For many readers, adult in their childishness, this poem is a sorry comedown from the poetic heights (supposedly reached before baptism into the Church of England, twenty-seven years earlier). Even more sympathetic readers, some of them offended, charge the Master with somehow equating the expectation of the Messiah with that of a seasonal turkey! What audacity, some shout! What pusillanimous discharge of misguided thinking and feeling, others proclaim! A problem—arguably, the problem—lies in our perceiving. It is my argument in this book—totally new, despite my having written about these Ariel Poems before, this vi

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one unique in being made of complete and pure readings—that Old Possum here explores with feeling, insight, and impressive poetic skill the meaning of Christmas, its demands and its joys, and our problems in coming to terms with it and the “new dispensation” that it signals and inaugurates: the “great joy” is inseparable from the “great fear,” and accordingly so much is exacted of us in the way of understanding. In these six poems, Eliot ranges widely, offering works linked in ways that have not before now been adequately explored, nor specifically related to Christmas. Read closely, and carefully, with due attention to their words and their “rhymes” with each other and with other Eliot poems (and prose), these Ariel Poems emerge. The poems need, deserve, and repay responsible reading. In them, T.S. Eliot defines, de-mythologizes, and defends child-like wonder, “the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree” and, at the same time, the Birth with which Christmas began, in the Magus’s words, as “Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” The issue remains what it has been for Eliot since “The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: what you see, how you see. In exploring “what Christmas means,” in, through, and by means of Eliot’s Ariel Poems, I am concerned, of course, with his definition of Christmas, that is, with his (Anglo-Catholic) understanding of the Incarnation: as “impossible union” (Four Quartets). My interests are also wide. Just as the Incarnation is more than an idea, or dogma, Christmas, in Eliot’s terms, also has to do, perhaps principally, with its demands— that “Hard and bitter agony” and the relationship of Birth and Death— and so with its effects on the person who comes in serious contact with it. It is, in other words, a matter of practice as well as “theory.” The Christmas poems, diverse, demanding, and never simple or simplistic, are a remarkable achievement. I wish you a happy embrace of them. Along with the demands and difficulties of both the poems and their subject(s), there is joy in the child-like recognition that atop the Christmas tree stands both a decoration and an angel. Typically, as I have said, the works that make up Eliot’s Christmas poems go unrelated to one another (although one recent critic, at least, has admirably advanced the effort to address this part-iality [John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery]). My own point of view takes its cue, and more, from Eliot’s own principles enunciated in Four Quartets, particularly his definition of “rightness” of phrase and sentence: “where every word is at home, / Taking its place to support DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0002

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the others.” This may be the most satisfactory perspective ever managed of the way to relate responsibly the part to the poetic whole; indeed, the Christmas poems foreground, in more than one way, the age-old matter of part and whole. It is also an act of undesirable partiality to overlook “the word within a word” (also Eliot, in “Gerontion”) and, ultimately, the Word within a word, “the Word within / The world and for the world” (Eliot one more time, in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems). I am happy to acknowledge again, and still, my unpayable debt to my lovely wife Rebecca, my loving children Leslie and Christopher, their delightful spouses Craig and Sharon, and our wonderful grandchildren Kate and Oliver. Then there is Dancing Diva, at once loving and funloving, taking but giving so much more. Also, the incomparable Brigitte Shull at Palgrave Macmillan, Pam LeRow at KU.

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Challenging Critical Orthodoxies, Confronting Binary Oppositions: The Commentator par lui-même Abstract: This introductory chapter outlines the approach to reading taken in the book. The approach involves writingas-reading and focuses, with attention to both Eliot and his “mentor” Lancelot Andrewes, on the “squeezing and squeezing” of words, attention to words in their immediate and remote contexts, and (eventually) deep and extended meditation. Here, commentary and poems mirror one another. The poems included in the two Ariel series are read as parts of a certain whole, around the idea for which they were commissioned, Christmas. This marks the first time they have been extensively considered (together) as Christmas poems. Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003

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Let us go then, you and I. . . .  —“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

In recent books, I have said that I practice essayistic criticism. I would not now disavow that terminology, although I have come much to prefer the term “commentary” instead of the familiar, but inaccurate, word “criticism.” “Essayistic,” in any case, names but part of the approach I take. It also needs refinement, and the idea it points to needs fulfillment. In this book, I am engaged in refining a critical practice, not in developing a (new) theory. The principles embodied in this practice represent an a posteriori approach, and I shall hope to present them in detail in another place. Here, I must be content to describe how I proceed. The subject of the commentary at this point is not so much me, or even me as commentator, but the commentary I write as intersecting and being intersected by Eliot’s poetic texts. I do not, then, impose a way of reading. I start from reading, and the way I read is hardly new, although I have not seen it played out quite as I do. I, in fact, have done “writing-as-reading” before in commenting on essays, and I have “squeezed and squeezed” the words of texts in writing about Old Possum, T.S. Eliot. He, in particular, demands, and requires, no less. But heretofore I have not put “in other words” what the “squeezing and squeezing” of a text’s words amounts to and reveals under the direction of “writing-as-reading.” I regard my earlier essais as precursors to the efforts here with Eliot’s Ariel Poems, efforts that (attempt to) complete and fulfill what came before. The “approach” (so-called for lack of a better term) perhaps begins from a long-held sense that the search for “meanings” can be deleterious, dangerous, and reductive. It bears “the old Platonick stink,” etherealizes, spiritualizes, and idealizes, and thus is alien to Eliot’s sensibility. It is a form of pur-itanism that he roundly criticizes and rejects; it substitutes abstraction for the concrete, the specific, and the materially textured that is literature (of whatever kind). The search for “meanings” may be appropriate for philosophy and theology, although I am not so sure, but I am convinced that it is not the primary business of literature. At least in approaching Eliot’s poetry, the poetics of reading and of writing incarnate in the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, and put in other words by Eliot in his keen, magisterial essay on the great seventeenth-century DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003

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preacher, are crucial: like Andrewes commenting on a passage in Scripture, I “squeeze and squeeze the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which you would never have supposed any word to possess.”1 We are, obviously, back to meaning. But it is of an altogether different sort from that displayed in our contemporary search for textual meaning. In fact, Andrewes begins, and pointedly shows great patience in staying with, individual words and their meanings, which I understand as a literal and material procedure. Squeezing and squeezing words only gets us started. There follows—is entailed, really—a comparison both intra-textual and inter-textual, a comparison of a word, an idea, a theme, an image with its “rhymes” within the work and then beyond, in other works by Old Possum. All the while, meditation is required. The whole effort moves in time. It does not readily jump to meanings. Instead, I stay with words and their meanings and their work. The overarching aim is to get from the first word of the text to the last. The best—the most responsible, accurate, and efficient—way of thus proceeding is to seek to put what the text is doing as well as saying in other words. It is a way of reading, mirabile dictu, close to paraphrase, often assumed to constitute the very worst of critical sinning. The issue is, as so often, parts-whole. Putting-in-other-words is never just a matter of immanence, or lateral recapitulation. It is also, and at the same time, transcendent, for a sense of the whole text must intersect with the part, which, of course, constitutes, along with the other parts, that whole. There is here, too, then, a to-and-fro movement, a movement of reciprocity, or what is sometimes referred to as “the hermeneutic circle.” The same essential structure informs the way(s) in which putting-inother-words entails the active use of analysis, comparison, and meditation, never a simple (uninformed, or uncritical) effort merely to repeat. Space thus opens, difference in the same. Tact is required, as Alexander Pope insists, so as not to veer too far from the original text(s) nor, at the same time, to offer but “crabbed . . . Faithfulness.”2 There is room—indeed, there is the necessity—that you as reader and text meet, intersecting. The “just” is not enough, by itself. The “lively” is not enough, by itself. They need each other.3 Eliot’s Christmas poems explore the implications and the effects of the “new dispensation,” of the Christian religion, and especially of Incarnational understanding. Although the Ariel Poems do not foreground the issue, in them Eliot releases Incarnational understanding to represent an alternative to the later challenges to binarism mounted DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003

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by the likes of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, who come at the issue, of course, from a decidedly non-Christian, or even anti-Christian, point of view, and of René Girard, whose point of view is problematically Christian (and centered in notions of mimetic rivalry and reciprocal violence). Take, for instance, Barthes, writing in the lecture course at the Collège de France posthumously published as The Neutral (delivered in 1977–78, first published, in French, in 2002, in English, 2005): . . . the paradigm [in other words: the opposition of two virtual terms from which, in speaking, I actualize one to produce meaning] is the wellspring of meaning; where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning … meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.4

In this situation, Barthes offers “the idea of a structural creation that would defeat, annul, or contradict the implacable binarism of the paradigm by means of a third term,” which he variously calls the “amorphous, neutral term (phonological neutralization), or zero degree.”5 In related fashion, Derrida points to “the trace” and the play of différance (the difference between the letter “a” and the letter “e” making all the difference). You might remember that, in the final section of The Waste Land, Eliot offers the following representation of the risen Jesus speaking to His disciples on “the road to Emmaus”: Who is the third, who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you?6

The “third” here is related to that other “third”—Tiresias, once woman, now again man—who appears in “The Fire Sermon,” observing the “young man carbuncular” and “the typist home at teatime” engaged in meaningless sex. The “third” may be related, as well, to the encounter with the “familiar compound ghost” in “Little Gidding,” where the speaker “assumed a double part” and then “heard another’s voice”: “I was still the same, / Knowing myself yet being someone other— / And he a face still forming.”7 Eliot was, thus, all along, very much concerned DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003

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with differences, oppositions, relations between and among apparent oppositions, parts, wholes, fragments. In the Ariel Poems, his response appears in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees in the form of the decorative angel that is an angel, and, to go from the end to the beginning, in Journey of the Magi, in the form of the Magus’s realization that “Death” and “Life” may not be “different.”8 In this fashion, too, in the Christmas poems, Eliot (thus) plays with, confronts, analyzes, and explores “end” and “beginning.” It helps, I maintain, to bring reading and writing together, making them essentially one act, which thus “privileges” the present moment, and so is to be distinguished from reflection, which, in best Wordsworthian fashion, interrupts and violates the temporal movement and nature of understanding. You write as you read, and—this is the novel part—you read as you write: the reading occurs in the writing. We have long recognized the need to write it down in order to be precise, in order to get it right. There may be no other way. Writing about reading fulfills the reading (and potentially completes the work of the primary, “calling” text). This “approach,” I am only outlining here, a point that I cannot overemphasize. Questions are bound to arise, refinements need be made, corrections rendered, and gaps filled in. I hope, in time, to do just that. I will, at that time, flesh out the principles drawn from the practice that I here merely describe. In so doing, it is important to state, I will be paralleling, and offering an analogue of, what actually occurs in the making of commentary: commentary is a fleshing-out of what goes on in the primary text, an extending, developing, clarifying, in some cases explaining, in others distinguishing and (even) measuring and judging. In the commentator, engaged and engaging, the text takes on body, and he or she precipitates that action. As he becomes the body of the text, now embodied, the commentator is in the business of putting his reader into the text, like a “writer,” always concerned that the reader see fully, be inside the descriptions and the stories rendered. The commentator’s job is thus (also) to make the text vivid, alive, so that his reader can know it, perhaps for the first time. That often—usually, in fact—means that, like Bishop Andrewes, the commentator on literature will add details here, which are faithful to the original text, explain a bit there, all the while seeking to be responsible to that text, to the reader, and to the writing that he is (now) engaged in making. In this work, the commentator slows down, the same way a “writer” does, rather than rushes through to the “finish line.” He allows—and DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003

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Eliot himself uses the word, in similar contexts—meanings and effects to accumulate—he slows down, in fact, so that that can happen, thus going some distance toward surrendering to the text before him. His efforts are directed toward drawing out meaning, forcing sometimes, if necessary, the text to surrender its meaning. Better, though, that the text recognize him and respond, accepting the commentator’s (reciprocal) call. It is writing that the commentator does. Commentary tells—or may tell—the story of a text’s coming to meaning, the narrative of its emergent meaning or meanings. Of course, you have to be able to recognize such meaning when it appears, and that necessitates that “transcendence” that intersects with “immanence,” a sense of the whole being brought to bear on each of the parts. In the story that commentary tells of a text’s journey toward meaning, there has to be—and is—drama. Responsible reader and (will-ing) text come together in finding not just tension but also conflict in that journey, marked as it is by travail, sometimes leaving you feeling as if on the edge of a grimpen. I venture further and suggest that, in literary commentary, there needs to be a meeting of writer and scholar: the latter to be “just,” the former “lively,” the latter blessed with “gracefulness,” the former with “perspicuity,” the latter perhaps tempted to “inaccurate . . . license,” the former blessed with restraining capacity itself capable of veering into “crabbed . . . Faithfulness” (my terms again derive from John Dryden).9 Commentary, then, we might further suggest, engages narrative, drama, and prose that is at best graceful and at least interesting and readable, textual wholes as related to and dependent upon parts (themselves never independent of wholes), and, finally, that ability sometimes said to resemble John Keats’s famous notion of “negative capability,” in any case, a way of reading and then writing “most entirely out of yourself ” and “inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul” of an-other.10 These seem to be universally acceptable and widely desired, if all too rarely practiced. For the moment, I must also emphasize that what I have described is nothing but instrumental—in other words, a set of tools. They are, in fact, tools of the mind. The act of doing commentary on literary texts involves—because it engages—much more than the mind. The whole sensibility is involved (in line with Eliot’s own sense that meditative, or devotional, reading is the most difficult of all the kinds of reading precisely because it engages the whole person).11 In addition to the mind, the commentator invokes, among other things, his or her imagination, DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003

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judgment, personal and professional experience, degree and level of capaciousness, knowledge, skills, deftness, “genius,” desire, sympathy, understanding (by which I imply the ability not only to control selfish, prideful urges but also to surrender the reader’s will-fulness to the text’s, thus to exercise modesty and humility), respect, responsibility, and not least, aforementioned patience. All of which amounts, perhaps, to this: reading is the act of a text’s intersecting with a reader. In other words, the reader (also) intersects with a text. Writing (too) intersects with reading, constituting writingas-reading. It matters—it matters a good deal, I would say—that the approach I am describing finds meaning in the particular words of a text, as each is employed at a specific moment in what appears to be the text’s movement toward its end. Another parallel thus exists: this time, with the way that, given the democratization of time instaurated by the Incarnation, each moment burns with meaning, thus “attended” (Four Quartets). In time, in the moment, in the word, meaning is thus “immanent,” rather than “transcendent”; it does not lie in some (superior) realm outside the text. And (yet) being thus immanent, meaning is, at the same time, a gift from outside that allows and makes the inside shine with light. I can imagine no better way of making the point than Eliot does in Triumphal March, which is all about ways of perceiving: O hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast, Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water At the still point of the turning world. O hidden.12

Immanence and transcendence form an “impossible union,” being a “necessarye coniunction” (again, Four Quartets). To “take” but one, separated from the other, is to have half-understanding, incomplete, unfulfilled. Full understanding—if that be possible—rather, is child-like, but not childish, in seeing the candle as a star “and the gilded angel / Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree / [As] not only a decoration, but an angel” (The Cultivation of Christmas Trees).13 Such fulfillment comes only at and with the “end.” It is curious—both odd and telling—that “end” is so close to “and.” Only one letter separates them. “The letter giveth life,” Eliot said once, “but the spirit killeth.”14 Way emerges by means of, and from, practice. I here refer to what is embodied, what appears in action. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003

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Attention then falls on what words do, not just what they say, or even primarily what they say. The Word, if or though silent, is in the saying— “hidden.” The Word, in other words, turns the “saying” into “doing.” It appears, does the Word, whenever and wherever the word is seen as doing and not only saying. The seeing is up to us: “The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving” (Triumphal March), but “perceiving” does not reveal what is “hidden” under, say, “the palmtree at noon” or “the running water.” We are called to look there—hard—“squeezing and squeezing” the event, the experience, the occurrence, as we do individual words in Eliot’s verse. Writing-as-reading therefore intersects with putting “in other words.” That (new, secondary) writing participates in the same general arena of discourse as the original writing (that called it into being). Both text and commentary are writing, and as such the latter owes it to the former (if to nothing else) to be interesting. The new (secondary) writing cannot afford, I would argue, to be anything but imitative: in other words, commentary imitates the being of the primary text, though not to the same degree, of course. In doing so, commentary does not necessarily reveal pride, nor does it engage in competition or jealousy or pride of place. Imitation, here, is not a matter of flattery, either. It is, rather, a structural and ontological matter, prompted more by love than desire, aiming toward supporting, extending, and developing, thus assisting the calling text (without the least hint that it stands in dire need of any such). Putting-in-other-words abetting and being abetted by writing-as-reading results in commentary engaging, willy-nilly, in some of the same strategies and with some of the same (literary) devices as the primary text. Commentary surely likes to imitate and borrow from the imaginative range of the primary text. Understandably, there is a sense in, and a degree to, which commentary imagines itself, not as the primary text’s equal in any way, but, in being a helpmeet (as Alexander Pope suggested in An Essay on Criticism), as both free and inspired to try to be true as writing and therefore to follow in that prior text’s footsteps—putting in other words that are respectful and affected by the first words. In a very real sense, it does respond in kind to the calling text, perhaps the only or the most responsible way possible. We may say, accordingly, that “other” intersects with and is intersected by “same.” In the same manner, “getting it right” intersects with and is intersected by (inevitably, some degree of) literariness. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0003

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Little wonder that Eliot devoted one section—the last—of each of Four Quartets to writing and words. Little wonder, either, that he chose to write six separate but related poems on Christmas, for Christmas revolutionized words and writing.

Notes 1 T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 347–48. 2 Borrowed from Michael Werth Gelber, The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999), 187. 3 Dryden’s terms in An Essay of Dramatick Poisie, used in the title above. 4 Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia UP, 2005), 7. 5 Ibid. 6 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922). 7 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943). 8 T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927). 9 In Gelber, 187. 10 John Keats, Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston, MA: RiversideHoughton Mifflin, 1959. 11 T.S. Eliot, Preface, Thoughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within, selected and arranged by N. Gangulee (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 12. 12 T.S. Eliot, Triumphal March (London: Faber and Faber, 1931). 13 T.S. Eliot, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). 14 T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in Our Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 66n.

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The Gift Half Understood, or Eliot’s Ariel Poems: Beyond the Old Dispensation Abstract:  Six poems comprise the Ariel Poems that Eliot wrote at the suggestion of Geoffrey Faber to commemorate the Christmas season: Journey of the Magi (1927), A Song for Simeon (1928), Animula (1929), Marina (1930), Triumphal March (1931), and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (1954, in the new series of Ariel Poems). The poems have received uneven critical and scholarly attention, rarely if ever together. As “Christmas poems,” they are related intertextually and show remarkable complexity of voice and tone. Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137479129.0004.

