The work of Mörike and Hopkins can be read as attempting to redress the theological difficulties encountered in the Hegelian aftermath. Mörike wants to prevent poetic writing from referring endlessly to itself (to avoid the leaden, self-referential materiality of text that results from Strauss's paradoxical hermeneutic). Like Mörike — and like Hölderlin — Hopkins wants to make poetry a signifier of the redemptive consummation of the community of Spirit. Both pose a fundamental question: do we assent to that redemptive possibility, or live with the impossibility of meaningful time?
That question intensifies in the twentieth century. Its most compelling critical formulation is J. P. Stern's idea of the 'dear purchase', which he defines in contrast to the notion of gift, to what is achieved, he says quoting Gryphius, without dear purchase, 'ohn' teuren Kauf' (Gryphius refers to Christ):
The theme I think of as fundamental to the major achievements of modern German literature is the theme of the dear purchase [. . .] this literature is concerned with the salvation of man [. . .] It is a salvation whose very validity is relative to its being supremely difficult of attainment.1
Rilke and Eliot are concerned with this question of purchase.2 Unlike Mörike and Hopkins, Rilke and Eliot have often been considered together, though not recently.3 However, they have never been read in the encompassing intellectual context we have been discussing here, which forms such a large part of the background to the questions Stern poses: what is the relationship between modernity and redemption — is redemption possible in modernity?
The thinker with whom Rilke is most associated is Nietzsche. Heller's treatment, focusing essentially on Zarathustra and the Duineser Elegien, has provided the backdrop to all modern discussions of the relationship between them, including Stern's arguments about purchase.4 But we have seen how Nietzsche's concept of redemption ('Erlösung') is highly problematic. The fundamental expression of Zarathustra's vision of redemption, the teaching of the eternal recurrence, itself represents a 'purchase': it requires investment (requires us to pass through the Gateway of the Moment), but despite the doctrine's opposition to what Nietzsche sees as the life-negating promise of religious transcendence, it remains unclear how his own conception can avoid simply deferring the return on the payment it demands.
The burden of our discussion of Rilke here will therefore be to ask: what is the status of this Nietzschean difficulty in the poetry? The question is particularly acute given the emphasis we have placed on what it is Nietzsche can be understood as turning against — the possibility of meaningful time that Hopkins, Mörike, and Hölderlin fight to make felt in their poetry. It can be approached through detailed reading of one of Rilke's most 'problematic' poems. In the Tenth Duino Elegy, affirmation and transcendence meet each other. Commentators have found it difficult because it appears to contradict the conventional argument that the Elegien revolve around the affirmations of human existence provided in the Seventh and emphatically the Ninth Elegy: 'Hiersein ist herrlich' [Being here is wonderful] (IX, 1. 39).5 The fact that the Tenth Elegy occupied Rilke for the whole span of the Duino cycle (its opening section (ll. 1—15) was written in 1912, the year the cycle was begun, while the remaining sections were produced in 1922), and therefore hardly has the status of a contingent 'afterthought', has been largely overlooked. We thus need to ask what relation the Tenth Elegy's themes of transition and, particularly, death bear to the idea of existential affirmation. In linking these themes to redemption and what Stern calls 'the purchase of poetry', we will see that the Tenth Elegy has to be read as a dialogue with Nietzsche, and that this raises complex hermeneutic issues of writing and representation that alter conceptions of how Rilke and Nietzsche relate.
In 1916, approximately halfway through the gestation perD ioud ino esf er Elegien, Eliot completed his doctoral disserta Knownledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.6 Since its publication in 1964, Knowledge and Experience has enjoyed sustained critical attention.7 However, Bradley’s importance for Eliot has never be considered in the light of the parallels we drew between Bradley and Nietzs Chapter 2. The upshot of that comparison was that in his response to Hegel, Br replicates the Nietzschean move towards non-transcendence. How paradoxi Bradleian subjectivity given Bradley’s insistence that there can be no perspective beyond that of the finite centre? By asking that question and relating it to E ask not only what is Eliot’s relation to Bradley, but: what is Eliot’s status a Nietzschean? We are then concerned with the Zarathustrian themes of purcha redemption (or its impossibility), their role within Bradley’s thought, their impact on Eliot as a poet, and how he negotiates them in comparison with Rilke.
The counterpart in Eliot to Rilke’s Tenth Elegy is ‘Little Gidding’ (1942) last of Four Quartets. Like the Tenth Elegy, ‘Little Gidding’ is the final poem of cycle, and is also concerned with the question of how to end. We will examine the relation between the Tenth Elegy and ‘Little Gidding’, considering the nature of Eliot’s ‘purchase’ at the end of Queartets. Furthermore, the two poems will be related to the poets we have treated in the preceding chapters: Hopkins, Mörike, and especially Hölderlin. The discussion of these two long poems will be framed by a more conceptual treatment of common themes in the relationship between Rilke, Eliot, Nietzsche, and Bradley. All of these ideas, however, can be suggested in a brief initial reflection on language and place.
The relationship between Rilke and Eliot might be broached by reference to two landscapes. 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes' (1904), part of Neue Gedichte, is an enigmatic poem inspired by a classical relief, and reflects an intense early interest in vision and its relation to space and subjectivity, the substantial quality of words, and the 'thingness' of poems. When Rilke gave a reading of the poem in November 1904, it shared the bill with a short prose piece entitled Von einem, der die Steine belauscht (Of One Who Listens to Stones), one of the Geschichten vom Lieben Gott (Stories of the Good Lord, 1899).8 In this puzzling episode, which revolves around words such as 'Gestalt' [figure], 'Gesicht' [face] and 'Blick' [gaze], Michelangelo is transfigured when he realizes that all his subjective endeavour as an artist is part of the objective working out of a divine immanence, so that at the end he is able to say to God: 'Dich will ich vollenden, du bist mein Werk' [I want to complete you, you are my work] (KA, III, 393). That word 'Werk' becomes pivotal to the progression through the negative landscape of death in 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes' (l. 39), resounding at the climax when Orpheus turns and perspective splits between what we see 'objectively' as readers of the poem, or viewers of the classical relief, and the fragmented subjective viewpoints within the poem.9 (In its shifts of perspective, and the way it implicates the reader as a co-viewer, with the poet, of an artwork, the poem strongly recalls Mörike's 'Göttliche Reminiszenz'.) We see Eurydice seeing (someone who is) Orpheus seeing Hermes seeing Eurydice who has already turned away:
Fern aber, dunkel vor dem klaren Ausgang,
stand irgendjemand, dessen Angesicht
nicht zu erkennen war. Er Stand und sah,
wie auf dem Streifen eines Wiesenpfades
mit trauervollem Blick der Gott der Botschaft
sich schweigend wandte, der Gestalt zu folgen,
die schon zurückging dieses selben Weges. (ll. 89—93)
[But far away, dark in front of the bright exit, someone was standing, his face unrecognizable. He stood there and saw how on a field pathway the god of message turned, with a mournful gaze, to follow the figure who was already going back that same way.]
Eurydice's unrepresentable turn, submerged behind language, ends the poem, which hovers on the visual axis established between the three figures, then itself turns into silence. The poem identifies itself with the move into absence that it describes, and so has to finish, though by implicating our gaze as readers it is able to suspend within this gesture of loss a suggestion of recovery: we see visual contact established between Orpheus and the lost object of his desire, in the moment that they look at each other but recognition fails. An anagnorisis of sorts is achieved as we survey the whole scene. However, because this objective, distanced view only exists outside the poem (the 'Werk'), the poem can only register it as a relinquishing of laneuaee and correspondence, and so it becomes inseparable from nothingness.
'Burnt Norton' (1935), the first of the Four Quartets, presents a setting with more personal associations — a place Eliot had been.10 Like 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes', it describes movement through a landscape, a rose-garden with paradisiacal, prelapsarian qualities: it is 'our first world' (ll. 21, 22).11 And, as in Rilke's poem, there is a simple but effective patterning of figures — the speaker and his companion, and the mysterious, ghostly inhabitants of the garden, 'dignified, invisible, | Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves' (ll. 23—24). Eliot's rose-garden, like Rilke's underworld, is a place where presence exists in absence, and vision is inseparable from concealment: 'And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses | Had the look of flowers that are looked at' (ll. 28—29). For Rilke, vision flickers between fixity and movement. In the terms of the Michelangelo story, figures in visual relation are 'reglos und doch am Rande der Bewegung' [motionless and yet on the edge of movement] (KA, III, 393). His early manipulation of sight is comparable to the movement in the field of vision in Eliot's qu artet. The climax of the rose-garden passage is a moment of suspension, on the brink between vision and blindness, presence and absence, reminding us strongly of Rilke's poem. There is a tight geometrical formation: 'So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern' (1. 31). The spectral duo moves into visibility only obliquely, in a spatial relationship to the speaker that does not allow direct sight:
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. (ll. 35—38)
'Before the poet, now, is the pool as still point; behind him is the ghostly couple. The poet and his companion are now the fulcrum across which the ghostly couple and the still point balance'.12 This tautness is the tension preceding the final turn in 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes'. However, there is a basic difference. In the case of 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes', the poem is that axial suspension between its protagonists, and it must itself end when their possibilities of vision have been exhausted. Eliot sets up the same scenario, but his poem does not disappear when the epiphany in the rose-garden tips over into loss ('Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty', l. 39). After the moment of presence passes, Eliot's protagonists move out of the rose-garden (ll. 43—44) and into Four Quartets. Instead of making his poem out of the visual relationships and landscape that it shows us, Eliot uses these things to produce associations that may be unthinkable without the poetry, but are also ultimately distinct from it. As such the two poems suggest different conceptions of the relation between language and presence: 'Burnt Norton' prepares the way for Eliot's remark in 'East Coker', the second Quartet, that 'the poetry does not matter' (l. 71), describing an epiphany without apparently participating in it, while in 'Orpheus. Eurydike, Hermes' the poetry matters so much that it achieves maximal significance only in the moment of making itself absent.
In Zur Genealogie der Moral [On the Genealogy of Morality], Nietzsche took up the relationship between vision and subjectivity, and connected it to God and the idea of suffering. He discusses 'die Curve der menschlichen Schmerzfähigkeit' [the trajectory of the human capacity for pain], and is preoccupied with 'sinnloses Leiden' [meaningless suffering] (KSA, V, 303, 304), which, he says, is unseen suffering, and which it has been the aim of religion to eliminate:
Damit das verborgene, unentdeckte, zeugenlose Leiden aus der Welt geschafft und ehrlich negirt werden konnte, war man beinahe dazu genötbigt, Götter zu erfinden und Zwischenwesen aller Höhe und Tiefe, kurz Etwas, das auch im Verborgnen schweift, das auch im Dunkeln sieht und das sich nicht leicht ein interessantes schmerzhaftes Schauspiel entgehen läßt. (V, 304)
[To ensure that hidden, undiscovered, unwitnessed suffering could be removed from the world and honestly denied, people were practically forced to invent gods and all manner of intermediate beings, that is, something that wanders in hidden realms, that sees in the dark and won't easily miss an interesting and pain-filled spectacle.]
Nietzsche here describes the relationship between 'gods' and subjective individuals in basically visual terms. The gods 'witness' suffering and so give it a point as far as those who undergo it are concerned, providing a guarantee that individual experience refers to something beyond itself. Nietzsche emphasizes intermediary entities ('Zwischenwesen') as basic elements in this process of reference, and couches his account in the imagery of transition between light and darkness which is central to vision in Rilke ('dunkel vor dem klaren Ausgang') and Eliot ('then a cloudpassed'). Nietzsche is talking about hidden gods who make life significant. But the pattern is negative: the transcendent gaze is a figment, part of the 'invention' of meaning.
For Nietzsche here, pain and suffering are important because they are pointless, and he is in no doubt about the consequences of suggesting otherwise: the insistence on finding a 'Sinn' constitutes 'Abscheu vor den Sinnen' [horror of the senses], which is 'Hass gegen das Menschliche, mehr noch gegen das Thierische, mehr noch gegen das Stoffliche' [hatred of the human, even more so of the animalistic, even more so of the material] (V, 412, emphasis added). We deny life not by recognizing that it basically consists of suffering, but by giving this suffering a hermeneutic burden. Accordingly, meaninglessness is the enemy of 'asceticism', whose deceitful presuppositions Nietzsche is trying to uncover, or deconstruct:
Die Sinnlosigkeit des Leidens, nicht das Leiden, war der Fluch, der bisher über der Menschheit ausgebreitet lag — und das asketische Ideal bot ihr einen Sinn! [. . .] In ihm war das Leiden ausgelegt; die ungeheure Leere schien ausgefüllt. (V, 411)
[Not suffering, but the meaninglessness of suffering, was the curse lying over humankind up to now — and the ascetic ideal offered it a meaning! [. . .] There suffering was interpreted; the monstrous emptiness seemed to be filled.]
In a subversion o£ Hegelian pleroma ('Ausfüllung'), Nietzsche uses the filling up of empty space to suggest the fallacy of signification: by being made to go beyond itself and 'mean' something, suffering loses its visceral, worldly character and is converted into 'einen Willen zum Nichts' [a will to nothing] (V, 412). The Nietzschean alternative to this is provided not so much by texts such as Zur Genealogie der Moral, as by the works we discussed in Chapter 2. Zarathustra's doctrine of eternal recurrence tries to fight against religious ideas of redemption by using the concept of 'Erlösung' against itself. In his attempt to redeem the things of 'this world', Nietzsche emphasizes their complete finitude and singularity, but nonetheless wants to affirm them. But is it possible to affirm anything without the concept of transcendent reference that Nietzsche denies, or put differently, is Nietzsche's form of affirmation always essentially negative, working against itself? Can something so apparently negligible be shown to be genuinely worth fighting for, or is it bound, to use Stern's central idea for our own purposes, to present us with a very dear purchase? Nietzsche's discussion of seen and unseen suffering raises the same question, because it too ends up emphasizing finite things ('das Stoffliche') over against the possibility of referring to something beyond them. Nietzsche again makes us ask whether affirmation in those terms is possible — whether meaninglessness can be redeemed as simply meaningless, and hence pain as simply arbitrary — or whether it ultimately subverts itself because it demands too much and offers too little.
During the period in which he was engaged on Duineser Elegien, Rilke developed ideas that can helpfully be considered against this Nietzschean background. Referring to Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge in 1915, for example, he uses the image of vitiation and replenishment:
daß ich es selbst manchmal wie eine hohle Form, wie ein Negativ empfände, dessen alle Mulden und Vertiefungen Schmerz sind, Trostlosigkeiten und weheste Einsicht, der Ausguß davon aber, wenn es möglich wäre einen herzustellen (wie bei einer Bronze die positive Figur, die man daraus gewönne) wäre vielleicht Glück, Zustimmung.13
[that sometimes I even feel it is an empty form, a negative, where all the hollows and depressions are pain, bleakness and the most agonizing vision, but that what we might possibly pour out of it (as with a bronze we finally get the solid figure) would perhaps be happiness, agreement.]
The negative spaces ('Mulden und Vertiefungen') recall the mirror-landscape associated with Eurydice, and they are typically elegiac in that through the painful recognition associated with them, they allow, in Rilke's example of moulding, a substantial and tangible fulfilment to emerge — the 'positive Figur'. But fulfilment is conditional here: 'Glück, Zustimmung', and the reciprocity of 'Einsicht' and 'Ansgang'/'AusguB', are put forward as possibilities. Furthermore, Rilke continues, these possibilities are connected to our position in relation to the gods:
Wer weiß, ich frage mich, ob wir nicht immer sozusagen an der Rückseite der Götter herantreten, von ihrem erhaben strahlenden Gesicht durch nichts, als durch sie selber getrennt, dem Ausdruck, den wir ersehnen, ganz nah, nur eben hinter ihm stehend — aber was will das anderes bedeuten, als daß unser Antlitz und das göttliche Gesicht in dieselbe Richtung hinausschauen, einig sind; und wie sollen wir demnach aus dem Raum, den der Gott vor sich hat, auf ihn zutreten? (I, 134)
[Who knows, I wonder, whether we are not, as it were, always stepping up behind the gods, their backs to us, and whether we are not separated from their sublimely radiant face only by them: very near the expression we so long for, just standing behind it. But what should that mean except that our visage and the divine face look out in the same direction, and are one; and how, then, are we to step out of the space in front of the god, and approach him?]
