CHAPTER 48
T. S. Eliot
The chief use of the “meaning” of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be … to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog. (Eliot, 1933, p. 151)
I gave the references [to Dante] in my notes [to The Waste Land], in order to make the reader who recognised the allusion know that I meant him to recognise it, and know that he would have missed the point if he did not recognise it. (Eliot, 1965, p. 128)
Perhaps there is no conflict between these statements, but they at least represent Eliot permissive – poetry as verbal music or imagistic free play addressed to the unconscious – and Eliot prescriptive – poetry addressed to a reader whose ability to respond fully draws on traditions of knowledge, especially the literature of Greece, Rome, and Israel, on which (as Eliot put it) Western civilization depends. Polemical about the importance of educated elites as Eliot could be, he also expressed a desire for an audience that (like Shakespeare’s) “could neither read nor write” (Eliot, 1933, p. 152) – though of course Shakespeare’s audience knew the literature of Israel – the Bible – from hearing it read aloud in church.
Recognizing allusion provides information about a poem, not knowledge of it as a poem – though it can all too readily be presented as or mistaken for that. Information can be one basis of knowledge, but attention is misdirected if readers too readily look for information to obviate expressive lacunae. Though Eliot’s views on the importance of tradition, a canon of common reading, and cultural continuity and cohesion mean that difficulties can be less difficult for readers educated in what he argues are the requirements of sophisticated literacy, the range of reference in his poetry is in fact not especially wide. Allusion is often to central texts of Western culture (the Bible, Virgil, Dante). Where it goes beyond this it assumes that modern consciousness is international – so should grapple with Eastern religions, especially Buddhism. And inclusions are also admittedly accidental: everybody engaged by the arts encounters work that especially appeals to their sensibility. Eliot happened to love Wagner – who has some claim to be the most important European artist of the age before Eliot’s. Ultimately, with certain classic texts, of which the Bible is the most notable, when readers do not recognize a story, a character, a famous phrase, they should (in Eliot’s view) blame not the poet writing for a coterie, but an educational culture that fails poets and readers alike.
The kind of biblical knowledge that Eliot requires or presupposes is often straightforward. “The Hippopotamus,” a satire of the Church for its worldiness, has an epigraph from St Paul (Colossians 4:16), the point of which lies not in the epistle but in the simple reference to Laodiceans, those whose religion is lukewarm (Revelation 3:14–16): religious institutions are always (the poem implies) “Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.” Some of the poem’s phraseology is biblical but, like “Laodicean,” in a way that has passed into the language, not that requires recognition of a particular text: the Church as a rock (Matthew 16:18; OED, rock, sb.1 2.b); Christ as the Lamb of God (John 1:29; Revelation 7:14; OED, lamb, sb. 3.a). Likewise, “Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” may be a very puzzling poem, but its biblical allusion is of the clearest – to the famous opening of St John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word.” The problems of interpretation lie not in recognizing one of the most famous sentences in Western culture but in understanding what Eliot does with it.
“Difficulties of a Statesman” (Coriolan II) works similarly: beyond the initial recognition of Isaiah (40:6) – perhaps as no more than a prophetic voice – everything is in the poem. The question of the prophet is direct and bold: “What shall I cry?” And it can be answered simply: “All flesh is grass.” The poet attempts to join his voice with the prophet’s, which he endorses, but he is more perplexed. Recognizing the need to cry out, he asks the prophet’s question, but his answers are hesitant. There is a mystery at the heart of the bustling public world, but the world does not notice, and the poet senses it only obliquely. What the reader needs to recognize is the tone of the prophet’s voice, the poet’s difficulty in adopting it, and the contrast with the modern situation – the languages of politics, administration, and prosaic material fact, and the hedging about of affairs these bring with them. The modern would-be prophet is enmeshed in myriad circumstances that obscure the only things of real importance: “the still point of the turning world” (Coriolan I); the heroic subject’s aspiration after what is “Hidden in the stillness of noon”; or the depths made by the context of spiritual search to resonate from the commonplace: “Please, will you / Give us a light? / Light / Light.”
J. Alfred Prufrock may know that he is not Prince Hamlet, and that (despite weeping, fasting, and praying) he is “no prophet,” but he nevertheless entertains two spectacular fantasy selves which are biblical. Here Eliot assumes the reader will recognize their originals. Prufrock has seen himself as the precursor of Christ, John the Baptist, whose extravagantly weird manner of life, the most complete obverse of Prufrock’s own (Matthew 3; Mark 1), is quite as relevant as the grisly manner of his death (to which the poem refers). In the biblical accounts (Matthew 14:3–12; Mark 6:17–29) John’s execution and the presentation of his head is a simple act of revenge, but it is relevant with this “love song” to remember the development of the story in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, where the execution arises from illicit and obsessive sexual desire. The Baptist focuses for Prufrock a double fantasy, as subject and as agent. His alternative biblical persona might be either of two Lazaruses. The brother of Martha and Mary (John 11:1–44) is brought back from the dead, but reports nothing about the hereafter; while in the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), Dives hopes that Lazarus’s report of Hell might transform the conduct of the living, but his return to this world is not permitted. One Lazarus returns, but tells nothing; the other could tell all, but does not return. Either would serve Prufrock equally well – able to answer “some overwhelming question,” but failing to do so.
