The Human Predicament in Eliot’s Early Poetry

THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT IN
ELIOT’S EARLY POETRY

DR. GUTTIKONDA NAGESWARA RAO, M. A., Ph. D.

The optimism, confidence and assurance of the earlier age are replaced in modern times by anxiety, insecurity, fear and despair. This change of outlook is largely due to the high frequency of unprecedented social and intellectual cataclysms which have occurred during the twentieth century. The thirty-six year period between 1914 and 1949, the period during which Eliot produced his best in poetry and criticism, included a decade of world wars, ten years of world depression–not to mention the Russian, Italian and German revolutions, the Spanish Civil War and Indian Independence movement. These disturbances and changes created a widespread revolt against all kinds of traditions. They also led to an uncertainty about all standards–political, social, moral and intellectual.

Naturally, this period has seen the spread of radical doubts about human life and dignity. Though there is nothing new in determinism in a philosophical or religious sense, to the follow of scientists of natural evolution, Marx and Freud determinism in human affairs has given a seemingly scientific basis. As for man’s relation to environment, the physical universe of science has become increasingly larger and more incomprehensible to the common people who do not possess a special knowledge of science mathematics. Marxism showed that human societies, in their organisations and historical development, are predetermined technological considerations. Freud advocated that human individuals are predetermined by the formation or malformation of unconscious parts of their minds during infancy or early childhood. Finally, the anthropological approach to human ciyilization and culture revealed that many a cherished belief and institution takes its significance solely from the cultural framework in which it occurs. Outside this framework they have neither validity nor meaning.

This many-sided revolution in all areas of human existence created a tough classical pessimistic outlook. As Hulme has pointed out, in the light of absolute values, “man himself is judged to be essentially limited and imperfect. He can accomplish anything of value by discipline–ethical and political. Order is thus not merely negative, but creative and liberating. Institutions are necessary.”¹ This reassertion of classical values, originally stated by Hulme, was later popularised by Irving Babbitt, Eliot’s guru. Eliot, nourished in this climate of ideas, is naturally concerned with the perennial predicament of man. Therefore, two themes, man’s perpetual metaphysical preoccupation and the failure of a depraved religion in guiding man through the stresses of life, occupy a prominent place in Eliot’s work, even in his juvenilia. In his first poem, A Fable for Feasters, Eliot satirises a band of merry friars given to heavy feasting. The gluttonous friars are nagged by an invisible spirit, who once seated their prior

on the steeple
To the astonishment of all the people, ²
and thus whips them into their senses.

Another poem called A Lyric shows his metaphysical enquiry:

If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The Sun which does not feel decay,
No greater is than we... ³

In his The Boston Evening Transcript Eliot presents the solid old generation as leading an orderly but obsolete life. Their life is a sharp contrast to the modern weariness nodding good-bye to the old wisdom:

I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to
La Rochefocauld, ⁴

He presents the last flicker ofthis dying vitality before its final extinction to emphasize what humanity was and what it is becoming. After the death ofthe maiden aunt in Aunt Helen, the order she maintained is broken.

And the foottnan sat upon the dining-table
Holding the second housemaid on his knees.
Who has always been so careful while her mistress lived. ⁵

Traditional sanctity and ethical order, ‘the unalterable law’, having lost its social validity became silent witnesses of this progressive deterioration of life. While describing this decay,

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it­
But they knew that it was modern. ⁶

Eliot quietly directs our attention to the forces of the eternal law silently, witnessing the process:

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law. ⁷
What is to be noted here is the compelling presence of the inescapable moral order. Though ignored it makes itself felt and is there the moment humanity opens its eyes.

Eliot opened to the world around him not only his eyes but his brains and heart as well–his whole being as it were. The eye is blind without the brain behind it; what the brain grasps is lifeless without the whole being which imparts life to what is seen. A man of unified sensibility feels his thoughts as immediately as the odour of a rose; every thought becomes an experience for him and it modifies his sensibility. Eliot conveys this type of immediate experience in his poems on urban setting. Hence landscape which is always passive becomes active and eloquent in his poetry. The dull diurnal routine of urban life presented in Preludes communicates the futility of life devoid of a central moral authority;

The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots. ⁸

The landscape presents a picture of life that it can hardly understand: it gives us the intimations of the eternal principle of life governing the whole flux of existence. It shows us the enduring in the transient. The light of the transcendental wisdom breaks through the shutters of ignorance; the lurking principle of rejuvenation hidden in the winter of forgetfulness announces its existence through the sparrows in the gutters:

And when all the world came

And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrow in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands; ⁹