This passage is perhaps an oblique reformulation of God's address to Moses (Ex. 33. 23): 'thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen'. Rilke associates the gestures of simultaneous proximity and distance with our capacities for expression: the elusive 'Ausdruck'. When he links this to the face he sparks a vast range of associations, both within his own work and with reference to other poets we have discussed. It immediately recalls the 'Angesicht' [face] of the First Elegy (l. 19), literally torn between physicality and dissolution, and between inside and outside. We might also think of Hopkins, who in the late poem 'To What Serves Mortal Beauty?' (1885) identified the face as a site of meaning, as he had in 'As kingfishers catch fire':
See! it does this: keeps warm
Men's wits to the things that are; ' what good means — where a glance
Master more may than gaze, ' gaze out of countenance. (ll. 3—5)
Hopkins concludes that 'Self' flashes off frame and face' (l. 11) and is, as 'heaven's sweet gift' (l. 13), the sign of 'God's better beauty, grace' (l. 14). While Hopkins talks of light, though, Rilke refers to shadow. His spatial terms of reference — standing behind the gods and so eluding their field of vision — replicate the patterning of figures in 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes', and move this into an explicitly eschatological framework, whose accents are noticeably Hölderlinian, reminding us especially of 'Patmos': 'Nah ist | Und schwer zu fassen der Gott' (ll. 1—2). The question for Rilke, as for Hopkins and Hölderlin, is one of relation: can the two perspectives, 'unser Antlitz' and 'das göttliche Gesicht', be mediated to each other so that we see more than just the backs of the gods, who like Eurydice have always already turned away?
Ambivalence and turning, light and dark, create a basic rhythm and tension for Rilke's thoughts, and these patterns are connected to the question of meaning. Echoing Hölderlin again, Rilke says that because we found it difficult to grasp the gods,
wuchsen sie [die Götter] über einen hinaus, zu einem Übermaß von Bedeutung an [. . .] Da sie aber Überfluß waren, das Stärkste, ja eben zu Starke, das Gewaltige, ja Gewaltsame, das Unbegreifliche, oft Ungeheure —: wie sollten sie nicht, an einer Stelle zusammengetragen, Einfluß, Wirkung, Macht, Überlegenheit ausüben? Und zwar nun von Außen. (Mat., I, 135)
[they [the gods] grew beyond us, to become an excess of meaning [. . .] But since they were a superabundance — the strongest thing there is, indeed too strong, something immense, indeed violent, something incomprehensible, often terrible — how were they not, all at once, to influence us, affect us, to exercise power and superiority over us? And they now did all this from outside us]
The same is true of death:
und so ging es nicht anders mit dem Tod. Erlebt, und doch, in seiner Wirklichkeit, uns nicht erlebbar, uns immerfort überwissend und doch von uns nie recht zugegeben, den Sinn des Lebens kränkend und überholend von Anfang an, wurde auch er, damit er uns im Finden dieses Sinnes nicht beständig unterbräche, ausgewiesen, hinausverdrängt, er, der uns wahrscheinlich so nahe ist, daß wir die Entfernung zwischen ihm und der inneren Lebensmitte in uns gar nicht feststellen können, er wurde ein Äuβeres. (I, 135)14
[and thus it was no different with death: something experienced, and yet unexperiencable by us in its reality; it constantly surpasses us in knowledge yet we never really admit its presence. From the beginning death exceeded and insulted life's meaning, and so too it was expelled, repressed, lest it constantly interrupt our efforts to discover that meaning. Death, which is probably so close to us that we cannot begin to fix the distance between it and the centre of life within us — death became something external.]
The result of this is that 'Gott und Tod waren nun draußen, waren das Andere' [God and death were now outside, they were the other] (I, 135). Death and the gods both define subjectivity and exceed it, so subjectivity on its own is unable to grasp them. We cannot stand back and gauge a relationship with them, but nor can we get away from their fundamental importance to us. Their presence impinges on us as a loss of our subjective self, an excess of meaning we cannot deal with. So we conceive of them as something alien, 'outside' us but with a dreadful power over us; death and the gods come to define us negatively. We turn against that part of ourselves, and it becomes a threat. Like Hölderlin in 'Patmos', Rilke expresses this perceived split between subjectivity and its 'other', as he puts it, in spatial terms: he is aware that we can determine no firm middle ground ('festellen') between 'Nähe' and 'Entfernung', and so are left oscillating between the two. Rilke restates the pattern of turning in letters of 1923 and 1925: 'Der Tod ist die unbeschienene Hälfte des Lebens' [Death is the unlit half of life] (Mat., I, 283); 'Der Schmerz ist die uns abgekehrte, von uns unbeschienene Seite des Lebens' [Pain is the side of life that is turned away from us, and unlit by us].15 Moreover, he links our collective turn against death and pain to the task of poetry:
Nur weil wir den Tod ausschließen in einer plötzlichen Besinnung, ist er mehr und mehr zum Fremden geworden, und da wir ihn im Fremden hielten, ein Feindliches [. . .] Unser effort (dies ist mir immer deutlicher geworden mit den Jahren, und meine Arbeit hat vielleicht nur noch den einen Sinn und Auftrag, von dieser Einsicht, die mich oft unerwartet überwältigt, immer unparteiischer und unabhängiger . . . seherischer vielleicht, wenn das nicht zu stolz klingt . . . Zeugnis abzulegen) [. . .] kann nur dahin gehen, die Einheit von Leben und Tod vorauszusetzen. (Mat., I, 283—84)
[Simply because in a sudden turn of thought we exclude death, it has increasingly become something alien, and since we kept it alien, something hostile [. . .] Our efforts (and this has become ever clearer to me with the years, and my work perhaps has only one point and one mission remaining: to testify more and more objectively, independently . . . prophetically perhaps, if that does not sound too proud ... to this insight, which often assails me unexpectedly) can only be directed at assuming the unity of life and death.]
These Rilkean meditations can now be compared with Nietzsche's reflections on the same themes. Nietzsche and Rilke both talk about moving into view of the gods, but there is a difference in perspective. Rilke talks about emerging from their shadow to catch 'das göttliche Gesicht', while Nietzsche speaks of the transcendent gaze wholly in terms of fabrication and illusion. For Rilke, the gods are out of sight, while for Nietzsche they are not even entertained as a possibility. Both argue that pain is something to explore rather than repress, and that the repression of pain is essentially decadent (this is the sense of Rilke's emphasis on 'Übermaß'). But again, their underlying positions diverge, and this can be seen in their views on meaning as expressed in the above passages: what they respectively call 'Bedeutung' and 'Sinn'. Rilke sees concentration on pain and acknowledgement of death as the means by which 'Bedeutung' might be created, whereas Nietzsche sees the heightened experience of pain as the ultimate refusal of 'Sinn'. Furthermore, while Nietzsche's rejection of 'Sinn' aims to debunk the idea of 'referring beyond', Rilke's understanding of 'Bedeutung' seems explicitly to require it. It involves bringing us back into contact with what has turned away and threatens to be meaningless: death and the gods. Rilke holds out the possibility that such a correspondence — 'Bedeutung' or 'Zustimmung' — can be achieved.16
Substance, vision, and subjectivity are Eliot's concerns too. He engages with the philosophy of substance from a historical perspective. By far the most important figure for him in this regard is Leibniz, whom he discusses in two articles published in 1916, the same year as the dissertation: 'The Development of Leibniz' Monadism' and 'Leibniz' Monads and Bradley's Finite Centres'.17 Like the dissertation, these pieces are concerned with the relationship between inside and outside, the importance of perspective, and the possibility of transcendence. On the basis of what we said about Bradley in Chapter 2, the most obvious difference between him and Leibniz is that in Bradley, there is no perspective from which everything makes sense. The Absolute, in which everything is contained, is Bradley's equivalent to the all-seeing perspective of God, but Bradley has trouble establishing the Absolute as a perspective at all. Vision and blindness form the core of Eliot's response to Leibniz and Bradley.
For Eliot, the systems of both Leibniz and Bradley are built around the blind spots which open up between the different perspectives. He emphasizes the themes of viewpoint, substance, and nothingness: 'I suggest that from the "pluralism" of Leibniz there is only a step to the "absolute zero" of Bradley, and that Bradley's Absolute dissolves at a touch into its constituents' (LMB, 200). In this essay, which is an attempt by Eliot to find his way around various possibilities rather than to formulate and defend a certain philosophical position, Eliot sets up Leibniz and Bradley as the converse of each other. They seem to face in opposite directions, since Leibniz emphasizes the plurality of monads and Bradley the oneness of the Absolute, but for Eliot these tend to the same result. Both, he says, establish elaborate systems which tread a fine line between substance and dissolution. Eliot presents the systems of Leibniz and Bradley as edifices of ash, ready to crumble at the slightest provocation:
Leibniz does not succeed in establishing the reality of several substances. On the other hand, just as Leibniz' pluralism is ultimately based upon faith, so Bradley's universe, actual only in finite centres, is only by an act of faith unified. Upon inspection, it falls away into the isolated finite experiences out of which it is put together. (LMB, 202)
Bradley, like Leibniz, emphasizes 'centres', and on this basis Eliot builds up a vocabulary of expansion and contraction, to show how in the moment of utmost fullness, the Bradleian and Leibnizian self discharges into emptiness:
Like monads they aim at being one; each expanded to completion, to the full reality latent within it, would be identical with the whole universe. But in doing so, it would lose the small reality which it actually achieves. (LMB, 202)
However, the basic difference between Bradley and Leibniz applies to their respective geometries of the self: both talk about 'finite centres', but whereas in Leibniz these are themselves centred, in Bradley they are not. In eliding Leibniz and Bradley here, Eliot overlooks what it means for a Leibnizian monad to be a unique reflection of everything. For Leibniz, the all-encompassing perspective from the centre remains infinitely remote, although monads are driven to attain it. Behind Eliot's conditionals ('would be identical', 'would lose') lies the assumption that Leibniz thinks reaching that perspective is possible for monads. In fact, the 'small reality' of isolated substances is preserved through their hidden dependence on that absolutely central perspective which is outside the reach of all of them.
One side of the parallelism Eliot tries to set up between Leibniz and Bradley is distorted, therefore, and so the symmetry as a whole will be called into question. However, the element in Leibniz which Eliot ignores (the role of God's perspective) resurfaces in his discussion of Bradley, and shows that there is more of Leibniz in Eliot's own view than he recognizes. The substance of Eliot's criticism of Bradley is that Bradley completely removes the possibility of any outside perspective, and thereby denies reality to his system as a whole. By its categorical refusal of externality, Eliot argues, Bradley's monism paradoxically makes 'absolute' the atomistic strand in Leibniz, displacing the other side of the Leibnizian equation, the idea of continuity. The result of this is recalcitrant particularity.18 So Bradley's account of transcendence in the absence of a transcendent perspective is vague and contingent:
What we do know is that we are able to pass from one point of view to another, that we are compelled to do so, and that the different aspects more or less hang together. For rejecting a higher experience there may be no reason. But that this higher experience explains the lower is at least open to doubt. (LMB, 207)
The central point for Eliot is that Bradley cuts off the possibility of self-consciousness, even when he emphasizes the necessity of the Absolute: this is why immediate experience and the Absolute are 'annihilation and utter night" (KE, 31). As we saw in Chapter 2, because finite centres cannot know that they are the means by which the Absolute is realized, the Absolute cannot know itself after all, and so is not made real.
In Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, Eliot identifies the absence of a central perspective, the absence of an outside, in Bradley in different terms: as an absence of objectivity. The theory of finite centres privileges subjects over objects: 'Feeling itself is properly speaking neither subjective nor objective, but its development into an articulate whole of terms and relations seems to affect the conscious subject, but not the objects of which the subject is conscious' (KE, 21). Bradley himself insists that identity cannot be guaranteed from the outside. However, Eliot intimates that if the objects of which the subject is conscious are properly taken into account, they do inevitably lead outside the finite centre, and that Bradley has a characteristically ambivalent attitude to this. What Eliot calls the 'object side' of experience (KE, 22), which emphasizes the perception of difference, of an other 'outside of the finite centre' (KE, 21), is necessary for continuity between finite centres to be established: for difference to be taken up, ultimately, into the oneness of the Absolute. But the 'subject side' (KE, 22) can never perceive objects this radically, because it persists in seeing itself as a totality beyond which it is not possible to go.
Using Bradley as an impetus, Eliot formulates his own tentative responses to these problems. His central idea here is the 'half-object', which is 'a place half-way between subject and object' (KE, 81). Eliot's half-object has a dual perspective: it is 'constituted by the act of perceiving another as an object and simultaneously identifying with him as a subject'.19 In contradistinction to Bradley's position, which entails that 'outside of the objectivity of objects appearing to finite centres, there is no objectivity at all' (KE, 141), the half-object is the moment of transition between centres, the moment of 'self-transcendence' (KE, 147), when the reality of the individual perspective is affirmed through its perceiving something beyond it with which it is nonetheless connected. Eliot's immediate model for this is Bradley's definition of the soul as a 'middle space' (AR, 305), or 'a finite centre viewed as an object' (LMB, 20420). Yet Eliot sees that Bradley evacuates that space, and closes off that perspective: there is no position in Bradley from which finite centres can be viewed 'objectively'."1 Eliot's own definition of soul in Knowledge and Experience is an attempt to restore that viewpoint:
The lite of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or lesser extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them. The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself [. . .] we have [. . .] a felt whole in which there are moments of knowledge: the objects are constantly shifting, and new transpositions of objectivity and feeling constantly developing. (KE, 147-48, 155)
In other words, Eliot aims here to restore a real outside to individual experience. In his analysis, the soul holds together the subject and object sides and stops them turning away from each other. We can see that despite Eliot's suggestion to the contrary, the logical underpinning, though not the language, of his attempt to get beyond Bradley here is not distant from Leibniz: the reality of individual elements is 'centred' through something which is in them and beyond them. Eliot develops his interest in objectivity (his concern to give a full account of the objects of experience), but ties this emphatically to subjective perception. In recognizing something 'other', the subject realizes that its experience is defined in relation to something outside that experience, but this realization is itself a moment of inclusion which 'transmutes' subject and object and allows a 'felt whole' (known elsewhere as 'felt continuity', KE, 21), by which Eliot essentially means self-consciousness. Eliot puts forward a dynamic 'objective correlative' to subjects' experience, based on the idea that each soul is always in the process of perceiving and being perceived. The dimensions of objectivity change with every new object perceived, but the perceiver has a constant sense that there is something beyond themselves, with which they are, however, continuous through their ability to relate to it.
Nietzsche and Bradley, therefore, make Rilke and Eliot ask the same question: 'wie sollen wir demnach aus dem Raum, den der Gott vor sich hat, auf ihn zutreten?' or 'how can we issue from the circle described about each point of view?' (KE, 141). Both of these questions articulate the paradox of estranged subjectivity through a spatial conceit, because both are posed from, and express the need to break out of, Nietzschean/Bradleian space. In the remainder of this chapter, we will ask what difficulties this answer poses, and whether in their poetry Rilke and Eliot are able to emerge from behind the gods.
The Tenth Elegy is about how to finish. Like 'Burnt Norton', which is about how to begin, it starts at the end:
Daß ich dereinst, an dem Ausgang der grimmigen Einsicht,
Jubel und Ruhm aufsinge zustimmenden Engeln. (ll. 1—2)
[That one day, at the end of my stern seeing, my singing joy and praise will meet the voice of angels.]