The allusion to St Matthew (12:38) in “Gerontion” is different, and more complex. The quotation marks around “We would see a sign!” prompt the reader to recognize a fragment with a context – scribes and Pharisees asking Christ for evidence of his powers, which he refuses to give. The speaker, apparently contemptuous of reading supposed “signs,” recalls the demand denounced by Jesus, and the reader may feel there is a link between his implied relish of the denunciation of Jewish teachers and his anti-Semitism. But though only the Gospel quotation is marked, the whole passage (“Signs … darkness”), incorporating phrases based on the first verse of St John’s Gospel, is in fact adapted from the 1618 Nativity Sermon of Lancelot Andrewes, in which (drawing on Luke 2:12–14) “signs” are considered quite differently, as legitimate. The presence of St Luke’s Gospel is perceptible in the poem without knowledge of Andrewes: “Swaddled,” a term familiar principally in relation to the Christ child’s cradle-clothes, draws on the Authorized Version rendering of Luke 2:7–12. Whether or not Andrewes is recognized, it is difficult to make sense of the one significant change to his text (“within” for “without”). The poem’s old man, though at times wise, is also – as he knows – confused (“a dull head,” “a dry brain”); and more confused than he recognizes. “I have no ghosts,” he claims, in a paragraph full of them. How far his biblical scraps characterize his confusions it is not easy to decide.
Of the poems written before Eliot’s conversion to Christianity in 1927, only The Waste Land has the Bible as a significant extended presence, and then within a frame of reference to other great sacred texts of world religions, the Buddha’s Fire Sermon and the Hindu Upanishads, as well as other writings from Christian and non-Christian religious traditions (the legends of the Holy Grail, the Divina Commedia of Dante, the Confessions of St Augustine, the Metamorphoses of Ovid). The Bible is just one element in the “heap of broken images” that epitomizes the waste land’s ignorance of its own wisdom. The poem is at one level a presentation of London after the First World War, but the framework of culturally diverse allusion implies that, while spiritual sickness may present itself in ever new forms, its substance is permanent. Or at times the comparison (contrast) implies a permanent gap between the actual and the imagined: life has consistently conceived of better than it has achieved.
The great biblical symbol of the desert is primary. In “The Burial of the Dead” the desert of Old Testament prophecy, symbol of spiritual aridity, place of trial and purgation, is the location of an authoritative and threatening voice, addressing the reader (“Son of man”) as the prophet Ezekiel is addressed when he is enjoined to reclaim the apostate community. The voice uses its desert location to establish a fundamental perspective: “fear in a handful of dust” – a momento mori. The desert returns in “What the Thunder said,” where it is the ground of intense imagination of its own opposite – a vision of an irrigated world “Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees.” At first the non-desert exists only in imagination and desire; “a damp gust / Bringing rain” is preface to wisdom from a different tradition, the Upanishads. But the final Sanskrit blessing, “shantih,” if Eliot’s notes are taken as part of the poem, is said to have a biblical “equivalent”: St Paul’s “Peace which passeth understanding” (Philippians 4:7). Or so texts say from the 1936 Collected Poems onwards. It is one of the few significant variants in Eliot’s poetry: originally St Paul’s phrase was “a feeble translation of the content of this word.”
The Bible is a presence too behind at least the better-known versions of the Grail legends that are the poem’s underlying myth of a potentially healing quest: the search for the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper in which, it is supposed, his blood was collected as he was pierced on the cross. This legendary accretion to the biblical story, though it has an aura of the sacred, has a different status from that of a sacred text. Unlike the Fire Sermon, the Upanishads, or the Bible, it is not foundational to the wisdom of a culture. And in any case Eliot’s use of the Grail legends largely emphasizes the negatives – not the healing potential, but the sickness in need of healing.
The Bible is a clearer presence in occasional phrases. “Murmur of maternal lamentation” (line 367): in the context of the falling towers of Jerusalem, Rachel mourning for her children (Jeremiah 31:15; Matthew 2:18), a resonant epitome in 1922 of the sorrowing mothers of the world. “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept” (line 182): the protagonist repeats the exile experience of the Old Testament community, but in modern isolation (Psalm 137:1; “I” for “we,” a Swiss lake for an ancient river). But even such verbal reminiscence can be puzzling. The phrase from Ezekiel (“Son of man,” line 20) might, without Eliot’s note, more probably suggest reference to Christ (a Messianic title he uses in all four gospels). Yet more problematic is Eliot’s note to “the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief” (line 23), which refers the seeker after sources to Ecclesiastes 12:5:
And when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.
