TS Eliot (5) - Poems 1920 - The French Poems and the Gautier Poems

These poems (all of those in Poems 1920 except Gerontion) reveal a tension. Eliot avowed that he had not been able to find any inspiration in Victorian English poetry, turning largely to France for that supply. It turned up in the form of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Corbière  and Mallarmé – the Poètes Maudits crew. Their poetry was urban, urbane, often atheistic, sexy, irreverent, sarcastic and acid in its outlook. ‘Spleen’ was a theme. It also, often, qualified as “Symbolist” given its propensity to create worlds, cityscapes especially, that acted as symbols of often morbid inner psychological states. Like a transfusion of monkey glands Eliot injected all of this into the English tradition and revivified it. The tension originated from the fact that the man who did this remained, in spite of his evident predilection for poets who had largely been raised in a Catholic tradition,  in the American Unitarian and puritan tradition in which he’d been raised.

Prufrock and Other Observations had been largely influenced by Laforgue’s vers libre mode, one which strayed over into Gerontion, the first poem included in the second collection. However, the remaining poems split into two types. There are four poems written in French and a series of poems written in beautifully measured and disciplined quatrains usually with one rhyme per quatrain. These had developed from an interest that Eliot and Pound had in the Art for Art’s Sake, French ‘Parnassian’ poet, Théophile Gautier, and especially in his collection Emaux et Camées which was largely written in highly finished and resistant quatrains, usually with two rhymes per quatrain.

The French Poems

Largely, in the four French poems, one senses Eliot’s delight in writing in a foreign language. There is a delicious relish in rhyming, punning and wordplay in a tongue that is not his own. In that sense these poems are entertainments, especially Le Directeur, Mélange Adultère and Lune de Miel where the influence of Laforgue and Corbière are obvious. Themes appearing in the English poems in the collection stray into Dans le Restaurant, which also features a French version of a section that will later appear in The Waste Land.

The Gautier Quatrain Poems

In terms of language and prosody Eliot continues to enjoy himself in the form he has chosen. What we would see as increasingly Modernist painterly tableaux and effects begin to feature with out of order time sequences, unexpected juxtapositions and hints of cubism and vorticism in the visual scenes evoked.

What is also apparent, in terms of the poems’ content, is a fracture between two worlds that stand over and against each other, as, in a sense, their content is Eliot’s inability to resolve or unify these two worlds. On the one hand he demonstrates a fastidious disgust of an almost pathological kind for the animal, fleshly side of human nature as it features in the real world – his first world.

A saggy bending of the knees

And elbows with their palms turned out,

           Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar

Gesture of Orang Utan

Rises from the sheets in steam.

This withered root of knots of hair

Slitted below and gashed with eyes,

This oval O cropped out with teeth:

The sickle motion from the thighs

Jacknifes upwards at the knees

Then straighten out from heel to hip

Pushing the framework of the bed

And clawing at the pillow slip.

Sweeney addressed full length to shave

Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,

                                             Sweeney Erect

The sleek Brazilian jaguar

Does not in the arboreal gloom

Distil so rank a feline smell

As Grishkin in a drawing room.

               Whispers of Immortality

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham

Stirring the water in his bath.

            Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service

Apeneck Sweeney spread his knees

Letting his arms hang down to laugh,

The zebra stripes along his jaw

Swelling to maculate giraffe.

        Sweeney among the Nightingales

At its most extreme this mode of engagement has Eliot practically pulling on his latex gloves in order to treat of the act of sex. The woman in Sweeney Erect is described as The epileptic on the bed. She is depersonalised and turned into a clinical case or specimen in an act of distancing that has already described her as

This withered root of knots of hair

Slitted below and gashed with eyes,

This oval O cropped out with teeth:

She is an external appearance with no sense of an interiority or a sense that the act of sex that has just been so graphically described contains any personal meaning for her or Sweeney. Indeed Apeneck Sweeney is, more often than not, evoked as an animal devoid of the superior human qualities that differentiate humans from animals.

One can extend such comments to the relation of Eliot’s male protagonists with women in general and the place of women. It might be suggested in saner times that the female of the species completes that species (for the male) in terms of biology by being the other half of the dynamic of life, and of relationship by offering the possibility of love. To see women as revolting, a threat or a distraction and to be alienated from them as Eliot’s protagonists seem to be in either their fearing of them or their using of them seems a further extension of a psychological pathology.