Man’s incapacity to ignore this metaphysical reality is implied even in the instances of his most blatant denial of his awareness of it. Sweeney, the embodiment of the rebellious flesh seeking genital gratification, may boast of his downright animalism:

Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks
Birth, and copulation, and death. ¹⁰

But his very exclusive emphasis on the physical betrays his inner vulnerability. Unable to ignore the enveloping boredom proceeding from his want of a guiding ethical force he wishes to escape to an Utopian savage island free from the paraphernalia of modern civilization:

Well that’s life on a crocodile isle.
There’s no telephones
There’s no gramophones
There’s no motor cars
No two-seators, no six-seators,
No Citroens, no Rolls-Royce.
Nothing to eat but the fruit as it grows. ¹¹

Sweeney’s attempts to nullify his gnawing inner vacuum by sensual indulgence and deliberate gloating over the brutal sadism of sex murders, land him only in a more disturbing dilemma of life and death. He tells, with an implied generalization about hidden brutal impulses of human beings, of his friend who did a girl in:

I know a man once did a girl in
Any man might do a girl in
Any man has to, needs to, wants to
Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.
Well he kept her there in a bath
With a gallon of lysol in a bath. ¹²

This friend of sweeney cheats all, society as well as law, but succumbs to his own invisible self:

He didn’t know if he was alive
and the girl was dead
He didn’t know if the girl was alive
and he was dead
He didn’t know if they both were alive
or both were dead
If he was alive the milkman wasn’t
and the rent collector wasn’t
And if they were alive then he was dead. ¹³

The unrecognised inner desire of humanity to go beyond the immediate is reflected in the attempts of the fallen women in Sweeny Agonistes to read their destinies through playing cards. Doris and Dusty, the gay prostitutes, try to guess their custom and luck by the cards they draw. A group of people arrive exactly at that moment proving what the cards foretold:

Dusty:

Wasn’t I saying I always draw court cards?
The Knave of Hearts!
(A whistle outside of the window.)
Well I never
What a coincidence! Cards are queer!
(Whistle again.)

Doris:

Of course, the Knave of Hearts is Sam! ¹⁴

In this incident, what looks like a mere superstitious and superficial indulgence of humanity betrays the inner concern (in disguise) to know the destiny guiding human affairs. Thus, Eliot shows the profound significance of apparently futile and trivial aspects of common life. He believed that any life “if accurately and profoundly penetrated, is interesting and always strange.” ¹⁵

Even at the present day, the craving for the spiritual and metaphysical is there. In fact, the frustration of modern humanity follows from its failure to satisfy this craving. It is in its failure to give guidance to this inner urge of man to go beyond himself that Eliot finds fault with the established church. Without making a naive direct attack on church and religion, he shows its putrid corruption by ironically juxtaposing its activity with the continuous rhythm of life in nature. Church as it stands is much worse than an existence of ‘mere flesh and blood’ because it is not troubled by the common spiritual struggles which the flesh is liable to. It has not given up its rhythm of life: hunting, mating and sleeping at the proper time, but the ways of the church are as mysterious as the ways of its God:

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,

The hippopotamus’s day.
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way
The church can sleep and feed at once. ¹⁶

The hippo lives a rhythmic life uninterrupted and after death ascends from its damp savannas into divine presence while the quiring angels are singing in loud hosanna. But the church remains below wrapt in the old miasmal mist. Religion instead of being a beacon light turned into a caterpillar. The same idea of nature carrying out its inherent functions undeviated whereas religion and philosophy are immersed in linguistic pedantry and subtle but futile controversies is depicted in Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service:

Along the garden wall the bees

With hairy bellies pass between
The staminate and pistillate,
Blest office of the epicene.

The masters of the subtle schools
Are controversial, polymath. ¹⁷

Eliot for a moment seems to prefer child’s paradise (not a childish vision) to the doctrinal perambulations of spirituality, devoid of the touch of life, promising heaven. His childhood joys with pipit are gone: all the doctrines cannot get them . In A Cooking Egg he says:

I shall not want pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.

But where is the penny world I brought
To eat with pipit behind the screen? ¹⁸

It is not by shirking from things earthly, physical and of flesh and blood and by deliberately cultivating abstract entities that man can evolve a living system of belief. On the contrary, one has to live through the experiences of flesh and blood and transcend them to arrive at a live metaphysical awareness. Donne could be so metaphysical because he was so physical:

Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense,
To seize and clutch and penetrate;
Expert beyond experience,
He knew the anguish of the marrow
The augue of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone. ¹⁹

It is only when one goes beyond the physical experience through experiencing it that one realizes the whispers of immortality, the anguish and augue of the inner-being which cannot be quenched by ‘any contact possible to flesh’, the mundane pleasures.