The semi-inscrutable imagery of the almond tree is clearer in context, where grinders that are few (teeth) and windows that are darkened (eyes) more obviously represent physical decrepitude. The almond tree (blossom) then represents white hair; but the grasshopper (cricket, locust) remains a challenge to interpreters. The verse is about death, and shares with Eliot’s line a tree (dead in one, flourishing in the other) and an insect (absent in one, burdensome in the other). If an annotator other than the author referred Eliot’s line to this source, the reader might be skeptical. There is a connection, death; but there is also a contrast (physical death as natural fact; spiritual death consequent on transformable conditions). “The Man with Three Staves … I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King,” says Eliot’s note on the Tarot pack. As with the Tarot, so with the Bible: the associations offered in Eliot’s notes need not always be the reader’s.
The most difficult to read biblical allusions occur in “What the Thunder said” (lines 322–30). “Torchlight … garden … agony … shouting … crying … Prison and palace” – Eliot’s notes make no reference to the Gospels, but all of this suggests the trial of Jesus: “the agony in the garden” (the usual phrase for Christ’s praying in Gethsemane the night before the crucifixion), the torchlight accompanying his arrest, his interrogation in the palace of the Jewish high priest, his scourging in the prison of the Roman governor, the shouts of the crowd for his death, and the lamentation of the women who follow his cross. “He who was living is now dead”: after the trial the crucifixion; or, once a living presence in the culture, Christ is now present only in moribund forms. But “reverberation / Of thunder of spring over distant mountains” intrudes an element that has no immediate connection with these scenes – an element that looks forward to the message the poem derives from the Upanishads. The death of the hanged god of Western culture is vividly recalled, but recall is not tied entirely to that unique example. So it is too with the other element of the myth, the god’s return to life, in Christian terms first revealed on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35). Eliot recalls this through a manifestation of incomprehensible presence drawn from contemporary life – the experience under conditions of extreme physical and psychological pressure of Antarctic explorers. And here there is no reference to the language of the Gospels: the parallel is drawn in the notes, but is present in the poem only by implication.
If there is a source of religious wisdom among the “broken images” of The Waste Land it is found as much in the Upanishads and the Buddha’s Fire Sermon as in writings from Christian tradition. In The Hollow Men intimations of a mode of consciousness beyond that of “headpieces filled with straw” can only grope toward fragments of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9–13). After his conversion to Christianity in 1927 the presence of the Bible in Eliot’s poetry changed. The change is most obviously signaled in Eliot’s published work in “Religion and Literature” (1935, see Eliot, 1951, pp. 388–401). There he endorses treating the Authorized Version as a literary work, but only with major reservations: the literary importance of the Bible is not separable (he argues) from its having been considered the report of the Word of God. An unpublished address of 1932 delivered in King’s Chapel Boston describes at greater length a similar fundamental view. Eliot begins by affirming that he cannot treat the Bible as literature because of its special religious status, which places on the reader special responsibilities about seriousness of ethical response – as the epigraph from Revelation (5:4) makes clear: “And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon.”1 Eliot goes on to consider the use and effect of the Bible for contemporary poets, arguing that borrowing must not be purely for the beauty of phrase or image – that a writer who borrows from the Bible must enter into its spirit, which means having purposes that are either akin to or consciously and pointedly diverse from those of the source text. The issue is (as Eliot puts it) about “the relation of word to flesh.” This view is fundamental to understanding Eliot’s practices of biblical allusions in poetry written after his conversion.
This began with commissioned work for the Faber series, “Ariel Poems,” the first two of which, Journey of the Magi and A Song for Simeon, constitute a pair: poems for Epiphany and Candlemas, both markers of the end of Christmas – the end of the period of festival, and the end of the ecclesiastical season. Both poems are as much concerned with death as with their obvious subjects of birth and visionary promise: desire for literal death, because spiritual knowledge entails a heightened awareness of pain; metaphorical death, because new spiritual awareness entails a radically different state of being. With both poems the biblical subject is mediated through the Church. This mediation – through liturgy’s set forms and the ministry of the Word – demonstrated for Eliot the close relationship between Church and Scripture often denied by the “inner light” Protestantism that he especially deplored, which sets the Bible and the Church in opposition. For Eliot they are continuous. The Church is established in the Gospels by Christ’s commandment to the disciples to preach, and by the accounts of the early Church in Acts and the New Testament Epistles.2 The Church is therefore the authorized and authoritative interpreter of the Bible, while the inner light is “the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity” (Eliot, 1934, p. 59). Ministry of the Word, in this view, is not personal exegesis. How uneasy Eliot was about exposition of biblical texts by anybody uninstructed in Catholic traditions of exegesis he made clear in the prologue to the one sermon he preached (in the chapel of Magdalene College Cambridge in 1948), which is a homily of moral reflection, not biblical exposition.3 Preaching in a tradition of disciplined meditation, reimagining the words and substance of a biblical text in terms of lights cast on it throughout the history of the Church, was best exemplified for Eliot in Anglican tradition by Lancelot Andrewes. To Andrewes Eliot applied Dante’s words of St Bernard, that in this world he tasted the peace of heaven. He is one in whom (Eliot’s highest praise) “intellect and sensibility were in harmony” (Eliot, 1951, p. 345). Working within the broadly Catholic exegetical tradition, “Andrewes takes a word and derives 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” (ibid., p. 347). For Eliot he was the most important preacher in the history of Anglicanism.