Also present in this first world is a strain of hopeless banality and mundanity which complements the disgusting carnality evoked elsewhere. We see it in the ladies of the corridor with their sal volatile in Sweeney Erect, the A.B.C. teashops and Pipit’s knitting in A Cooking Egg, the cracked and browned wilderness of Piero della Francesca’s ‘Baptism’ in Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service and the grasping rentier jews and their earthly control of a shorn Venice in Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar and also in Gerontion.

In opposition to this world of carnality and banality is positioned a second world. This is inhabited by Ariadne on Naxos, Nausicaa and Polyphemus in Sweeney Erect,

Display me Aeolus above

Reviewing the insurgent gales

Which tangle Ariadne’s hair

And swell with haste the perjured sails.

by what Christian mercantile Venice once was in the time of Canaletto with the comparison of Burbank to Mark Anthony in Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar,

Slowly: the God Hercules

Had left him, that had loved him well.

by the Ruskinian high-mindedness of the aspirations portrayed in A Cooking Egg,

I shall not want Honour in Heaven

For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney

And have talk with Coriolanus

And other heroes of that kidney.

by the ‘metaphysics’ of the Metaphysical poets in Whispers of Immortality,  

But our lot crawls between dry ribs

To keep our metaphysics warm.

by the exalted, other-worldly religious ceremony described in Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service

Under the penitential gates

Sustained by staring Seraphim

Where the souls of the devout

Burn invisible……………

and by the momentous, mythic death of Agammemnon in Sweeney among the Nightingales.

And sang within the bloody wood

When Agamemnon cried aloud

The word Nightingales points up Eliot’s unresolved opposition beautifully in its two meanings. On the one hand the birds are mythic creatures evoking the nobility and grief of Greek myths such as that of Procne and Philomel while, on the other, they evoke the sordid banality and carnality of prostitutes. What is interesting is that, while Eliot feels fastidious disgust for one world, he finds it equally impossible to refrain from mocking the opposite pole and its inability to console him. This is the world of his elevated liberal and religious education which he might have expected to offer such consolation. That it doesn’t but only serves to point up the ghastliness of the real world is a kind of tragedy for him. Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service introduces the carnal unpleasantness of Sweeney wallowing naked in his bath on a Sunday morning while everyone is in church but the poem’s epigraph is Look, look, here come two religious caterpillars and the heightened ecclesiastical language used to describe the service mocks it for its intellectualised ethereality and sexlessness:

Along the garden-wall the bees

With hairy bellies pass between

The staminate and pistillate,

Blest office of the epicene.

It is noteworthy that the form chosen for these poems lends itself well to their content. Gautier’s quatrains have a highly polished, exotic and rarified formality that belongs, perhaps, to the promising mythic and religious worlds suggested. Eliot derives a great deal in terms of bathetic comedy from the ironic distance between this form and the banal and crudely carnal which he treats within it. This ironic distance contributes greatly to the success of the poems.

It could be said, finally, that Eliot is, at the outset with Prufrock and Other Observations and, increasingly so in Poems 1920, a curious phenomenon. The humour and comedy in his poems derive from a heart-breaking dichotomy which represents an acute personal, spiritual and psychological crisis. He is unable to countenance the revolting carnality of real people and he finds no consolation in religious ceremony or myth which serve simply to highlight a painful reality by showing the distance between reality and something he thinks is finer. This provides bathos but no resolution. The question to be asked, at this stage, is whether what we are witnessing is a noble soul pursuing a spiritual odyssey that charts a trajectory in the Western Christian tradition or, more simply, the banal struggles of a psychologically maladjusted  puritan coming to terms with the parameters of the human condition. He is unable to locate everyday physicality in ancient myth or religion or to begin to see that those myths may have originated in the loves springing from that same, normal human physicality. Perhaps he should have considered what the cause of the Trojan War was. This question may be resolved in the works that followed Poems 1920.

It may be noteworthy that John Ruskin, who is evoked in both Burbank with as Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar and in A Cooking Egg shared an experience with Eliot. Both had disastrous wedding nights, in Ruskin’s case, due to his horror at the uncovered female form of Effie. Both were high-minded men who found it difficult to resolve the coexistence in human forms of the cerebral and the fleshly. Indeed, Eliot made reference to this problem in addressing the character and nature of the Metaphysical Poets.