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I thought my poetry was over after “The Hollow Men” . . . writing the Ariel poems released the stream and led directly to “Ash Wednesday.” —T.S. Eliot, The New York Times, November 29, 1953

The invitation in 1927 from Geoffrey Faber to contribute to a series of illustrated poetic Christmas pamphlets may have been a gift. It came from Eliot’s boss at (then-called) Faber and Gwyer, the London publishing house that Faber founded; he would soon be the author himself of Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement (1933). The “gift,” if that is what the commission was, must have struck Eliot as a “hint” whose significance he would have to “guess” (to borrow the further terms from his climactic verse in Four Quartets: “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation”).1 At any rate, the idea of writing about Christmas, and in short form, had to appeal to the newly baptized “Anglo-Catholic” as he described himself in 1928, in his essays collected as For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, one year after his baptism into the Church of England.2 Andrewes is the seventeenthcentury churchman so influential on Eliot’s religious understanding—a quotation from whom he modifies in opening the first of his Ariel Poems, Journey of the Magi, published in 5000 copies on August 25, 1927. One popular commentator on Eliot has surmised that he “may have been stimulated by this commission to write for a wide audience, a circumstance which seems to be reflected in the relative accessibility of [Journey of the Magi] and the other Ariel poems.”3 As it turns out, Eliot’s Ariel Poems were not exactly runaway bestsellers, subsequent press-runs falling with A Song for Simeon to 3500 copies, Animula to 3000, Marina to 2000, and Triumphal March at that same last number (following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, Eliot’s popularity naturally soared, and the press-run in the new Ariel series was 10,140 copies of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees).4 In truth, despite the (imprecise and largely meaningless) claim of “relative accessibility,” Eliot’s Ariel Poems are far from simple. As a matter of fact, they are complex, complicated, sophisticated, and very tightly woven, featuring the linguistic, comparative, and meditative poetics that Eliot derived from Bishop Andrewes and that he developed in the post-conversion works Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (1930) and Four Quartets (1943). In the Ariel Poems, Eliot tries on new techniques and strategies, first employing tones and voices, DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0004

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especially, that find their fulfillment in the major works. The shorter poems are not so much experimental as essayistic: attempts and trials, in other words. The complexity and significance of Eliot’s Ariel Poems is attested by the critical attention they have received, by no means all of it complimentary. To my knowledge, only one book-length study has so far been offered, John H. Timmerman’s T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery, published twenty years ago. The title is a bit misleading, however, for the book includes significant discussion of Ash-Wednesday “in the Ariel pattern,” and in addition, the author devotes major attention to “recovery of a tradition,” “the aesthetics of impersonality,” and “the validation of voice.”5 This “theoretical” consideration, in the end, works against close and intensive attention to poetic structures and individual practice in the several poems. The result is that the poems do not receive the complete and pure commentary that is likely most to benefit a reader turning to them for delight and instruction. There is, that is to say, very little of the “squeezing and squeezing of a word” that Eliot took from Lancelot Andrewes and made the basis of his Christian poetics and artistic practice.6 Reading the poems according to the poet’s own strategies for writing and for reading reveals them, in fact, to be successful to a greater degree than has yet been recognized. Unfortunately, in much of the published commentary, including Timmerman’s 1994 book, the poems assume importance secondary to over-riding concerns of history and of theory, the critical writing itself thesis-driven. A responsible reading of Journey of the Magi, A Song for Simeon, Animula, Marina, Triumphal March, and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees will proceed along the lines of Eliot’s Christian poetics and thematics, as derived from Lancelot Andrewes. This means, to elaborate on a point made in passing above, that the poems will be read closely and intensely, their individual words “squeezed and squeezed.” The words will be compared with their “rhymes” elsewhere in the particular work, and those “rhymes” will expand to include relations to larger poetic, rhetorical, and thematic units, including images, scenes, characters and personages, and, especially, voices and tones. Finally, the poetic structures, points, and points of view revealed must be carefully and patiently meditated upon.7 The problem with previous commentary on Eliot’s Ariel Poems is not simply that the six individual poems have been scanted, primary attention being devoted to argumentative matters into which they are DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0004

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fitted, but also that they have been left as separable works, united only by means of their commissioned inclusion as individual members of a series bearing a common name. Their relations to each other have, then, been scanted, and no attempt has been made to ask whether they form a group whose meaning and significance are greater than the sum of the entailed parts. The fact of the matter is, all of Eliot’s last major poems, “The Hollow Men” (1925), Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, and Four Quartets are “composites.” Each is made up of parts—and in the latter two cases, poems—first published separately. Eliot himself acknowledged, in a 1959 interview, that “The Hollow Men” and Ash-Wednesday originated out of separate poems. . . . Then gradually I came to see it as a sequence. That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have worked throughout the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a whole of them.8

“The Hollow Men” first appeared as we know it in November 1925 in Eliot’s Poems 1909–1925, the fifth and final section being previously unpublished. Section I had appeared as “Poeme” in the periodical Commerce in Winter 1924; Sections II and IV together with another verse work as “Three Poems” in the January 1925 number of The Criterion, which he edited; and Section III as one of “Doris’s Dream Songs” in Chapbook, November 1924. Assembling “The Hollow Men” clearly presented Eliot with a number of problems, but it seems clear that, for whatever anxieties he once and for a while experienced about it, he came to value it as a whole. Something similar can be said of Ash-Wednesday—though it is the only one of Eliot’s works to have a subtitle (on the dustjacket), calling specific attention to its being made up of several poems. Three of these were first published separately, as independent works: Section II as “Salutation” in December 1927 in the Saturday Review of Literature; Section I in Commerce, Spring 1928, bearing the title “Perch’io Non Spero”; and III in Commerce, Autumn 1929, with the title “Som de L’Escalina.” Sections IV, V, and VI appeared for the first time when Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems was published on March 24, 1930. The four poems that make up Four Quartets relate to one another differently from the ways that the parts of “The Hollow Men” and Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems relate to each other. This is not to say that the last mentioned bear the same sort of parts-to-whole relationship. Ash-Wednesday reveals a “logic of the imagination,” a term that Eliot used DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0004

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in describing the “order” of St.-John Perse’s great prose poem Anabase, which Eliot translated and published (as Anabasis) within weeks of his own great poem (May 22, 1930).9 Voice is critical, and it is by no means clear that a single voice is heard throughout the poems. The (whole) poem’s movement is governed by “imagination,” rather than a “logic of concepts,” and yet Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems still feels more “seamed” than “The Hollow Men.” Although the six sections represent a certain sequence, they could stand alone. “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding” at once feel both individual and united. The first was published four years before the second, and all four together, each still bearing the same title as when independently published, did not appear until seven years after “Burnt Norton.” The four poems still carry a sense of independence, partly owing to the knowledge we have that each was not only published separately, but that each was previously published as a book (“Burnt Norton” actually first appeared in 1936 as the last poem in Collected Poems 1909–1935, although it, too, received separate book publication, in 1941, several months after “East Coker,” the second of Four Quartets). Yet, the four poems bear such “interleaving,” such internal comparisons and contrasts, such anticipations, modifications, and fulfillment that a reader is bound to think of them as (at least) united, if not also planned as a single unit from the beginning (which was not, apparently, the case). This paradoxical sense of Four Quartets as consisting of both separate parts and a fully united whole reflects, of course, the Incarnational and Trinitarian character of its fundamental structure and foundational themes. Something similar, if on both a smaller and a simpler stage, may be going on with the Christmas poems. The six Ariel Poems obviously resemble “The Hollow Men,” Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, and Four Quartets in their being: six individual, independent works, all of them published separately. They were never brought together, assembled, or fused into one, however. In fact, Eliot took Triumphal March out of the Ariel Poems published as a unit in Collected Poems; and of course, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees followed the last of those in the First Series of Ariel Poems by twenty-three years. They can hardly, then, be thought of as one work, and yet they are all Christmas poems. And they are related to one another in ways that go beyond their being about, all of them, a single subject; they are, I will argue, related inter-textually. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0004

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As such a group, Eliot’s Ariel Poems have never been extensively considered. Doing so, however, may well show us something about the individual poems, their inter-connections, Eliot’s Christian understanding, and the nature of Christmas itself. The Ariel Poems are, no matter what the authorial intentions were, a composite, albeit their character as a composite is, as I say, different from that of the other poems that they thus resemble. Their differences remain, ineluctably and properly; no synthesis emerges, for example. And yet, taken together, the Ariel Poems point to something greater than the sum of their parts. At the same time, this sense of their relation, strangely perhaps (although squarely orthodox, in fact), reveals each of the parts in new light. In that new light, the individual poems, all of them, stand revealed as significant poetic achievements, capable of providing intense pleasure and acute understanding. I will consider them, not in chronological order, but in relation to what they are as Christmas poems.10 Thus, I arrange them thematically, beginning with Triumphal March, which essays the epistemological and ontological issues surrounding the “essential” dogma of the Incarnation. I follow with the last of the Ariel Poems, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, which returns to these matters and presents them in a fresh light. That poem “bookends” with the first of the Ariel Poems, Journey of the Magi, which is about the First Coming as the last ends with questions concerning the Second Coming. Having considered problems attendant upon understanding the journey to the Incarnation, I will turn to Its work and effects in the world, precisely what is betokened in Journey of the Magi, where the speaking voice evinces significant changes in point of view following the encounter in the stable in Bethlehem. The first of these last three Ariel Poems will be Animula, which essays the journey of the individual, ordinary soul from birth to the viaticum. Then follow A Song for Simeon and Marina, the two most complicated of the Ariel Poems. Here, Eliot is at his most complex and technically sophisticated in rendering speaking voice; and here, Eliot essays the utmost difficulties in embracing and incarnating in the ordinary “pilgrim” the full implications of the Incarnation. It is a treacherous path, full of windings, curves, stops, starts, misdirections, and wrong turns. It is, at any rate, a single journey: from the Incarnation in a lowly stable in Bethlehem to the decorative angel atop the Christmas tree in Edgware Road, where young Cyril thrills at the sight (that is attended by site). DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0004

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Therein lies arguably the most significant and lasting character and effect of the Ariel Poems considered together: like parts of time, they are isolated, and totally separate (or separable), precisely because Journey of the Magi “attends” The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, as it does Triumphal March and Animula. In like manner, A Song for Simeon may be seen as “attending” Marina. And so it goes, as we fare forward. Perceiving is, fortunately, not our only way of seeing.

Notes 1 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943). 2 T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929). 3 B.C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 235. 4 Details regarding publication here and elsewhere I draw from Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography, revised and extended edn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969). 5 John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994). The terms all appear in chapter titles. 6 T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 347–48. 7 See my recent books in which I have outlined these procedures and treated them in play: Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word: Intersections of Literature and Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 8 T.S. Eliot, quoted in Southam, 259–60. 9 T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, by St.-John Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 10. 10 Two other poems might be considered along with the Ariel Poems: Two Poems, published by Frederic Prokosch at the Cambridge University Press and bearing the words “Christmas 1935.” Privately printed, in but 22 copies (one of which I am fortunate enough now to possess), Two Poems appeared in October 1935. Both are “geographical poems,” one in the US, the other Wales. Although “Cape Ann” is sometimes mentioned in the commentary, “Usk” almost never is. It has been the subject of scholarly interest, however, for the

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words “white hart inn,” which was recently discovered in Wales; “Cape Ann” attracts modest attention, not for its poetry, but for its mention of so many birds. Neither poem has been explored for its meaning. I reserve the right to (re)turn to the poems at some early point, but for now I can but say that no specific relation to Christmas appears in either. I do find it interesting that Eliot chose two poems, smacking of binary opposition, which he so often explored.

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Triumphal March: The Problem Lies in Our Perceiving Abstract: Although Triumphal March appears in Collected Poems among the “Unfinished Poems,” it was first published as an Ariel Poem, in 1931. What the eye brings, and what the ear likewise contributes, form the ontological surface of the poem. “The natural wakeful life of the Ego is a perceiving,” says the Roman speaker, a thoroughgoing empiricist, observing a parade in honor of a victorious general, whom the crowd awaits, expectantly. Other voices break in, as does another time, and the poem proceeds to juxtapose (the truly triumphal) Christian “dispensation” with the pagan: in the perceived lies hidden the Word. Both/and trumps binary oppositions, opening a way to understand the meaning of Christmas. Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005.

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The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving. —Triumphal March

 . . . the child For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree Is not only a decoration, but an angel. —The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

Published on October 8, 1931, Triumphal March was written, like Eliot’s other Ariel Poems, to commemorate Christmas. He did not, however, include it with the other five seasonal celebrations in the Collected Poems 1909–1962, where it resides with Sweeney Agonistes (1932) and as one of the two parts of “Coriolan” (the other being “The Difficulties of a Statesman”). In neither subject matter nor manner does Triumphal March, in truth, seem very Christmassy, but then, most of the others do not, either. Because it seems so unChristmas-like in appearance, manner, and subject, Triumphal March is a good place for us to begin our explorations of the Ariel Poems, of which it is, in any case, a part. About perceiving and its inseparability from human egotism, the poem establishes our ways of seeing as the issue to be dealt with in any attempt to come to terms with Christmas, and the Incarnation that is its historical and doctrinal heart. As Eliot put it also in 1931 in his introduction to Pascal’s great Christian work Penseés, the problem we have with the Incarnation stems not solely or even primarily from the admittedly difficult (but “essential”) dogma itself but, as well, from our starting from the wrong “end,” and “likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible?” That we think of habitually as “going straight to the heart of the matter.” But Eliot’s “way” is indirect: it involves a “process” of mind of “the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminates in faith,” a matter of “rejection and elimination” (italics added). He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory: among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral world within; and thus, by what [Cardinal John Henry] Newman calls “powerful and concurrent reasons,” he finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005

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The Incarnation is, as Eliot everywhere affirmed, the heart and soul of Christian understanding and belief. But: To the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse: for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to “preserve values”. He does not consider that if certain emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the highest sense can be called “saintliness” are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world must be an explanation which will admit the “reality” of these values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such values are of no great value.1

Where you start from is thus of the greatest importance. Eliot does not start from a problematic historical and physiological occurrence but from observations of both the outer and the inner worlds, their “disorder,” and the desire for explanation of how things work. By a process, or “sequence,” of “rejection and elimination,” he comes to the most “satisfactory” account of the inner and outer worlds, and that lies within “Catholic Christianity”; within that, Eliot chooses Anglo-Catholicism. The mind—and its way of seeing—is ever at work, proceeding empirically and experientially, as well as according to such reasoning as common sense affords. The end is, simply, or not so simply, but rather humbly, the “satisfactory.” Triumphal March is worldly, secular, and based solely in observation, in what the physical eye, especially, brings in. What the eye brings in and accounts for, aided by the ear, in fact, constitutes the poem’s ontological surface, which is all that the (speaker’s) word speaks—the words spoken by its principal voice. Sights, sounds, things—they dominate the poem, replete with catalogues of numerical details, new and unique in Eliot’s verse. Journey of the Magi, the first of Eliot’s Ariel Poems, in 1927, treats the First Coming (of the Logos, or Word), into the world, within which and for which, says Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, It began doing its work in a lowly stable in Bethlehem, a most surprising and unexpected event. The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, published in 1954, in a new series of Ariel poems, ends with these enigmatic lines, linking last with first: “Because the beginning shall remind us of the end / And the first coming of the second coming.”2 Triumphal March, four years after Journey of the Magi and the last of Eliot’s Ariel poems published in the first series, is also DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005

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about a coming, full of expectation, and a quite different kind of surprise from that which greeted believers in the Jewish world of the first century. In Triumphal March, we see and feel the people waiting, anxiously; they include the speaking voice, otherwise unidentified, a thoroughgoing empiricist. The opening verse establishes the texture, if not also the tone, of Triumphal March: “Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels,” which the speaker reports, interestingly, as coming to his perception “Over the paving.”3 Sound is the functional, determinative sense, and the thrice-mentioned, triune “stony” signals at once such hardness and difficulty as Eliot typically establishes via rocks and rockiness and perhaps echoes, or “rhymes” with, the “stony silence” of the awaited triumphant general: “stone,” after all, stands alone, and dominant, thus “triumphal,” in that first verse because both lifeless and natural, that is, not man-made. It will live on—even if reduced to dust (as emphasized later on in the poem). In the second verse, sight catches up with sound, as the speaker reports “the flags,” “And the trumpets,” “And so many eagles.” The response is thus by no means detached; the speaker is reacting excitedly, emotionally, impressed. He wonders then, “How many?” and says (to no one, in particular), “Count them.” “And,” he adds, no more specific, “such a press of people.” The tense of the speaker’s observing and reporting is, generally, present; he is in the moment: “and we so many crowding the way,” that to the temple. But then he steps back, and speaks from a later time, making the former and future present past. There are so many people, he acknowledges, that “We hardly knew ourselves that day, or knew the City.” At the very least, the reader of Triumphal March appreciates, after but a handful of verses, the poem’s complexity that portends significance often denied it. Eliot may have relegated it, in Collected Poems, to the “unfinished,” but Triumphal March is far from being “minor.” The speaker’s questions continue, more rhetorical now, or so it seems: “So many waiting, how many waiting? what did it matter, on such a day?” But of course, it does matter. In its incessant questions, the voice recalls the whining female voices of The Waste Land: “ ‘What is that noise?’ / . . . / ‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’ ” This is followed there by “ ‘Do / ‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / ‘Nothing?’ ” In Triumphal March, the voice grows more importuning with time: “Are they coming?” He answers his own question: “No, not yet.” DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005

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Yet—“You can see some eagles. / And hear the trumpets.” They are, then, coming: “Here they come. Is he coming?” At this point, another voice entirely breaks in, coming from nowhere; it is philosophical, like that heard on occasion in “The Hollow Men” and Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, a single, portentous line: “The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving.” The main speaker of Triumphal March certainly shows no signs of such insight, or of having such language, and there is no indication elsewhere in the poem of that kind of understanding by anyone. Immediately, and surprisingly, comes another line that is in an apparently different register, breaking in from another time altogether—it anticipates points later on in the poem: “We can wait with our stools and our sausages.” Then, in the very next line, the voice is recognizable as the one we have heard from the beginning: “What comes first? Can you see? Tell us.” Evidently it is still this voice that then says “It is,” but is it he who proceeds with an enumeration of the munitions on display that can hardly have been observed by anyone attending the celebration: “5,800,000 rifles and carbines,” next “102,000 machine guns,” then “28,000 trench mortars,” followed by “53,000 field and heavy guns.” Another surprise immediately follows, as the speaking voice resumes, returning to presumed direct observational mode: “I cannot tell how many projectiles, mines and fuses,” but he does proceed to list “13,000 aeroplanes, / 24,000 aeroplane engines, / 50,000 ammunition waggons,” this catalogue followed by “now 55,000 army waggons, / 11,000 field kitchens, / 1,150 bakeries.” The (main) speaker cannot have “perceived” what appears in the lists he provides: he cannot have counted so many and so specifically (even if the numbers be rounded-off), and neither he nor anyone else can have seen and totaled these massive numbers. Nor could such numbers of these “things” be present. Simply put: the speaker has stopped perceiving, his desire, though, now granted for the counting he has sought and specifically asked for earlier. “How many?” he then asked, and then said, “Count them.” The philosophical-sounding verse over which we have paused has it that our “Ego,” naturally and in its “wakeful” state, desires to see, a fact that our (main) speaker certainly embodies and acts out. Yet, as we have seen, that desire is variously frustrated: sound breaks in, depriving sight of any attempt or desire at primacy of perception, and so “You can see some eagles. / And hear the trumpets,” sound here actually appearing more capacious. The later question thus feels plaintive, if not poignant, DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005

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certainly full of desire: “Can you see?” The immediately following statement reveals the speaker’s reliance, now, on another’s perception. That “perception,” impossible for anyone in the crowd to make based solely on his or her immediate seeing, feels as if not at all perception as such but, rather, a packaged public-relations or news account, written for propagandistic purposes. Puzzling, though, is the interruption in the catalogue of available munitions by the statement “I cannot tell how many projectiles, mines, and fuses.” It signals, we may at least say—­ indeed, it confirms—the speaker’s incapacity of vision: his sight fails him (yet again). And yet—amidst these revelations, we begin to realize that, if ultimately unsatisfactory by itself, sight is of great value. What we are able to take in with our eyes, though limited, is far better than the results of turning away from them for assistance from such an outside force as mechanically and grossly exaggerates and ruthlessly inflates numbers and things—the Ego certainly is involved. There is no accurate representation (of reality) in these numbers. And so, we see, counting is valuable, is a good thing. Good and bad, the familiar binary opposition, thus get mixed up here in the poem in ways we could hardly have anticipated. The passing of these virtually astronomical numbers, in the poem but not at the scene, causes the exclamation, “What a time that took.” The reference cannot be to the passing of these “things” on parade, unless it be that the reading or the hearing of these numbers so affected our speaker’s perception that he then imagined so many as being there. “Will it be he now?” he then asks, respecting grammatical case. Here, the greatest surprise erupts for the reader of Triumphal March, even if placed on (mild) alert by the earlier line I noted, referring to waiting “with our stools and our sausages.” Just before the awaited general comes into view, the poem switches to another time altogether: suddenly we are out of the (presumably) Roman world and into modern European time and space, a turn worthy of the mock-heroic efforts of (still) another time period from the poet’s own. For in the parade come “the golf club Captains,” then “the Scouts, / And now the société gymnastique de Poissy / And now come the Mayor and the Liverymen.” This list is short, and about as far from the martial as you can imagine. Introducing (as it were) the general, who immediately is then seen, this account deflates all the pretensions: this is what we have come to. It may, however, with its ordinariness and represented democratization of efforts and achievements, be better. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005