Journey of the Magi has a New Testament source (Matthew 2:1–12), but more important than the source itself is the implied contrast with the way it is sometimes developed in Christian tradition, particularly in painting: Eliot contradicts the saccharine Christmas card tableau. As he indicates by quotation marks, the poem also draws on Andrewes’s 1622 Christmas Day sermon (on Matthew 2:1–2), from which Eliot took not only (in free paraphrase) the opening lines of the poem, but also the fundamental idea of imagining the background to the biblical account with prosaic realism. As sometimes in paintings of the Christ child, the poem also contains premonitions of the gospel accounts of Christ’s sufferings and death, as well as a hint of his ultimate triumph: “three trees” (the crucifixion), “pieces of silver” (for which he was betrayed), “dicing” (for his robe by the soldiers who crucified him), a “white horse” (Christ as King of kings: Revelation 6:2, 19:11–14). These details give new life to the meaning of the biblical gift of myrrh, which looks forward both to the crucifixion (where it is offered as an anaesthetic: Mark 15:23) and to death more generally (because of its use in anointing for burial). Eliot conveys this Gospel premonition of suffering and death through other biblically derived details suited to the poem’s harsh travelogue, which is described without picturesque aspects that might prompt feelings of historical distance or conventional piety. A preacher’s manner of firm instruction (“set down this,” which Eliot also derived from Andrewes), introduces the central question: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” Apparent conviction turns out to be profound uncertainty – a birth so like death as to unsettle everything; an experience so alienating as to prompt a desire for oblivion. It is a reimagining of the biblical account quite different from that sanctioned by tradition.
A Song for Simeon also has a New Testament source (Luke 2:25–35), but again there is an intermediary – the liturgical use of the Lucan text in the Book of Common Prayer service of evensong, important because of its daily use in the offices of the Church. The evensong canticle “Nunc dimittis” is drawn directly from the Gospel – the words of Simeon when Jesus is brought to the Temple for the first time, as required by Jewish Law. Parts of the “Nunc dimittis” are worked into the poem, from the first word (the first word of the canticle), “Lord.” The canticle’s personal plea, “now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,” is translated into the more general “Grant us thy peace” (from “dona nobis pacem” in the “Agnus Dei” of the Mass). And much else in the poem is drawn from the canticle and its Gospel context, with one intervention from Andrewes – the Christ child as “the still unspeaking and unspoken word” (from a sermon on St John’s Gospel that Eliot also used in Gerontion and Ash-Wednesday). “And a sword shall pierce thy heart, / Thine also” (from Luke 2:35) looks forward to Mary’s sufferings, while the final lines of the poem are taken directly from the canticle. “According to thy word” refers to Simeon’s revelation “that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord’s Christ” (Luke 2:26), but Eliot deploys the endorsement more generally: the Bible will provide inspiration for saints and martyrs in every generation. Simeon also allusively foresees the crucifixion (the flagellation; the lamentation of the women who follow the cross; the stations of the cross – its stages as formalized from the Gospel narratives in Catholic tradition; the seven sorrows of the Virgin, again formalized in Catholic tradition from the Gospel accounts). And he looks beyond the crucifixion to the sack of Jerusalem in AD 70, which Christ prophesies in Luke (19:41–4, 21:23–4, 23:28–31). A tissue of quotations and allusions, largely from the evensong canticle, but absorbed into the balanced, musical voice created for its speaker, A Song for Simeon is Eliot’s most biblical poem.
Alongside these commissioned poems Eliot began writing more personal poetic meditations on his own spiritual state, which in 1930 cohered into the sequence Ash-Wednesday. As a poem named from the first day of Lent, three biblical texts underlie this: the central text of the Ash Wednesday liturgy, “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19); and the two fundamental texts of the ecclesiastical season, the gospel accounts of the temptation in the desert (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13). Eliot does not refer to these, but he would assume knowledge of them, and all are relevant: the Genesis sentence as a reminder of mortality and because of its context (God’s judgment on the sin of Adam and Eve); the gospel narratives as epitomes of one significance of Lent, a season in which to exercise the disciplines of abstinence that evince resolutions of repentance. The poem begins in this register: temptation, sin, judgment, penitence. What leads this Lent toward the light of Easter is also derived from the Bible, but less directly: the figure of the Virgin Mary as developed in Catholic tradition, and particularly as embodied in the Divina Commedia in relation to that poem’s central female figure, Beatrice. Like Andrewes, Dante wrote in a tradition of exegesis sanctioned by the Church. While Eliot’s symbolic writing invites much more free play of the reader’s imagination, the separate sections of Ash-Wednesday in earlier forms (partly as published, partly in typescript) were given titles from Dante, and some of the poem’s weirdness is analogous to the visions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise that Dante drew in large measure from biblical sources.