The poem begins 'with the awareness that perhaps only the moment of death [. . .] will be the fitting moment to sing the angels',22 anticipating the letter of 1915 in which 'agreement' is made subject to 'agonizing vision'. This beginning recalls the end of 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes'. By self-consciously projecting itself towards the 'Ausgang', it suspends itself between the moment of absolute finality and the resources of poetic language, rephrasing the question of how death and poetry relate and making us reflect 'on the complexities of fictionality and textuality'.23 There is a certain looseness of diction, reminding us that this section is an initial exploration of possibilities for the whole Duino cycle: 'daß mich mein strömendes Antlitz I glänzender mâche [that my Streaming face make me shine more brightly] (ll. 5—6, emphasis added). But the idea of visual recognition, 'Einsicht', being transposed on to a face that is not only tearful but also in the process of being dissolved, is striking. Tearful dissolution is supposed to make the 'ich' of the poem sparkle more brilliantly: the heightening and effacement of subjectivity are linked from the start. The upsurge of possibility is aimed at linking inner pain to outward expression: 'daß das unscheinbare Weinen | blühe' [that inconspicuous crying may blossom] (ll. 6—7). We may think of the emergence of 'Worte, wie Blumen' [words, like flowers] in 'Brod und Wein' (l. 90). Rilke's elegiac project here is to insist, against the decadent view of pain which refuses to see that it means anything ('Wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen' [we who waste pain], l. 10), that pain has substance24:
Sie aber sind ja
unser winterwähriges Laub, unser dunkeles Sinngrün,
eine der Zeiten des heimlichen Jahres —, nicht nur
Zeit —, sind Stelle, Siedelung, Lager, Boden, Wohnort. (ll. 13—15)
[But they are our winter foliage, our dark contemplative green, one of the times of the secret year — not only time — they are place, settlement, camp, soil, dwelling.]
This series of images captures Rilke's own idea of 'Hälfte des Lebens', and the section closes by envisaging a deep correspondence between loss, pain, and the quietly insistent seasonal rhythms which for both Rilke and Hölderlin form part of the poetic transformation of existence 'in dürftiger Zeit'.
But in the main part of the poem (that written in 1922), Rilke asks whether these meanings can be more than just envisaged. The gap between possibility and fulfilment is emphatically signalled by the sudden, jarring move to 'Freilich, wehe, wie fremd sind die Gassen' [But alas, how strange are the streets] (l. 16).25 A new vision is presenting itself, one that apparently cannot be grasped within a search for meanings. Rather, this scenario Seems to pervert words themselves, as we find ourselves 'in der falschen, aus Ubertönung gemachten | Stille' [in the false silence of excess noise] (ll. 17—18). This is a drastic and perhaps sardonic reformulation of the theme of ineffability running through all Rilke's poetry, because it presents silence as a meaningless excess of the sayable. This false silence is not the significant absence created, however precariously, by 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes'. It is instead the product of words being unable to create anything at all. This is a world of surfaces:
aus dér Gußform des Leeren der Ausguß
prahlt: der vergoldete Lärm, das platzende Denkmal. (ll. 18—19)
[the swank poured out of the empty mould: the gold-plated din, the bursting monument.]
This reiterates the image of the 'positive Figur' in the letter on Malte, except that now what is turned out of the mould is gaudy and fractured. 'Das platzende Denkmal', consisting of a cracked outside surface which makes the monument impossible to understand, shows how memory (we have the familiar play on 'Erinnerung' here), and therefore death itself, can fall victim to meaninglessness. The paradoxically death-effacing monument gives rise, in a passage of sustained compulsion, to a relentless movement beyond and outside. Now Rilke's elegiac use of landscape becomes the driving force of the poem. The portrayal of the urban landscape and the fairground attacks everything from organized religion (ll. 21—22) to pornography (ll. 29—30): the mercantile aspect, the emphasis on monetary intercourse ('Geschlechtsteil des Gelds' [genitalia of money] (l. 31) etc.) is telling, since for Rilke existence on the wrong side of the gods is an 'auf Gebrauch und Leistung eingerichtete [s] Dasein' [existence based on use and success] (Mat., I, 135). The landscape unfolds kaleidoscopically before us in fairly loose rhythms checked occasionally by really rigorous elegiac counterpoint (e.g. ll. 26—27), taking on the gestures of restless searching and dissatisfaction. 'Rilke's fairground scenario contains some of the very few sharp, satirical thrusts to be found in his work',26 and Rilke passes into it and out the other side with a series of spatial references which build to a climax:
Draußen aber kräuseln sich immer die Ränder von Jahrmarkt.
[...]
. . . . Oh aber gleich darüber hinaus,
[...]
gleich im Rücken der Planke, gleich dahinter (ll. 23—38)
[But outside the edges of the fairground still wind. [...]....Oh but straight after that, [. . .] just at the back of the hoarding, just behind it]
This longing build-up to the invisible side of the final hoarding is perhaps Rilke's most pregnant example yet of 'nah und schwer zu fassen': the hoardings are there to hold and enclose, but what they hold is emptiness. The whole point of Rilke's satiric evocation of the City of Pain ('Leid-Stadt') and its fairground is that these things fundamentally lack substance. From 'das platzende Denkmal' to the 'Plakaten des "Todlos"' [posters for the beer 'Deathless'] (l. 35) at the edge of the fair, the scene reveals the displacement and repression of death, which results in a grotesque parody of life: 'nicht zur Belustigung nur [. . .] das unterrichtet und macht | fruchtbar' [not just for amusement [. . .] it teaches a lesson and brings results] (ll. 32—34). These things stand in direct opposition to the possibility of meaningful correspondences mooted at the beginning of the elegy. In this world of surface the rhythms of the 'heimliches Jahr' are broken up into the frenzy of the 'Jahrmarkt'. But these details are important precisely because of what they suppress and deny. The fairground is defined just as much by what its hoardings exclude as by what they include, and Rilke finally says, or starts to say, what is beyond those limits: 'gleich dahinter, ists wirklich' [just behind it, it's real] (1. 38). This moment is in keeping with Rilke's predilection for turning points, because here the Tenth Elegy begins to move round its axis. 'Even here', though, 'the poetry is intent on recording not divisions [. . .] but transitions'.27 In seeking to grasp a transition beyond the last plank to what is 'real', the poem is trying to refer to something other than the tetishized surfaces of the City of Pain. If it could do that, the Tenth Elegy would avoid excess of meaning, which is meaninglessness, but rather 'hüten das Maas' [preserve the measure], as Hölderlin puts it in the second version of 'Der Einzige' ['The Only One] (1. 55). But this involves going out into what seems beyond experience and making us see how nothing can be real without it — going out into death.
Once Rilke is beyond the final hoarding, he assembles an array of images which recapitulate central ideas in the Elegien, but also go back much further. It has often been pointed out that children, lovers, and animals (ll. 39—40) strike an immediate chord, but what really seizes us is 'Klage'. Like 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes', the Tenth Elegy is creating a landscape out of lament.28 Within the space of a few lines, Rilke brings together death, the motif of transition, the relationship between inside and outside, and the axial pattern of 'Wendung':
Weiter noch zieht es den Jüngling; vielleicht, daß er
eine junge
Klage liebt ..... Hinter ihr her kommt er in Wiesen.
Sie sagt: — Weit. Wir wohnen dort draußen ....
Wo? Und der Jüngling
folgt. Ihn rührt ihre Haltung. Die Schulter, der Hals —,
vielleicht
ist sie von herrlicher Herkunft. Aber er läßt sie, kehrt um,
wendet sich, winkt . . . Was soils? Sie ist eine Klage. (ll. 41—46)
[The young man goes further; perhaps he loves a young Lament..... He comes behind her through meadows. She says: far. We live out there.... Where? And the young man follows. He is touched by her bearing. The shoulder, the neck — perhaps she is of noble descent. But he leaves her, turns round, waves . . . What of it? She is a Lament.]
We can see how this fits in with Rilke's intention of exploring the unity of life and death — there is the characteristic movement back and forth between states of being as the young man crosses into the land of the dead, which opens up simply through the repetition of 'weiter', 'weit', but then turns back (as in 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes' ll. 25—57, the words 'umkehren' and 'wenden' direct the poem's visual trajectory). The young man turns away from the Lament, because 'presumably still alive',29 and we are told that only the young dead, 'im ersten Zustand | zeitlosen Gleichmuts' [in the first state of timeless serenity] (ll. 47—48), follow the Laments. But then he re-emerges to be led into the landscape of sorrow: 'der Älteren eine, der Klagen, | nimmt sich des Jünglinges an' [one of the older Laments comes to see to him] (ll. 54—55). In other words, while the young man is out of sight, he dies. He turns around ('umkehren') and so away ('abkehren') from death and back towards life, but this is simultaneously a turn away from life and back towards death, because as he disappears from view in the fields he reappears in the valley of the shades: 'dort, wo sie wohnen, im Tal' |there, where they live, in the valley] (l. 54). The verbs of turning show Rilke exploring the relationship between poetry and the moment of death. This retraces a longstanding pattern in his poetry. But the Tenth Elegy differs from poems such as 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes' and 'Alkestis' (1907), which followed it in Neue Gedichte, in that here the young man dies in the poem. It is no longer a question of 'Gestorbensein', as in the case of Eurydice, but of 'Sterben' itself. Significantly, the poem does not simply narrate a death, though. The young man still turns out of view, and Rilke is still concerned with how death and absence are woven into poetry — how they affect the perspectives which poetry sets up. Rather, the movement into death is linked both to invisibility and the creation of expressive possibilities: as the young man crosses a boundary and withdraws from sight, he also opens a new perspective within the poem.
The major consequence of this is that death is described as something real. We have already been told that, beyond the final boundary line, there is something 'wirklich', and seen how elsewhere Rilke regards death as having an ambivalent relation to reality: death structures the reality of experience, and so the reality of death itself seems outside experience ('in seiner Wirklichkeit [. . .] uns nicht erlebbar'). When it reaches the city's boundary, moves out into what lies beyond, and then turns simultaneously away from the Land of Lament and back towards it, the poem suspends two 'abgekehrte Seiten': life and death.
The Land of Lament, rightly described in terms of 'embodiment',30 is both an articulation of grief in language, and a continuation of the experience of death itself, as the young man is led further away from the realm of the living. As a 'Klagefrau' (compare 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes', 1. 48), the Lament performs a ritual of remembrance and initiation synonymous with the act of elegy in which she appears. But the depredations wrought on her world are further signs of the repression of death:
Und sie leitet ihn durch die weite Landschaft
der Klagen,
zeigt ihm die Säulen der Tempel oder die Trümmer
jener Burgen, von wo Klage-Fürsten das Land
einstens weise beherrscht. (ll. 61—64)
[And she leads him through the vast landscape of the Laments, showing him the temple columns or the ruins of those castles from which Princes of Lament once wisely ruled the land.]
Loss is double-edged: the possibility of grief itself has been eroded, so the act of mourning is also a recovery of the poem's elegiac potential. Conversely, though, if the act of 'Klage' is thwarted, the prospects for poetry are bleak. This knife-edge on which the poem is poised is part of the theme of turning, and reminds us again of 'Patmos': where there is danger, the means of rescue also grows. Now the poem actually becomes structured around the gestures of reference — the insistent, threefold act of shoiving in 'zeigt ihm die Säulen [. . .] Zeigt ihm die hohen | Tränenbäume [. . .] zeigt ihm die Tiere der Trauer' [shows him the columns [. . .] shows him the tall trees of tears [. . .] shows him the animals of mourning] (ll. 61—67).31 The progression of these two figures through the landscape is a continuous redirecting of the gaze, as the panorama is put together out of the details which the Lament reveals to the young man. The act of 'Klage' is then a process of visual location and relocation, and as in 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes' our own gaze is certainly implicated, since as viewers/readers we participate in the poetic ordering of the scene. Elements of this process form part of a larger pattern of correspondences within the poem. 'Felder blühender Wehmut' [fields of blossoming melancholy] (l. 65), which come into view as the Lament points them out, achieve the blossoming of 'das unscheinbare Weinen' sought by Rilke as he began the poem, and the cycle, in 1912 — as if the journey out into the negative landscape has at last fulfilled Hölderlin's prophecy and produced words and images to express the inner experience of loss.
That is one driving force behind this part of the poem, but there is another. Rilke is also on post-Nietzschean terrain. We are made to ask whether such correspondences have value beyond the realm of aesthetic image-making in which they have been created. That is to say, are these images, however beautiful, actually able to connect to something the poem shows to be real ('wirklich')? If they cannot do that, then the poem will just be circular, and we will have to doubt the worth of its whole intended trajectory 'from the inauthentic "to the Real"'.32 Does the emphasis on 'wirklich' signal a genuine contrast to the language of the City of Pain, or is it itself part of the meaningless noise (i.e. an example of 'Übertönung')? Nietzsche is important for understanding what is at stake here: are the gestures of reference and revelation duplicitous, pointing towards a 'meaning' which is merely an aesthetic fabrication? If so, they would be both subject to and complicit in Nietzsche's deconstruction of meaning, which undermines interpretation and the search for significance but in their place puts a hypertrophied form of interpretation and a problematic insistence on its own meaning. Zarathustra's all-seeing eye, which is Nietzsche's alternative to any 'invented' transcendent witness, is reduced to blindness because everything is potentially figurative and therefore nothing has actual reference. It faces a sheer outside — an eternal signifier but an eternally effaced signified. In this it has much in common with the perception of excessive meaning 'from the outside', brought about primarily through the repression of death. Rilke has diagnosed this repression as a problem, but diagnosis is not the same as resolution, and at this stage the status of Rilke's images is unclear. We need to look at the question of figurality in the rest of the elegy, and then relate this to Nietzsche.
As the journey through the landscape continues (as the act of elegy goes on), the visual relationships become more and more insistent:
und manchmal
schreckt ein Vogel und zieht, flach ihnen fliegend
durchs Aufschaun,
weithin das schriftliche Bild seines vereinsamten Schreis. (ll. 67—69)
[and sometimes a bird starts, flying low through their plane of sight as they look up, and pulling after it, through the wide expanse, the image, in letters, of its lonely cry.]
The emphatic geometric patterning here reminds us of the axial movements in Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes'. The horizontal movement of the bird bisects the line of vision, which is a vertical 'Aufschaun'. Where these two lines cross, sound is converted into vision and a sign is created. In this sequence vision is confronted with nothing but a sign (the beautiful and intriguing yet indecipherable hieroglyph, no doubt). The image belongs to what we might call the Tenth Elegy's figurative turn — where it starts to reflect on the role of images as images. Words and letters suspended enigmatically in the field of vision occupy a blind spot behind literality and figurativeness. As letters their (literal) function is to stand for something (to be figurative), but if the point of reference is withdrawn or concealed and all we are left with is the outward shape of the hieroglyph, which we know to be a sign but do not know of what, then that figurative capacity is subverted. They fall into a negative metaphoricity which in fact comes close to inert literalness: they might refer to something, but that is as much as to say that they refer only to themselves and their own ambiguity. This latter option has been seen as the conclusive note of the poem: 'the constellations of Lament country do not fit together into a system accessible to the reader. Sign and signified fall radically apart'.33 However, it would be more accurate to say that the failure of signification is one possibility faced by the poem, which it now has to weigh in the balance.