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As the general comes into view, sight returns to primacy: “Look / There he is now, look.” He is precisely available to sight—and therefore real. The speaker’s eyes hone in (as subject) on his object’s, and what he sees in the general’s eyes reveals and tells all: “There is no interrogation in his eyes / Or in the hands, quiet over the horse’s neck, / And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent.” He thus differs importantly from the speaker, whose desire leads always to questions (however mundane and finally unsatisfactory). With his hands mirroring (as it were) his eyes, the general is, essentially, blank (although, I would say, not “hollow”). Clearly, Eliot intends the series of four pointed adjectives to be compared with the philosophical observation “The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving.” In this scene, with the seen now become the seer, superficial similarities of the principal characters (the speaker and the general) fade before the major differences. The general too desires, but he seems, unlike the speaker, not at all desirous of seeing; in fact, he is indifferent—always an undesirable quality for Eliot. To be sure, the general, like the speaker, waits, perceiving. But his eyes are seen as “watchful,” in keeping with the anxiety of politics and leadership manifested in the extravagant and grossly exaggerated claims concerning munitions on display. He may “watch,” but there is no hint of his being “wakeful.” This adjective, in keeping with other elements in the poem, points to seeing beyond perception, to a wakefulness alert to what lies beyond the watching— and thus relatively limited—eye. Indifference now (also) clashes with desire. This interpretation is confirmed by the immediately succeeding verses, “spoken” in a register yet unheard in Triumphal March and pointing to what lies within the perceived: “O hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast, / Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water / At the still point of the turning world. O hidden.” This is the language of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems and Four Quartets. What is supposedly hidden is the Word, said here to be apparent in the mundane and the (merely) natural “things.” Peaceableness now (also) clashes with imposed force. After this, a (restful) break in the poem: we move, that is, into a new verse paragraph, for the first time (there will be a second, shortly). We are back with the main speaker, and the tense is again present. Simply put, “Now they go up to the temple. Then the sacrifice. / Now come the virgins bearing urns. . . . ” The tone is subdued, the matter of the scene now shifting to a religious ceremony (appropriately, it seems, following the mention of “the still point”). The texture is one of contrast, but not DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005

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so much with that awaiting the general’s arrival, for in this dispensation religion and state are identified. Rather, the real contrast is the implicit one, which the reader is invited to make, with the monumental effects of a religious point of view that honors the dove’s wing, the turtle’s breast, the palmtree, and the running water for the light that shines within them, through and by means of them. The “sacrifice” that (Incarnational) religion enacts and demands, clashes with the sacrifice involving virgins and the urns that will carry their dust. A binary here that is not to be discounted, but in fact measured, weighed, and judged. In fact, “Dust” constitutes the next word and the next line, as well as the following word, which amounts to the following line, which is, in turn, followed by “Dust of dust. . . . ” This reduction, this destruction, leaving next to nothing, leads to a return to the poem’s opening words, “Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels. / Over the paving.” Ironically, we now realize, dust has been paved over, and the lifeless stone, bronze, and steel stand in marked contrast to the dove, the turtle, the palmtree, and the running water. Dust is, literally, all that is left, the general and all his munitions come to this. The touted “paving” covers even that, making for noise. “That is all we could see,” says the speaker now, opening the final verse paragraph. That he returns to the exclamations he made before the climactic “sight” confirms the strong sense we likely have of a certain disappointment, the let-down that follows so much staked in falsehoods: “But how many eagles! and how many trumpets!” The tone may approach the desperate. Immediately comes a parenthesis, another eruption in time and space, transporting us specifically and directly to the Christian “dispensation,” in fact to Easter (which is a binary with Christmas deconstructed by the Resurrection). This, too, may appear to be a mock-heroic, but it actually functions as something quite different: (And Easter Day, we didn’t get to the country, So we took young Cyril to church. And they rang a bell And he said right out loud, crumpets.)

These moderns are far from being exemplary Christians, perhaps not Christians at all: they go to church on Easter, evidently in order to have something to do, not being able to “get to the country.” Apparently, as parents of a young child, they think he should go to church, on Easter, at least: that they take him says quite a lot. And he responds in programmed DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005

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fashion, like Pavlov’s dogs, reacting to a stimulus that acts as a catalyst for the word “crumpets” in a structurally parallel circumstance. The ringing of the bell signals the consecration of the Host, and accustomed to what follows the sound at home, “young Cyril” exclaims, “crumpets.” Cyril’s programmed response to the bell’s sound echoes the Romans’ response to the victorious general and all his glory, amidst all his booty and largesse. With the mention of food, the way is thus paved for the reference to “that sausage,” which the speaker asks not to be thrown away. The reason, he says, is that “It’ll come in handy. He’s artful.” Whether he thus refers to the triumphant general is unclear, though it appears likely that our speaker may have in mind the general’s penchant for drawing out and extending celebrations of himself and his successes. In any case, the poem moves now to a close with the speaker’s making a simple but pregnant request: “Please, will you / Give us a light?” This last word is then twice repeated as the ante-penultimate and penultimate verses in Triumphal March. In this fashion, “Light” rhymes ironically, thus contrasting, with the earlier “Dust.” Evidently, a request for a cigarette, the speaker’s words show him totally innocent of any meaning burning (as it were) in that “light.” For him, a light is a means of turning into a “smoke” a bit of rolled tobacco—itself a thing foreign, of course, to the Romans, and thus another eruption of another time. The speaker does not see what the poet does—and what the poet hopes and expects his reader to see: there is another kind of light altogether, and it functions as “the Word” does in relation to “word.” The light that ignites the cigarette may also be—like the decorative angel atop the Christmas tree—the Light that is the Logos, which Ash-Wednesday identifies as “the Word within / The world and for the world.” The speaker’s “light” is, in other words, that which ignites the cigarette and, at the same time, that which serves as medium of such apprehension as goes beyond perception. In still other words: the Light is hidden in that cigarette light, attending it, nevertheless and always. Both/and trumps binary oppositions. One verse remains, in French and italicized, with the last words in capitals: Et les soldats faisaient la haie? ILS LA FAISAIENT. The voice here, suddenly modern (again), but now speaking in another tongue, though the gymnastic society mentioned earlier is French, is, like the main speaker in Triumphal March, and unlike the celebrated, victorious general, “interrogative.” The question this voice raises concerns the line formed by the soldiers to protect and separate the noble leader from DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005

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the crowd. The resort, finally, to capital letters may cement the fact, as Elizabeth Drew believes, that he can no longer be seen.4 There is no such protection, or separation, for the Incarnate God “within / The world and for the world.” Of course, the “indifferent” general can hardly be said either to be “within” the world of the crowd attending him or “for” that world—he is for himself. The several eruptions of another time and place into the main narrative is a rhetorical fact (and strategy) that bears considerable thematic weight. At work is something akin to that “mythical method” that Eliot finds in his friend James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), which allows for implicit or sometimes explicit juxtaposition working somewhat like mock-heroic to provide criticism absent the writer’s own, direct, explicit commentary. Eliot first tried out the method in The Waste Land and refined its use and capacities frequently thereafter. In time, Eliot comes to understand the enormous significance of the Incarnation, that is, of God’s becoming fully human while remaining fully divine, in the Person of Jesus Christ. This eruption of the transcendent and the timeless into time—our time—changes everything. Democratizing time, the Incarnation makes every moment count, not just the so-called special, even the epiphantic, ones: each and every moment is attended (to take the term used in Four Quartets), and it burns with meaning, thus having the capacity to refine and purify each (ordinary) person attending and attuned. What Christmas means, then, is what the Incarnation accomplished. It means that something is “hidden” in the light that burns the cigarette, as it is, for example, in those other avenues and media mentioned in Triumphal March—and as it is in the stable in Bethlehem, where, of course, it is in plain sight, though not yet understood. Perception may not reveal it, for it is, precisely, within those objects, rendering them at once both what our sight shows them to be and something other. The issue has nothing to do with depth: there is no deep meaning to Christmas. It is all really quite simple; thus the child—and the child-like—can apprehend the decoration on the Christmas tree as both that and (also and at the same time) an angel. Perception is superior to lack of perception, but it is not an end in itself, and not the end of the story. Perception is, instead, the medium, not to be transcended or left behind, that leads in, through, and by means of itself, to another way of apprehending, another apprehension. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0005

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The poet is not invisible in Triumphal March: Eliot is very much present although you cannot see him.5 The poet thus shows his difference from the speaker. He is by no means indifferent (unlike the “leader”), but, rather, participates in seeing and in seeing in, through, and by means of, notably including “the dove’s wing,” “the turtle’s breast,” “the palmtree at noon,” and “the running water.” There is, in short, pattern, and the poet catches it, finding connections to which his “personages” are blind. The poet, we might further say, speaks by acting in, through, and by means of the words he uses; although he is not exactly silent (obviously), he differs greatly from the lyricist in the fifth poem of Ash-Wednesday, who mainly makes noise, rendering it nearly impossible for the Word to be heard. In the poet’s “intersection” and “attend-ance” here, the Word speaks—is allowed to speak—through the words within the words. Eliot thus actively affirms the Word, Its truth, Its presence, indeed Its timelessness and Its universality.

Notes 1 T.S. Eliot, “The Pensées of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 3rd. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 408. 2 T.S. Eliot, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). 3 T.S. Eliot, Triumphal March (London: Faber and Faber, 1931). 4 Elizabeth Drew, T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), 136–37. 5 I take the last two paragraphs in the chapter from my book T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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The Cultivation of Christmas Trees: Through the Eyes of Children (and the Child-like) Abstract:  The Cultivation of Christmas Trees is the last of Eliot’s Ariel Poems, appearing in the “new series” in 1954. An essay in verse form, it has not been highly regarded in the commentary. “There are several attitudes towards Christmas,” it opens, rather unimpressively. But voice here is critical; it is “child-like,” in its capacity for “both/and” that allows for the angel atop the tree to be seen as both decoration and angel. Herein lies the real character of Christmas, apparent in the child, represented in the child-like, and dramatized in the poem’s texture and structure. The humbleness of the poem is thus appropriate, participating in the “meanness” that surrounds the Birth in a stable, a mere decoration (or so it seems) that is a gift, both decoration and angel. Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137479129.0006.

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Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!” The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness. —“Gerontion”

And the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life. “Baudelaire in Our Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern

Saint Lucy, you did not hide your light under a basket, but let it shine for the whole world, for all the centuries, to see. We may not suffer torture in our lives the way you did, but we are still called to let the light of our Christianity illumine our daily lives. Please help us to have the courage to bring our Christianity into our work, our recreation, our relationships, our conversation—every corner of our day. Amen. —Prayer, “Catholic Online”

Critics have never much cared for The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. It strikes many of them as sophomoric. Even those disinclined to blame Eliot’s embrace of Christianity for an alleged decline of poetic powers find fault with this his last important poetic effort. Hugh Kenner says little about it, but what he does say is not flattering: it “gets under way with some difficulty, like a commissioned Pronouncement.”1 As an Ariel Poem, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees may have been commissioned, but a “pronouncement” goes scant distance in describing the poem. Many critics belittle The Cultivation of Christmas Trees by ignoring it (among them, Paul Murray and Denis Donoghue).2 In his monograph on the Ariel poems, John H. Timmerman devotes four-plus pages to the poem, emphasizing its so-called “celebration tinged with solemnity, Christian significance tinged with emotional giddiness.”3 He ends with a paragraph that puts the poem in the line of such affirmativeness as critics find better expressed in Marina (about which more later): In Eliot’s canon, few such poems of simple, unabated joy and consolation occur. It is a remarkable testimony, in simple lyrical measures that in themselves capture the theme and spirit of the poem. Although, because of its apparent simplicity, the poem is often slighted, it also forms a remarkable response to the divisiveness of an earlier work such as “Animula.” Here the DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0006

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fractured soul is annealed into wholeness in the simplicity of wonder and the profundity of joy.4

Well. With the opening words, Eliot comes close to the central thematic question of the present book. But the question here—which, according to Kenner, presents “some difficulty” in getting underway—concerns “attitudes towards Christmas,” about which the poem says, “There are several.”5 “Attitudes,” one presumes, even without “squeezing and squeezing” it, is a particular and probably a specially chosen word: Eliot does not say “meanings” or “points of view.” Rather, the point concerns, we might put it, ways of seeing that are not objective, that, in fact, imply, however vaguely, a tincture or more of evaluation and judgment. The fact is also that Eliot has written in this manner elsewhere, and neither ironically nor critically. The beginning “There is” represents neither clumsiness nor carelessness—we were urged in “English” classes to avoid the construction in our “papers.” The phrase does, however, help to establish a tone of at least relative informality. There is present here a certain simplicity of expression, although not of feeling or apprehension. It is, perhaps above all, a sign of respect for the child-like, to be distinguished from the high-formality and pretenses of what the speaking voice will shortly distance himself from and criticize as “the piety of the convert,” words that, I suspect, we can little think of apart from the poet who penned this. The felt informality of expression immediately joins with the speaker’s bringing the reader into kinship with him, via his use of the first-person plural in the poem’s second verse: some of the “attitudes” toward Christmas, he says, “we may disregard.” It is difficult to define, to capture, the texture of this poem, and with it the character of the tone that we hear in this voice. That voice does not resemble the others in the Ariel Poems, a fact that leads John H. Timmerman, among others, to conclude that Eliot here “looks back on his [‘long journey’] with a kind of laconic ease of spirit.”6 That conclusion does not, though, account for the uniqueness of structure here. The formality of language and tone joins, as a matter of fact, with a structure that is not informal at all. The texture consists, therefore, not just of informality and simplicity but also of clarity. The first ten verses accomplish a great deal: they note the “attitudes” toward Christmas that may be disregarded—the “social, the torpid, the patently commercial, / The rowdy . . . / And the childish”—and then, DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0006

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offering a critical distinction, presenting the “child-like” as not merely different but also desirable, satisfactory, and necessary. As this rational structure builds, the speaker’s “human” note is not surrendered; he provides a parenthesis that comments on the “rowdy” attitude: “the pubs being open till midnight.” There is, indeed, a mixture, an im-purity, in fact. All of these qualities—with “impure” and “human” now added to those I noted previously—begin to settle in the reader’s mind and work toward a completion and a conclusion. The “thesis” that, as it were, responds to the “antithesis,” without eliminating or transcending it, constitutes the dogmatic heart and soul of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees:  . . . that of the child For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree Is not only a decoration, but an angel.

It is quietly said, humbly expressed. And that helps to make the contrast all the more striking: the “torpid,” the “commercial,” the “rowdy” beside the child, in all his innocence of belief. But Eliot’s point is not that the child believes that the decoration is an angel, the candle a star; rather, the child sees a both/and at play, Angel within angel. That point is Incarnational: the Word “within / The world and for the world.” So understanding, “The child wonders at the Christmas Tree,” not pretending to understand, but accepting. The speaker then implores: “Let him continue in the spirit of wonder / At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext.” The words are, of course, precise, exact: the holiday is a “Feast,” and we ordinarily, in the spirit of “The social, the torpid, the patently commercial, / The rowdy . . . / And the childish,” merely accept it (in the sense of being resigned to) or blatantly using it as a “pretext” for making money or getting drunk or gorging ourselves on “goose or turkey.” In moderation, there may well be nothing inherently wrong with at least some of these activities, as we shall soon see; the trouble is, we do not possess child-like capacity for both/and-ness. The poem makes the case for continuing wonder, and with it humble acceptance of human limitations. The voice that speaks all this is thus respectful of the child-like, and therefore, he does not condemn the “several attitudes towards Christmas” that he mentions: to “disregard” them is not at all to revile them, though DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0006

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he does not respect them, either. To look ahead in the poem, we do not hear piousness in the speaker. What we do hear, feels not so much like restraint as reflex of apprehension and acceptance. No stuffiness marks the speaker—he would not be inclined to wear a four-piece suit. We feel, I dare say, the presence of a particular (kind of) voice in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, but we know very little about him beyond that capacity of seeing. There is no reason that I can see to suspect this voice to be distanced from the poet’s; I hear no irony, and the poem lacks the texture of the dramatic monologue that Eliot found so congenial. The poem’s concern is not the speaker but the message, for which he but serves as medium. And yet as medium, he shows the effects on him of the message that he delivers (in keeping with Journey of the Magi, as we shall see in the next essay). I may seem to contradict myself in claiming that The Cultivation of Christmas Trees is not about the speaking voice and yet depends on the texture and the capacity of that voice. Again, I say, though, that voice is means, and means becomes the message, or at least a significant part of it. The voice of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees is essayistic, the poem (also) an essay, a form notoriously disregarded, disparaged, treated most often, says one of its most distinguished practitioners, as “second-class citizen,” a point of view, or attitude, regarding this poem that most critics would most likely accept and embrace.7 In essential form, the poem thus follows the success of Four Quartets, a point regarding the great essaypoem that I have developed elsewhere (I have also argued that the essay is an Incarnational form).8 In a dramatic monologue, the speaker would not open as The Cultivation of Christmas Trees does. There is no occasion for the “speaking” here, no dramatic situation at all. In fact, the metaphor of speaking likely misleads; “writing” would be better, more accurate: “There are several attitudes towards Christmas / Some of which we may disregard.” That the essayistic is in play is confirmed by the joining of formal structure with informality of expression: that is, the remainder of the poem consists of three sections, each of which begins “So that.” The texture is, indeed, written, rather than spoken. The formal structure to which I refer takes shape in the lines remaining after the speaker’s prayer that the child continue with the reflex of wonder exhibited in seeing the Christmas decoration as more than decoration, as what it signifies. Twenty-three verses then follow, divided into four unequal sections: a first of only two verses, a second of four, a third of nine, and a fourth and final one of eight. Each of the three sections DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0006

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begins, as I said, with “So that,” the verses extending from the speaker’s prayer and explaining the hoped-for results of the child’s continuing in wonder and in seeing the decorative candle as a star, “the gilded angel” as “not only a decoration, but an angel.” The request is not, to repeat, that the child return in adulthood to an understanding of the decoration as angel but that he continue after childhood to see the thing on the tree as “not only a decoration, but an angel.” Therein lies the real character of Christmas, its Incarnational meaning, thus a matter of wonder, magic, and mystery, and a response to the usual thinking in binaries. The speaker—I continue to use for convenience’ sake what is, in fact, a misnomer since these words may not issue orally—first prays for the child’s continuance in wonder: “So that the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree” remain with him and vivid and real. A verb absent, the couplet echoes in language and diction the first Christmas, the tree (now) a means of appreciation and understanding, as well as, like this poem, a medium. The second section, of four verses, introduced by “So that” picks up on both the idea of expectation and that of the most familiar attitude toward Christmas: “So that the surprises, delight in new possessions / (Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell), / The expectation of the goose or turkey / And the expected awe on its first appearance. . . . ” The tone, we now realize, is child-like, the adult (for the speaker is also clearly that) participating in the expectation and the excitement, his attention to detail both essayistic and expressive of interest, and indeed delight, in “new possessions.” The speaker is, in other words, not immune to the lures that, confronting others, so often lead immediately to thoroughgoing materialism or hedonism. The third section introduced by “So that” differs from the first two in texture and orientation. The hope is expressed directly that such engagements and memories as have just been noted, with both “the reverence” and “the gaiety,” “not be forgotten in later experience.” Facts of adulthood here replace the joys and wonderment of childhood. The general nature of the terms accentuates the now-prevailing dullness, devoid of expectation and excitement alike: “the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium, / The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure. . . . ” It all points to sameness unrelieved. I have omitted the final “item” in this series of adult experiences, which item probably comes as a surprise, especially given the attention paid to it: “the piety of the convert / Which may be tainted with a self-conceit / DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0006