Part II epitomizes this mixture of the Dantean and the biblical: a Beatrice-like Lady “honours the Virgin in mediation”; a lyric addressed to the Virgin-Mother on her all-encompassing paradoxes; and extravagantly strange biblical images, such as leopards satiated on human viscera (God’s agents of destruction in Jeremiah 5:6 and Hosea 13:7, emblems of ferocity in Isaiah 11:6); fragments from Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37:1–10). As the main Old Testament foreshadowing of the resurrection of Christ, in Christian tradition Ezekiel’s vision brings to mind the focus of Lent in Easter Day. In Ezekiel the bones are restored to life: here they are a death-and-dissolution prelude to resurrection. “This is the land which ye / Shall divide by lot” is also from Ezekiel (48:29). There, after exile in Babylon Israel is re-established: here, remaking the individual is followed by a more fragmentary reordering of the community. In the final chapters of Ezekiel division of the land matters very much: it is the basis of the ordered unity of the nation, symbolic of the ideal relationship between God and his people. Here, that “Neither division nor unity / Matters” is a stage of development – abnegation of the ego, willingness to be “dissembled” (disassembled), a beginning to being remade. Like other endings, it looks forward to further stages of the Lenten journey.
Progress in a Dantean mounting of Purgatorial stairs (III) is sealed by allusion to the first of several biblical texts that are used liturgically in the poem: a fragment from the story of the centurion at Capernaum who asks Christ to heal his servant, though without entering the house of one unworthy to receive him (Matthew 8:5–13). The incident is notable for Christ’s endorsement of the faith shown by a Gentile. Words adapted from the centurion’s demonstration of faith are used in Roman Catholic liturgy by the priest immediately before taking the sacrament, though here with the significant omission, “and I shall be healed.” This Lenten journey is not so near conclusion, but there is further positive movement under the influence of the Beatrice-like Lady, who comes to seem almost an avatar of the Virgin. Eliot echoes St Paul (Ephesians 5:15–16; Colossians 4:5): “Redeem / The time. Redeem / The unread vision in the higher dream” (IV). The contexts in St Paul have no special bearing on this unusual use of “redeem”: “save (time) from being lost” (OED, redeem, v. 8). The focus is on the unusual use, urgently repeated – St Paul wrestling with words and meanings – and the inscrutability of dream-vision, which, for all its restorative effects, though it can be conveyed by signs is not otherwise articulate. Apparently inscrutable symbolic dreams, which the prophet (Daniel, in Daniel 4) or the God-favored leader (Joseph, in Genesis 41) is able to interpret, are a repeated biblical motif. Eliot describes the triumphal car of Beatrice (Purgatorio, 29), which is based on a collocation of biblical images, as belonging to that world of “the high dream” (Eliot, 1951, p. 262). In Ash-Wednesday “the higher dream” is symbolic thinking that can be genuinely reanimated, “restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme.” This attempt to recover St Paul’s meaning (“redeem”) and reimagine biblical–ecclesiastical–Dantean symbols (the Virgin, the Lady) is followed by help from Andrewes in giving new life to another crucial biblical term: “word” (“Word”).
“The token of the word unheard, unspoken” is taken up (V) with a meditation on the presence of Christ in the world developed from the opening of St John’s Gospel on Christ as the Eternal Word. Again the biblical text is partly filtered through Andrewes: “The Word without a word” is from his Christmas sermon of 1618. And as elsewhere (III, VI) Eliot incorporates a biblical sentence (Micah 6:3) that has an important liturgical use, this time in the Good Friday offices of the Roman Catholic Church, in the reproaches uttered by the priest (in the voice of Jesus) against the ingratitude of those by whom Christ is crucified. This invocation of the Good Friday offices recalls the focus of Lent in the celebration of Easter. There is “a garden in the desert”: the great biblical locations of fecundity and drought are present in the poem’s pasture and fountains, dry air and dry bones. Quite who spits out “the withered apple-seed” of Original Sin (Genesis 3) Eliot’s fluid syntax leaves uncertain. If it is the terrified who, like St Peter (Matthew 26:69–75), in extremis deny, even this can be overcome through the process begun on Ash Wednesday.