The Sphinx is the climactic image of the Tenth Elegy. It is introduced in Rilke's Hölderlinian lexis,34 with strong implications of Cosmic Night: 'Abends führt sie ihn hin [. . .] Naht aber Nacht, so wandeln sie leiser, und bald j mondet's empor' [In the evening she leads him there [. . .] but when night falls they walk more softly, and soon it rises moon-like] (ll. 70—73). But it is a single word which grabs our attention: the Sphinx is 'der verschwiegenen Kammer | Antlitz' |the face of the chamber hidden in silence] (ll. 75—76). The 'Antlitz' brings the poem full circle by immediately recalling the initial elegiac image of the face streaming with tears, as well as Rilke's reflections on subjectivity, denial of the face of God, and the way these things relate to poetic language. Language is at issue here too, but we know this because of the emphasis on silence: a new grouping of words now finds its way into the poem, as the earlier vocabulary of reference ('zeigen') is brought into contact with, and echoed assonantly within, the vocabulary of non-language ('schweigen', ll. 75, 78, 96). Referentiality and silence meet in the Sphinx, which produces an image whose grandeur manages to be touching:
Und sie staunen dem krönlichen Haupt, das für immer,
schweigend, der Menschen Gesicht
auf die Waage der Sterne gelegt. (ll. 77—79)
[And they wonder at the crowned head, which has silently placed man's face on the scales of the stars, forever.]
This image of filling up and filling out recalls previous instances in the poem, but differs from them in that here what joins up the stars and replenishes the vacant interstellar spaces is itself an image. The structure of the sequence bears comparison with Eliot's moment in the rose-garden: 'the likeness of a human face'35 is projected from the secret space behind the 'Antlitz', inaccessible to sound, vision, and language, through the surface of the Sphinx's features, and on to the stars. Like the ghostly figures glimpsed in the pool, who stand behind the field of vision but are reflected into it, the face suspends the possibility and the impossibility of sensory perception. But the question of what to make of the image remains: it certainly has gravity ('für immer'), but if 'what is being weighed in this scene [. . .] is not [just] poetry but the human condition itself',36 then we need to ask how the poetry tells us this.
A clue is provided by the renewed emphasis on death and vision: 'Nicht erfaßt es sein Blick, im Frühtod | schwindelnd' [His gaze cannot grasp it, dizzy with early death] (ll. 80—81). This is in itself a turning point in the poem, because it suggests that death goes beyond all the possibilities we have associated with the dead young man so far. Here it is impossible not to hear Hölderlin again ('nah und schwer zu (er) fassen'), and Rilke repeats the pattern of close proximity between danger and the means of rescue, since the young man's failure of vision opens up a final perspective for the poem. This involves Rilke's characteristically nimble shifting between various viewpoints, and then moves beyond viewpoint:
Aber ihr Schaun,
hinter dem Pschent-Rand hervor, scheucht es die
Eule. Und sie,
streifend im langsamen Abstrich die Wange entlang,
jene der reifesten Rundung,
zeichnet weich in das neue
Totengehör, über ein doppelt
aufgeschlagenes Blatt, den unbeschreiblichen Umriß. (ll. 81—87)
[But their looking, over the top of the diadem, startles the owl, which grazing the cheek's ripest roundness in a slow wing-stroke, softly etches into the new hearing of the dead, on both sides of an open page, the indescribable outline.]
The book opened here may well be the book of life and death,37 in which case its double page gives a new sense to 'abgekehrte Seiten', again held in suspension. Other imagery is typically suggestive: the 'ripest roundness' is shape expanded to its full potential, ready to turn into something else, and reiterates the parallel between ripeness and death which is in Rilke's work from the beginning.38 But this passage is really an exploration of the possibility and function of poetic imagery itself. As at the end of 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes', there is an interplay between the two figures and the point of view of the reader. This involves a visual fulfilment which is outside of vision: the owl moving across the Sphinx's invisible surface produces a noise which etches itself into the young man's hearing in pictorial terms ('zeichnet'), bringing together all sorts of sensory contrasts and possibilities. 'Hearing' stands out against all the instances of silence, but this act of hearing is, in fact, the creation of a new picture. The drawing made here, though, is not the 'schriftliches Bild' hovering between interpretation and inscrutability, because it transforms the subjective interpreter: the inadequacy of the viewer, standing before this grand sight but unable to take it in, is overcome when the separation between the two is broken down and the sight of the Sphinx is actually internalized by the viewer. The surface of the Sphinx is revealed to vision in a way which is inaccessible to vision — the drawing of a picture which can only be heard, and which does not open itself to any gaze.39 Not only can what is being drawn here not be seen, it cannot be written either: it is 'unbeschreiblich'. The perceptions registered as 'early death' begins to give way to absolute finality are invisible, and so indescribable — when the young man's vision is collapsed inwards so that there is no longer a lack of fit between observer and observed, so our own perspective, as readers of the poem where this happens, is foreclosed on, since the picture drawn in hearing cannot be revealed to our gazé ëither. The poem is now addressing the uniqueness of finality, and it cannot provide an image to show us that. Rather, it is putting it beyond view and beyond poetic representation. With the approach of the 'final stage' of death and the move beyond vision and writing, the poem will have to end, but equally, what is being achieved in this climactic sequence sets itself against the charge of aestheticism and 'mere' poetry, because the poetry points emphatically beyond poetry.
But the poem is an insistent movement of systole and diastole, and characteristically, after registering indescribability, it immediately opens up a new panorama, as if by getting ready to go beyond vision it is possible to see further. The perspective shifts from the ineffable recesses of the dead man's hearing to the stars ('die Sterne', l. 88), as the gaze is directed suddenly upward with an emphatic command to look: 'Hier, I siehe' (ll. 89—90). Here reference, naming ('nennen', ll. 89, 91) is brought back from silence and reunited with vision as the Lament points out and describes the constellations, This involves a further image, and the movement of filling out and opening up is continued. The young man's expanding gaze is able to find correspondences wherever it looks, simply by the act of seeing, recognizing, and naming: 'das vollere Sternbild | nennen sie: Fruchtkmnz. Dann, weiter, dem Pol zu: | Wiege; Weg; Das Brennende Buch; Puppe; Fenster' [the fuller constellation they call the Garland of Fruits. Then further on, towards the pole: Cradle; Path; the Burning Book; Puppet; Window] (ll. 90—92). Awareness of impending finality and of the limits of writing actually brings an increase in the referential capacities of poetic language, but only alongside another movement which closes down vision and tends again to silence:
Aber im südlichen Himmel, rein wie im Innern
einer gesegneten Hand, das klar erglänzende >M<,
das die Mütter bedeutet — (ll. 93-95)
[But in the southern sky, pure as the inside of a blessed hand, the clearly shining M, which means the Mothers......]
This is another letter suspended at the limit of vision, and brings the poem's only explicit mention of meaning, 'Bedeutung'. That word, though, is on the brink between expression and silence — the sequence tails off as soon as it is uttered. The culmination of vision as it moves higher and higher, then, is a twofold recognition: recognition of a meaning, but also recognition that we are being referred beyond our capacities of reference. If we are to see here an allusion to the Mothers in Faust,40 then the importance of the link is surely that Rilke is pushing towards a realm of pure possibility. With this image we are coming to the crux of Rilke's poetic hermeneutic of death. The reality of death ('der Tod in seiner Wirklichkeit') turns out to be the point where a process of significance is articulated ('bedeutet'), but where whatever is signified is unrepresentable because it can only be thought of as the possibility of signification itself, felt by the dying only in the necessarily unique moment that reference is transgressed. This, though, would seem to place poetic language in an aporia, becausë it can only register that possibility as nothingness, which is void of meaning. Does such uniqueness not resist all gestures of communication, including poetic writing? After this point has been reached, vision contracts again and there is no more naming of stars, though the young man is now known by a different epithet: 'Doch der Tote muß fort' [But the dead man must leave] (l. 96). The poem has come to the brink, but goes no further: 'schweigend bringt ihn die ältere | Klage bis an die Talschlucht' [silently the older Lament brings him to the valley gorge] (ll. 96—97). Poetry and death come together emblematically in the embrace which follows: 'Lind da umarmt sie ihn, weinend' [And there she embraces him, crying] (l. 103). This embrace, taking place at the edge of the elegiac landscape and so at the edge of language, is a culmination in the poem's basic rhythm of meeting and separation, nearness and remoteness, since it sets the scene for one last turn away.
The 'architectonic' pattern of the Tenth Elegy is the same as that of 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes'. It too is spanned by two moments of turning. The embrace breaks up and the dead young man moves away for the last time:
Einsam steigt er dahin, in die Berge des Ur-Leids.
Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los. (ll. 104—05)
[Alone he journeys into the mountains of great suffering. His lot is silence, and not even his steps echo.]
This is a turn into soundlessness, out of language. It is also a turn away from vision, as the resources of elegiac poetry are separated from the death such poetry mourns — as the dead man moves out of sight of the Lament, into what cannot be seen or shown or written. This mirrors the turn away from the Land of Lament and back into it, and the initial moment of death we do not see. Death seeps out elusively at both ends of the 'Leidland' sequence, generating the poetic language and the sensory relationships but always pointing them towards where they must end; it is the condition and the limit of elegy. But just as the young man's first turn into death and away from sight began the visionary journey beyond the City of Pain, so now his final turn into silence is a turn back into language for the poem which appeared to be over:
Aber erweckten sie uns, die unendlich Toten, ein Gleichnis,
siehe, sie zeigten vielleicht auf die Kätzchen der leeren
Hasel, die hängenden, oder
meinten den Regen, der fällt auf dunkles Erdreich im Frühjahr. —
Und wir, die an steigendes Glück
denken, empfänden die Rührung,
die uns beinah bestürzt,
wenn ein Glückliches fällt. (ll. 106—13)
[But were they, the infinitely dead, to provide us with a symbol — see, perhaps they would point to the catkins on the bare hazel, hanging down, or the rain falling on dark earth in spring. And we who think of happiness rising would be moved almost more than we can bear, when something happy falls.]
The two concluding stanzas have provoked widely differing critical reactions.41 In one of the most important modern readings of Rilke, Paul de Man picks up on the word 'Gleichnis', arguing that 'some of Rilke's allegorizing poems, such as "Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes" or the Tenth Duino Elegy, programmatically thematize the renunciation [of meaning] in a narrative mode, by telling the story of this renunciation'.42 These stanzas have an instructive antecedent in German poetry: the two stanzas appended by Mörike to 'Auf eine Christblume' ('Wer aber weiß, ob nicht sein zarter Geist [. . .] Mir unsichtbar, dich blühende umkreist?'). Mörike tries to reinstate vision while mindful of the possibility of blindness, and Rilke here creates another instance of expansion after contraction: the poem opens up its visual field again, restating the mechanisms of reference. It asks us to look again ('siehe'), and talks about things which might be shown (the vocabulary of 'zeigen' once more). These gestures are all present in the 'Gleichnis', which might connect the worlds of the living and the dead. Rilke is returning to the paradox noted above: the thought that by recognizing meaning, poetry in fact negates itself and creates emptiness, because whatever is 'meant' is automatically only an absence. If the 'beyond-ness' of death could be refracted back into language, however, then this 'Gleichnis' would be language referring beyond itself to something rather than nothing: figurality grounded in death, rather than the death of figurality. Put differently, this final section returns to the idea of redemption, exploring the possibility of redeeming within language the loss which has occurred in the move beyond language. The 'Gleichnis' reiterates the face (the 'likeness', as Stern says) seen in the stars, but whereas earlier the face led the gaze upwards to the point where sight is eventually eclipsed, and its contours were felt where writing gives way to ending, or between death and language ('l'espace de la mort et l'espace de la parole', as Blanchot says43), this new likeness would provide an equal and opposite reaction, projecting back down from that vanishing point and reinvigorating expression and sensory perception. The 'Gleichnis' would answer the difficulties Rilke addressed in 1915 when he spoke of being behind the gods ('an der Rückseite der Götter'), looking in the same direction but seeing only a shadow. This problem is replicated as the point of death is reached and the dead man moves out of sight: the elegy (the 'Klage') is poised at the edge of the valley gorge, and facing out in the same direction, but looks into a void. In receiving an image from 'the infinitely dead', we would be looking at something face to face. We can note here that the final idea of Duineser Elegien (simultaneous 'steigen' and 'fallen') overlaps strikingly with the opening thought of Four Quartets: Eliot's Heraclitean citation about the way up and the way down being the same. To understand these points we need to return to Nietzsche.
By invoking the concept of 'Gleichnis', the Tenth Elegy invites discussion in the context of Nietzschean debates about figurality, because, as we saw in detail in Chapter 2, 'Gleichnis' is one of Nietzsche's most problematic terms. The ever-present possibility of figurativeness (what Nietzsche calls 'die Unfreiwilligkeit des Gleichnisses') is what characterizes Zarathustra's vision. In the final lines of the Tenth Elegy, there is a typically Rilkean, but also typically Nietzschean, return to things and their status in signification ('die Kätzchen der leeren | Hasel' — we might see another reflection of 'Hälfte des Lebens' in the nature imagery which points downwards but is filled with possibility from above). The signifying articulated by 'bedeutet' and by the move into death goes through the limit of words and sight and emerges not into nothingness, but back into the modest details of life. This process makes us think of the 'gleiche Dinge' with which Nietzsche wrestles in the allegory of Zarathustra. The finest example of this is the Gateway of the Moment with its two faces ('zwei Gesichter'), which can be compared to the transition between life and death, language and silence, at the end of Rilke's elegy. We know that the pseudo-allegory of conversion before the gateway does not work, because it seems to want to 'mean' something but can in no way provide us with a level of reality to which it might refer — anything we think it could be signifying is, in Nietzsche's own terms, liable to become just another surface or signifier. This connects to Rilke's questions about what comes after writing. Zarathustra presents itself as an allegory, but it is an allegory of ideas that undermine the possibility of allegory, and which gesture towards an outside perspective they cannot support. Elements of allegorical narrative (biting the head off a snake) only signify other emblematic gestures (passing through the gateway), so that the idea to be communicated (accepting the eternal recurrence) is not arrived at by the apparent chain of reference, but rather submerged and deferred in a contrafacture of images. In Nietzsche, the text as 'Gleichnis' does deconstruct itself into an absence of signification, and so makes itself unreadable, The 'Gleichnis' Rilke is talking about, though, is based on that perspective which Nietzsche cannot allow himself. To root reference in death is to root it in that which is not reference and always exceeds reference, so images and things are freed from the play of infinite textual regress and reawakened in relation to something uniquely real, beyond which they cannot be deferred. Whereas, in the passage we looked at from Zur Genealogie der Moral, Nietzsche suggests that through being liberated from a transcendent gaze, things can be affirmed in their brute materiality, the figurality considered at the end of the Tenth Elegy would go beyond this and reveal not inert thing-ness ('das Stoffliche', as Nietzsche says), but something more substantial.
As we have come to expect, though, there is another movement m these final lines, which seems to point away from realization and back towards uncertainty. This is expressed by the subjunctives in which the two stanzas are couched,44 and the 'zeigten vielleicht', where the dactylic undertow dredges up 'zeigten' but then lets it slip away into vagueness. Commentators have rightly drawn attention to the language here, and moreover linked it to the question of going beyond, but have often tended to draw simplistic conclusions. Thus for instance: 'the moment of understanding that reaches beyond human language and thought has not yet arrived: it is postulated, not actualised'.45 De Man's programmatic verdict on the Elegien goes further: 'the promise asserted by these texts is grounded in a play of language that can only come about because the poet has renounced any claim to extra-textual authority'.46 De Man attributes to Rilke the same textual, and allegorical, inertia we have identified in Nietzsche — the inability to refer beyond. He views the poem as a promise that cannot be redeemed. But two important points need to be made here. First, it is in the nature of the poem that it would not be able to Say that correspondence has been achieved, since as we have repeatedly seen, the 'referring beyond' Rilke is concerned with is a referring beyond reference. For the poem to state that such a move is achieved (for it to speak in the indicative) would be self-contradictory, since it would simply confirm that we have not moved beyond the referentiality of language. It would be the same as simply narrating the moment of death, and if that could be done Rilke would not have to bother at all. We therefore cannot read into Rilke's language a renunciation of 'extra-textual authority', because the presence of such extra-textual authority would itself point language away from telling us that a relationship has been fixed. Secondly, if the possibility of reference beyond the text has not been abandoned, then there is no reason to suppose, in the manner of de Man, that the poem mentions 'Gleichnis' ironically or disingenuously, having given up on it in advance. The word 'Gleichnis' can be read, and does hold out a genuine possibility: that a correspondence between us and the infinitely dead, or between language and something beyond language, is achievable, and therefore has been achieved (or 'actualized') — in the poem we have just read. The poem cannot tell us more about that than it already has without becoming self-contradictory, spewing out language to show something it acknowledges cannot be shown. This is demonstrated by the last quatrain, which falls oddly flat with its recourse to self-conscious assertiveness and repetition: 'die an steigendes Glück [. . .] wenn ein Glückliches fällt'. The last line flops with a dull heaviness, and comes nowhere near suggesting reinvigoration. This section is anticlimactic not in the way it acknowledges the limits of language and text, but in the way it then tries to overreach them.