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Displeasing to God and disrespectful to the children. . . . ” I find it impossible to think otherwise than that Eliot here refers to himself. The words, in any case, image truth. The next words support an autobiographical reference, another parenthetical statement: “(And here I remember also with gratitude / St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire).” Our speaker has not forgotten; he remembers the first Christmas Tree, and the first Christmas, and he remembers “with gratitude.” Similarly, he remembers St. Lucy. Eliot’s choice of the young Christian martyr, who lived in Syracuse, 283–304, is at once poignantly apt and rhetorically and thematically brilliant. Squeezing the mere two lines allotted to her yields a richer “juice of meaning” than we can suppose hardly any other allusion to possess. That Lucy—whose name means light and thus connotes understanding—was a child who lived her faith and died rather than renounce that faith during the time of the Diocletian persecution of Christians is only the first point to be acknowledged. Another is that her life is actually swaddled in the darkness of time; we know, in fact, little about her, though legends aplenty surround her. She became the patron of blindness, legend having it that she either lost her eyes or gouged them out herself after refusing to marry a pagan—she had dedicated herself to Christ, for whom she vowed to remain a virgin. Venerated in a number of religions, St. Lucy is, in Roman Catholicism, one of eight women commemorated by name in the Canon of the Mass. On her Day— December 13—celebrations include the wearing of a wreath of candles by a young girl. The 13th of December has been recognized as the day of the year with the shortest amount of light. To the perhaps inevitable question how St. Lucy is related to Christmas, the answer comes that she is not, apart from the proximity of her day to Christmas itself. For Eliot, in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, what matters, includes the fact that Lucy died a child, that she is associated with light and ironically, then, with blindness, that that “crown of fire” recalls “the candle [that] is a star,” that that “carol” rhymes with and comments on those “old familiar carols” that we blithely sing at Christmas, not at all remembering St. Lucy. The “crown of fire” is an interesting rhyme that serves as an intensification of the candles traditionally associated with her celebrations as well as a reminder of fire as the medium of refinement such as the child-like may embody in seeing the Christmas decoration as also an angel. Perhaps the Catholic prayer that I have adduced above as an epigraph helps to contextualize Eliot’s apt reference to St. Lucy. She DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0006

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embodies, as it were, those very things that Eliot’s Ariel Poems are all about, and particularly The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. That St. Lucy is not theologically or liturgically connected with Christmas is important and appropriate to Eliot’s poem: without such an official connection, the speaker’s remembrance of her signals the capacity that the poet elsewhere refers to as the “amalgamation of disparate experience,” itself representative of our lost “association” of “sensibility.” The final section of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees introduced by “So that” treats the “end,” with the hope and request that individual human lives not cease, absent memories of Christmas that promote present joys. Here occurs the fourth parenthesis of the poem. The speaker has just said, “So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas . . . .” Then he adds, parenthetically, “(By ‘eightieth’ meaning whichever is the last).” There is an echo of, and perhaps an allusion to, A Song for Simeon: “Grant Israel’s consolation / To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.” Often read as clumsy on Eliot’s part, this verse is actually quite telling, a near-exquisite instance of just what The Cultivation of Christmas Trees is all about: the seemingly meaningless, by the standards associated with “perception,” is also shining with such light as the preceding allusion to St. Lucy has, I hope, represented. Far from being clumsy, the parenthetical statement—“eightieth” being acknowledged as metaphor—points to what Triumphal March calls the “hidden.”9 As with the decorative angel, the figurative contains within itself substance that transcends—without leaving behind—what it is merely perceived to be. The verses then pick up notions of the first Christmas made familiar in our carols and especially the Biblical account in Luke, emphasis properly falling on remembering, itself kept alive in the “cultivation” of the poem’s title: so that “The accumulated memories of annual emotion / May be concentrated into a great joy / Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion / When fear came upon every soul. . . . ” The words “shall be also” are critical; they not merely rhyme with “not only a decoration, but an angel,” but they also capture the heart of the poem’s way of apprehending, the way of Incarnation: both/and-ness manifested in the quietest, humblest manner. Precisely that connectedness marks the last couplet of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, the grammatical form of which completes the logical structure of the series of “So that” verses: “Because the beginning shall remind us of the end / And the first coming of the second coming.” With memories of Journey of the Magi, these lines also return us to the child DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0006

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and his “first-remembered Christmas Tree.” Also by way of the reference to “fear” as well as “joy,” the words confirm the link between beginning and end, rhyming with Birth and Death. With this self-reflexivity, Eliot signals, I think, the way we may hasten, if not effect, that “first coming of the second coming,” drawing from, among others, Lancelot Andrewes, who not only emphasized “orthopraxy” but expressed commitment to the (Eastern Orthodox) idea of human collaboration with the Spirit and thus our “partaking” of the divine nature: God becoming man so that we can become God. In his magisterial study of Bishop Andrewes, Fr. Nicholas Lossky writes, discussing him as preacher in relation to Anglican mystical theology:  . . . the Incarnation is omnipresent in the message of Lancelot Andrewes and . . . Christology is central in his preaching. Any human activity, in private life just as in public life, is called to reflect the new reality inaugurated by the Incarnation, the union of humanity to divinity in Christ, which opens up the way of a new humanity, that of deified humanity.10

Brimful of remembering and the continuation and (eventual) fulfillment of memory in new embodiments, as the last couplet of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees suggests (including the explicit “shall remind us”), Eliot may well have wanted to end a poem about mere decoration, the seemingly trivial, and the place of gewgaws with a return to just that, reminding his reader of the Ultimate by means of—at once playful and metapoetic—allusion to this very essai and the light that thus shines in it. The “second coming” may, then, be the new series of Ariel Poems and that return of Jesus Christ to time and humankind—Eliot uses only lower-case here, after all. Moreover, His “second coming” may be in the work of the Spirit in the world as embodied in human enterprises, including the making of poetry: the Word in the word. It is not, of course, that Eliot set out, or would have done, to make a trivial thing, although The Cultivation of Christmas Trees has been read as that, and nothing more, and then dismissed, shut up in a box with (other) decorations and stored, safely and out of sight (and mind) in an attic or a basement. Instead, Eliot completed his series of Christmas poems by offering one, in the new series of Ariel Poems, in line with the fulfillment of Christian poetics that he gave us in and as Four Quartets. The Cultivation of Christmas Trees is, in some ways, more daring. It is at once humble and confident, confident enough, in fact, to be humble, and DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0006

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humble enough to reveal that confidence. All in all, the poem is not only an angel, but also a decoration. Another way of putting the same: in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees Eliot offers to our perception a mean thing, but as such, the poem is a reminder of the totally surprising Birth—the wonder—in a lowly stable. The mean is thus a means of the transcendent, which is inseparable from immanence. Who could have expected Thomas Stearns Eliot, magisterial critic, possibly the greatest poet then writing, recent recipient of the Nobel Prize, to write such a (revealing) little thing? It is a gift to us all.

Notes 1 Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 106. 2 Paul Murray, T.S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of “Four Quartets” (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000). 3 John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994), 134. 4 Ibid., 137. 5 T.S. Eliot, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). 6 Timmerman, 134. 7 E.B. White, Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), vii. 8 See my T.S. Eliot and the Essay: From “The Sacred Wood” to “Four Quartets” (Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2010). 9 T.S. Eliot, Triumphal March (London: Faber and Faber, 1931). 10 Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626): The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of England, trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 329.

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Journey of the Magi: A Fable of Commentary: With a Second Coming to the Inexhaustible Abstract:  Journey of the Magi (1927) is the first of Eliot’s Ariel Poems, published the same year as he was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England. It shows the profound influence of the seventeenth-century churchman Lancelot Andrewes. The account of a journey (that is actually a “journey to Understanding,” which is the first Christmas, at which point all time changed), this supposedly straightforward poem begins puzzlingly with a (modified) quotation from Bishop Andrewes that thus fractures the time-frame of the Magus’s account. The words from Andrewes, though offered as a quotation, are changed to reveal an unreliable voice different from the Magus who then speaks, affected and changed by what he has seen. In reporting and emphasizing the difficulties encountered, the Magus reveals the (difficult) way of Christianity itself. Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007.

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inexhaustible: incapable of being depleted, used up; endless; all the essential having drawn from  . . . the beginning shall remind us of the end / And the first coming of the second coming. —The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

i T.S. Eliot received the sacrament of baptism on June 29, 1927, and the next day he was confirmed in the Church of England.1 Eliot’s decision, based in Incarnational understanding, owed much to Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and his understanding of Christianity, a debt to the great Divine that Eliot acknowledged in his 1928 book For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, in which the important essay “Lancelot Andrewes” gets pride of place. Journey of the Magi was published on 25 August of the year of Eliot’s baptism. It opens with what purports to be a quotation, the first five verses a modification of Bishop Andrewes’s words. Eliot’s conversion, Lancelot Andrewes, and Journey of the Magi are thus closely related, if not inseparable. Eliot had borrowed from Andrewes as early as 1920 in his poem “Gerontion,” modifying his words: “Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’ / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness.”2 Eliot’s specific, and considerable, debt here is to Bishop Andrewes’s Nativity Sermon 12, preached on December 25, 1618, and based itself on Luke 2:12–14 (“And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the Child swaddled, and laid in a cratch. And straightway there was with the Angel a multitude of Heavenly soldiers, praising God, and saying, Glory be to God on high, and peace on earth, and towards men good-will”). As Nicholas Lossky has said, in his magisterial study of Andrewes, “Starting from the word ‘sign’, interpreted as a miraculous sign, [he] develops the traditional paradox of the medieval liturgy that makes use of a procedure the inverse of what would appear in some way ‘logical’ for our humanist and scientific civilization.”3 Fr. Lossky develops the point, which Eliot shares with Andrewes and which he, in fact, expresses, as we saw earlier in this book, in his account of

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the “sequence” that brings the “intelligent believer” to the Incarnation, a “process” the opposite of that taken by “the unbeliever,” who is said to begin from “parthenogenesis,” understood as “the heart of the matter”:4 This latter would start out from materially tangible and verifiable facts and advance towards “optional” or “doubtful” notions, so to speak, which can only be grasped by faith, this latter not having an entirely proper status as a means of knowledge. In this new perspective, the paradox would be of admitting that this child, whose historical existence has been more or less demonstrated, is effectively God eternal. In the perspective that Andrewes shares with the medieval liturgy . . . , the paradox is reversed: what is astonishing is that the Second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Word, can “become” this humble child who is born in a manger.5

Bishop Andrewes’s own words, about which Fr. Lossky has written so well, are these, the preacher engaging in what Eliot termed his characteristic way of “tak[ing] a word and deriv[ing] the world from it; squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess. In this process,” Eliot adds, “the qualities . . . of ordonnance and precision are exercised”:6 Signs are taken for wonders. ‘Master, we would fain see a sign,’ that is a miracle. And in this sense it is a sign to wonder at. Indeed, every word here is a wonder. . . . Verbum infans, the Word without a word; the eternal Word not able to speak a word; 1. a wonder sure. 2. And . . . swaddled; and that a wonder too. ‘He,’ that (as in the thirty-eighth of Job he saith) ‘taken the vast body of the main sea, turns it to and fro, as a little child, and rolls it about with the swaddling bands of darkness;—He to come thus into clouts. Himself! 3. But yet, all is well; all children are so. But in praesepi, that is it, there is the wonder. Children lie not there; He doth. There lieth He, the Lord of glory without all glory. Instead of a palace, a poor stable; of a cradle of state, a beast’s cratch; no pillow but a lock of hay; no hangings but dust and cobwebs; no attendants, but in medio animalium, as the Fathers read the third of Habakkuk. For if the inn were full, the stable was not empty we may be sure. A sign this, nay three in one, able to amaze any.7

A bit later in the same sermon, Andrewes expands on the idea here “of poverty assumed out of love”—“if the most despised aspect is assumed, then everything is assumed”: He left gloriam in excelsis for . . . ‘His good-will towards men.’ It was a sign of love too this. A sign, nay an ensign, His very colours, as in the second of Canticles he terms it, ‘love His banner or ensign over us.’ Signal love, indeed,

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that for our sakes refused not first our nature, our mortality—that alone had been love enough—but not the basest estate of our nature, not poverty; poverty, and such poverty as the like was never heard of, usque ad squalorem et foetorem stabuli, to be found where He was found, there to lie. ‘Thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb,’ so we sing. Thou didst not abhor the beasts’ manger, so we may sing too; and is not this hoc erit signum, a very ‘ensign of love?’8

The Magi are important to the story, too, a point on which Eliot capitalizes. The star of faith that leads them on “demands,” writes Fr. Lossky, “a free response in the form of the journey.”9 In Nativity Sermon 15, Andrewes emphasizes the difficulties the Magi encountered in that journey, a fact that Eliot seizes upon, beginning with the last two sentences in the following quotation: First, the distance of the place they came from. It was not hard by as the shepherds—but a step to Bethlehem over the fields; this was riding many a hundred miles, and cost them many a day’s journey. Secondly, we consider the way that they came, if it be pleasant, or plain and easy; for if it be, it is so much the better. 1. This was nothing pleasant, for through deserts, all the way waste and desolate. 2. Nor secondly, easy neither; for over the rocks and crags of both Arabias, specially Petraea, their journey lay. Yet if safe—but it was not, but exceeding dangerous, as lying through the midst of the “black tents of Kedar,” a nation of thieves and cut-throats; to pass over the hills of robbers, infamous then, and infamous to this day. No passing without great troop or convoy. Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, ‘the very dead of winter.’10

Lossky says that the “difficulties encountered by the magi are there to bring out the quality of their faith, soon to be contrasted with the laziness and lukewarmness of Western Christians when it is a matter of making an effort to make their faith concrete.” In Eliot, in any case, the difficulties endured by the Magi serve as well to define the very nature of the “new dispensation”:11 Christianity is a journey, a very difficult one. For his first Christmas poem, Eliot chose the first Christmas, for with the Incarnation Christianity came into being, and all time changed. As he put it in 1937, “the Christian revelation is the only full revelation; and . . . the fullness of Christian revelation resides in the essential fact of the Incarnation,”12 a point of view that he shared with—and perhaps DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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derived from—Lancelot Andrewes (though it is also the heart and soul of the Anglo-Catholicism with which Eliot identified himself). To tell his story, Eliot chose a favorite form, that of the journey. In so doing, he played into the perennial “journey toward understanding,” which perhaps begins with Homer’s Odyssey and involves a geographical quest that is also an intensely personal and moral one, even a metaphysical and an ontological one: the “hero” learns from his travails, especially from a visit to the Kingdom of the Dead, which showcases the value of life and his own failures and responsibilities.13 In Homer’s great tale, the hero returns home and reclaims land and wife, a changing person—his is a continuing education. Journey of the Magi is at once about the undertaking, the journey itself, and the understanding that emerges in the Magus, that understanding being precisely the Understanding represented as the Christ-child, the means by which Love proceeds from Being. The poem, in other words, takes us on a literal journey to Understanding that results in (our changed) understanding. The meanness of the birthplace of the Saviour, Understanding Itself, matters for the poet as it did for the preacher, for the “new dispensation” has to do centrally with the fact of the light shining in darkness. In the mean—that “poverty” of which Andrewes speaks eloquently—is revealed the glory that in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees Eliot represents by the decoration that is also an angel, and that he embodies in offering to (mere) perception a commissioned set of verses, a perhaps seeming trifle. Journey of the Magi, for all its apparent simplicity and straightforwardness, begins enigmatically, with what purports to be a quotation. We cannot know from the poem itself that the words derive from Lancelot Andrewes, indeed from Nativity Sermon 12. We cannot know, then, that despite the inverted commas, this is not a faithful rendering of what Andrewes actually said. And that matters, especially since the Magus later will reveal his own concern for truthfulness. A quotation from the seventeenth-century Divine obviously contravenes the time scheme, for the speaker is the first-century Magus, at least the speaker of the remainder of Journey of the Magi. Is this, then, another instance of something like that “mythical method” that Eliot says Joyce employed in Ulysses and that he variously modified?14 The Magus cannot, of course, have been able to quote from Bishop Andrewes. We, though, can see differences between the quotation and Andrewes’s words. The main difference begins to emerge with Eliot’s DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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substitution of “we” for the preacher’s “they,” a change that is responsible for the strikingly different tone of the two statements. Whereas Bishop Andrewes reports on the journey, way back then, of the Magi, from his present position, Eliot quotes from an unknown and unidentified figure who falsely offers his quotation as Andrewes’s exact wording. He gets it wrong, though, at a key point, just where the journey veers from being the preacher’s account, looking back, of them, to the quoted speaker’s claim there of identity with the Magi: the Christian way is, after all, always hard and difficult. Moreover, thanks to the pronoun shift, the tone veers from Andrewes’s, which is respectful and reverent, descriptive and uncomplaining (he has not made the physical, historical journey). In the poem, the verses, set apart, appear almost whining, descriptive but also complaining and lamenting, attentive solely to the speaker’s inconvenience and pain: “ ‘A cold coming we had of it, / Just the worst time of the year / For a journey. . . . ” Andrewes’s version focuses on the difficulty of the journey, but the quoted speaker in Eliot’s poem emphasizes, differently, the difficulties for the men taking that journey: “and such a long journey; / The ways deep and the weather sharp, / The very dead of winter.” Andrewes places the words of the last verse here in inverted commas, but the quoted speaker in Journey of the Magi passes them off as his own, thus falsifying while, so to speak, internalizing them. Turning from the quoted verses, we find a very different tone, indeed. The Magi’s account opens with one of Eliot’s favorite words, the coordinate conjunction, which, for him, bears, as within the essential Christian dogma, that “impossible union” and “necessarye coniunction” (Four Quartets)15 that is the uniting of the divine and the human, transcendence and immanence in the Person of Jesus Christ: “And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, / Lying down in the melting snow.” He feels sorry for his animals, concerned for them—a good steward, one surmises— rather than whining about his own difficulties (a characteristic of the wastelanders). The conjunction, opening a new section of the poem and following the quoted verses, does something more. This speaker is adding to what has gone before, modifying it, seeking to get it right, trying to “set down” the way it actually was, a characteristic concern in Eliot’s poetry, beginning with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The Magus also completes the account—something that “the hollow men” pointedly do not, or cannot, do, their efforts, like Guy Fawkes’s, abortive. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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Having the Magus as his speaker must have appealed in a special sort of way to Eliot. In prose and verse alike, he had always been concerned with voice: from that of the strange love-song that is J. Alfred Prufrock’s, to the voice of tradition that is Gerontion speaking, to the ironically represented voices of various wastelanders. Eliot’s first collection of prose writing, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), is written in a voice that many readers (still) find stuffy, pedantic, dogmatic, sometimes nearly insufferable. I for one have described it as magisterial. Eliot’s (at least, early) prose voice knows. Here, the Magi are undertaking a journey in expectation of seeing and coming to know. It is critical to get it all down accurately and correctly. “But set down / This set down  /  This,” says the Magus later on in the poem. He therefore distinguishes (mere) “information” as well as “evidence” from the understanding—the new way of seeing—that comes as a result of the journey. In more senses than one, as I have said, Journey of the Magi is a “journey toward understanding.” The reader bears, as I have been suggesting, the considerable burden of distinguishing: things are just not what they seem. At least, though, in this Eliot poem, the verse is no longer truncated; complete sentences have replaced the fragments of The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” and quotations have, for the most part, given way to a single speaker’s enunciations (the opening quotation an obvious exception). Difficulty remains, a prime characteristic, said Eliot, of modern(ist) poetry, along with indirectness, among other qualities.16 He seems, here, to be re-defining difficulty, in which both reader and speaker share. Christianity essentially does the same. Difficulty, indeed, marks the Magi’s journey, and the speaker scrupulously and honestly reports it, admitting their regret for undertaking it in the first place. In describing that difficulty, the Magus is particular, specific, attentive to details, and as a result he does not dwell on how he and his friends felt or their pain and inconvenience. It is, so to speak, observational, rather than reflective. To be sure, they “regretted / The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, / And the silken girls bringing sherbet.” That way was easy and without difficulty, indeed satisfying. The journey toward the Birth was altogether different. The way was hard: the “camel men” grumbled and cursed and ran away, “wanting their liquor and women,” fires went out at night, they lacked shelter, and the cities, towns, and villages were “hostile,” “unfriendly,” “dirty,” and charged “high prices.” In describing these travails, the Magus continues DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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to use the present gerund that he has relied on throughout. The new way is difficult, demanding distinction and entailing sacrifice of comfort, safety, and even comradeship. Journey of the Magi is not only about this one, first journey toward Christian understanding, but it is the way of Christianity itself, the new “dispensation,” summer replaced by winter, palaces replaced by dirty, over-priced rooms and nothing, it seems, but dirt, rocks, and perhaps a blanket. At the end, the Magi “preferred to travel all night, / Sleeping in snatches,” the journey become so dangerous, the environment so threatening. What they heard all about them brought no comfort: “the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.” The Magus has allowed himself one personal reflection, “A hard time we had of it,” which is to be distinguished from the quoted words with which the poem opens: “ ‘A cold coming we had of it.’ ” “Cold” is but part of their experienced problems, a small part, in fact; “hard” is inclusive, figurative as well as literal. “Coming,” likewise, suggests the more restrictive matter of journeying itself, whereas “time” (in “a hard time of it”) signals wider-spread difficulty. Following the first of two poetic breaks that divide Journey of the Magi into three unequal sections, the speaker adopts the past tense. At the same time, approaching the scene epochal and life-altering, the Magi find things changing for the better. The weather is now “temperate,” they are in a valley, “below the snow line,” and there is the smell of vegetation, “a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness.” The Magus reports seeing “three trees on the low sky,” perhaps an anticipation of Golgotha. “And,” he adds, “an old white horse galloped away in the meadow,” at the very least a rather striking difference from the camels “Lying down in the melting snow.” But—alongside these apparent affirmations stands another representation, people here little different from those above the snow line. It is, though, the details that apparently matter most: that the Magus notices as well as what he notices. In the quoted verses at the beginning of Journey of the Magi, generality rules (“such a journey”), but the Magus is much more particular. And now the details are meant, I suspect, to represent both attentiveness on the part of the speaker and the reflex of democratization that results from the Incarnation: in the ordinary lies the extra-ordinary, the mean the means whereby glory is annunciated. Thus we get the otherwise gratuitous particulars, marvelously detailed, of this account, with emphasis lying in the seen: “Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, / Six hands at an open door dicing DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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for pieces of silver, / And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.” Here, there was no “information.” So they “continued,” arriving at evening: “not a moment too soon / Finding the place.” The Magus then adds, with restraint, reticence, circumspection, and diplomacy: “it was (you may say) satisfactory.” Immediately, the Magus shifts from the journey and the scene itself to meaning and significance. He affirms that, despite the ridicule that came their way, and despite all the hardships, “I would do it again.” Then he says, as we have already observed, “but set down / This set down, / This.” A rhyme thus exists with the poem’s opening, the Magus wanting, perhaps needing, to get the truth (as he sees it) down on paper. What the Magus wishes to be “set down” begins, significantly, with a question: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” The question is huge. “There was a Birth, certainly, / We had evidence and no doubt.” This much comes to us via perception, “information,” and “evidence.” But in that birth, what (else)? Is the decoration atop the Christmas tree (also) an angel? The Magus puts the matter this way: “I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” In nearly over-wrought fashion, Eliot employs capitals and lower-case to distinguish the two key words (though not from one another). Birth lies (with)in birth, as Death does with(in) death. The “hard and bitter agony” returns us, willy-nilly, to “A hard time we had of it.” In fact, the difficulty—and “agony”—began with and in the journey, which was “like Death, our death.” But Birth lay in that journey, as well, with arrival, with end, completing and fulfilling it. Birth and Death are, then, inseparable. For God and man have become one in the Person of the Christ-child. And this is a whole new way of seeing, never seen before. This new way—precisely a way—has enormous implications and repercussions. We have already seen (some of) them in the Magus, who is now attentive to the small and the mean. As the poem moves toward close, the Magus reports: “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods.” They are now separate from those without these eyes, the familiar become “alien.” The Magi came to see a new (kind of) god, indeed God Himself. In the DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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“old dispensation” you could touch the gods (plural), and people then clutched them, desperately, seeking protection, assistance, and favor. The new “God” will have none of it. His way is indirect. He is a god not just of birth but of Birth and Death, together, at the same time, like God and man, the rose and the fire. Birth leads to death, but does Death lead to Birth? It is a question. Little wonder that the Magus, ever-honest, says, finally, “I should be glad of another death.” This is, indeed, news: if good news, it is because it is, above all else, bad news to “the old dispensation,” and, more, to us, hypocrite lecteurs, mes frères, mes semblables.17 In Journey of the Magi, Eliot (at last) gives us the Hanged Man, whom Madame Sosostris did not find in her Tarot cards in The Waste Land. Clairvoyantes could not find Him, but the poet does—although He still had no part, apart from His absence, in “The Hollow Men.” He now appears in terms of the difference He makes. The speaker, as we have observed, embodies that very difference: not just in the way he has come to regard those still under the old dispensation but also in the way he tells the story of the Magi’s journey to Understanding. In addition, he pulls no punches, ending his account by affirming that the new dispensation is, purely and simply, contrary to human wishes: “I should be glad of another death”—still wishing it were all otherwise. But it is not. The voice of the Magus speaking in Journey of the Magi is not, despite the echo of “magisterial,” that commanding voice of The Sacred Wood. There, Eliot clearly adopts the role of Magus, not a magician, to be sure, but one who knows, even a wise man. He speaks for—and as—Tradition, the tried, tested, and sanctioned voice of the ages. Differently, in Journey of the Magi, we, in truth, have not so much voice as we do embodiment, which means we are in the presence of an entire sensibility, privileged to have access to a personal and moral stance that clearly exceeds the (merely) intellectual. You might even say that the speaker in this later poem is not really a medium at all, for he has been—and reveals how he has been—affected, and effectively changed, by the experience he recounts. The vessel that was hollow (and also stuffed?) in the major poem of 1925, has now been filled—a telling way, indeed. Appropriately, we cannot but conclude, because Christianity involves the whole person—hence the familiar, if abused, notion of being “born again”—more than point of view is engaged, and changed. The Magus DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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who speaks here is, indeed, different, representing a new way of seeing, and living, one entirely and everywhere congruent with that that Bishop Andrewes so vividly and at great length holds up for his royal audience’s (and our) close attention.