Contrary to the willed effort in the first poem to construct a ground of rejoicing in approved holy terms that turn their back on the secular – an effort that signally fails – the last poem (though it judges this “lost,” “weak,” “blind,” and “empty”) records a spontaneous experience of rejoicing in the natural world. The speaker may retain pious delusions about what constitutes spiritual health: he discovers ways out of desolation despite these. The poem also recapitulates: the speaker has shored fragments against his ruin. Dante, the liturgy, and the Bible are drawn together in the closing prayer. “And let my cry come unto Thee” (Psalm 102:1) is a final biblical text better known through its liturgical use, as a congregational response to the priest’s “Hear my prayer, O Lord.” The Psalm allows Eliot to introduce singular personal pronouns, a transition that is also effected by the incorporation of words from the Catholic prayer “anima Christi” (“suffer me not to be separated”). Though Eliot does not present the experiences of the poem in personal terms, he aimed to be true to his own experience of beginning in desolation and moving toward regeneration, analogous to the movement of the ecclesiastical season of Lent toward Easter. The biblical-liturgical quotations allow him to speak in a personal register – “I am not worthy”; “let my cry …” – but to do so while uniting an individual voice with the religious experience of historic communities, Christian and Jewish.
In Ash-Wednesday Eliot is at his most elusive. In the Choruses from “The Rock” – the most biblical work in the Collected Poems – he is at his most perspicuous. From a pageant written to raise funds for the restoration of London churches, these choruses are principally based on the obvious Old Testament analogy for their fund-raising cause, the prophecy of Nehemiah, an account of the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem after the exile in Babylon, and the social processes of communal repentance and return to God that accompany that rebuilding. In Eliot’s view Europe in the 1930s had similarly lost a living sense of its religious foundations: the Enlightenment had given rise to perspectives in which political and economic creeds had replaced Christianity, with ruinous results. Writing for a Christian audience on a Christian subject Eliot clearly felt that a range of biblical analogies and allusions would be resonant and could be frequent and various. The Rock is God (2 Samuel 22:2–3), Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4), and the Church (Matthew 16:18) – an image biblical in origin, but familiar enough to have passed into common use. From Isaiah (63:3) he took Messianic prophecies of apocalyptic change (the winepress; Chorus I), and of Christ as the chief cornerstone (28:16; Chorus II). By reference to Jeremiah (17:9) he articulates the view that a secular society with no practice of penitential self-examination is likely to be always self-deceiving (Chorus V). The Chorus as a body – and, when the texts are incorporated into the Collected Poems, in effect Eliot himself – adopts the posture of all Old Testament prophecy (“the word of the Lord came to me,” Chorus III), and reference ranges widely, beyond the prophets, from Genesis (Chorus VII) to the Psalms (Chorus III) and the Gospels.
Eliot’s theme – the moral bankruptcy of a society that has turned away from the Church – is also biblical: failure to obey the injunction of the law and the prophets to care for the poor and disadvantaged, the injunction of Leviticus (19:18) incorporated into Christ’s summary of the law and the prophets: “love your neighbour as yourself” (Matthew 22:39; Chorus II). The spiritual condition of Britain in the 1930s is epitomized by the state of the unemployed, whose keynote is struck using Christ’s parable of the labourers in the vineyard: “No man has hired us” (Matthew 20:7). This became a central social theme with Eliot in the 1930s. It is one of the lines of thought that makes The Idea of a Christian Society – which in some ways appears (and appeared in its time) backward-looking – also so modern: insistence on the non-exploitation of labor and of nature. The politics of The Idea of a Christian Society are in contemporary terms “green,” environmentally conscious in advance of their time, an emphasis that is allied to biblical precepts about care of God’s creation and care by a community of all its members.
The Rock is the most didactic of Eliot’s poems. Despite Eliot’s stress on “incantation” and beauty of language, and the arts of verbal music that he so skillfully exercises, the basis in biblical narrative, the adoption of a prophetic voice, and the copious biblical allusions all signal these choruses as Christian polemic written for an audience of believers. The non-Christian reader may acknowledge aspects of the argument as valid independent of their basis in Eliot’s beliefs, but the work’s polemical stance is too distinctly Christian to be subsumed into a less doctrinal, more general acceptance of the importance of spiritual perspectives.
Not so Four Quartets: though explicitly religious, they are less biblical than much of Eliot’s later work and more doctrinally open. The sequence is about states of spiritual awareness, moments not characterized by the deflections from full consciousness that (in Eliot’s account) time characteristically engenders. Eliot exemplifies by re-creating experiences, describing and defining, often by paradox, and calling upon other forms of testimony, not all of which are Christian, or even religious, but which include the Bible. Congruent with the relatively pellucid nature of the verse – Eliot’s only major poetry written after he began addressing a wider audience through the theater – knowledge of other texts is rarely assumed, and the processes of allusion are straightforward. Burnt Norton (V) sets a pattern with its single biblical reference, to the Gospels (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13):
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation.
The spiritual states that Eliot describes and embodies can be created or sustained by poetry. The temptation in the desert of Christ, the Word (John 1:1), by the Devil – the attempt to make Jesus fail by compromising with the worldly – is analogous to the verbal precision essential to poetry assailed by the forces that cause language to decay. While Eliot’s late writings about culture and education offer views on how the modern desert might be irrigated, the poem presents this form of the struggle between Word and world as perpetual.
