‘…………………………………………….
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.’
The last twist of the knife.
The last twist of the knife.
Grafted suddenly
onto the English scene, Eliot seems, in these poems, like a fully-fledged
French Symbolist who has strayed across the Channel and into another language
to take that language by surprise. Suddenly
we have our own poète maudit, our own Laforgue, Corbière, Verlaine, Rimbaud or
Baudelaire. Of course he came from further afield and might have seemed more
fastidious than that disreputable crew.
Like a true symbolist he brilliantly sets out for us a concrete cityscape
that suggests his state of mind or soul using rusting, broken springs,
prostitutes in doorways, a lunatic moon, dirty rooming houses, vagabond women,
crowds, captive, dancing bears and broken musical instruments.
Retracing our steps from these images to the creator we find he has placed us in the company of a protagonist who suffers from inertia, the dissociation of an hysteric, moral paralysis, self-disgust and impotence. For this man consciousness is hell and to be awake is to experience moral anguish to the extent that one would be forgiven for thinking such anguish is his natural element; a default state synonymous with life. Events just cause him more pain by underlining his fecklessness. Returning to our poètes we are reminded of Baudelaire’s ‘irrémédiable’ and ‘irréparable.’ There is a sense of past transgression with eternal consequence felt by a character of whom it can be said ‘De profundis clamavi.’
This is a very particular state of soul which we are presented with tout court without explanation. One wonders how Eliot (if we are allowed the license to assume it has something to do with him rather than purely the artist that he is) came by it.
Noteworthy also is that, beyond the suite of 'Portrait of a Lady,' 'Preludes' and 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night,' there are eight shorter poems. The most interesting is 'Mr Apollinax' which was inspired by a reception at the home of a Massachusetts Philosophy Professor at which Bertrand Russell was received. This poem seems like the first taste of the style that would later appear in 'The Waste Land.' The poem feels like a poem written in the Jazz Age and the age of Picasso. The dream-like unconscious intrudes unannounced on the conscious, heads roll under chairs, centaurs appear at a garden party and drowning souls are evoked. Caricatures with absurd and exotic names like Mrs Phlaccus and Professor Channing-Cheetah alongside Russell's stand-in, Mr Apollinax himself, make their first appearance.
Retracing our steps from these images to the creator we find he has placed us in the company of a protagonist who suffers from inertia, the dissociation of an hysteric, moral paralysis, self-disgust and impotence. For this man consciousness is hell and to be awake is to experience moral anguish to the extent that one would be forgiven for thinking such anguish is his natural element; a default state synonymous with life. Events just cause him more pain by underlining his fecklessness. Returning to our poètes we are reminded of Baudelaire’s ‘irrémédiable’ and ‘irréparable.’ There is a sense of past transgression with eternal consequence felt by a character of whom it can be said ‘De profundis clamavi.’
This is a very particular state of soul which we are presented with tout court without explanation. One wonders how Eliot (if we are allowed the license to assume it has something to do with him rather than purely the artist that he is) came by it.
Noteworthy also is that, beyond the suite of 'Portrait of a Lady,' 'Preludes' and 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night,' there are eight shorter poems. The most interesting is 'Mr Apollinax' which was inspired by a reception at the home of a Massachusetts Philosophy Professor at which Bertrand Russell was received. This poem seems like the first taste of the style that would later appear in 'The Waste Land.' The poem feels like a poem written in the Jazz Age and the age of Picasso. The dream-like unconscious intrudes unannounced on the conscious, heads roll under chairs, centaurs appear at a garden party and drowning souls are evoked. Caricatures with absurd and exotic names like Mrs Phlaccus and Professor Channing-Cheetah alongside Russell's stand-in, Mr Apollinax himself, make their first appearance.
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