ii With—and thanks to—the Incarnation, all things are newly seen, the “ancient rhyme” continuing from Incarnation (minus the). Perception is no longer the only game in town, nor the most reliable, as Triumphal March dramatizes, as we have observed. There is another way of seeing, altogether different, affective, and life-changing. It upsets, challenging, de-mythologizing, de-familiarizing, re-orienting. Journey of the Magi implies all this, in short space, and humbly. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” had represented the disjuncture between ways of seeing/ways of living. The women of the salon, in the drawing-rooms coming and going, “Talking of Michelangelo,” contrast vividly and powerfully with the men in “one night cheap hotels,” the “men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows,” stoking their pipes and contributing to the somnolent scene in which apparent peace is belied by the very condition that helps to create and perpetuate it.18 The contrast is there, in the poem, but in the representations within the poem, the twain do not, and shall not, meet. Realms remain separate. One does not venture to bring to the fore, to the “superior,” that world totally, sadly apart. Prufrock does not “fare forward.” A flicker of recognition appears in The Waste Land, but there, too, the poem alludes to the difference, rendered indirectly. Allusions, created by some semblance of the “mythical method,” are largely responsible for the reader’s recognition, unseen by the wastelanders locked in the prisonhouse of their own egos. Eliot offers “hints” and prompts “guesses” aplenty regarding an alternative to Prufrock’s contrasting worlds and to the sorry plight of the “Unreal” cities in The Waste Land. But an effective, responsible, and affective alternative never emerges. It is not even clear that an alternative is even possible, or now available. Wishes there be, of course, and temptations abound. Prufrock is “sightless,” certainly the wastelanders are, including the speaker of Eliot’s poem. “The Hollow Men,” three years later, recognizes the essential fact: we are, and remain, “Sightless, unless,” until, sighted by the “Multifoliate rose.” In other DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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words, we stand in abject need of the sight afforded by the Subject of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, the Blessed Virgin, Holy Mother, Holy Sister, who in seeing Herself and thus receiving God, conceived the Word, His Incarnate Son, showing us the way. The Magus accepts—following a journey that figures the “Way” of what Eliot himself refers to as that of the “intelligent believer.” Christianity is a matter of (the) way. Not only is the way (chosen) determinative, but belief is itself a creation of “way,” a process, a journeying, observing, measuring, one that is never transcended.

iii Journey of the Magi opens, as we have seen, with a “hermeneutic perplexity,” possibly fulfilling the poet’s—Old Possum’s—intention. It seems that Eliot is always concerned to disabuse us of “falsehoods” (a key point made and elaborated in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems). The ensuing response to the opening words points, in any case, to a community (though limited in size) of interpreters of “the coming” to the site of Jesus’s birth: Christ came, not in the expected manner, but as a baby, a fully-human being, in a slowly stable, in “the dead of winter,” not the season for “coming” at all. The Magi, in response to word of the coming, came to Bethlehem to see and behold the Wonder (in all its Wonder). If the poem seems to ignore time differences—the Magus evidently having access to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, nearly sixteen hundred years later—it is because it does. Eliot’s point is that the same occurs in difference. Time does not really change the essential truth. The Magi come to find much that is different from and other than what they expected. They expected, and had every right to believe, that the birth would be wondrous, but wondrous in the familiar way. The “new” that they expected was hardly what they found and saw and came to understand. In a sense, Journey of the Magi is about the death of expectation, its very nothing-ness. It is, likewise, about the birth of a new way of seeing. The first Ariel Poem thus anticipates and prepares the way for Four Quartets, in which occurs the following refinement and fulfillment of the earlier poem’s essential points: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. (“East Coker”)

“Little Gidding” puts the matter “in other words” when the “familiar compound ghost” disabuses the poet of his expectations of “old age,” about which “East Coker” had asked: “What was to be the value of the long looked forward to, / Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity / And the wisdom of age?” One expectation after another succumbs to the light of understanding. The Magus says more than we are likely to understand (we cannot, after all, stand too much truth). This is, in fact, precisely what he is so concerned to “set down,” to get down right—the Magi are in the same structural position as Dante led on by Virgil, as well as Beatrice:  . . . were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

I have given so much thought, time, and meditation to the statement concerning deconstruction of the opposition of Death and Birth that I have, until now, missed the simple, surface truth of the Magus’s plain words: this Birth means the Death of binary oppositions, of seeing in terms of differences separated and made absolute. This new Birth means a way of seeing that does not exclude opposites. It does not transcend binaries, but it does go beyond them. Good is inseparable from bad, but bad, in the same way and at the same time, is inseparable from good. The speaker, a Magus, is, moreover, a commentator (Eliot had, in The Sacred Wood, represented the critic as a Magister, in fact had embodied the notion, notably in his most famous and influential prose essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”). In this poem, the Magus carries on a tradition of commentary. Appropriately, his first word is “And,” following the quotation, which is itself, in and outside the poem, a commentary. Although a Magus, the speaker recalls J. Alfred Prufrock in his (own) concern to speak well, convey his meaning, and “get it right.” “All this was a long time ago, I remember, / And I would do it again, but set down / This set down / This . . . ,” he says near the end. He resembles Prufrock as well in desiring, ardently, to share what he has seen with “others.” DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

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What the Magus does, unlike Prufrock, is to refine the message, indeed to correct the “way” the essential points are made in the quoted passage, to “get it right,” correcting “falsehood.” Moreover, in showing the effects on the speaker of the journey and the site of the Christ-child—affects alien to the representation in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” of the critic as “medium”—Eliot represents a refinement and fulfillment of his own position. The Magus has, in fact, fulfilled the Christian promise in revealing the positive effects of the Magi’s journey (to understanding). The later commentator on Eliot’s poem representing commentary refining and fulfilling (even) earlier commentary finds himself—the commentator par lui-même—in a situation that mirrors, repeating and replicating, that dramatized in the poem on which his commentary is dependent. This is the commentator’s situation—not merely the hermeneutic, but also that that proceeds as writing about an interpretation come to. The commentator’s “journey” is likewise to understanding, and it is full of travail and hardship, if not of the physical sort of a very real kind, nevertheless. He too, this latest commentator, desires to get it right and to get it down right, once he has seen. Journey of the Magi is (also) an important critical “document” because it shows that fulfillment of promise—of the “call”—is dependent upon, and demands, the pilgrim’s, the traveler’s, the interpreter’s, being affected by the seen (and the scene), which he then bears the (further) responsibility to translate so that others may also see, and see clearly and correctly.

Notes 1 The best account of the details of the church position that Eliot committed himself to is Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010). 2 T.S. Eliot, Poems (New York: Knopf, 1920). 3 Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626): The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of England, trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 50. 4 T.S. Eliot, “The Pensées of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 408. 5 Lossky, 50. 6 T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 347–48. 7 Lancelot Andrewes, Nativity Sermon # 12, quoted in Lossky, 50. 8 Andrewes, quoted in ibid., 51. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0007

Journey of the Magi

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18

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Lossky, 67. Andrewes, quoted in ibid., 93–94. Lossky, 94. T.S. Eliot, “I [Untitled],” in Revelation, by Gustaf Aulen, Karl Barth, Sergius Bulgakoff, M.C. D’Arcy, T.S. Eliot, Walter M. Horton, William Temple, ed. John Baillie and Hugh Martin (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 1–2. On this point, see my Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial 80.5 (November 1923), 480–83. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943). T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 289. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922). Starting with this paragraph and going to the end of the chapter, I have taken, and sometimes modified, passages from my T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist Press, 1917).

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Animula: What the Simple Soul Knows, or “Living first in the silence after the viaticum” Abstract: Among the similarities of Animula to The Cultivation of Christmas Trees is their fundamental form: both are essays. The essay-poem Animula traces changes in “the little soul.” It “progresses” from child-like to both offending and perplexed, thence to “irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame, / Unable to fare forward or retreat.” It thus misses (out on) “the warm reality,” the good that is available to and for it, for it denies “the importunity of the blood.” The poem also suggests that “the little soul” comes to live first “after the viaticum,” the final words of the Last Rites, at that point sent on its “way,” its “journey,” born in and with death. Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137479129.0008.

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Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted. . . . How then are Souls to be made? . . . How, but by the medium of a world like this? —John Keats, letter, February 14–May 3, 1819

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 1933

In perhaps surprising ways, Animula anticipates The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, a quarter century later, or it may be that it finds fulfillment in the latter poem. While often dismissing Eliot’s contribution to the new series of Ariel poems, critics compare it, favorably, to the 1929 Christmas poem. John H. Timmerman, for one, acknowledges a resemblance, writing that the later Poem “bears on” the other Ariel poems, particularly Animula, “as a sort of benediction”: “The torment of the fractured soul exposed in ‘Animula’ is set at peace by the wholeness of recapturing, in old age, the childlike vision.” “A kind of lyric balm” is said to cover The Cultivation of Christmas Trees.1 The question of anticipation and fulfillment raised by consideration of the two poems together points to the relation of early and later and so sets the stage in Animula for the climactic statement concerning “Living first in the silence after the viaticum” (italics added).2 As to critical commentary on Animula, as we will see in the references below, it is marked by the reader quickly passing over Eliot’s words, leaping to meanings, and thereby failing to catch in the words—those gewgaws— what is mistakenly sought outside and transcendent of them. The texture of the two poems in question is admittedly different, even as “the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree” wafts through Animula, offering its own kind of “balm,” lyric or otherwise.3 The childlike, though hardly childish, understanding honored in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees is anticipated in the “simple soul” of the child; after “growing,” though, the soul becomes simple again, bearing, as Hugh Kenner has observed, resemblance to the Hamlet-esque J. Alfred Prufrock.4 Considered as a made-thing, Animula looks toward the later poem. Both poems begin with a quotation, although the quotation functions quite differently in Animula, and that minor point itself looks DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0008

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toward perhaps the greatest similarity between the two poems: they are both essays (which, as a form, has historically been enamored of quoting other voices, welcoming them in). No dramatic character or personage appears or functions in Animula, neither this poem nor The Cultivation of Christmas Trees having a dramatic speaker (as in Journey of the Magi, whose “via” is replaced in Animula by the rhyming “viaticum”). Or rather, no personal voice is heard until near the end, in the separated second of the two distinct, and distinctive, verse paragraphs (the first consists of four long sentences). The term “animula” evidently derives from the Emperor Hadrian, who addressed his “little soul,” with a term of endearment.5 Appropriately, at any rate, Animula opens with a line from the Purgatorio: “ ‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul’ ” (at the point at which these words appear in the medieval poem, Dante has met Marco Lombardo, the discourse on free will coming as “Virgil has recognized that human reason is not self-sufficient and that he needs instructions to see ‘If this is the right way to mount the hill.’ ”6 The grammatical inversion—with the prepositional phrase in-­between— emphasizes both the act (of God) and that Ultimate Actor and thereby establishes, via the inversion of subject and predicate, the critical thematic interest in temporal order. The inversion is completely Eliot’s doing, no such appearing in Dante’s corresponding verse. The “simple soul,” of course, comes before the “growing soul,” but then time asserts itself, restoring—with difference—the “simple soul”: “Issues from the hand of time the simple soul.” Complexities abound, connections, relations, differences and similarities, binary relations, the most important of which is that that, as we have seen, other Ariel Poems treat, that is, death and living. Animula explores these issues, although, as I indicated, there is no person or voice engaged in reflection. Pace Timmerman, Animula is not a lyric, at all; it is a familiar essay, not a personal essay (despite the emergence of a personal voice, at the end, in a prayer). The soul—the animus—derives from God, issued into a world objectively described in the poem. It is a flat—I am tempted to say, preRenaissance—world in which things simply change. Indeed, change characterizes this world of “lights and noise,” of rapid turns from light to dark, dry to damp, chilly to warm. In like manner, the child is always moving about, “Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys.” Lee Oser, for one, believes that these verses “epitomize what we know of Eliot’s youth: the DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0008

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servants, the moral expectations, the sea’s presence, the love of books,” all in all “a rather Wordsworthian” perspective).7 However that be, the child he (or she) oscillates from one extreme to the other: “Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, / Retreating to the corner of arm and knee, / Eager to be reassured.” At the same time, there is “pleasure” in that “fragrance of the Christmas tree,” also “in the wind, the sunlight and the sea.” That “pleasure” twice mentioned marks the world of the “simple soul” as one where satisfaction is immediate and ubiquitous, any “alarm” always subject to readily available reassurance. As part of the pleasure that the “simple soul” derives from the simple, the ordinary, and the quotidian, Eliot mentions the attention given to “the sunlit pattern on the floor / And running stags around a silver tray.” These the soul “studies,” in fact, and the word “pattern” assumes thematic heft (in part because it bears so much weight later in Four Quartets). So consumed (if that is not too strong a word), the “simple soul” lacks the power of necessary discrimination, and so “Confounds the actual and the fanciful.” That soul is, simply, “Content with playing cards and kings and queens, / What the fairies do and what the servants say.” Wrapped in pleasure, and the reassurances that enable that pleasure even in the midst of “alarm,” this first “stage” of the soul’s change or evolution, not exactly “progress,” mixes indiscriminately the imaginary and the real, no basis for determining difference or rendering judgment yet available. Nothing really weighs heavy on the “simple soul,” light and peregrine and readily appeased. Everything changes, as the soul “grows,” that is, ages. That Eliot describes it precisely as “growing” means that the changes it experiences, do not stop: there is no “grown” soul, not in the poem, at any rate. The “growing soul” is no longer soft and light as the proverbial feather. Instead, it shoulders a “heavy burden,” perplexity replacing pleasure. Eliot phrases this change in an unmistakable way, for that burden is said not merely to perplex but also to offend: “The heavy burden of the growing soul / Perplexes and offends more, day by day; / Week by week, offends and perplexes more. . . . ” Oscillation continues, now between offending and perplexing. At the same time, and helping significantly to account for these effects, is the replacement of that “confounding” of “the actual and the ­fanciful.” That confusion occurred for the “simple soul” in the essential form of play, but the “growing soul” faces “the imperatives of ‘is and seems’  / And may and may not, desire and control.” The soul thus continues to be caught in extremes, in binary oppositions, in fact, and it reacts, both DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0008