In East Coker Eliot adopts the rhetoric of Old Testament Wisdom, and revises the Theological Virtues of St Paul. The balance and antithesis of a time for x and a time for y – “a time for building / … / And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane” (I) – are taken directly from Ecclesiastes (3:1–8). Ecclesiastes offers a more purely human wisdom than the prophets: the writer presents himself as King Solomon, a man of such wealth and power that, insofar as one individual can, he claims to say what life adds up to on the basis of having experienced all it has to offer. His often gloomy, even atheistic, wisdom fits so uneasily with Old Testament expectations that some readers take his more consolatory statements as the interpolations of an editor. Eliot discusses Ecclesiastes in his King’s Chapel address. On the basis of his initial distinction between reading the Bible as revelation or as poetry, he further distinguishes Ecclesiastes from “inspired” work – the writings of the prophets, or of the psalmist. But he insists nevertheless that, when Ecclesiastes is understood within the Old Testament as a whole, what makes it cohere from the point of view of readers who treat the Bible as revelation is precisely what seems extraneous to readers who treat it as poetry, its moral statements – often fierce, but nevertheless consolatory because they see purpose in life. In accordance with this emphasis, while deploying in East Coker the book’s balanced acceptance of opposites, Eliot gives this a context that contradicts the Preacher’s best-known verdict on existence: “vanity of vanities: all is vanity.” Though the poem finds so much of life “filled with fancy and empty of meaning,” it does not present this as life’s necessary condition.
While the Preacher is recruited for his rhetoric, St Paul is invoked for a substantial revision of the virtues faith, hope, and love (1 Corinthians 13; East Coker, III). All are, or can be, ways of looking to the future, and so they potentially distract the mind from its own fundamental emptiness, which East Coker would have us face as the first step toward wisdom. Eliot changes St Paul’s valuation. He also changes his hierarchy. This is not a critique of St Paul but a view from a different perspective – temporal, not eternal. For the Apostle hope will eventually be fulfilled, and faith finally subsumed in knowledge, so the greatest of his virtues, the only one that is eternal, is love. But for Eliot, concerned with spiritual perspectives in this life, hope and love are both likely to deceive, and even faith can be endorsed no more than partially. “The faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting”: learning to wait properly requires mastering the disciplines that resolve the paradoxes central to Four Quartets by which “the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
It is important to the status and tone of Eliot’s biblical allusions in Four Quartets that they are not presented as decisive points of reference but as permanent possessions of the culture that can, within limits, be reread and reshaped in new contexts. Eliot is not like Pound, drawing together, with slashing “guide to kulchur” confidence, a light from Eleusis and philosophies of ancient China. On the contrary, Eliot was aware from his Sanskrit studies how difficult it is to enter into the ethos of a culture based on fundamentally different traditions. Nevertheless, even though writing as a Christian, Eliot does not treat Catholic Christianity as a unique repository of wisdom. Expression is culturally dependent; wisdom can be translated. In Four Quartets Christian texts other than the Bible are also presented as authoritative – the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich, and the Divina Commedia, which Eliot admired partly because of the breadth of the biblical, Classical and Christian culture, philosophy, and theology that it drew into a genuine synthesis. But in The Dry Salvages Eliot also goes beyond Christian tradition with new ways of addressing what was implied by the drawing together of St Augustine and the Buddha, or the Sanskrit blessing annotated from St Paul, in The Waste Land. Like the Bible, the Mahabharata distils from a broad cultural base a wisdom that is permanent. Being in accordance with things as they really are, this wisdom is not only derived from a text but can be heard “in the rigging and the aerial / … a voice descanting … / … and not in any language.” Eliot offers a “translation” that is in part a free rendition of gists and piths, but he also quotes specifically from the Bhagavadgita (8:6). The Dry Salvages could not be more a Christian poem: its fundamental points of reference are the Annunciation (II) and the Incarnation (V). But the Bible is scarcely a presence. “The bitter apple and the bite in the apple” (II) recalls the primal act of disobedience in Eden (Genesis 3). The “ragged rock in the restless waters” may be taken simply as a symbol of permanence in the midst of change, though it may also assume biblical resonances of Christ and the Church. Christianity is present in myth and doctrine, but the sacred text of The Dry Salvages is the Bhagavadgita.
The choice of symbolic location for Little Gidding – a High Church Anglican community founded in the embattled situation of the reign of Charles I – appears to promise the opposite – sectarian polemic. But the poem is explicitly non-sectarian: opponents are “folded in a single party” (III). Eliot is not specific, but the context suggests opponents of the English Civil War including Charles I (“a king at nightfall”) and Milton (“who died blind and quiet”). The poem’s biblical allusions are congruent with this inclusiveness.