Though we have taken long strides on the plane of material progress, we have yet to learn to live well. The real purpose of life, progress or no progress, is to live well. The plethoric growth of knowledge in the modern age resulted, it appears, in a simultaneous stunting of wisdom. The development and progress of scientific knowledge and the power it gave is unquestionably good.

5,800,000 rifles and carbines,
102,000 machine guns,
28,000 trench mortars,
53,000 field and heavy guns,

I cannot tell how many projectiles, mines and fuses,

13,000 aeroplanes,
24,000 aeroplane engines,
50,000 ammunition waggons,

Now    55,000 army waggons,
11,000 field kitchens,
1,150 field bakeries. ²⁰

But the questions, whether these things are made for man and life and what for they are made, land us in a horror too deep for human tears. Ironically enough, all modern attempts of social reform and upliftment seem to take into account everything except a sense of direction, the idea of values and the necessity of a significant goal. In a haste to progress and develop, it looks as though humanity lost its intelligence, memory and moral purpose. Has life become better after perpetual committee formation? That is the dilemma of Eliot’s statesman and to see the significance of his difficulty. In The Difficulties of a Statesman, the statesman realises that the real need is something that puts an end to all this futile activity and sets the humanity on its real purpose.

The purpose of life is to find a purpose that transcends it, not to cling to one that engulfs it. The whole business of living becomes wasteful whenit is not guided by such a purpose beyond life. It is the lack of such an enduring ideal that makes life weary and burdensome. Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night, Portrait of a Lady and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock present such a state of life. Prufrock is a representative of the devitalised young man. The predicament of Prufrock is universalized by making it a situation that serves as a common denominator for all such states of existence. It is made eternal by linking it with the state of Dante’s Guido. Both Guido and Prufrock are made spiritual non-entities by their lack of animating faith. As they are not sure of what they really are, they are paralysed by the fear of the world’s judgment. The poem opens with a captivating image of living death that is modern life, a vivid picture that conveys a whole climate of feeling of the speaker as well as of his time. The image exercises such a strong impact on the reader and sticks to his mind because it communicates an important truth. The touch of truth is the touch of life. When Prufrock said:

Let us go then, you and I,  
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table. ²¹

He is recounting his age while recounting himself. He is not so much an individual as a state of live-consciousness and a refined sensibility. Here the poet is presenting a state of the mind and a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience and absorb various fugitive and intermingled sense-impressions and crystallise them into new wholes of meaning. By this method a meaningful unity is imparted to such diverse thoughts, feelings and experiences as the digressing perfume from the dress, sensuous feelings evoked by white and bare hands that are braceleted, the singing of the mermaids sensuous feelings evoked bt the movements of the yellow fog, the smoke that rises from the pipes of the lonely man in shirt sleeves, the thoughts of squeezing the universe into a ball, ideas of impotency, death and eternity, all leading to a single judgment. So a single image accompanied by an eclact of syntactic gesture, the eloquent tone and a meaningful nudge conveys experience too complex to state and communicates depths of feeling too profound to plumb. In these few words Prufrock makes his reader feel the emptiness, futility and purposelessness of the life he lives:

For I have known them all already, known them all
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; ²²

He might look like saying an absurd lie if we judge his words by the canons of logic. But it is a lie that tells the whole truth. 

¹ T. E. Hulme, Speculations quoted from Eliot’s Selected Essays. Faber and Faber. p. 431.
² The Sewanee Review Vol. LXXIV No. 1. p. 377.
³ Ibid p. 376
⁴ Boston Evening Transcript Collected Poems 1909-1962 New York. P. 20.
⁵ Ibid p. 21
⁶ Ibid p. 22
⁷ Ibid
⁸ Ibid, Preludes, iv, p. 15
⁹ Ibid iii, p. 14
¹⁰ Ibid. Fragment of an Agoo, p. 119.
¹¹ Ibid p. 118
¹² Ibid p. 122.
¹³ Ibid p. 123
¹⁴ Ibid. Sweeny Agonistes p. 115
¹⁵ T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood. 1928. p. 31.
¹⁶ Collected Poems ‘The Hippopotamus’ p. 41.
¹⁷ Ibid. Mr. Elliot’s Sunday Morning Service. p. 48
¹⁸ Ibid. A Cooking Egg. p. 36.
¹⁹ Whispers of Immortality. p. 45
²⁰ Ibid, Coriolon ‘Triumphal March’ p. 125.
²¹ Ibid. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ p. 3.
²² Ibid. p. 4.