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offending and perplexing by the response to the “imperatives.” There is no escaping binary oppositions, or so it seems. Indeed, the soul finds (some) solace and consolation from “The pain of living” in such conditions with “the drug of dreams” (and, most likely, the dreams of drugs, as well). At the end of this “phase,” the soul is no longer represented as “growing” (nor is it said to be “simple”). Rather, it is now termed “small,” and it curls up, cat-like, “in the window seat / Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” for which Eliot had little use. The third phase of the soul occurs with its issuance “from the hand of time” as (again) “simple.” But it is not the same soul as that that issued “from the hand of God.” Time and God represent another set of oppositions. The “simple soul” is now the reduced soul, time having rendered it at once “Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,” and rather like the crabesque Prufrock, “Unable [either] to fare forward or retreat.” The “simple soul” now also turns away, “Denying the importunity of the blood,” and ending up like that speaker in Ash-Wednesday (but unlike the escaping transcendentalist Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who precisely does engage in the “retreat” brilliantly figured in the famous sermon he is forced to endure in the long, central third chapter).8 Oser has helpfully written that the “simple soul” now “ironically recapitulates a process of interiorization, a turning inward for spiritual strength” that actually signifies “a flight from God.”9 In Animula, the soul that has come from God is misused and abused by time (just as Wordsworth said in the Intimations Ode); rather than growth and enrichment has come (only) reduction, the soul narrowed, misshapen, in effect made the virtual opposite of what it might have been, could have been, and should have been. This is that inverse of outward progression that Alexander Pope details in the fourth part of An Essay on Man, and so it mirrors the fourth book of The Dunciad, where All ends “in Self.”10 Far from time bringing wisdom as we popularly assume and often declare, it brings return and reduction. The only wisdom, Eliot says in Four Quartets, is “the wisdom of humility,” seen lacking here, of course, in the “simple soul.”11 The interpreter is free to suggest that the picture finally emerging of the “simple soul” is nothing other than that of Hell, one definition of which is separation from God. The (newly) “simple soul” is also fearful, again like Prufrock, and what it fears is most important: “the warm reality” (italics added): no longer does the poet represent the soul between DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0008

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the real and the imaginary, no longer caught between “ ‘is and seems’ / And may and may not, desire and control.” Reality stands before the soul, and it is “warm.” But the fearful soul turns away from “the offered good, / Denying the importunity of the blood.” “Time” may be responsible for parts of the soul’s condition, but it also has itself to blame for others. In fact, we may suggest, time takes away, but it also gives, opportunity existing alongside the “importunity,” or, rather, with it. The soul, the “simple soul,” now, is but a “Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom, / Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room.” It, essentially, lacks substance, light as a feather again. It does not, any longer, appear to be “peregrine,” although it leaves “disordered papers in a dusty room,” a place perhaps a writer’s, but in any case pointedly different from the earlier rooms inhabited by the (first) “simple soul” and the “growing soul.” It is described, moreover, as “Living first in the silence after the viaticum.” In his generally authoritative, recent study ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity, Barry Spurr writes, speaking of Animula, that Eliot, in this climactic verse, refers paradoxically to “living first in the silence after the viaticum”, a reference to Holy Communion given to those in likelihood of immediate death (the Latin word used for “provision for a journey” and, ecclesiastically and metaphorically, applied to provision for the passage from this world to the next).12

Spurr does not mention Animula, nor has he done so before this point. He thus lets go by the words that the poet uses and their “ordonnance.” We must linger a while over the “viaticum.” This part of the Last Rites consists of an act involving both the letter of the Word, spoken by the priest, and the Eucharist as the embodiment of the Word, given to the dying. The Word, then, spoken and silent, gives life to the spirit at the intersection of death with life. The suggestion is inescapable: the spirit begins to live at this point, not earlier. In other words, thanks to the mediation and intercession of the priest, communion, and the Word, the spirit is released: in the sense both of being sent on its “way” and coming to live. Before that point, it has been held captive. It is not, though, set free from a body thus “dissembled” or now merely transcended; instead, the person is purified, his or her full and total being transformed and transfigured. This is structurally parallel to what Eliot describes in “Little Gidding” as the “expanding / Of Love beyond desire.” In a sense, the DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0008

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body has come “inside” the spirit, or soul, and in this way begins, at last and first, to live. A “squeezer” of words, Eliot was well aware of the idea of “journey” in “viaticum,” and the sacrament, particularly attuned as he was to the centrality for Christianity—and thus for Christmas—of way. It is, however, the “silence after the viaticum” (italics added) that the reader must “squeeze.” First, though, “silence,” which Eliot makes of prime importance in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, referring to “the silent Word,” for instance, and representing the Blessed Virgin as “Lady of silences,” Who speaks through Her works in the world, our mediator.13 The verse in question in Animula also recalls the powerful, memorable last sentence of “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: the poet, Eliot writes there, “is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (italics added).14 The verse in Animula completes the treatment that we have noticed above concerning temporal inversion: “living”—not “life”—begins, that is, comes first, in “the silence” that follows the spiritual provision made for the soul’s departure from the body. It can then “fare forward,” once again light and peregrine. And living—“first.” “Fare forward” becomes, in Four Quartets, Eliot’s insistent—and urgent—message to us all: not “fare well,” but fare forward, ever-moving, despite the early speaker in Ash-Wednesday, who, in not faring forward, commits himself to the ineffectual, unnecessary, and false “way” of asceticism, believing that he needs nothing from outside himself to craft his soul, rather constructing it all himself and on his own, effectively reducing all to an act of transcendence. “First” thus comes after “last,” reversing temporal order, living after death—perhaps confirming the Magus’s recognition of his error in thinking that they “were different.” It is thus misleading, reductive, and but half-truth to conclude, as B.C. Southam does, in his often trenchant and helpful discussion, that Eliot embraces and advocates “the idea of living on, spiritually, after the last sacrament.”15 From Eliot’s treatment of death from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” forward and especially in Four Quartets—for instance, “that which is only living / Can only die” [“Burnt Norton”], “We die with the dying: / See, they depart, and we go with them. / We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them” [“Little Gidding”]), we know that he understood a positive relation as obtaining from death to life. This may well not have much, if anything, to do with Resurrection as we ordinarily think of it. What Eliot evidently means in Animula is that to be living it is necessary to DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0008

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understand and accept Death’s reality, facing it squarely—as the wastelanders characteristically refuse to do and as “The Hollow Men” and, differently, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems embrace. Once you accept Death as perhaps the fear that is the only thing we have to fear, things immediately change, a burden is felt floating away like the lightest feather, and we can begin to “fare forward.” It is miraculous, or so it seems. It is actually quite simple, and that may well be the major point of Animula. The advice that the poem offers, moreover, is simple, extended in indirect fashion: it concerns “the warm reality, the offered good,” and “the importunity of the blood.” Perhaps not much-seeming, but really quite a lot. Surprising, too. Surprising as well are the end-rhymes in these last verses of this first long verse paragraph. Rhymes appear earlier, to be sure, but they are scattered, hardly systematic. Here, though, we have good, blood, gloom, room, viaticum. The rhymes are obviously off, slant, imperfect, like the soul that misses opportunity for true rhyming (in the metaphorical sense). Christmas is the season of surprises. They begin with the unexpected Birth of the Christ-child in a lowly stable, the King of kings, God incarnate in human flesh. They extend, in a manner reminiscent of the meaning of the angel on the Christmas tree itself, to the child not knowing what wonders await her or him, wide-eyed, sleepless, eager, completely assured in and by the colors, shapes, and smells. He does not know what lies there; though he may have been asked what he wanted, she does not know what she desired and lacked until he sees it, unswaddled, fresh, and glowing. There have been “hints” and “guesses” (which, “The Dry Salvages” affirms, we make regarding Incarnation, at best half-getting it). The simple thing—a German-made red metal Buick sedan miraculously preventing itself from falling over the edge of a grimpen, a gray felt hat with a red feather in the band, a tin “Unique” typewriter (that I could pronounce only as “uni-q” and on which I typed out my first “book,” copying word for word from a later miraculous gift, Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia—these things were surprises, and well remembered, as are always, says Ole Ez Pound, Old Possum’s friend, what we love best. This is not the end of Animula. A second section of six verses follows extra white space—indicative graphically of the “silence” mentioned in the preceding verse—succeeding the line concerning the “living” that comes “first in the silence after the viaticum.” The new section consists solely of prayers. We may take this poetic fact as reflective of “the logic DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0008

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of concepts,” in that the immediately preceding verse has to do with the “final” prayer at expected death. Despite the names prayed for, there is no apparent historical reference. Pray for Guiterriez, avid of speed and power, For Boudin, blown to pieces, For this one who made a great fortune, And that one who went his own way. Pray for Floret, by the boarhound slain between the yew trees Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.

Anonymity (despite names) is part of the point, another being the variety and diversity of the dead here represented, the desires, quests, and ways of living and dying all coming to one end (as Four Quartets powerfully dramatizes). They include one killed between the symbol almost ubiquitous in Eliot’s post-conversion verse, the yew representing both mortality and immortality. The figures named and unnamed alike are dead, with no indication of “Living . . . after the viaticum”; thus we pray for them. And the poem ends: “Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth” (italics added). Surely we expected “death” as the end of the prayer—and so as the last word of the poem. But there lies, and comes, for us another (Christmas) surprise, for the last word is “birth,” and it is “our birth” we pray to pray for. The birth earlier mentioned, near poem’s end (which has to do with living’s end—and beginning) is clearly said to come—we think of Emmanuel, at Christmas especially —after we face death. Death may be the way, that in, through, and by means of which we live. The prayer for us “at the hour of our birth” is thus to have life and have it “more abundantly” then, beginning at that point. Might “Living in the silence after the viaticum” also refer to the first coming of our second coming?16

Notes 1 John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994), 134. 2 T.S. Eliot, Animula (London: Faber and Faber, 1929). 3 Timmerman, 134. 4 Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959). DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0008

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5 See B.C. Southam, A Reader’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 243. 6 Ibid. (italics added). 7 Lee Oser, T.S. Eliot and American Poetry (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998), 97. 8 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916 (New York: Viking, 1964). 9 Oser, 98. 10 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 4:c.480ff. See also An Essay on Man in the same volume. 11 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943). 12 Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010), 98. 13 T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (New York: Putnam, 1930). 14 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 22. 15 Southam, 244. 16 Some scattered ideas and a few sentences in this chapter are taken from a very different account in my T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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A Song for Simeon: The Difference the Letter Makes: Prayer, Self-Criticism, Validity Abstract: Deriving from Christian understanding, which makes the Incarnation a fulfillment of Incarnation, this poem stands in a certain relation with Judaism, the faith of the poem’s aged speaker, who awaits the Messiah’s coming. Rather than a straightforward spiritual autobiography, this popular, but critically neglected, poem works like a dramatic monologue. An ethical, upright, and righteous person, Simeon simply and precisely waits, skeptical, lamenting the severe demands exacted by Christianity. Of critical importance to the poem is its title: “for” appears where “of ” is surely expected. The poem is Simeon’s words held up as a mirror for him to see himself. Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137479129.0009.

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My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estimet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. —“Gerontion”

Animula ends with a series of prayers. A Song for Simeon begins with an address or invocation of “Lord” and proceeds with various one-sentence petitions that he himself be granted peace, until the end when he prays, “Let thy servant depart, / Having seen thy salvation.” The voice we hear in Eliot’s second Ariel Poem is that of an old Jew, not exactly the speaker we are likely to expect at Christmas-time. In any case, A Song for Simeon appears to be a readers’ favorite. It is quite sophisticated and very complex, a fact that we typically place in binary opposition with popularity. Generally, critics have done a creditable job reading A Song for Simeon, perhaps because of its irony, with which we seem happily to deal. And yet, lulled into a false sense of security, the poem become (suddenly) accessible because of that very difficulty, we may allow ourselves to get newly tripped up, now become victims of another of Old Possum’s stratagems, not yet well understood. Part of the poetic challenge presented to Eliot’s reader, relating to the Jewishness entailed, has to do with the poem’s being as a completion and fulfillment of Incarnational understanding, always and everywhere available. “Incarnation,” which Eliot calls in Four Quartets “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood,”1 stands as precursor to and anticipation of the Incarnation, a pattern shared with the New Testament in relation to the Old, Christianity, therefore, in relation to Judaism. The Incarnation fulfills Incarnation precisely in being embodied in a person, which Christianity asks each of us to replicate and perpetuate, moving, thereby, toward the Second Coming. The place to begin a consideration of the poem is Simeon himself, whose story Luke tells in ii:25–35: a devout Jew, living in Jerusalem, he awaits the Messiah’s coming. The Holy Ghost reveals to him that he will not die before he has seen the Christ-child, Who has been brought by Mary and Joseph to the temple for circumcision. With Jesus in his arms, DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0009

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Simeon finds the prophecy or his destiny fulfilled: “Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of my people Israel.” In the scene, Simeon prophesies to Mary the difficulties and sufferings to come: “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and a sign which shall be spoken against; (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also), that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” As always, Eliot remakes a passage or quotation to serve his own immediate and specific poetic purposes. In The Book of Common Prayer, Luke’s words beginning at verse 29 make up what The Order for Evening Prayer calls the “Nunc Dimittis (or the Song of Simeon)” (italics added). “Nunc Dimittis” is also the title of a poem written by the poet’s grandfather, Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot, “with the same theme and taking over some of the same Biblical phrasing, in celebration of his seventy-sixth birthday.”2 Despite these connections, in ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity, Barry Spurr provides only one brief mention of A Song for Simeon, and it is the following:  . . . “A Song for Simeon” might be said to be an Anglican poem in the sense that it takes the canticle for Evening Prayer, the Nunc Dimittis, as its frame (and The Book of Common Prayer translation of it for its source). But it is not an Anglo-Catholic poem in any definite way, unless one wanted to draw a very long bow and argue that its reference to Rome in the opening line: “Lord, the Roman hyacinths . . . ” is a coded indication of Anglo-Papalist tendencies!3

What matters, for readers of Eliot, is the use to which, again, he puts references and allusions, that is, the poetic function of Simeon in A Song for Simeon. It is a point—indeed, a fact—missed in commentary that does not read the poem but assumes that Eliot puts the Bible in other words. The commentator’s responsibility is to put the primary text in other words. Rather like Barry Spurr, George Williamson in his popular A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot spends little time on the poem, barely more than a page, although he does recognize how Eliot “has renewed and reinterpreted the [Biblical] story.”4 Elizabeth Drew devotes two pages to the poem, emphasizing how Simeon is “passive, detached, waiting,” suspended “between dying and birth, between birth and dying,” a fact “beautifully created in the rhythm.” Alongside the waiting, she says, is DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0009

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the being “haunted by the pain and disquiet of the revelation.”5 Hugh Kenner, for another, allots A Song for Simeon three or four pages, noting a resemblance between the old Jew and Gerontion and offering the intriguing but undeveloped suggestion that “Simeon is not regarding himself at all: hence a conspicuously unrhetorical poem.”6 You might, then, expect John H. Timmerman, in a book titled T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems, to spend some time on the poem, and he does. Unfortunately, he misreads Simeon’s words, hearing in them only “the wholeness of vision that sees the terror but also the benediction of peace.”7Although Simeon may not be a bad person, he is a much greater failure than Gerontion, and rather than “vision[ed],” he is “Sightless” (“The Hollow Men”).8 Eliot turns Simeon’s attempt at spiritual autobiography into something more like Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. Consider that first word, “Lord,” which I once thought was an exclamation or interjection, perhaps signifying insouciance. I now realize otherwise; the word is part of a straightforward address to the Lord. The first verse is important, not only for the mention of those “Roman hyacinths” (possibly with an echo of “hyacinth” gardens elsewhere in Eliot) but also for the way the line ends: with that “necessarye coniunction” the coordinate “and,” itself an embodiment of the “impossible union” that is Incarnation. The line thus helps to establish Simeon’s link with both the Lord (at the beginning) and that pre-Christian, timeless pattern called Incarnation (minus the). The time is winter, the hyacinths blooming indoors and snow visible in the hills. Simeon says, “The stubborn season has made stand,” perhaps a veiled allusion to what Cynthia Ozick calls the notorious stubbornness of Jews, who refuse to yield, to accept the idea that God is incarnate in any thing or person.9 In any case, Simeon continues, anticipating Animula in describing his life as “light,” “Like a feather on the back of my hand.” Twice, he uses the word whose base is “wait,” the last time waiting “for the wind that chills towards the dead land,” words that recall both The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men.” The first verse paragraph thus concludes on a note, and in a tone, that links up not only with pre-Christian points of view but also recalls the poet’s own pre-conversion points of view. If a certain aura reminiscent of pre-spring thus hangs over the first paragraph of A Song for Simeon, irony marks the second. Here, the old man details his works, that is, the good that he has always done and been known for. The paragraph begins with a prayer, “Grant us thy peace.” Simeon says that he has “kept faith,” made observances, “provided for the DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0009

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poor”—and “given and taken honour and ease.” With these last words, an eyebrow rises. Simeon goes on, “There went never any rejected from my door.” He is, then, basically, a good man, in the eyes of God and his fellow-men alike. A different tone, I think, is heard in the next words, perhaps confirming my suspicions concerning Simeon’s admission of taking, as well as receiving, “honour and ease”: “Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children / When the time of sorrow is come?” To be sure, who would not be concerned? But there may be a hint here that he has performed all those good works with little ultimate but expected benefit to himself and his offspring: “They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home, / Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.” This will, indeed, be the time of lamentations. So Simeon continues, opening the third verse paragraph, “Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation / Grant us thy peace.” Before that time comes, he prays, “Now at this birth season of decease, / Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,” grant “Israel’s consolation”—to, he adds, “one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.” “Birth season of decease” rhymes, of course, albeit ironically, with Christmas. Here, in any case, the reference is different from in Journey of the Magi; there is Death but no Birth mentioned as descriptive of the “stubborn season.” When Simeon mentions “the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,” I cannot but hear sarcasm, tinged with some impatience if not dismissal. He says that “the Word” remains “unspoken.” The first verse of the succeeding paragraph of A Song for Simeon offers no challenge to this interpretation: “According to thy word.” It is, of course, a seemingly proper follow-up to the just-preceding ministration for “consolation”—upon himself. But the tone feels snippy, “thy word” echoing with “still unspeaking and unspoken Word” and perhaps forcing to the forefront that innocent-seeming word “still,” which surely recalls the “still point” but here means only “continuing,” in other words, but one-half of the whole. I think Simeon doubts that the Child is the Messiah. Still, he appears to hedge his bets. He says, in fact, “They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation, / With glory and derision,” suffering never being far from Simeon’s rather tender—and unGerontion-like—mind. Then comes his clearest, most powerful statement of the double-bind in which he finds himself, possibility and pain ineluctably linked, the very condition of Christianity, and the tensional state that Eliot’s Christmas poems everywhere confront DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0009

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and explore: “Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer, / Not for me the ultimate vision.” He then prays again, “Grant me thy peace.” Of course, no hint ever appears that his petition is granted. But the problem, if that be what it is, is not that God is not listening, but, rather, that the prayer is not, to use the term from “Little Gidding,” “valid.” Simeon’s prayer, I cannot but conclude, is self-centered. His following statement, in parenthesis, stands out, as well, though differently: “(And a sword shall pierce thy heart, / Thine also).” Williamson surmises that the point is the contrast with God’s selfsacrifice,10 and that may be so, but still Simeon’s tone bothers, perplexes, and, I think, simply offends (to refer again to Animula, later poem to previous, this one). You will not escape the pain and suffering, indeed death, the old man (sort of) smirks. For Simeon, a piercing of the heart would mean finality. Jesus will end up much like himself, in other words, for all the “glory,” faith, and good works: fodder for worms, perhaps no more than an object of “derision,” fear, and hatred. With these remarks, only four verses remain, the first two remarkably insightful: “I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, / I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.” Unfortunately, Simeon says these things without really internalizing them. They do call attention to the critical need for self-examination and self-criticism, but Simeon’s uttering of the right words seems to leave them hanging in the air; they feel, therefore, more like lamentation, and self-pity, than the product of needed self-discovery. At this point, more­ over, all his protestations about his kin and progeny vanish into thin air. “Let thy servant depart,” Simeon says finally, “Having seen thy salvation.” The last verse cuts more than one way: he may mean that he has, indeed, seen what he was promised, and so is now ready to “depart.” The words probably mean, at the same time, that what he has seen is quite enough to convince him that “thy salvation” is nothing to encourage or embrace. What he does not mean is what should appear to him if he were honest with himself and able to look carefully into himself. There remains that strange first experience of A Song for Simeon: that is, the title, and the “for” where we surely must have expected “of,” the difference of but one letter. John Timmerman notices, and writes: “The poem is about the song of Simeon. The poem itself is a song for Simeon. The poet, this singer, enters a history from his own cultural position, participating in that song but also adapting it to his particular history.”11 Insofar as I DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0009

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understand the commentator’s words, I have to say: no. The matter is both simpler and more complex. Timmerman, like other commentators, does not satisfactorily explain why the title contains “for” rather than “of.” Simply put: the poem represents Simeon’s song. We have his words. But his words do more than they say, revealing him—to us—in a way that escapes his perception. It is once more all about seeing, how you see, whether something attends “perception.” Simeon shows, in other words, the “dark underbelly” of himself, but he lacks the critical insight— “Sightless”—to see himself critically, the way we see him. Another way of putting it: the song for Simeon is in his song. He has to see it. The title A Song for Simeon literally tells us how to read it—another mise en abîme. It is (all) quite simple, really. The poem is, then, for Simeon: it is a gift, being a mirror, into which he is invited to peer so that he might join in and share our understanding of him. Simeon has to turn his eyes inward, a capacity that Eliot has shown to be sadly lacking in the wastelanders and “the hollow men.” It is a difficult requirement, and Eliot shows, in the 1925 poem, that we are “Sightless, unless” our vision is activated by some outside force. In the case of Simeon, the eighty-year Jew, that external power is precisely A Song for Simeon. The Jews are, of course, the people of the Book, for whom the Law is paramount in importance. Eliot here offers a book (albeit a small one) for Simeon’s enlightenment, a book in which, appropriately, then, the letter makes all the difference. A Song for Simeon does not condemn the old man, no more than the New Testament does the Old. The acts of goodness that Simeon has performed, are the way to live and conduct ourselves, but the reasons why they are done needs refinement. Likewise, we should care greatly about those who come after us, but we must care too about those who came before us, the Dead, who are absent from Simeon’s accounting. He himself is “dying in my own death,” but those who are “only living / Can only die,” affirms Four Quartets. What Simeon lacks, Christmas provides. It also requires that we so understand if we are fully to appreciate and satisfactorily celebrate the Day. Included in the necessary “sight” is an understanding of “the Infant,” Simeon right about that, but wrong that He is “the still unspeaking and unspoken Word.” Jesus’s coming into the world is the Act—that gave us Christmas. It is also the means by which God speaks, the Babe thus speaking in His silence, revealing the nature of His Holy and wholly unique (both/and) Being. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0009

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Notes 1 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943). 2 B.C. Southam, A Reader’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 240–41. 3 Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010), 214. 4 George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis (New York: Noonday, 1953), 166. 5 Elizabeth Drew, T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribner’s 1949), 122. 6 Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 250–54. 7 John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994), 120. 8 T.S. Eliot, Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925). 9 Cynthia Ozick, “The Riddle of the Ordinary,” rpt. in The Art of the Essay, ed. Lydia Fakundiny (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 416–23, esp. 421. 10 Williamson, 166–67. 11 Timmerman, 117.