Redundant language, though, cannot efface what the poem has put outside language: 'Gleichnis' or 'Zustimmung' (l. 2), which is the condition of words, resists verbal formulation and so has to remain a possibility, but it is the possibility to which we are asked to assent. The poem weaves less fulfilling strands into its fabric too (the would-be totalizing gaze of the deconstructive critic, and the excesses of decadent text), but it also subverts them. In this, it shows Rilke and Nietzsche to be each other's 'abgekehrte Seite': while Nietzsche sets up an endless array of possibilities but negates them, since none of them can lead beyond the circularity of the text, Rilke provides a counterweight to this by projecting the single, fundamental possibility (of talking about 'possibilities' at all), but this has to involve ending. The Tenth Elegy is a post-Nietzschean poem, and it demands to be seen in the context of tensions which Nietzsche was in a unique position to formulate. We cannot read it without bringing to bear Nietzsche's problematic idea of figurality and his evacuation of textual substance. If the poem is a process of balancing and rendering account, as Stern says,47 then what is calculated are the prospects for poetry after Zarathustra's descent from the mountain. Such poetry, the Tenth Elegy finally suggests, cannot perhaps avoid the suspicion, voiced by de Man, that it conceals a breakdown into inertia, but it does have a way of rebutting those charges and showing that they are themselves caught up in the contradictions they claim to uncover. To do that the Tenth Elegy must finish where it does, at the thought that its words have become real by ceasing to be just textual, and that the silence coming after them underlies new possibilities for language. That thought cannot be subjected to deconstruction, because it offers nothing to deconstruct: it is already outside the textual circle which the critic might set up to break down. And in expressing that thought, the Tenth Elegy is a development, not a contradiction, of the idea that 'Hiersein ist herrlich': it realizes that the affirmation of worldly existence is possible only through reference to what exceeds it. This is the 'purchase of poetry'. The poem gives up language so as not to give up on language, and gets back the thought of redemption, which is both 'Einlösung' and 'Erlösung'. This in itself may seem like a dear purchase, but it has the capacity to prove itself a necessary one, and to increase our returns. By contrast, there is no end, and so no investment in a new beginning, in Zarathustra. The Tenth Elegy echoes the basic ambivalence of Nietzsche's text: it is about the emptying of words. But the thought of replenishment is genuine, if difficult and inexpressible, and the poem does give us grounds for taking its images seriously. In this, it goes beyond what Nietzsche has to offer. For a poetic attempt to reveal meaning in more explicit terms, we must leave the City of Pain and the Land of Lament for a rather different location: Little Gidding.
In a lecture Eliot gave in America in 1933, he identified some fundamental aims for the writing of poetry:
To write poetry which should be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry, poetry so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poem points at, and not on the poetry, this seems to me the thing to try for. To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music.48
Poetry stripped of its aestheticizing accoutrements, Eliot suggests, allows clearer vision because it is not encumbered by the diversions of competing points of focus all laying claim to our attention but perhaps leading nowhere. Like the letters Rilke wrote around the time he was composing the Tenth Elegy, Eliot's statement about writing poetry envisages a connection (what Rilke calls 'Zustimmung' and 'Bedeutung') between us and something beyond us (what Rilke calls 'die Götter' and 'der Tod'). Eliot is developing an idea he famously articulated fourteen years before the American lecture, in Tradition and the Individual Talent:
What happens [to the artist] is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality [. . .] The poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.49
The priority of 'medium' over 'personality' is reflected in the idea of seeing through poetry, rather than seeing the poetry itself. Personality is contingent: it is an array of 'particular events' and 'particular emotions',50 regarded in such a way that they have no bearing on anything other than themselves. It is fragmentary in the sense that it consists of isolated elements to which no wider meaning can attach, and which must assert themselves against each other to seem important. To dwell on personality is therefore to perpetuate what Rilke calls cacophony ('Übertönung'), which characterizes the death-denying City of Pain. The transition Eliot suggests from particularity 'to something which is more valuable' is comparable to the Rilkean 'Wendung' leading beyond the City of Pain into the Land of Lament. Eliot's identification of poetry as 'continual self-sacrifice' and movement beyond therefore has underlying similarities with Rilke's view of poetry, and language, as grounded in death.51 Eliot suggests that the task of poetry is to enact 'the great transition' which is for Rilke the universal fact of death.52 The 'peculiar and unexpected ways' in which poetry registers 'impressions and experiences' would then be the constantly shifting 'transpositions of objectivity and féeling' which Knowledge and Experience envisages for the soul. As Rilke does in his letters, though, Eliot makes clear in the lecture that this is something to aim at, 'try for', not something to be taken for granted. Like Rilke, then, Eliot puts poetry in the balance: can the particular be transformed, or will it persist as diversion — can poetry adjust our vision, or will it make us blind?
'Little Gidding' is peculiarly concerned with meaning and expansion beyond the personal. The place named in the title has historical associations: Little Gidding was the site of an Anglican religious community established by Nicholas Ferrar in 1626, which was 'controlled by ideals of Holy Living and Holy Dying'.53 The poem starts in-between:
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. (ll. 1—3)
This suspension in time, between beginning and ending, rearticulates the possibilities of turning. Midwinter spring is not only 'between cold and heat', as Eliot originally wrote,54 but 'between pole and tropic'. This expansion of the initial idea into metonym introduces axial vocabulary: cold and heat become, respectively, axis and equator. The landscape is 'between' the vertical pole and the horizontal equator. It is neither one nor the other, but the point where these lines cross, like Mörike's Christmas rose.
Vision becomes explicitly important. Sight teeters on the brink between an encompassing vision of fullness, and its converse which is blindness (l. 8). But those possibilities come together in the syntax at the close of the stanza, which by pulling in two directions makes them complementary:
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. (ll. 9-11)
The effect is of simultaneous antithesis and connection — the movement suspends 'and' with 'but'.55 'Blindness', poised at the centre of the pentameter line, is a turning point in the poetry and itself a mirror, appearing to withdraw vision at the moment of intense visual possibility while in fact reflecting it inward, to the responding 'spirit' that is roused to words.
The poetry remains between external scene and internal response, and finds a word for this: 'Between melting and freezing | The soul's sap quivers' (ll. 11—12). The soul seems to come into the poem as the result of the spirit becoming articulate. And this new-found articulacy gives rise to a fundamental question: 'Where is the summer, the unimaginable | Zero summer?' (ll. 19—20). In the final manuscript of 'Little Gidding' the question was fuller:
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Summer beyond sense, the inapprehensible
Zero summer?
These lines have always been found difficult of access.56 The poem's first reader, John Hayward, pre-empted most interpretations when he asked Eliot if it was 'an allusive reference to the Absolute Zero of physics?'57 Commentators have, however, overlooked a parallel in Eliot's earlier work: 'Ί suggest that from the "pluralism" of Leibniz there is only a step to the "absolute zero" of Bradley'. Whether Eliot had Bradley in mind or not, the ideas worked out in Eliot's discussion of Bradley can help us understand this juncture in 'Little Gidding'. Clearly, the midwinter vision reflects Eliot's earlier definition of soul: midwinter spring goes beyond opposed perspectives and bridges their difference. In the terms of Knowledge and Experience, the midwinter moment is a 'fresh transposition of objectivity', a moment in which partiality is transgressed and 'everything means one thing and the same'.58 But 'Little Gidding' is not content with simply stating that. The power of the midwinter spring passage does not consist only in its beauty and poetic richness, but in the fact that these are part of the 'purchase' on reality achieved by the poem. In looking to zero summer, the poem looks beyond midwinter spring, to the space at which the 'quivering' energy of that moment is directed. In the terms of Tradition and the Individual Talent, the poem is addressing the question of how it can reveal itself to be a 'particular medium'. The reminiscence of Bradley (conscious or not) in the absolute zero summer is important because it suggests what is at stake. Bradley had shown Eliot what it means for the space of convergence to remain unrealized — for it to remain an anti-space. The Bradleian risk in 'Little Gidding' would be for the moment of midwinter spring to collapse back in on itself, for it to be only a matter of poetic effect, rather than a means of grasping something real towards which the poem leads us. In Bradley the possibility of 'ultimate interpretation' is put forward but always withdrawn, since the Absolute cannot develop: despite Bradley's assertions, it remains tied to the limited but persistent viewpoint of finite centres. The final draft of 'Little Gidding' seemingly goes beyond making the space of transcendence subordinate to finite perspective, acknowledging that it is 'unimaginable', 'inapprehensible', and 'beyond sense'. However, that does not detract from the urgency of Eliot's question: if it is inapprehensible, what does poetry do with it?
Having seemingly narrowed its perspective at 'zero summer', the poem then reopens it by reflecting on the convergence of the particular and the universal:
If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness. (ll. 20—24)
The convergence of perspective is at first held in the subjunctive ('If you came', 'If you came', 'It would be the same', ll. 26—28) and so beyond realization, but in a sudden turn 'if' becomes 'when': 'when you leave the rough road | And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade | And the tombstone' (ll. 28—30). This redirecting of the gaze brings a shift not only towards certainty, but also towards the language of signification — 'façade' then: 'And what you thought you came for | Is only a shell, a husk of meaning' (ll. 29—30). The emphasis on signs and outside surfaces is balanced with 'meaning' and 'purpose' (l. 34), which is 'beyond the end you figured | And is altered in fulfilment' (ll. 34—35). This is a filling up of space, and as such brings to mind both the moment of epiphany in 'Burnt Norton' and the Tenth Elegy's expansion of vision across the boundary of the 'Leid-Stadt' or into 'das vollere Sternbild'. But 'meaning' is not just plenitude, it is excess; it overflows the surface, the shell or husk, and produces a transformation into an entirely new order of things — an entirely new perspective.
Midwinter spring at Little Gidding now has a strengthened eschatological dimension and can be understood clearly as the moment when a particular place and a particular time exceed themselves and become eternity:
There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some it the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city —
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England. (ll. 35—39)
The emphasis on ending may remind us of the Tenth Elegy again. If so, it is because now we begin to see that 'Little Gidding' is not only a post-Bradleian poem, but also, therefore, a post-Nietzschean one. This is connected to the importance 'Little Gidding' attaches to surfaces and their role in meaning (their rolé as signifiers). Like the Tenth Elegy in its attempt to move beyond the 'Leid-Stadt', 'Little Gidding' is concerned to find something real behind the surfaces. To remain at the level of partial perspective (or 'particular emotion') would be to remain at the level of outside surface and infinite deferral: everything would be just a shell or husk. Accordingly, the façade at Little Gidding, in front of which all individual purposes are 'realized' and individual viewpoints are altered, has to be thought of as the signifier of the highest possible consummation the poem can imagine: the signifier of reality itself. This then is how zero summer is evoked and apprehended: not in the poetry at all, but through envisaging a space which is a vanishing point for everything we know, and in which the ultimate thing that we can conceive of happens — a space in which the world ends. If the poem persuades us to that thought, then Little Gidding in midwinter can be understood as a means of seeing into that space — as the 'nearest' point at which we can achieve a total perspective on the universe, at which 'the end you figured' becomes 'the world's end'.
The final section of Part I (ll. 39—53) makes apparent why the turn off the road at Little Gidding confronts us not only with a dull façade but also with a tombstone (a written sign): the poem extends its emphasis on signs to an emphasis on words, and its emphasis on ending to an emphasis on death. Where those two meet another term is found, 'prayer':
You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. (ll. 43—46)
The 'significant' space is a space of absence becoming present: a space in which the weight of words is felt through silence. Prayer exceeds the context in which it was uttered and becomes a silent echo in the place that gave rise to it. It is therefore another example of excess or going beyond — the transformation of the particular elements (words, voice, and an individual's thoughts) that make it up, in the moment they come together (ll. 46—48). 'That one word valid [. . .] contains notions of health and of faring well, and ties them to the idea of being true and right'.59 Valediction is turning away: 'Abschied' or 'Abkehr', as the Tenth Elegy puts it. Prayer in 'Little Gidding' has the same function: it is the moment when words achieve universality through turning away from particular association towards an ultimate reference, which underlies all their individual meanings. The poem is quite clear about what that reference is:
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
(ll. 49-51)
Death is reflected back to the living, through prayer. As in the Tenth Elegy, death is a 'transcendental condition' of language. The 'kneeling' perspective in 'Little Gidding' therefore positions itself at the edge of language, like the embrace pointing in two directions at the culmination of the Tenth Elegy. What we said about Rilke's poem — that it directs our gaze to a space between death and language — could, subject to an important modification, be said of Eliot's too. That modification is a result of the different relationship between text and meaning in Rilke and Eliot. The Tenth Elegy directs us, often by the overt textuality of italics and strings of dots (for example 'bedeutet . . .', l. 95), either to text forced to its limit, or to the spaces on the page unmarked by text. And indeed the whole movement of the poem is to the edge of the 'Talschlucht', where the 'Jüngling' recedes from view and the only language left, before the poem ends altogether, is speculation in the subjunctive (Aber erweckten sie uns', 'zeigten vielleicht'). The Tenth Elegy cannot state the presence of a 'Gleichnis' provided by death, because that 'Gleichnis' is the possibility of language, and of Rilke's poem, in the first place. 'Little Gidding', though, states that correspondence explicitly:
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always. (ll. 52—53)
Words in prayer move from 'speech', which is the language of the living, to 'communication', or from activity to reciprocity: communication requires that something outside the speaker be acknowledged, unlike speech, which may take the form of the Tenth Elegy's 'Ubertönung'. Communication is 'intersection', where the perspective of the living fixes on its vanishing point: the 'timeless moment' of death, which is within but always beyond vision and language, experienced and yet unexperiencable.60 For Rilke text enacts perspective, so that to read the Tenth Elegy is to enter into full visual relation with the figures and settings it presents, and therefore eventually to be brought to the edge of the valley and see nothing as the poem ends. In Eliot the converse is the case. He uses poetic writing to reflect on perspective, rather than making it into a perspective in its own right: kneeling and prayer may take place at the edge of language, but Eliot's description of them shows no signs of doing so. Yet the space his text presents, the interior of the chapel at Little Gidding, can therefore be claimed by poetry as the space of intersection, or 'Gleichnis', in a way that the Land of Lament cannot: because Little Gidding is itself beyond text. That is presumably what Eliot had in mind when he stressed the music of words:
The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts.61
Such music is not an intersection, but at an intersection: the intersection exists independently of the poetry. Words stretch 'indefinitely' beyond themselves, in two directions simultaneously, so that as their 'particular' meaning gets more and more attenuated, their 'context' expands, until it includes all 'other' contexts. The only terms wide enough to stand at the beginning and end of that progression (to stand outside words, at the point where extremes meet), and relate singularity and difference in the way Eliot suggests, are the terms with which 'Little Gidding' has been operating: life and death. The quality or resonance of poetic music, therefore, rests on the degree to which words provide awareness of the intersection between life and death. This is how Eliot modifies Rilke's definition of the poetic task: assuming the unity of life and death. Words evoke a secluded chapel, but for Eliot that chapel has already achieved an objective significance, prior to its evocation in words, as the place where words become possible.