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love. (IV)
This Dove is the Holy Spirit that descended on the disciples at Pentecost as “cloven tongues like as of fire” (Acts 2:1–4). The force behind the terrifying descent is named by reference to the First Letter of John: “God is Love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (4:16). The tongues of flame reverse the curse of Babel: in place of fragmentation and incomprehension, the ability to speak so that every ear may hear. But though the image and its articulation are biblical, and the terms offered emphatically unitary (“one discharge … only hope … we only live”), the pains associated with adequate and inadequate response are imagined in other terms. Love’s “intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove” recalls Hercules and the poisoned shirt of Nessus; the imagery of entrapment in the secular world (“Consumed by … fire”) recalls, not how Christian tradition has imagined the forces ranged here against the Spirit, but the Sermon of the Buddha that Eliot made central to The Waste Land.
The close of Little Gidding looks forward to a condition in which apparently opposite pathways of the sequence as a whole will be found to lead to the same end: the ways of vacancy and plenitude (Burnt Norton, III); the way up and the way down (Burnt Norton, epigraph; The Dry Salvages, III); severe spiritual disciplines and openness to the unexpected moment; the tongues of flame of the Holy Spirit and the vision of the rose garden at Burnt Norton. That allusions to Ecclesiastes, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and St Paul are set in a broad context of other sacred writings, Christian and non-Christian, plays a part in making Eliot’s last poems inviting to readers for whom the Bible is what Eliot stressed it could not be to him: a literary work with the same status as any other.
Notes
1 Houghton Library, Harvard, bMS Am 1691 (26). This seventeen-page carbon typescript is headed (in the hand of John Carroll Perkins, minister of King’s Chapel Boston), “Read by T. S. Eliot / before the Women’s Alliance King’s Chapel / Dec. 1, 1932.” Perkins also recorded that this is an uncorrected copy – implying that the copy from which Eliot read (now in the collection of Mrs Valerie Eliot) contained changes. A copy identical to the Harvard typescript (another carbon from the same original) exists in the archives of King’s Chapel. I am grateful to Mrs Eliot and the Eliot Estate for permission to transcribe this typescript, and to the British Academy for funding this research.
2 See E. S. Abbott et al., Catholicity: A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West, especially section II. Eliot was one of fourteen co-authors of this report, which was presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury “with complete unanimity” (preface).
3 Something of Eliot’s private reading of the Bible can be gleaned from a copy he owned (a plain text of the Authorized Version including the Apocrypha), now in the Hayward Collection of King’s College, Cambridge (London, Oxford UP, n.d.). Lyndall Gordon notes two markings in Isaiah, on personal redemption, and the forgiveness of sin (Isaiah 43.1, 43.25; Eliot’s New Life, pp. 244, 494). There are also markings in New Testament epistles, as follows: Romans, 5.10 and 6.3 (“we shall be saved by his life,” and “were baptized into his death” underlined), 6.16, 7.24 (“O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” marked by marginal lines), 8.24–25, 8.28, 8.35 (that no trials need separate the believer from the love of Christ), 11.6; 1 Corinthians, 1.23, 2.13, 4.7 (on not taking pride in one’s abilities since they are the gift of God), 6.16–17; and Ephesians, 6.12.
References and Further Reading
Writings by T. S. Eliot
Collected Poems: 1909–1962. Faber, London, 1963.
Selected Essays, 3rd edn. Faber, London, 1951.
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Faber, London, 1933.
After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. Faber, London, 1934.
The Idea of a Christian Society and Other Writings, ed. David L. Edwards. Faber, London, 1939 and 1982.
Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Faber, London, 1948.
To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings. Faber, London, 1965.
Untitled address delivered in King’s Chapel Boston, 1932 (“The Bible as Scripture and as Literature”). Houghton Library, Harvard, bMS Am 1691 (26).
Catholicity: A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West, E. S. Abbott et al. (including T. S. Eliot). Dacre Press (A. & C. Black Ltd), Westminster, 1947.
“The Language of the New English Bible” (1962), in Dennis E. Nineham, ed., The New English Bible Reviewed. Epworth Press, London, 1965, pp. 96–101.
Scholarship and Criticism
This list is confined to books and essays that discuss or bear upon Eliot’s use of or relation to the Bible.
Cook, Cornelia (1996) “The Hidden Apocalypse: T. S. Eliot’s Early Work,” Literature and Theology 10, 68–80.
Cook, Cornelia (2001) “Fire and Spirit: Scripture’s Shaping Presence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,” Literature and Theology 15, 85–101.
Gordon, Lyndall (1999) T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. Norton, New York.
Jones, Florence (1966) “T. S. Eliot among the Prophets,” American Literature 38, 285–302.
Schmidt, A. V. C. (1983) “Eliot’s Intolerable Wrestle: Speech, Silence, Words and Voices,” UNISA English Studies, 17–22.
Wright, Terence R. (2001) “The Writings in the Church: T. S. Eliot, Ecclesiastes and the Four Quartets,” in John Schad, ed., Writing the Bodies of Christ: the Church from Carlyle to Derrida. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 25–39.