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Marina: “Living to live in a world of time beyond me”: Recognizing, Perceiving, and Understanding Abstract: Marina is a readers’ favorite, owing in part at least to its being seen as positive. The relatively extensive commentary on the poem proves to be a mixed bag, with speculations concerning the applicability to Eliot’s own life and generally running from the sanguine to the joyous. As a dramatic monologue, the poem is complex, the speaker— Pericles—not quite all that he seems to be. His daughter has returned from a shipwreck that, it had been presumed, took her life—she is now, for many, a Christ-figure. She does not speak, and her father focuses on “images” of her. His tone and his words begin to suggest guilt for having constructed a faulty ship, in which his daughter very nearly lost her life. Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010.

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Marina

But besides the act, we are to look to the Person in excitabo. It is not, Destroy you, and some other shall raise it; but I, even I Myself, and none but Myself, will do it; nec alienâ virtute sed propriâ, ‘and by none others beside, but by Mine own proper virtue and power.’ An argument of His divine nature. For none ever did, none ever could do that. Raised some were, but not any by himself or by his own power, but by a power imparted to some Prophet by God for that time and turn; Christ, by none imparted from some other, but by His own from Himself. And let it not stumble any, that elsewhere the Father is said to raise and exalt Him; that is all one. Both will stand well. The same power the Father doth it by, by the same doth it He. There is but one power of both; of both, or of either of them, it is alike truly verified. —Lancelot Andrewes, Resurrection Sermon 10

 . . . [T]he Christmas sermons, treating of the dogma of the Incarnation, underline time and again the paradox of the most high God of the heavens who limits Himself to become fully man, consubstantial with us, becoming participant in human nature in its entirety, sin only excepted. In the Easter sermons, the accent will constantly be placed on what could be called the corollary of this paradox: this suffering servant who has reached the last degree of the human condition is the almighty God, consubstantial with the Father, who with the Father has created the world. In His resurrection, which is due to His consubstantiality with the Father, He remains fully consubstantial with the Father. He remains fully consubstantial with men, and there ensues a new life and a new destiny for creation. Easter is then the feast, par excellence, of spring-time joy for creation re-created and become the heir of a great destiny. —Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626): The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of England

Before I said, there was no Gospel till the Resurrection; I now say, the Resurrection itself is no Gospel, not of itself, unless ascendo follow that. . . . Never take care for resurrexit, that will come of itself without any thought taking; never trouble yourselves with that. Take thought for ascendo, set your minds there. Ascendo, look well to that; resurrexit, let that go. —Lancelot Andrewes, Resurrection Sermon 16

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Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? (“What place is this? what region? or of the world what coast?”) —Seneca, in Elizabethan translation

The rather extensive commentary on Marina stages the issues that we have been considering in this book. No one of the several worthwhile studies quite manages a satisfactory job of it, but taken together the published commentary offers hints and guesses that can lead us into an understanding of the poem that may effectively serve to close out this look at Eliot’s Christmas poems. Early on, Elizabeth Drew found affirmation and completion in Marina, singling it out for special praise because of its near-perfection of vision represented in the speaker. She said of the speaker Pericles and the miraculous return to him of his daughter: “it is not only the sudden, unexpected presence of life when death has been accepted, but the sudden return of life transfigured and transformed, matured out of all knowing, which is the miracle.” This is a wonderful reading, made of whole cloth, itself the product of a governing idea of return and resurrection, applied to a work whose details challenge that familiar way of seeing. Still, Miss Drew concludes: Marina, “like the Lady [of silences in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems] does not speak, but she is ‘the warm reality, the offered good’ ” that Simeon mentions. “And the poem ends in ‘the ecstasy of assent’ to the new life and love, to a glad surrender to wherever the voyage may end.” In other words, Marina tells the (same) story that Eliot found in Vita Nuova and detailed two years earlier in Dante (1929). Normally restrained, Miss Drew fairly gushes: “it is the only purely joyous poem Eliot has ever written.”1 A few years later, George Williamson somewhat similarly read in Marina “hope, even guidance.”2 In 1959, Hugh Kenner was more doubtful, in fact skeptical before “a slight but stubborn possibility that the speaker may be mocking himself with falsehood.” Thus, in his very brief account, Kenner points to instances of the “equivocally mingled,” the “curious,” a “perhaps illusory dispensation.”3 Regrettably, Kenner develops none of this. More recently, as commentary has grown more specialized, and readings have yielded to the exposition of themes and the development of over-arching arguments, Lee Oser, for one, has claimed that “The poet leaves behind a world of ‘Death,’ identified by preparations for war, DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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by vanity, stasis, and animal pleasure,” having found “a more adequate symbol for the movement toward spiritual fulfillment than the still point.”4 In a chapter of T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems, John H. Timmerman reads Marina within a welter of previous literary texts, including, of course, Shakespeare’s Pericles and Seneca’s Hercules Furens, proceeding to find that the poem offers “the timeless moment within time. Marina too transcends time, for in the poem she is spiritually abstracted. No actual Marina figure as a living personality enters the poem. She is the beatific figure who nonetheless, in the narrator’s experience, obliterates the past with its horror and transforms the present.”5 Such a reading flouts, I am sorry to have to say, a good deal we have seen earlier about Eliot (in this book and my previous books). A seemingly more productive tact is taken by B.C. Southam, who helpfully adduces relevant comments in Eliot himself. To begin with, there is this from a lecture in 1937: “To my mind the finest of all the ‘recognition scenes’ is . . . [in] that very great play Pericles.” Then in a letter dated May 9, 1930, regarding the poem, there is this: I intend a crisscross between Pericles finding alive, and Hercules finding dead— the two extremes of the recognition scene—but I thought that if I labelled the quotation [which I have used as epigraph] it might lead readers astray rather than direct them. It is only an accident that I know Seneca better than I know Euripedes [whose Mad Hercules also contains a like “recognition scene”].6

And finally, the following, from a letter to E. McKnight Kauffer, who made the drawings for the poem as published in the Ariel series—the reiteration of the idea of “crisscross” is interesting: I dont [sic] know whether it is any good at all. The theme is paternity; with a crisscross between the text and the quotation. The theme is a comment on the Recognition Motive in Shakespeare’s later plays, and particularly of course the recognition of Pericles. The quotation is from “Hercules Furens,” where Hercules, having killed his children in a fit of madness induced by an angry god, comes to without remembering what he has done. (I didnt [sic] give the reference for fear it might be more distracting than helpful to the reader who did not grasp the exact point): the contrast of death and life in Hercules and Pericles. . . . 

Eliot then identifies the poem’s scenery as that of Casco Bay, Maine: “I am afraid no scenery except the Mississippi, the prairie and the North East Coast has ever made much impression on me.”7 DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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In a study conversant with recent critical theory, Eloise Knapp Hay explores Eliot’s “negative way,” and begins by linking Pericles’s description of Marina returned to him—“more distant than stars and nearer than the eye”—with Martin Heidegger, author of Sein und Zeit: “Being is farther away than all that is, and nevertheless is nearer to man than any thing, whether it be a rock, an animal, a work of art, a machine, an angel, or God. Being is the nearest, and yet the nearest is what remains remotest from man.” This is suggestive, as is the following summary commentary: “Marina” can be read as the end point in a series of ascents, beginning with “Ash-Wednesday” and “The Journey of the Magi” [sic], each poem recording an “in-between time”—here between dream and waking, whereas in the earlier poems the midway conditions were between birth and death, between the Old and the New Dispensations, or between hope and expectation. In the earlier “Ariel” poems the midway time was experienced as a deprivation, a denial to the speaker separated from the time of fulfillment, but in “Marina” the moment recorded is a passageway into fulfillment.8

It is almost as if Hay has the parts all in sight, but only some of them come together, and any real sense of the whole eludes her, partly because, unlike Kenner, say, she fails to see Eliot’s irony and the tone in which Pericles is dramatized. In what is to my mind the best account of Marina ever crafted, Denis Donoghue properly directs attention to Eliot’s words; he is a strong, close reader, engaging in a possibly unique mode of personal criticism. He writes, for instance: “Eliot’s language makes the visible hard to see, and it compels us to divine in its phrasing something that can be felt as presence or pressure but not delivered in evidence.”9 This is, I believe, at least close to that sense of “attend-ance” that Eliot marks (and that Donoghue, for all his insight, misses), whereby, in parallel fashion, the timeless intersects with time (it also echoes Derrida’s notion of the “trace”). A result is that, argues Donoghue, “At every point [the poem] is porous to ambiguity.” Donoghue concludes, provocatively: My sense of the poem is that its content, its story, is Eliot’s conversion to Christianity, his waking up to find himself a Christian and wondering what to make of it all. The poem is his Recognition Scene as a Christian: he fulfilled his poetic temperament by making the scene remote and ghostly even to himself.10

Possibly. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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But Eliot’s “journey toward understanding” is much more intellectual than Donoghue allows; it follows the path that Old Possum set out clearly in his representation of the “sequence” by which the “intelligent believer” ends up—not “waking up to find himself ”—committed to the Incarnation, Christianity, and “Catholic Christianity,” a process of close observation, careful examination, and, said Eliot in his essay on Pascal and the Pensées, “rejection and elimination.”11 I get no sense of such a tensional journey from Donoghue’s sanguine account. Still, that account remains helpful, not least in the way that it directs us to explore the relation of Marina to completion and fulfillment. Eliot must have had some similar sense; after all, he moves on to “Burnt Norton” and then the other three poems that in 1943 became Four Quartets. Only after that, eleven years after, in fact, did he return to the (new) Ariel series, in more than one way completing his exploration of Christmas and its meaning. Looking at Marina on the printed page, you very likely first perceive is likely “Death.” Not only that, but also the no doubt unexpected arrangement of the second verse paragraph in which it stands out four times. Each time “Death” constitutes a verse in, of, and by itself. It appears that the word completes the preceding line, all four of which end with the word “meaning,” and being longish lines (treating, from the Seven Deadly Sins, gluttony, pride, sloth, and lust). Only one of the verses would require “Death” as a carry-over. Thus there is no indention to indicate that “Death” completes a verse; rather, it begins four verses, and stands alone. Old Possum is once more at pranks. The preceding paragraph, the opening verses of Marina, echoes the characteristic mindscape of T.S. Eliot, with seas and rocks, the omnipresence of water, followed by the “scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog.”12 The bird here anticipates the “thrush” in the opening garden-scene of “Burnt Norton,” where it embodies the idea of deception. Pericles then says, “What images return / O my daughter.” I note the word “images,” not “a heap of broken images” (The Waste Land),13 to be sure, but nevertheless, pictures in the mind: these “return.” In images, Pericles proceeds to represent “Death”: “Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird,” “meaning / Death”; “Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning / Death”; and the Deadly Sins of gluttony and sloth joining these of pride and lust. “Return” thus for Pericles conjures images whose “meaning” he feels the need to explain, DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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although he does not specifically name the four sins here imaged. “Death,” rather, is the end of each of the sins, of all of them, although, as I said, it is not the end of these verses in which they are imaged, but rather the beginning, middle, and end, all in one. In the next verse paragraph, Pericles declares that “Those who” indulge in the sins of gluttony, pride, sloth, and lust “Are become unsubstantial, reduced.” This comes about by means, he further says, of “a wind, / A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog / By this grace dissolved in place.” These last words, of course, return us to the opening verses, the “water lapping the bow,” that “scent of pine,” and the “woodthrush singing through the fog.” Now, though, somewhat differently we have “the woodsong fog,” a curious combining and transformation. Next comes the “recognition scene” that Eliot refers to. Eloise Knapp Hay relates the paradoxical statements to Heidegger; I have been tempted to recall their echo of the “Lady of silences” in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, represented by a long series of seeming contradictions. Here, Pericles asks, his words and their syntax echoing directly his opening words of Marina: “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.” But, clearly, this is not the paradoxical, both/and-ness that figures prominently elsewhere in Eliot’s poems as an analogy of the Incarnation’s “impossible union” and “necessarye coniunction” (Four Quartets). These too are images, the poem so far, or so it seems, little more than “a heap of broken images,” a fact perhaps meant to link Pericles in our minds with the wastelanders, for whom death (also) looms so large, even as it is that “nothing” that they assiduously seek to avoid (if not void— what is itself void). After still more images, born of memory and imagination alike (“Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet / Under sleep, where all the waters meet”), Pericles suddenly veers to memories of the ships he built, including that in which, it was long feared, his daughter had perished, at sea. The texture, if not also the tone, changes at this point, images yielding to facts remembered, acts committed. Before we look at this last section of the poem, we might do well to pause and take stock, a move strengthened by the full-stop at the end of the two verses just quoted. To begin with, the epigraph from Seneca alerts us to the possibility that the speaker—here, Pericles, rather than Hercules—may not be all DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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that he appears to be. Perhaps Hugh Kenner was right to be skeptical of him. Is he, to apply the words he himself addresses to the image of his daughter, perhaps “more distant than stars and nearer than the eye”? Interrogative seems, of course, to be Pericles’s mood, but in fact, apart from the epigraph, the poem offers but a single question mark, that in the verse paragraph from which I drew the previous quotation. More important by far is Pericles’s fondness for images, on which he obviously relies. At the same time, he shows signal distrust of them, four times explaining the “meaning” of the image he provides. This penchant for images makes me, at least, think of Eliot’s important preface to his translation of St.-John Perse’s great prose-poem Anabasis, which appeared four months before Marina. In the preface, Eliot defends Perse’s difficult poem by accounting for that difficulty in terms of its reliance on the “logic of the imagination,” which he distinguishes from the “logic of concepts.” I have argued elsewhere that Ash-Wednesday reflects in its order the “logic of the imagination,” which Eliot describes in this manner: any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, 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. The justification of such abbreviation of method [in Anabasis] 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.14