Eliot's conception of words stretching forward and back in a chain of meanings and contexts may remind us of Hopkins's definition of words in the 'All words' notes. For Hopkins too, words are constantly exceeded by what they communicate, and spokenness ('vocal expression') is always moving out into the 'whole field of the middle term' but never filling it. Despite this apparent similarity, though, Eliot sees Hopkins's relation to words as problematic: 'his innovations [. . .] sometimes come near to being purely verbal, in that a whole poem will give us more of the samé thing, an accumulation, rather than a real development of thought or feeling'.62 Eliot finds words in Hopkins, but no music: Hopkins's poetic practice remains too close to plainsong, which lacks a non-verbal dimension,63 and for this reason 'Hopkins is not a religious poet in the more important sense'.64 However much Hopkins's poetry is about transcendence, Eliot says, it cannot escape words, whether written or spoken. 'For Hopkins "inscape" is a feature of poetry [. . .] the embodiment of an experience in language',65 the same goes for Rilke. The 'risk' of embodying experience in language is seen in the Tenth Elegy as the possibility of what Eliot calls 'accumulation', of words and images building up with no demonstrable referent. Accordingly Rilke makes that referent the end of the poem, and we are left to consider that the elegy supplies grounds for thinking its language has transcended itself by looking to death, and that it does not, finally, make itself complicit with the Nietzschean problems of referentiality it identifies. Rilke, like Hopkins, makes his reader aware of the need for something behind the words, and often by similar means. In Hopkins's late poetry, our attention is constantly drawn to the way text breaks up and tails off, to the spaces between text, and to words pushed to the point of transformation: these presumably all belong to what Eliot calls Hopkins's 'innovations'. Rilke uses italics ('und sagte leise: Wer?', 'gleich dahinter, ists wirklich') to signal writing's limits; Hopkins often uses repetition, as we saw in 'Carrion Comfort' and 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection'. The transformation of crude substance into 'immortal diamond' takes Hopkins almost by surprise, and is rearticulated as a tautology because the poem knows it has come to the limit of what it can say.66 The phrase itself is surrounded on all sides by blank unmarked space (which the Tenth Elegy calls 'unbeschreiblich'), as the gaps between and after text turn from blind spots or areas of disjunction into flashes of light reflecting into and beyond words, infinitely. The function of the diamond and the function of the poem are then the same. Adopting Geoffrey Hill's verdict on Hopkins for our own purposes, we could say that for Hopkins, 'principle is inseparable from nuance'.67 But there is only one way the poem can do justice to its final realization, of the transition of the subjective persona, whose words make up the poem, into continuity with God. It must direct our gaze beyond his words, following the light they reflect, into the spaces they cannot describe: as Rilke directs us beyond the edge of the 'Talschlucht'. Likewise in 'Carrion Comfort', the sudden, exclamatory, and revelatory awareness of what Hopkins has been wrestling with — 'my God!' — is a moment of truth, or a turn on the poem's axis, when the persona becomes conscious of something indescribable rising up at the edge of expression, and can do nothing more than echo the realization with measured finality: 'my God'. It is the moment when plainsong stops, and voice hovers on air between articulation and silence. Similarly, the Tenth Elegy leads the gaze upwards to the point where nothing more can be seen. Rilke goes further than Hopkins, though, and so hints at the converse of this poetic strategy: having reached 'Gleichnis', he begins a diminuendo leading back down to text, and tries to encapsulate the insight he has reached in a self-consciously verbal conceit ('steinendes'/' fällt) which is inevitably inadequate to it.
Eliot's objections to Hopkins are in fact objections to that prospect indicated by Rilke. Eliot is responding to the possibility that the space poetry puts after writing could just be empty; despite itself poetry might not be 'transparent', in the phrase of Tradition and the Individual Talent. But are the attitudes of Hopkins and Rilke on the one hand, and Eliot on the other, really in opposition? The Times Literary Supplement noted the difference between the approaches but also pointed to underlying continuity when, reviewing the first edition of Hopkins's Poems in the same year that Eliot formulated his idea of the 'particular medium', it compared Hopkins favourably with 'our young poets' (including certainly Eliot himself): Hopkins is 'one who sees another world, not through, but in this one'.68 Both approaches are attempts to work out a relationship between poetry, vision, and transcendence. Moreover, in so far as both are concerned with seeing 'another world ', they could be understood in the light of a powerful assertion by Nietzsche:
Drücken wir das Abbild der Ewigkeit auf unser Leben! Dieser Gedanke enthält mehr als alle Religionen, welche dies Leben als flüchtiges verachten und nach einem unbestimmten anderen Leben hinblicken lehrten. (KSA, IX, 11[ 159 ])
[Let us impress upon our life the image of eternity! This thought contains more than all the religions which despise this life as something passing, and taught us to look for an indeterminate other life.]
This passage, from the unpublished notes on eternal recurrence of 1881, clearly points forward to the sections of the Zur Genealogie der Moral where Nietzsche attacks the 'invention' by religion of a transcendent gaze which, by creating interpretation and 'meaning', destroys 'the human' ('das Menschliche'). Both passages bear comparison with Rilke's discussion of vision and the gods discussed above. In the quotation of 1881, vision is emphatically directed away from otherness: we sense eternity not by looking beyond ourselves, but by glorifying ourselves in 'this' life, in the here and now. This rearticulates the Nietzschean aversion to death that the Tenth Elegy shows to be a problem. In their views on poetic language Hopkins, Rilke, and Eliot all regard as problematic the means by which Nietzsche says eternity's impress is to be felt. Hopkins's 'winter world', Rilke's Duino meditations, and Eliot's reflections at Burnt Norton or Little Gidding all address what it means to direct the gaze towards, or away from, what Nietzsche calls 'einem anderen Leben'. They all demonstrate why Nietzsche is at the heart of the 'dear purchase', and how this is connected to turning: Nietzsche is ambivalent because he tries to have it both ways. He wants to feel eternity without looking beyond, without encountering anything other. Hopkins, Rilke, and Eliot see a problem of objectivity here: how can we know that we are eternal if we only have ourselves to go on? 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire' and the Tenth Elegy run language up against what is not language, and articulate the possibility that there is a non-textual space outside the visual field of the poem which is continuous with, but always exceeds, writing. With 'In a flash' and 'ein Gleichnis', Hopkins and Rilke want to light the whole poem in a new perspective, by taking words to their limit, making them achieve meaning. In that sense they attempt a reversal of Nietzsche's viewpoint: they do 'nach einem anderen Leben hinblicken' (Hopkins looks to 'the comfort of the resurrection', Rilke to death as the means by which life is imbued with significance). But Nietzsche's description of that 'other' as necessarily 'unbestimmt' does not lose its force: whatever exceeds the poem cannot be determined within the poem. We cannot write, or see, what comes after writing, though we can trust that it 'flashes off' the text and makes it readable. So Hopkins and Rilke present us with a choice. We can accept as redemptive the insight to which 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire', 'Carrion Comfort', and the Tenth Elegy struggle, in which case words reflect an extra-textual space ('my God' for Hopkins, death for Rilke) but only in so far as they are always ending. Or we can accept, as Paul de Man does in reading the Tenth Elegy, Nietzschean 'Erlösung', which points in the other direction and fixes its perspective on the isolated, non-referential and non-ending materiality of illegible text — the 'material' ('Stoff') that Zur Genealogie der Moral places in opposition to 'meaning' ('Sinn') and 'interpretation' ('Auslegung'). But Hopkins and Rilke are clear about the consequences of that. To write, or read, without reference to ending, where ending is understood as the ultimate thing the writer or reader can honestly think of (God or death), is to adopt a wilfully arbitrary perspective, and if we read in those terms we will have to answer the accusation that such a viewpoint has no means of justifying itself: that it can never consciously bear the imprint of eternity, and so can find no 'Erlösung'.
Hopkins's climactic and urgent 'Flesh fade, and mortal trash | Fall to the residuary worm; ' world's wildfire, leave but ash' ('That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire', ll. 19—20) becomes Eliot's rhythmic patter:
Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended. (ll. 54—57)
Like Hopkins and Rilke, Eliot makes ending the focal point of writing: ending is now connected to fire, dust, and substance. But for Eliot these ideas are separate from the poetic means of evoking them: they are 'other', and poetry looks to them by recognizing them as its ultimate theme, granting them an objective significance. However, we can see that as a development, rather than a reversal, of Hopkins: like Hopkins and Rilke but with a different emphasis, Eliot justifies poetry through reference to what exceeds poetry. His conscious attempt to diverge from Hopkins is really an attempt to answer the Nietzschean charge whose implications are also essential in assessing Hopkins: if Nietzsche objects that the space beyond writing is always 'unbestimmt', Eliot counters that the space beyond writing is Little Gidding, which is not a vague or empty space, but a highly determinate one. Hopkins, Rilke, and Eliot are all religious poets 'in the more important sense', in so far as all are dissatisfied with Nietzsche's injunction not to look beyond.
There is an increasingly insistent and specific historical dimension to 'Little Gidding', and it reaches an initial climax early in Part II. Burnt substance is made a sign of ending, and the elements commingle with death in their association with the devastation wrought by bomb attacks:69
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth. (ll. 64—69)
Behind the charred wall (l. 59), beneath the parched soil and in the derelict town (l. 71), then, something real and important is passing away. 'Little Gidding' brings an entire background of ideas on poetic writing and substance to bear on a specific turning point in the middle of the twentieth century. In that respect it is most similar, among all the poems we have looked at, to 'The Wreck of the Deutschland': both address seismic ruptures in the history of Europe. The verse now ebbs and flows with the rhythms of historical and metaphysical association:
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire. (ll. 74—77)
In its destruction the urban landscape has become one of the 'other places | Which also are the world's end [. . .] in a [. . .] city'. The 'world's end' takes on a new complexion in the context of the London Blitz. Moreover, as at Little Gidding, ending might be beginning. Eliot glossed in a draft:
Fire without and fire within
Shall purge the unidentified sin.
This is the place where we begin.70
What is envisaged here is a 'Gleichnis', an equivalence between inside and outside. But Eliot's motifs take us further back than Rilke: to the destruction of earth by fire in the opening lines of 'Mnemosyne'. Eliot's lines, like Hölderlins, want to make of the hermeneutics of substance a hermeneutics of history: we do not stop at the scorched exterior of a devastated building, rather that corresponds to (or signifies) a transformation behind the surface, and in the relation of the two there is a meaning, the possibility of new beginning. Eliot's ruined cityscape may remind us of the 'Leid-Stadt'. It too is a world of surface — of bombed-out husks of buildings. But it develops Rilke's scenario: in Eliot the strong sense of historical juncture means that what has hollowed itself out behind the burnt frontages is an era, a way of life, a culture. Like Rilke, Eliot looks beyond the surfaces, but in the streets of his city (wartime London) there echo the footsteps of his predecessors (Hölderlin, Mörike, Hopkins, Nietzsche, Bradley, Rilke himself) as figures whose contributions, since they are connected, at a lesser or greater remove, to the transition Eliot is talking about, can be put into the balance and assessed in relation to ending and the possibility of regeneration.
The centre of 'Little Gidding' is a meeting with death: the so-called 'Dantesque passage* where Eliot attempts 'the nearest equivalent to a canto of the Inferno or the Purgatorio, in style as well as content'.71 This passage has provoked more discussion than probably any other by Eliot.72 However, obvious parallels with the Tenth Elegy (parallels anticipated in the relationship between 'Burnt Norton' and 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes') have gone unnoticed: two figures moving through a landscape of betweenness, 'In the uncertain hour before the morning' (l. 78), one of whom finally fades from view (l. 149). The verse produces a counterpoint between ending and continuity (underpinned by Eliot's adaptation of Dante's metric via alternation of masculine and feminine endings), so that night is 'interminable' but has an 'ending' (l. 79), the end is 'recurrent' (l. 80), '"ending" is not an ending but is within the second line',73 and 'unending' is not unending but stands at the end of the third.74 But this conscious manipulation of words immediately gives way to a reminder of the historical context, of what has occasioned the poem and is going on outside it:
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing. (ll. 81—82)
In this 'dark dove' are conflated fire-bombing and the Holy Spirit.75 It therefore has a 'pentecostal' reference. The question now faced is: can Little Gidding allow us to make sense of what we now see in London, or, what is the relationship between 'pentecostal fire' and burning cities?76 If turning towards the tombstone and the dull façade at Little Gidding does not also open a perspective on the contemporary events the poem engages with, then the poem is mistaken in taking Little Gidding as its point of orientation or reference for poetic writing, which would mean the poem cannot claim to be at an intersection at all. This is what makes 'Little Gidding', like the Tenth Elegy, a poem about redemption: it not only asks whether the cataclysm represented by the bombing raids can be redeemed, but makes that question identical with a question about the redemption of poetry into meaning. The implications of asking those two questions at once could hardly be more farreaching. 'Little Gidding' finds a correlative to the Zarathustrian deconstruction of reference in the destruction visited upon Europe, made emblematic in the crumbling façades left by the physical deconstruction of buildings. Moreover, 'Little Gidding' comes after deconstruction in both senses, and attempts to answer it. As in 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', the violence of historical events is linked to a rupture in intellectual consciousness. And as in Hopkins's later poems, such violence threatens to frustrate poetic activity. The historical situation recognized so clearly by 'Little Gidding' has the potential to subvert the basic poetic assumption by which Eliot is able to talk about it — that there is something outside the text. To fail to respond to the destruction the poem sees would itself be a failure of reference, a mere perpetuation, or indeed fetishization, of that destruction. It would mean the poem had become complicit with the forces it identifies as needing urgent redress.
That is what is at stake in Eliot's famous encounter with the 'familiar compound ghost' (1. 95). The initial meeting has all the nuance of shifting perspective, turning, and facial movement we recognize from 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes', 'Burnt Norton', and the Tenth Elegy:
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master. (ll. 89—92)
Visual recognition becomes verbal and also, in that moment, Self-consciously textual: 'So I assumed a double part, and cried | And heard another's voice cry: "What! are you here?"' (ll. 97—98). As the speaker hears the echo of his voice, the poem feels its writtenness. 'Eliot seized on the page's retention of voice, its ability to educate us in the variousness of speaking'.77 The drafts show how various speaking is: Eliot progressed from direct translation of Dante's call to Brunetto Latini in Hell ('"Are you here, Ser Brunetto?"') to submerging the name behind italics.78 Much more than a specific, identifiable figure is meant (the ghost is 'Both intimate and unidentifiable', l. 96), and in the course of the passage we turn behind that emphatic 'you' to discover a new intersection of life and death. We tack between identity and otherness, and the move between the two is cadence, the dactylic fall and iambic rise of the verse:
I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other —
And he a face still forming. (ll. 99—101)
Both ghost and speaker are 'compound'.79 Encountering the face of this spectre, the speaker is divided, made aware of an otherness which exceeds his living self, but which he recognizes as part of him. Eliot's 'dead patrol' (l. 179) along the Cromwell Road has something of Orpheus' progress through Hades: 'seine Sinne waren wie entzweit'. But the significance of that otherness only comes out in what the ghost has to say. Brunetto Latini 'first taught Dante "how man makes himself eternal"; yet he is damned for having perverted that impulse into a love of earthly fame'.80 We can see, then, that this meeting fits in with the themes identified as part of the poem's post-Nietzschean status: life, death, and the impress of eternity are all at issue. The ghost expresses caesura:
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice. (ll. 118—19)
And continuity:
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore. (ll. 120—25)
Life and death are one for the ghost. But in life it was scarcely aware of death, in any Sense: Brunetto Latini's focus on worldly success is conflated with the attitude of those turning their backs on the increasingly derelict spectacle of England, denying what is happening around them (outside of them) by removing to a distant shore where they need not face it. Both attitudes are presented as complacent and decadent: one indulges itself in worldliness, the other refuses to recognize that it belongs to anything other than its own whims. Both, in other words, reproduce perfectly the logic of Nietzsche's imperative not to look to anything other than ourselves: Eliot walks with Zarathustra.81 The ghost automatically echoes Bradley too (who certainly qualifies as 'some dead master'): the perspective the ghost describes is that of the finite centre, which sees the world as coterminous with itself. Moreover, it is impossible for such a perspective to have a sense of historical situation, since it acknowledges nothing that could situate it — nothing that is not already subjugated to its own viewpoint. Here again we recognize alienated subjectivity as Rilke sees it: the attitude the ghost expresses, in the person of Brunetto Latini or of those who would isolate themselves at a time of crisis, parallels the turn away from the gods and away from death. Whatever exceeds the personal gaze (Knowledge and Experience would say whatever is objective) is suppressed. This attitude is an ultimate example of recalcitrant particularity. The ghost represents a Zarathustrian purchase, and now reveals the price paid for turning away from death, the gods, and the fact of living in history.
