Our poet of the week was one of the reasons I enjoyed college and English Literature studies. There were parts of literature classes, no matter how clichéd and tired the syllabus sometimes was, that planted seeds of joy and thought, that never quite went away.
I speak of the superlative drama, Murder in the Cathedral. Based on the assassination of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, T. S. Eliot’s play splendidly harnesses the Chorus to create a sinister atmosphere. The four temptations, the king’s frustration, the knights and their call to duty… all these are vividly imprinted in my mind. The play is pure poetry and so many of the lines are now part of popular parlance. “The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” Or the line, “For good or ill, let the wheel turn.”
Thomas Stearns Eliot has created so many notable poems- Four Quartets, The Hollow Men and the iconic The Waste Land. In these lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table…” the poem that starts off innocently enough, even romantically, abruptly changes face with the image of a patient. There is a sense of numbness which is far removed from how alive our senses feel in love. Perhaps, the poet is remarking on modern times. We often seem removed from most experiences, looking at them from behind our phone’s cameras. The opening lines are enigmatic and harsh. When the poem first appeared in 1915, the lines upset a lot of people.
There is other imagery too of “streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent.” But it’s the yellow smoke that is a visible, palpable presence in the poem, as it, “rubs its muzzle on the window-panes/ licked its tongue into the corners of the evening/Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains/Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys/Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap/And seeing that it was a soft October night/Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”
In contrast, The Waste Land is stark and sombre. The poem that gave us , “April is the cruellest month,” was written at a time of turmoil. T.S. Eliot was facing personal difficulties, and the world was trying to put the pieces together, post the war. This is not an easy poem to read. Its tone, so filled with disenchantment, is coupled with a strange and intricate poem pattern - there’s a sense of displacement when one reads the poem. You don’t always know where you are or what you’ve made sense of. But there is no doubt that the poem is a seminal text in modernism in poetry. Themes abound - from religions to the sheer drudgery of daily life.
The poet is existentialist about the future, about humankind and the way life is. The Wasteland shines a sharp, unflinching light on the many crises that the world had to grapple with. There’s a strange apposition of imagery - on the one hand, there are classical references, and on the other, gross references to bodily functions, modern culture shows up in strange places, chased by learned examples from ancient scripts and sagas.
T.S. Eliot was proficient in German and French, had studied Pali and Sanskrit, was well-versed in the classics and in many religions and was undoubtedly, a master in a new form of poetic style that comprised rhythm and cadence. The poem, despite its many, many references and images, fits together, like a jigsaw. There are sharp edges and blurry exteriors, but it all fits. The poet’s fifty-two notes, on The Waste Land, often accompany the poem and simplify the process, to some extent.
Despite what he said, this was not a life, measured out, “with coffee spoons.” This was the life that created the extraordinary art of T.S. Eliot.