The images, of course, cannot be said to function in the same way in Marina. Primarily because the speaker may be—and is—suspect. The question, furthermore, is not what sort of “total effect” that they produce, but, rather, how Pericles, the speaker, uses them and what his particular use of them reveals, especially about him. In a sense, then, I am suggesting, Eliot is experimenting; he may have Perse in mind, and be in the process of making a very complex work, indeed. Not only does Pericles not completely trust his images, but he moves away from images as his preferred vehicle of interpretation and meaning (more on the new section of the poem, in due course). He has begun to move away, not just in the second verse paragraph, but more so in the third, when he writes, importantly, that those four kinds of sinners “Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind, / A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog / By this grace dissolved in place.” His treatment and use of images also shows his own critical reductiveness, to which fact we DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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are alerted by his transferring—or attempting to—his own reductiveness to the wind, the pine, and the fog. He it is, after all, who has reduced the Seven Deadly Sins to four. He it is who reduces his daughter to “face” and perhaps “pulse in the arm.” He has said, in the poem’s fourth verse, that “images return / O my daughter,” the lack of punctuation in the first line here meaning (in the strictest grammatical terms) that “daughter” serves as object of the verb (a pattern to be repeated later on in the poem). And then there is that curious “woodsong fog,” made out of “the woodthrush singing through the fog.” In the shortened version, the woodthrush is reduced out of the picture, “wood” and “song,” sight and sound, made one thing and used to describe the “fog,” which had stood alone. Matters are, indeed, “less clear”—and perhaps “clearer,” albeit the latter in a way that goes beyond Pericles’s ken. Differences escape him, the sins all reducing to one meaning. He literally cannot see clearly—in the fog. And Death stands out. Readers like to see, perhaps understandably, hope, affirmation, and commitment to the spiritual. Thus they applaud (separated) words: “unsubstantial,” “grace,” in particular. But the “total effect” of the poem does not support them. Now, as we move into the poem’s second section, “I” is spoken for the first time, and though images still appear, they yield pride of place to reflection and memory. Here, Pericles begins by recalling the ship that wrecked, carrying his daughter: the bowsprit “cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.” “Cracked” thus stands out, pointing to faulty construction (much like the words Pericles is giving us). Then, says he: “I made this.” He made the faultily constructed ship whose wreck nearly cost his daughter her life, and in a sense did for some time, since she was presumed dead. Pericles, though, ensconsed in images, has represented death in relation to sin, no one of which necessarily pertains to him. He adds, enigmatically, “I have forgotten / And remember.” Whether this stands as a contradiction that cannot be resolved, it asks that the reader distinguish it from the paradoxical, both/and-ness that appears in the Blessed Virgin in Ash-Wednesday. Here, and elsewhere, Pericles’s words do not themselves show recognition of Incarnational understanding. That understanding “attends,” nevertheless, present, as it were, in its absence, its presence evoked by the reader’s recognition of similarity and difference. We note that there is no rhyming anywhere in Pericles’s lines. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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What he remembers—perhaps now, but forgot (he did not say that he had forgotten)—is the weakness of the rigging and the “rotten” canvas. That was, he adds, “Between one June and another September.” Fog continues to cover his words, not just his memory, perhaps defensively, whether consciously or not. Though he now again uses the word “make,” he—significantly—omits the “I” that convicts him as subject of his line: “Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.” Suddenly, the verb tense shifts to the present, perhaps explaining the last words of the preceding verse: the ship is Pericles’s “own” now, and “The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.” Problems with the ship thus remain. That said, Pericles shifts again, back, now, to “This form, this face, this life / Living to live in a world of time beyond me.” Pericles obviously loves the sea, as well as the fog that it engenders and that, in turn, shrouds it: the fog allows you to imagine, to form images (note the similarity of the words), and not to see clearly. He also loves ships, and the pine of which they are made. The vessels that he builds to travel the seas prove to be faulty, partly as a result, apparently, of his not seeing clearly. The thing itself seems always to escape his notice, discernment, and recognition, not that he necessarily wanted to see exactly and precisely. A certain and continual equivocation marks his words, along with reduction. Images represent a way of seeing, and Pericles is far different from the child-like in the “first coming of the second coming” that is Eliot’s sole contribution to the new series of Ariel Poems, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, twenty-three years after Marina. For Pericles, the angel atop the Christmas tree is, insofar as he can actually see it, only a decoration. And his daughter is no medium of understanding for him. When he says, in the fourth line of the poem, to which I have already drawn attention more than once, “Images return,” I think of Four Quartets. That is to say, “Images return” echoes forward to the verses in “Little Gidding,” especially: “We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them.” In Marina, the dead do not return, only the presumed dead, and we never see Marina. She remains merely the progenitor of images. That is all that Marina’s return effects in and for her father. He has not (even) always remembered her, evidently. Marina, in truth, floats about, and above, Pericles’s words, like a disembodied spirit, perhaps “unappeased and peregrine” (Four Quartets).15 She is evanescent, ethereal, only imaged—and then, in fact, mainly in terms DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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of what she engenders in the mind, which is not really ideas as such but a sequence of images, of pictures, whose focus narrows, precipitously, to the speaker himself. There is certainly no movement outward from self to Other, but the reverse. The poem’s final words seem to belie even that, however: “My daughter,” a return to the opening mention at the end of the first verse paragraph. The point is, or seems to be, that the analogy of Marina and Christ is close enough to make us think of the latter in reading of the former. But it is, as it were, seen in a fog, the outlines hazy, at best. And in fact, clear vision reveals that the analogy leaks, and breaks down—like the ships Pericles builds. What more can you expect, building in fog? We have no reason to suppose, moreover, that Marina has herself done the necessary work of facing death. She may have done so, but we have no access to what transpired within her following shipwreck and the ensuing suffering. Indeed, she “attends” the poem, present in her absence, not exactly a memory but a force, redivvus. Which brings us back to verses that clearly stand out: “This form, this face, this life / Living to live in a world of time beyond me.” By this point, the generality of the first three phrases does not surprise, let alone shock: “this,” “this,” “this,” is all that Pericles can muster. “Living to live” echoes forward to “We die with the dying” (again, “Little Gidding”). Apparently, the words in Marina are—so far in the verse—positive, but the phrasing “a world of time beyond me” is problematic. At least, there is no hint of mere transcendence, possibly a recognition that any transcendence is to be in time, not outside it in some realm of the ideal. It is especially the “beyond me” that troubles, for it smacks of the selfish. Problematic certainly describes and characterizes the words that follow, completing the poem: “Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, / The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.” There is, I submit, only fog here, but Eliot is not writing to make his meaning ambiguous or equivocal; rather, we may not be able to see what Pericles means—for he cannot see, either. We may be left in a fog. The problems here begin with “Resign,” hardly the same as “surrender.” And Pericles says, we must note carefully, “let me / Resign my life” (italics added): in other words, he asks, rather nonchalantly, in my judgment, to do so! Moreover, any such resignation will come, he says, via exchange: one thing for another, giving up one thing in order to have another. The words “this life” then repeat those Pericles has just above used in describing his daughter returned and promising: “this” is his DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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“go-to” word, ambiguous and foggy. You expect that he means the life to which Marina has (new) access, based on her near-tragic experience. In any case, her father goes on to state that he also resigns “my speech for that unspoken.” What the last word here means is no clearer than many others that Pericles utters, but, for us readers, it recalls words in Ash-Wednesday, most notably “Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, / The Word without a word, the Word within / The world and for the world.” As elsewhere in Marina, Pericles here mouths something that must recall the Incarnational and Christian, but his “unspoken” is patently not the same as that in Ash-Wednesday. In Marina, very nearly the opposite emerges, the implication being that the Word has not been spoken. And then to complete the paragraph, “the new ships” ends the brief catalogue of this “vita nuova” with a certain heft. Ships seem to be Pericles’s main concern, and, if not his last word, perhaps his deepest and clearest meaning. Ships are the vessels that bear us over troubled seas and dangerous waters; they are our medium, in other words. Pericles’s interest characteristically lies in the medium, not the message, in the image, not the thing itself. The brief concluding verse paragraph does nothing to clear the fog. It begins with an echo of the poem’s opening line, but with a telling difference: “What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers.” The last three words tend to confirm my interpretation of “the new ships” as expressive of Pericles’s continuing, rather than refined or expanded, desire. The “woodthrush” reappears, that North American passerine bird with the beautiful voice, which Henry David Thoreau described in terms that rhyme with Eliot’s in Marina: “Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free society and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him.”16 Obviously, Pericles hears it—something of its magnificent song, at least. But in fact, he no more truly hears it than he truly sees his daughter: in other words, there is no “attend-ance,” no apprehension of “the angel” in the decoration. The image of the sound is there, and that is all he gets. Furthermore, he says, tellingly, that the woodthrush is “calling through the fog / My daughter.” (Earlier, he had said that the woodthrush was “singing through the fog.”) The omission of the comma at the end of the penultimate line here means that the woodthrush is calling Marina. It could be, of course, given the fog, that “My daughter” is an apostrophe, although I doubt it. That the last line here is “My daughter” and so stands DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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in contrast with the earlier “O my daughter” confirms the strict grammatical reading. In the final analysis, I have to say, you cannot package Marina, nor tie up all, or tightly, the seemingly loose ends. It is not necessarily, however, that the poem resists such attempts and desire; rather, the fog surrounding Pericles is so thick. Pericles causes the problems. He is not, however, the “usual” dramatic speaker, whose misperceptions and misunderstandings the poem exposes for our benefit and delight. Certainly, he misreads, (vaguely) implying the Christological when it does not apply. But our interest resides less in him and more in what the poem does, he being a critical part though still only a part. The Christian story, that of Incarnation as its heart and soul, is present—much like Marina, to be sure—but in this case, it “attends” in its difference. Eliot has fashioned a poem that requires the most scrupulous attention to its words and the most responsible effort imaginable to put those words together so to reach a “total effect.” The meaning of Christmas is in its beginning. The Christmas of meaning also lies in the beginning, as does the meaning of beginning. To the beginning, you must return.

Notes 1 Elizabeth Drew, T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), 128, 131, 126, 127. 2 George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis (New York: Noonday, 1953), 187. 3 Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 272–73. 4 Lee Oser, T.S. Eliot and American Poetry (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998), 110. 5 John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994), 145. 6 Eliot, quoted in B.C. Southam, A Reader’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 246–47. 7 Eliot, quoted in ibid., 247. 8 Eloise Knapp Hay, T.S. Eliot’s Negative Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982), 5, 89–90. 9 Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000), 175. 10 Ibid., 179, 180. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0010

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11 T.S. Eliot, “The Pensées of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 408. 12 T.S. Eliot, Marina (London: Faber and Faber, 1930). 13 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922). 14 T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, by St.-John Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 10. 15 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943). 16 Thoreau, quoted, Wikipedia.

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Bibliography Andrewes, Lancelot. Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures. Ed. Peter McCullough. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. ——. Works. Ed. J.P. Wilson and James Brill. The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. London: 1841–54. 11 vols. Atkins, G. Douglas. Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ——. Swift, Joyce, and the Flight from Home: Quests of Transcendence and the Sin of Separation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ——. T.S. Eliot and the Essay: From The Sacred Wood to Four Quartets. Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2010. ——. T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ——. T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word: Intersections of Literature and Christianity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ——. T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. Trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Bergonzi, Bernard. T.S. Eliot. Masters of World Literature. New York: Collier Macmillan, 1972. Brooker, Jewel Spears. Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994. Bush, Ronald, ed. T.S. Eliot: The Modernist in History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 86

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——. T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000. Drew, Elizabeth. T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Scribner’s 1949. Eliot, T.S. Anabasis. By St-J. Perse. Trans. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1930. ——. Animula. London: Faber and Faber, 1929. ——. Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. ——. The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. ——. Dante. London: Faber and Faber, 1929. ——. Essays Ancient and Modern. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. ——. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1931. ——. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943. ——. Introduction. Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies. Ed. Thomas Newton. London: Constable, 1927. v–liv. ——. “I”. In Revelation, by Gustaf Aulén, Karl Barth, Sergius Bulgakoff, M.C. D’Arcy, T.S. Eliot, Walter M. Horton, William Temple. Ed. John Baillie and Hugh Martin. London: Faber and Faber, 1937. 1–39. ——. Journey of the Magi. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927. ——. Letters (1926–1927). Ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. Vol. 3 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2012. ——. Marina. London: Faber and Faber, 1930. ——. Poems. New York: Knopf, 1920. ——. Poems 1909–1925. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925. ——. Preface. Thoughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within. Selected and arranged by N. Gangulee. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. 11–14. ——. Prufrock and Other Observations. London: Egoist Press, 1917. ——. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1920. ——. Selected Essays. 3rd edn. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. ——. A Sermon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1948. ——. A Song for Simeon. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928. ——. Triumphal March. London: Faber and Faber, 1931. ——. Two Poems. Cambridge: Privately printed for Frederic Prokosch at Cambridge UP, 1935. ——. “Ulysses, Myth, and Order,” The Dial. 80.5 (November 1923). 480–83. ——. The Waste Land. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0011

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Gallup, Donald. T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography. Rev. and extended edn. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T.S. Eliot. London: Cresset, 1949. Gordon, Lyndall. T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1999. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. New York: Penguin, 1964. Kaye-Smith, Sheila. Anglo-Catholicism. London: Chapman Hall, 1925. Keats, John. Poems and Letters. Ed. Douglas Bush. Boston, MA: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959. Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957. Levy, William T. Affectionately, T.S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship, 1947–1965. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1968. ——. [“The Idea of the Church in T.S. Eliot”]. Original typescript in possession of the author. 23 pp. Lossky, Nicholas. Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626): The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of England. Trans. Andrew Louth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Moody, A. David. Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Oser, Lee. T.S. Eliot and American Poetry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Riddle of the Ordinary.” In The Art of the Essay. Ed. Lydia Fakundiny. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. 416–423. Pope, Alexander. Poetry and Prose. Ed. Aubrey Williams. Boston, MA: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Schneidau, Herbert N. Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Schuchard, Ronald. T.S. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Southam, B.C. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. 6th edn. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996. DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0011

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Spurr, Barry. ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010. Timmerman, John H. T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1991. Williamson, George. A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis. New York: Noonday, 1953.

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89

Index accept, acceptance, 32, 33, 50, 61 “amalgamation of disparate experience,” 36 and (coordinate conjunction), 7, 28, 44, 51, 67. See also both/and Andrewes, Lancelot, 2, 3, 5, 11, 12, 37, 40–43, 49, 50 Nativity Sermon #12, 40, 43 Nativity Sermon #15, 42 Anglo-Catholicism, vii, 11, 20, 43, 66 apprehension, 27, 31, 36 attend, attendance, 7, 15, 16, 26–28, 70, 76, 80, 82–84 baptism, vi, 11, 40 Barthes, Roland, The Neutral, 4 Beatrice [Portinari], 51 binary, binarism, 3–5, 16, 23, 25, 26, 34, 51, 56–58, 65. See also both/and Birth and Death, vii, 37, 38, 47, 48, 50, 51, 81. See also Death and Life The Book of Common Prayer, 66 both/and, 26, 27, 32, 36, 70, 78, 80. See also and (coordinate conjunction) Browning, Robert, 67 Catholicism, 19, 20, 35, 77. See also Anglo-Catholicism

90

change, changed, 42, 48, 52, 56, 57 child-like, vii, 7, 27, 31–35, 55, 81 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christ-child, 43, 47, 52, 61, 65 Christianity, vi, 11, 12, 37, 40, 42, 44, 48, 50, 52, 68 Christmas, attitudes toward, vi, 27, 31, 33, 34 Christology, 37, 84 come, coming, 21, 50, 59, 62, 70. See also second coming commentary, commentator, 2, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 27, 51, 52, 66, 74, 76. See also criticism comparison, 3, 12, 14 composite, 13, 15 connections, connectedness, 28, 36 criticism, 2, 52, 70, 76. See also commentary Dante, 51 Purgatorio, 56 Vita Nuova, 74 Death and Life, 5, 56, 59. See also Birth and Death democratization (of time), 7, 23, 27 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 76

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Index

desire, 8, 22, 24, 51, 52, 57, 59, 62, 83, 84 difference (and différance) and sameness, 3, 4, 34, 48, 50 difficulty, 30, 31, 42, 44–47, 65, 66, 70, 79 Donoghue, Denis, 30, 76, 77 drama, dramatic, 6, 33, 52, 56, 62, 67, 76, 84 Drew, Elizabeth, 27, 66, 74 Dryden, John, 6 Easter, 25 “the ecstasy of assent,” 74 Eliot, Rev. William Greenleaf, 66 Eliot, T.S., 28 Ariel Poems, 10–17 Animula, 30, 54–63, 65, 67, 69 The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, vi, 5, 7, 20, 29–38, 43, 55, 81 Journey of the Magi, 5, 20, 33, 36, 39–53, 56, 68, 76 Marina, 30, 72–83 A Song for Simeon, 36, 64–71 Triumphal March, 7, 8, 18–28, 36, 49 Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, viii, 11, 13, 14, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 50, 58, 60, 61, 74, 76, 78–80, 83 Collected Poems 1909–1935, 14 Collected Poems 1909–1962, 19, 21 “Coriolan,” 19 “The Difficulties of a Statesman,” 19 For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, 11, 40 Four Quartets, vii, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 27, 33, 37, 44, 50, 57, 58, 60, 62, 65, 70, 77, 78, 81 “Burnt Norton,” 14, 60, 77 “The Dry Salvages,” 14, 61 “East Coker,” 14, 51 “Little Gidding,” 4, 14, 51, 59, 60, 69, 81, 82 “Gerontion,” viii, 40, 45, 67 “The Hollow Men,” vi, 13, 14, 22, 45, 48, 49, 61, 67, 70 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” vii, 44, 49, 60 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0012

91

Poems 1909–1925, 13 The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 45, 48, 51 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 51, 52, 60 Sweeney Agonistes, 19 Two Poems, 16 The Waste Land, vi, 4, 21, 27, 45, 48, 49, 67, 77 embodiment, 7, 22, 35–37, 43, 48, 51, 59, 65, 67 emerge, emergence, vii, 6, 7, 15, 49, 58 essay, essai, 2, 12, 33, 34, 37, 56 essay-poem, 33 Eucharist, 59 Euripides, Mad Hercules, 75 expectations, 21, 51 extending, expanding, 5, 8, 59, 83 Faber, Geoffrey, vi Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement, 11 falsehood, 25, 44, 50, 52, 77 “familiar compound ghost,” 4, 51 “fare forward,” 16, 49, 58, 60, 61 first coming (of the second coming), 15, 20, 36, 37, 62, 81. See also second coming fulfillment, 2, 7, 12, 14, 37, 47, 50, 52, 55, 65, 66, 75–77 getting it right, 5, 8, 44, 45, 51, 52 Girard, René, 4 guesses, 11, 49, 61 Hadrian, Emperor, 56 half-understood, 7, 11, 61, 65 Hay, Eloise Knapp, 76, 78 Heidegger, Martin, 76, 78 Hercules, 75, 78 hermeneutic, 3, 50, 52 hidden, 27, 36 hints, 11, 49, 61, 74 Homer, Odyssey, 43 humble, humility, 7, 32, 36, 37, 41, 49, 58

92

Index

imagination, 14 immanence, 3, 6, 7, 38, 44. See also transcend, transcendence “impossible union,” vii, 7, 44, 67, 78 impurity, 32. See also purify, purified in, through, and by means of, 25, 27, 28, 37, 62 Incarnation, 11, 14, 15, 25, 32, 34, 36, 49, 61, 67, 83, 84 Incarnation, the, vii, 7, 15, 19, 27, 37, 41, 42, 46, 49, 50, 65, 77, 78 Incarnational form, 33 Incarnational understanding, 3, 40, 65, 80 indifference, 24, 27, 28 indirect, 19, 45, 48, 49, 61 in other words, 2, 3, 8, 51, 66, 70, 82 inseparability, 19, 38, 40, 47 “intelligent believer,” 41, 50, 77 intersection, 2, 3, 6–8, 28, 59, 76 inter-textual, intra-textual, 3, 14 Jesus Christ, 4, 27, 37, 44, 50, 65, 69 journey, 15, 42–47, 50, 52, 59, 60, 77 toward meaning, 6 toward understanding, 43, 45, 48, 52, 77 Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 58 Ulysses, 27, 43 Judaism, 65 Kauffer, E. McKnight, 75 Keats, John, 6 Kenner, Hugh, 30, 31, 55, 67, 74, 76, 78 “Lady of silences,” 60, 74, 78. See also Virgin Mary Last Rites, 59 letter and spirit, 7 light, 26, 37, 43 literariness, 8 live, living, 49, 55, 59, 60, 62, 81, 82 logic of concepts, 14, 62, 79

of the imagination, 13, 79 Logos, 20, 26 Lossky, Nicholas, 37, 40, 42 Lucy, St., 35 Luke, 36, 40, 65, 66 Marx, Groucho, vi meaning, 3, 4, 6, 7, 26, 27, 31, 34, 35, 38, 47, 55, 77, 79, 80, 82–84 means, 33, 38, 43, 46 mediation, mediator, 59, 60 meditation, meditative, 3, 6, 12, 51 medium, 33–35, 48, 81, 83 Messiah, vi, 65, 68 mock-heroic, 23, 25, 27 Murray, Paul, 30 music hall, vi “mythical method,” 27, 43, 49 “necessarye coniunction,” 7, 44, 67, 78. See also and New Testament, 65, 70 Newman, (Cardinal) John Henry, 19 Nobel Prize, 11, 38 noise, 25, 28 observation, 45, 77 order, 14, 20 ordonnance, 41, 59 orthopraxy, 37 Oser, Lee, 56, 58, 74 Ozick, Cynthia, 67 paradox, 14, 40, 41, 59, 78, 80 part (and whole), viii, 3, 5, 6, 13–15, 19, 76, 84. See also whole parthenogenesis, 19, 41 Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 19, 77 pattern, 28, 57, 65, 67, 80 perception, vi, 7, 8, 16, 19, 21–27, 36, 38, 43, 47, 49, 70 Pericles, 74–84 Perse, St.-John, Anabase, 14, 79 Pope, Alexander, 3 The Dunciad, 58 An Essay on Criticism, 8 DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0012

Index

Pound, Ezra, 61 Prokosch, Frederic, 16 Prufrock, J. Alfred, vi, 49, 51, 55, 58 purify, purified, 27, 59 puritanism, 2 reading and writing, 2, 5, 7, 8, 33, 70 recognition scene, 75–78 refinement, 2, 27, 35, 50, 52, 70, 83 reflection, 5, 56, 80 rejection and elimination, 5, 19, 20, 77 resurrection, 60, 74 Resurrection, the, 25 rhyme, vii, 3, 12, 21, 26, 35–37, 47, 56, 61, 68, 80, 83 sameness. See difference (and différance) and sameness second coming, 15, 36, 37, 65. See also come, coming; first coming self-criticism, 37, 69 Seneca, Hercules Furens, 75, 78 separation, 7, 9, 13, 14, 16, 26, 27, 47, 49, 51, 56, 58, 76, 80 sequence, 19, 20, 40, 77, 79, 82 Seven Deadly Sins, 77, 80 Shakespeare, William, 75 sight and sightlessness, vii, 23, 24, 49, 70 Southam, B.C., 60, 75 speaker, speaking, 48, 70 Spurr, Barry, 59 ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity, 66 “squeezing and squeezing,” 2, 3, 8, 12, 31, 35, 41, 60

DOI: 10.1057/9781137479129.0012

93

still point, 24, 68 tension, 6, 68, 77 Thoreau, Henry David, 83 time, 3, 7, 27, 50, 58, 59, 82 Timmerman, John H., vii, 30, 31, 55, 56, 69 T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery, 12, 67, 75 tone, 11, 12, 21, 25, 31, 34, 44, 67–69, 76, 78 transcend, transcendence, 3, 7, 27, 32, 36, 38, 44, 50, 51, 55, 59, 75, 82. See also immanence turn, turning, 8, 15, 26, 56, 58, 59 viaticum, 15, 55, 56, 59–62 Virgil, 51, 56 Virgin Mary, 42, 50, 60, 65, 66, 80. See also “Lady of silences” voice, 11–15, 20–22, 26, 31–33, 45, 48, 56, 83 wastelanders, 44, 49, 61, 70, 78 way, 7, 19, 27, 36, 42, 45, 46, 48–50, 52, 59, 60 whole, 3, 6, 13, 14, 48, 76. See also part (and whole) Williamson, George, 69, 74 A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot, 66 Woolf, Virginia, vi Word, the, viii, 8, 20, 24, 26, 28, 32, 37, 41, 50, 59, 60, 68, 70, 83 Wordsworth, William, 5, 57 Intimations Ode, 58 writing. See reading and writing