In his 'communion' with the ghost, the speaker is doing what the ghost never did when living (in all its compound personages): engaging with death. The ghost recognizes this as necessary only now, in retrospect, and communicates it with specific reference to the creative achievement of poetry. The passage is therefore about Eliot's own poetic enterprise, what the ghost calls 'your lifetime's effort' (l. 130). Indirectly, it recapitulates the central ideas of Tradition and the Individual Talent. The ghost looks back on a poetic career dedicated not to poetry as a 'particular medium', through which other things can be seen, but to itself, for its own sake. For the Eliot of Tradition and the Individual Talent that was a sort of anti-poetry; by the time of the Dantesque passage it has a strong moral undertow. The ghost describes the emptiness felt at the end of a life lived in the absence of death, when dying is felt as no more than the slow onset of physical decrepitude:
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder. (ll. 131—34)
But there is a counterpoint and a shift of view here, which give to the ghost's bleak evocation of ending the suggestion of new beginning. These lines are narrated at a remove, presenting us with the ghost's perspective before it became a ghost — before it died. They recall a former state, but are articulable only from a viewpoint that has surpassed that old perspective, that is, from a viewpoint made possible by death. The ghost speaks from a perspective it spent its life denying, though at the very end some realization dawned:
the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue. (ll. 140—43)
Now, at the end of the passage, the question of redemption becomes explicit. For if the ghost has been granted a voice to speak 'words I never thought to speak', then it has been granted them by something it never recognized, which is outside living beings but constitutes them through relations with other things, and is felt at death. Put another way, the presence achieved by the ghost is a manifestation of something outside the economy of purchase: a manifestation of something freely given. And that might yet redeem the dear purchase struck. Eliot saw the Dantesque section as beginning in Hell, but 'wished the effect of the whole to be Purgatorial',82 and it is in Purgatory that the passage ends. The ghost can now sum up the insights made possible in death: 'From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit | Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire' (ll. 144—45). The relationship of ghost and speaker, death and life, gives fire a double sense. If the speaker heeds the ghost's words, which is to say if Eliot, at the end of 'Little Gidding', formulates an attitude to life that is the opposite of that recalled by the ghost, and does so by fixing on death and Purgatorial fire, which the ghost, when living, denied, then not only will the ghost's former ways provide a redemptive impulse for the poem, but fire will move from being Purgatorial to being Pentecostal. This is the prospect open to the poem as the ghost turns away: 'He left me, with a kind of valediction, | And faded on the blowing of the horn' (ll. 148—49). A return to Little Gidding has already been suggested by fire's Pentecostal possibility; it is made clearer by 'valediction', expanding on the 'validity' of prayer. The ghost's words have faded into silence; the poem might make them valid.
At the end of the Dantesque passage, Eliot looks out. We are transported back to Little Gidding by the only splash of colour in six lines of pallid abstraction:
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them,
indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives — unflowering. (ll. 150–55)
Urban and rural landscapes, London and Little Gidding, coalesce when Eliot sees that 'hedgerow' from the 'disfigured street' (l. 147) in which the ghost leaves him. The fifteen lines beginning this section have been seen as 'a prosy and somewhat contrived commentary on what the poem is about'.83 The accusation of 'prosiness' is astute: it suggests that the poem turns on its axis and begins to unravel into something unpoetic. But it does not explain why we get this reflex at this point. That is only possible through reference to the Tenth Elegy, whose final lines do the same thing. Eliot's 'death resembles life' could be seen as an exact commentary on Rilke's 'Gleichnis', which the Tenth Elegy also tries to explicate in its awkward final conceit. This is the point where 'Little Gidding' most keenly feels the possibility of becoming just 'verbal'. Coming immediately after the departure of the ghost and the most sustained, disciplined passage of verse Eliot ever wrote, it is confronted with the questions 'what does redemption look like?' and 'how is it to be communicated?' We feel the strain of those questions in the 'didactic'84 assertiveness of the lines, labouring to explicate a meaning. The passage returns to the idea of expansion beyond (l. 157), specifically beyond the self: 'love of a country | Begins as attachment to our own field of action | And comes to find that action of little importance' (ll. 159—60). In 'field of action' the landscape of Little Gidding and the military shadow over wartime London come together, but this is not jingoism, '"love of a country" being crucially different from "love of country"'.85 This account of self-transcendence is still a self-commentary, though, elaborating in free, expository sentences (that seem a felt reaction to the rigour of terza rima) a perspective that could be deduced from reading the Dantesque passage itself. In the course of doing this, though, it finds a new word: 'history' (l. 162). Though there has been a strong historical element in 'Little Gidding' up to now, only here is it fully recognized as such. The recognition of 'history' opposes itself to the recognition only of time, of flux, of the realm in which Brunetto Latini sought worldly fame, and in which self-isolation 'on a distant shore' seems as meaningful as love. But conversely, living in history, and love of a country, are emphatically not about security or personal well-being: 'History may be servitude, | History may be freedom' (ll. 162—63). Rather, to understand oneself as living in history is to gain a certain perspective. That perspective is an expansion, beyond Rilke, of the view the Tenth Elegy invites us to adopt when the young man disappears and our gaze is directed to the limits of the visible:
See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. (ll. 163—65)
What Eliot sees as recognizing history equates in Rilke to understanding death as constantly present in life and language, and constantly taking them beyond themselves in ways that cannot be stated from the perspective, and in the language, of the living: that is, in time.
Like the Tenth Elegy at its close, 'Little Gidding' addresses the Nietzschean question of 'Gleichnis', which Eliot calls 'symbol' and like Rilke associates with death. The drafts effectively read as a commentary on the end of the Tenth Elegy: 'The symbol created by death, | The life only death transmits, | The perfection of the motive | Which the moment of death brings to life'.86 Death animates life. Eliot and Rilke both have a poetic hermeneutic of death: death creates symbols and is part of the transmission of meanings. But in Rilke the focus remains on the highly individualistic moment of one's 'own' death, however much the silence of death is understood as an objective condition of language. For Eliot by contrast, the hermeneutic of death involves historicity, since awareness of being historically situated is an awareness of things that happen outside us but are part of us and define us. The emphasis on historical situation turns into an emphasis on receiving:
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us — a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death. (ll. 192—95)
We inherit and we take: that is, we are given something. The idea of gift becomes increasingly important in the final sections. Its implications are extensive because it both underlies and contradicts purchase: what is given is 'not dearly purchased',87 or indeed purchased at all. The words of a theologian concerned with writing and its limits will be useful for understanding the end of 'Little Gidding':
one can speak of a 'return' indissociable troni the act of giving, simultaneous with it, a condition of its possibility, and yet not reducible to an economic market exchange — not reducible because the return is not simply something one is hoping to receive later, but is something one is already receiving in giving.88
Such a gift is opposed to deferral, the constant looking ahead to something that never happens. Deferral has its own morbid logic:
the subject actively intends a meaning, but is acted upon by the signs which always prevent that meaning's realized arrival. Therefore, the subject does not receive this retrospective action as a living gift but instead receives merely its own death, and the end of its capacity to receive at all.89
That is what happens in the Nietzschean 'Gleichnis', and what the Tenth Elegy attempts to counteract: Zarathustra is 'acted upon' by the infinite regress of signs he creates, and we see him constantly failing to realize a meaning. He is radically open to the possibility of meanings, but closed to the possibility of meaning, open to reading everything figuratively but closed to ever establishing a functional metaphor. The eternal recurrence cannot be signified by a linked set of 'symbols', even though Zarathustra constantly needs to gesture towards that possibility: the emblems he uses to communicate his doctrine send the gaze round in a circle, always adverting to each other rather than to anything outside them to which they might all refer. They indulge their monopoly on vision, and consequently have a grotesque, cloying, fetishized character (as such they are far from 'transparent' in Eliot's sensé). Moreover, if we sée the dearness of a purchase as proportional to the extent of its distance from gift, then accepting the eternal recurrence is the dearest purchase possible. For not least, we must give up attaching importance to the two terms that, for Rilke and Eliot, form the compass of our whole self-awareness: life and death. Although he refers to constant birth and dying, for Zarathustra these activities have no primal or ultimate significance beyond their infinite and identical individual instances, but are completely subject to the rule of time — they are simply palpitations within the endlessly extended temporality that eternal recurrence buys us.90 Zarathustrian subjectivity does therefore receive 'merely its own death', in so far as its infinitely repeated life is only a process of self-dereliction begun over and over again: the cold friction of expiring sense,
'Little Gidding' addresses recurrence: 'We cannot revive old factions | We cannot restore old policies | Or follow an antique drum' (ll. 185—87). Turning back time is continued enslavement to the rule of time: it does not create a beginning, but a repetition masquerading as a remedy. It cannot progress beyond the endpoint that the poem articulates, because it simply tries to resurrect what has been hollowed out to make that ending. Such an attitude therefore makes ending into something stultifying, unsurpassable, and continually recurring: 'old policies' constantly 'receiving' their own demise amid burning buildings. Productive continuity is not to be found in the cacophony (Rilke would say 'Übertönung') produced by old factions, but in the common denominator of all language. Openness to silence is openness to gift. It means that experience is seen not in terms of the particular, but of the universal, or rather, of what is particular and universal. Death becomes, not an endlessly repeatable flicker of discrete entities in time, but a boundary at the edge of time, through which all things pass and are transformed, not simply reborn into temporal existence. That is the symbol the defeated give us: their attachment to a field of action is expanded through death to a universal condition. As such, awareness of death is the precondition of awareness of history, but awareness of history allows death to be transgressed. Awareness of death is the ever-present possibility of gift, in so far as it sees time as able at any moment to be surpassed (we can at any moment pass through time's limit), and subjectivity as able at any moment to be given access to something in excess of itself: we can find ourselves looking into the pool at Burnt Norton, or contemplating midwinter spring at Little Gidding. Opening oneself to life in history, and not just in time, is not only accepting those moments as transformations, when life configures itself 'in a new pattern', but accepting that other such moments are constantly possible. That is the ethical and 'political' core of the injunction not to revive old factions: to do so would be closure to possibility, to the thought that something comes after the flames, and is detectable now amid them. History may be servitude, but history can be freedom.
Nietzsche himself saw metaphysical discoursing on time and history as ultimately an ethical affair. Eliot shares that view, but turns Nietzsche's terms around, replacing movement in time with movement out of time, and eternal dying with dying into eternity. 'Little Gidding' now runs the two attitudes together by manipulating an earlier image:
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. (ll. 200—06)
This is gift versus purchase: the 'choice' between the two.91 But now the poem has argued for its own choice, and shown what is involved in rejecting it. The 'dove descending' is still 'the dark dove with the flickering tongue', but its other association has now been strengthened: the dove of the Spirit, 'discharging' itself in history. If that outpouring is quintessentially gift, then 'Little Gidding' shows the relation between poetry and Spirit at work, in the ghost who despite himself is given a voice from Purgatory and steers the poem towards its understanding of history. The ghost when living made his choices and his purchase. But the process that reveals them to be inadequate and expensive, and communicates that to us, is the process by which we are confronted with the possibility of the world's redemption, from the fire dispensed with a flickering tongue, by the fire of Spirit. Eliot's ethics, unlike Nietzsche's, locates something beyond death (locates the thing allowing the ghost to speak), and names it:
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
Lhe intolerable shirt of flame. (ll. 206—10)
Eliot goes further than Rilke here too. The hermeneutics of death expands into a hermeneutics of love: love, not death, is the ultimate referent (though death is essential in recognizing that), since love is the presence of an outside to individual experience, the condition of possibility itself, identified by the poem as the act of gift. And if love is seen in those terms it is the condition of both 'torment' and its overcoming. Expanding to love completes the poem's initial gesture of metonymy, since love is the Name behind all names, the intersection of pole and tropic, and the reason names like Burnt Norton and Little Gidding are 'significant'. In doing so the poem also completes Eliot's critique of the Nietzschean/Bradleian fetish of the particular: 'Little Gidding' shows not only that the viewpoint of Zarathustra and the viewpoint of the isolated finite centre suppress death and are closed to gift, but that this brings an adherence to negativity by enshrining death as a continually felt ending that cannot be beginning.
But the poem still feels the need to point this out, repetitiously and with 'prosy' self-commentary that now seems conscious:92 'Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning' (l. 224). The flaccid seven-line parenthesis about words ('where every word is at home, | Taking its place to support the others [. . .]', ll. 217—18) is Eliot's 'steigendes/fällt': perhaps it obtrudes even more than Rilke's emphasis. This is 'accumulation'. But then the poem regains the courage of its convictions and presents these insights much more compactly and dynamically, and instead of talking about poetic words allows poetic words to talk, surveying all that has gone before:
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England. (ll. 238—37)
The last section is a definite turn, as the writing feels the constitution of silence. First, there is the excess of writing at ll. 214—27, where writing simply draws attention to itself (and is therefore 'untransparent'), then, after 'History is now and England' we have, for the only time in the poem, a line on its own, suspended in blank space:
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling (l. 238)
We have moved from words emphasizing words to words emphasizing what is not words.93 In this line text, non-text, love, and voice commingle to suggest the gift of speech to the ghost that is the gift of writtenness to the poem that makes it heard. It reminds us directly of Hopkins with his spaces between words, and Rilke with his attenuation of words into punctuation then blankness. In insisting that history is felt at the point where the particular name ('a secluded chapel', 'Little Gidding') signifies — that is, symbolizes — the universal name, the poem as a whole has itself become a signifier, or a symbol, of love. The poem recognizes love as the condition of poetic writing, the condition and fulfilment of metaphor, as Hegel says in the Phänomenologie. 'Little Gidding' allows us to sense the presence of everything that is outside the text — the act of gift through which 'Little Gidding', as a poem that sees itself existing in history and the compass of Spirit, is able to take place. And at the end, following the recognition of love, this impinges on the writing in the same way as it does in Hopkins and Rilke, and in a way that is new for the Quartets. 'Little Gidding' feels the danger of excess writing, of becoming self-commentary, as the Tenth Elegy does, but having felt that danger Eliot, like Rilke and Hopkins, finally projects his poem beyond its endpoint, into the spaces after writing:
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. (ll. 252—59)
'Quick now, here, now, always' is from the close of 'Burnt Norton',94 which makes a cycle but also draws attention to the difference between the two endings. 'Burnt Norton' leaves us with 'the waste sad time | Stretching before and after' (ll. 174—75) the moment of realization; 'Little Gidding' replenishes that interim by pointing forward. Its ending is fully comparable to Menon's projection of himself beyond poetry, to the place where poems are true. Eliot in his last three lines looks beyond interpretation as Hölderlin does, to when symbolic analogues, defined by Über die Verfahrungsweise as a fundamental part of the dynamics of historical revelation, no longer need to be pointed out, because history, the outpouring of Spirit, has consummated itself. At that point the privileged moment (in the rose garden, at Little Gidding) is no longer a moment at all but a timeless condition, effortlessly identifiable as the fire of love which was the condition of all interpretation, and so of all reading and writing, in the first place.95 That is, these lines look beyond poetry, and moreover beyond this poem. Little Gidding, as a place, is Eliot's Patmos: a particular locality, subject to time, in which the redemption of time is felt as a projection, a 'thrown-ness', beyond time into history. If we see Eliot's common ground with Hölderlin here, we see too how he is much closer to Hopkins than After Strange Gods realizes (his poetry knows better than his prose), strengthening his affinity with Rilke. 'Little Gidding' at the close creates a silence that animates the poem. The poem places the final consummation of Spirit ahead of itself, because the poem too exists in time: Mörike's 'Wer aber weiß, ob nicht sein zarter Geist [. . .]' is as important an antecedent to 'Little Gidding' as it is to anything by Rilke. And if we have assented to the recognition of history that 'Little Gidding' states, then that is not merely deferral, as some have argued.96 Rather the poem has made itself part of that consummation by revealing its own status as gift, made possible by love. In this light, the words of 'Little Gidding' are as imbued with life and death as those of 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire' and the Tenth Elegy; Eliot's evocations of prayer and vision are, like Rilke's landscapes and Hopkins's inscapes, located both within and at the edge of language, always moving into a space poetry cannot show. 'Little Gidding' establishes the objectivity of that space (of 'intersection') by first presenting it at a remove from the poetry, but then reveals that the crossover is felt in, but always exceeds, poetic words themselves. Eliot may seem to reflect on an attitude to ending and vision and death, while Hopkins and Rilke enact them, but the insight to which Eliot's reflecting leads him — his understanding of Spirit and love and their relation to language in history — makes his poem too an enactment and a symbol, because it has ultimately to reflect on its own relationship with those things. The 'projective' ending, casting us beyond the text of the poem, makes principle inseparable from nuance for Eliot as well.
Projecting ourselves forward like this costs 'not less than everything'. Eliot uses the terms of purchase to suggest what is required to live up to gift. That effort has been the effort of the poem in comprehending itself as given in love, and thus in making the redemption of time, achievable through history, synonymous with the redemption of words. And it is simultaneously the effort needed to avoid the temptations of stasis and particularity, which Eliot at the time of 'Little Gidding' saw presenting themselves with beguiling force. Awareness of those temptations is what makes 'Little Gidding' a post-Nietzschean poem, and a culmination of the whole progression we have traced here. In common with the other poets we have discussed, Eliot sees time poised at the limit of time, and words poised at the limit of expression. In his understanding of Spirit and its relation to writing, he shares with them the conviction that the most necessary question for modern poetry is: what comes after the written word and makes it possible? That, they all demonstrate, is also the most difficult question, but like Hölderlin, like Mörike, like Hopkins, and like Rilke, Eliot thinks that by putting it we are already on the way to an answer, and moreover that though poetry cannot always say very much about it, poetry can at least show that answer to be worth the effort.
1. Dear Purchase, p. 28.
2. See Dear Purchase, ch. 5, passim.
3. See for example Stephen Spender, 'Rilke and Eliot', in Rilke: The Alchemy of Alienation, ed. by Frank Baron, Ernst S. Dick, and Warren R. Maurer (Lawrence, KS: Regents, 1980), pp. 47—62. Also Elsie Weigand, 'Rilke and Eliot: The Articulation of the Mystic Experience', Germanic Review, 30 (1955), 198—210; H. P. Rickman, 'Poetry and the Ephemeral: Rilke's and Eliot's Conceptions of the Poet's Task', German Life and Letters, 12 (1958—59), 174—85; R. W. Sheppard, 'Rilke's Duineser Elegien: A Critical Appreciation in the Light of Eliot's Four Quartets', German Life and Letters, 20 (1966—67), 205—18; Kathleen L. Komar, Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies' (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), passim.
4. See also Kaufmann, Shakespeare to Existentialism, p. 229: 'Rilke accepts Zarathustra's challenge to remain faithful to the earth'.
5. All references to Rilke's poetry follow Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe (KA), ed. by Manfred Engel and others, 4 vols (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Beck, 1996). We are told the Tenth Elegy 'cannot provide a culminating example of the poetics [of affirmation] Rilke envisages' (Komar, Transcending Angels, p. 196). The most extreme case is Jack Stein, 'The Duino Elegies', Germanic Review, 27 (1952), 272—79, who elides it altogether, calling it an 'afterthought' (p. 279). But see also Torsten Petterson, Internalization and Death: A Reinterpretation of Rilke's Duineser Elegien, Modern Language Review, 94 (1999), 731—43, for a useful attempt to question the traditional reading.
6. T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber, 1964).
7. For an overview of publications on Eliot and Bradley, and on Eliot's relation to other thinkers, see the introduction to Donald J. Childs, From Philosophy to Poetry: T. S. Eliot's Study of Knowledge and Experience (London: Athlone, 2001), pp. 1—48. Of particular note are Richard Wollheim, 'Eliot and F.H. Bradley', in On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 220—49; Manju Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 205—44; M. A. R. Habib, The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 125—60.
8. See Wolfgang Leppmann, Rilke: Sein Leben, seine Welt, sein Werk (Bern and Munich: Scherz, 1981), pp. 239-41.
9. Cf. Ray Ockenden, 'Rilkes Neue Gedichte: Perspektive und Finalität', in Rilke und die Moderne, ed. by Adrian Stevens and Fred Wagner (Munich: Iudicium, 2000), pp. 89—108 (p. 89). There are notable parallels with 'Patmos': 'Wenn ihnen plözlich | Ferneilend zuriik blikte | Der Gott' (ll. 130-32).
10. See Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets' (London: Faber, 1978), p. 38.
11. All references to Eliot's poetry are to T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969). The poem's spatial terms of reference develop the quotation from Heraclitus with which Eliot prefaces the Quartets: 'the way up and the way down are the same'.
12. Childs, Philosophy to Poetry, p. 117.
13. Materialien zu Rainer Maria Rilkes (Duineser Elegien' (Mat.), ed. by Ulrich Fülleborn and Manfred Engel, 3 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980—82), 1, 134.
14. For a discussion of the background to Rilke's views on death, see Marielle Jane Sutherland, 'Refiguring Death: The Poetics of Transience in the Work of Rainer Maria Rilke' (PhD dissertation: University College London, 2003), ch. 1, esp. pp. 9—12. This dissertation is the most recent in-depth treatment of death in Rilke.
15. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe, ed. by Horst Nalewski, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1991), 11, 374. Cf. Jacob Steiner, Rilkes Duineser Elegien, 2nd edn (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1969), p. 247.
16. Cf. the comparison of Nietzsche and Hofmannsthal in Robert Vilain, The Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 127—30.
17. The Monist, 26 (1916), 534—56, 566—76, reprinted in Knowledge and Experience (KE), pp. 177—97, pp. 198—207; subsequent references in the text to 'Leibniz' Monads and Bradley's Finite Centres' (LMB) use the latter edition. On these essays, cf. Nur Abdelwahab Elmessiri, 'On the Doorstep of the Absolute: Alterity and Individuation in the Work of T. S. Eliot' (unpublished PhD dissertation: Cambridge, 1990), pp. 39—41.
18. Cf. Wollheim, 'Eliot and F. H. Bradley', p. 229.
19. Sandford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 186.
20. Quoting Bradley, Truth and Reality, p. 414.
21. Bradley himself cannot really countenance this idea of soul, though as Eliot suggests Bradley's basic ambivalence consists in the fact that the Absolute requires it: 'the plurality of souls [. . .] is [. . .] appearance and their existence is not genuine' (AR, 305).
22. Roger Paulin, 'Elegy Ten', in Rilke's Duino Elegies: Cambridge Readings, ed. by Roger Paulin and Peter Hutchinson (London: Duckworth, 1996), pp. 171—91 (p. 177).
23. Petterson, 'Internalization and Death', p. 732. Having raised the question of'textuality', though, Petterson fails to pursue it in his reading of the Tenth Elegy.
24. Cf. Paulin, 'Elegy Ten', p. 177.
25. Cf. 'Patmos', ll. 31—33: 'und geblendet sucht' | Ich eines, das ich kennete, denn ungewohnt | War ich der breiten Gassen'.
26. Stern, Dear Purchase, p. 297.
27. Stern, Dear Purchase, p. 298.
28. Cf. Richard Sheppard, 'From the Neue Gedichte to the Duineser Elegien: Rilke's Chandos Crisis', Modern Language Review, 39 (1973), 577—92 (pp. 591—92).
29. Paulin, 'Elegy Ten', p. 182.
30. Stern, Dear Purchase, p. 296.
31. Cf. Paulin, 'Elegy Ten', p. 185.
32. Stern, Dear Purchase, p. 296.
33. Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 183.
34. See Paulin, 'Elegy Ten', p. 185.
35. Stern, Dear Purchase, p. 302.
36. Stern, Dear Purchase, p. 303.
37. See Stern, Dear Purchase, p. 301, and Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, pp. 182—83.
38. For a detailed discussion of fruit imagery and death in Rilke, see Sutherland, 'Refiguring Death', pp. 18—24.
39. Cf. Blanchot's comments on death in Duineser Elegien: Maurice Blanchot, L'espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 192—93.
40. See Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, p. 179. Ryan (ibid.) elaborates on the similarities between various literary and mythological journeys with a bearing on Rilke's poem: those of Orpheus, Dante and Faust.
41. Stern regards them positively: Dear Purchase, p. 303; Ryan sees them as an 'anticlimactic conclusion': Rilke, Modernism, p. 184.
42. Allegories of Reading, p. 48. A similar deconstructive approach to the poem can be found in Carol Jacobs, The Dissimulating Harmony: The Image of Interpretation in Nietzsche, Rilke, Artaud, and Benjamin (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 25—49.
43. L'espace littéraire, p. 181.
44. As emphasized in Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, p. 184.
45. Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, p. 184.
46. Allegories of Reading, p. 50.
47. Dear Purchase, p. 303.
48. Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 90.
49. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), pp. 40—43.
50. Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 43.
51. In Tradition and the Individual Talent the 'presence' (p. 38) of death approaches the status of a critical concept: the poet must be conscious of death because the dead are 'what is already living' (P. 44).
52. Stern, Dear Purchase, p. 303.
53. Charles Smyth, Criterion, 71 (January 1939), p. 369; see A. David Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 243. For the most detailed account of the background to 'Little Gidding', see Gardner, Composition, pp. 57—71.
54. See Gardner, Composition, p. 158.
55. Moody, Poet, p. 245. On 'pentecostal fire' see Cornelia Cook, 'Fire and Spirit: Scripture's Shaping Presence in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets', Literature and Theology, 15 (2001), 85—101 (pp. 96-97).
56. See Gardner, Composition, p. 160. Moody, Poet, does not gloss 'zero summer'. Julia Maniates Reibetanz, A Reading of Eliot's 'Four Quartets' (Epping: Bowker, 1983), reads it in terms of expansion and contraction: 'what would it be to widen these contraries until "cold" should go down to "zero" and "spring" ascend to "summer"?' (p. 142).
57. Gardner, Composition, p. 160. Cf. Mörike's 'im gleichen Nu | Erloschen sein wird' ('Göttliche Reminiszenz', l. 26).
58. Moody, Poet, p. 245.
59. Moody, Poet, p. 245.
60. See Cook, 'Fire and Spirit', p. 97: prayer 'violates the separate spheres of life and death'.
61. 'The Music of Poetry' (1942), in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), pp. 26—38 (pp. 32-33).
62. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber, 1934), pp. 47—48. See Bagchee, 'Subtle Souls and Dry Bones'.
63. See Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, p. 324.
64. After Strange Gods, p. 48.
65. Bagchee, 'Subtle Souls and Dry Bones', p. 53.
66. See Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, p. 180.
67. Geoffrey Hill, Style and Faith: Essays (New York: Counterpoint, 2003), p. 11.
68. Times Literary Supplement, 9 January 1919, p. 19.
69. For detail on 'Little Gidding' and Eliot's wartime experiences, see Gardner, Composition, pp. 166-69.
70. See Gardner, Composition, p. 168.
71. T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber, 1965), p. 128.
72. See for example Gardner, Composition, pp. 171—96; Moody, Poet, pp. 248—54; Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber, 1988), pp. 264—65; idem, Ά Note on "Little Gidding"', Essays in Criticism, 25 (1975), 145—53; Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 236—43; Dominic Manganiello, T. S. Eliot and Dante (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 147—65; Eric Griffiths, 'Writing and Speaking: The Work of Eliot, Yeats and Pound' (unpublished PhD dissertation: Cambridge, 1980), pp. 184-85.
73. Ricks, Prejudice, p. 265.
74. Cf. Griffiths, 'Writing and Speaking', p. 185.
75. See Gardner, Composition, p. 172.
76. Cf. the final revisions to 'Patmos': 'Wie Feuer, in Städten, tödtlichliebend | Sind Gottes Stimmen' (GStA, 11, 185, ll. 145—46).
77. Griffiths, 'Writing and Speaking', p. 185.
78. See Gardner, Composition, pp. 174—75.
79. See Gardner, Composition, p. 185.
80. Moody, Poet, p. 253.
81. Speculation about the identities of the ghost is almost as old as the poem. Most critics agree that the ghost is not one single figure, but rather represents the 'tradition: see for example Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), p. 321, and more recently Moody, Poet, p. 252: there are echoes of'Hamlet's ghostly father; of Milton on Sin and Death; of Swift's epitaph upon himself; of Johnson on the vanity of human wishes; also of Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold'. On the background to the presence of Yeats here, see Manganiello, Eliot and Dante, pp. 147—65, who argues that the ghost should be thought of primarily as Yeats; also Gardner, Composition, p. 176. All these figures are arguably present, but we need to be more specific about the context of redemption in which Eliot frames this presentation of poetic tradition, and less concerned with literary allusions he may be making. The ghost represents the turn against transcendence, the negative underside of the tradition. The comparison with Rilke and the discussion of Eliot's response to Bradley have shown how that turn has to be seen as fundamentally Nietzschean. This does not mean that Eliot is making a conscious reference to Zarathustra, but that Zarathustra is inevitably the figure who most essentially captures the attitude associated with the ghost, in all its multiple voices: the tradition of worldly self-glorification, begun for Eliot by Brunetto Latini.
82. Gardner, Composition, p. 176; see also Moody, Poet, pp. 250—51.
83. Moody, Poet, p. 254. John Hayward also thought it 'prosy': Eliot agreed it needed rewriting but never did so (see Gardner, Composition, p. 199).
84. Hayward's phrase: Gardner, Composition, p. 199.
85. Ricks, Prejudice, p. 255.
86. Gardner, Composition, p. 207.
87. Stern, Dear Purchase, p. 28.
88. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 112.
89. Pickstock, After Writing, p. 117.
90. Cf. Pickstock, After Writing, p. 117: 'the problem for postmodern thought [. . .] is that its appeals to death remain a mere gesture, without upshot'.
91. Cf. Gardner, Composition, p. 213: 'Eliot's original plan was to repeat the "metaphysical" manner of the lyric in "East Coker", using the language of financial transactions'.
92. But which Hayward, oddly given his previous reservations, found 'all right': see Gardner, Composition, p. 221.
93. Cf. Cleo McNelly Cearns, 'Negative Theology and Literary Discourse in Four Quartets: A Derridean Reading', in Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot's Four Quartets', ed. by Edward Lobb (London: Athlone: 1993), pp. 131—57 (p. 154).
94. See Gardner, Composition, p. 224.
95. Cf. Virgil's last speech to Dante: 'No more expect my word, nor my sign' ('Non aspettar mio dir più nè mio cenno'), Purgatorio, XXVII, 139.
96. Cf. Cearns, 'Negative Theology', p. 155.