Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  Wordsworth ; you cannot find more than an echo of it in Landor ;

  still less in Tennyson or Browning ; and among contemporaries

  Mr. Yeats is an Irishman and Mr. Hardy is a modern Englishman

  - that is to say, Mr. Hardy is without it and Mr. Yeats is outside

  of the tradition altogether. On the other hand, as it certainly

  exists in Lafontaine, there is a large part of it in Gautier. And of

  the magniloquence, the deliberate exploitation of the possibilities

  of magnificence in language which Milton used and abused, there

  is also use and even abuse in the poetry of Baudelaire.

  Wit is not a quality that we are accustomed to associate with

  'Puritan' literature, with Milton or with Marvell. But if so, we are

  at fault partly in our conception of wit and partly in our generalizations about the Puritans. And if the wit of Dryden or of Pope is not the only kind of wit in the language the rest is not merely a

  little merriment or a little levity or a little impropriety or a little

  epigram. And, on the other hand, the sense in which a man like

  Marvell is a 'Puritan' is restricted. The persons who opposed

  Charles I and the persons who supported the Commonwealth

  were not all of the flock of Zeal-of-the-land Busy or the United

  Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association. Many of

  them were gentlemen of the time who merely believed, with

  considerable show of reason, that government by a Parliament of

  gentlemen was better than government by a Stuart ; though they

  were, to that extent, Liberal Practitioners, they could hardly

  foresee the tea-meeting and the Dissidence of Dissent. Being

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  men of education and culture, even of travel, some of them were

  exposed to that spirit of the age which was coming to be the

  French spirit of the age. This spirit, curiously enough, was quite

  opposed to the tendencies latent or the forces active in Puritanism ;

  the contest does great damage to the poetry of Milton ; Marvell,

  an active servant of the public, but a lukewarm partisan, and a

  poet on a smaller scale, is far less injured by it. His line on the

  statue of Charles I I , 'It is such a King as no chisel can mend',

  may be set off against his criticism of the Great Rebellion : 'Men

  . . . ought and might have trusted the King'. Marvell, therefore,

  more a man of the century than a Puritan, speaks more clearly

  and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age than does

  Milton.

  This voice speaks out uncommonly strong in the Coy Mistress.

  The theme is one of the great traditional commonplaces of

  European literature. It is the theme of 0 mistress mine, of Gather

  ye rosebuds, of Go, lovely rose ; it is in the savage austerity of

  Lucretius and the intense levity of Catullus. Where the wit of

  Marvell renews the theme is in the variety and order of the

  images. In the first of the three paragraphs Marvell plays with a

  fancy which begins by pleasing and leads to astonishment.

  Had we but world enough and time,

  This coyness, lady, were no crime,

  . . . I would

  Love you ten years before the Flood,

  And you should, if you please, refuse

  Till the conversion of the Jews;

  My vegetable love should grow

  Vaster than empires and more slow . . . .

  We notice the high speed, the succession of concentrated images,

  each magnifying the original fancy. When this process has been

  carried to the end and summed up, the poem turns suddenly with

  that surprise which has been one of the most important means of

  poetic effect since Homer :

  But at my back I always hear

  Time's winged chariot hurrying near,

  And yonder all before us lie

  Deserts of vast eternity.

  A whole civilization resides in these lines :

  Pal/ida Mors (£quo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas,

  Regumque turris . . . .

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  •

  And not only Horace but Catullus himself:

  Nobis, cum semel occldit brevis lux,

  Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

  The verse of Marvell has not the grand reverberation of Catullus's

  Latin ; but the image of Marvell is certainly more comprehensive

  and penetrates greater depths than Horace's.

  A modern poet, had he reached the height, would very likely

  have closed on this moral reflection. But the three strophes of

  Marvell's poem have something like a syllogistic relation to each

  other. After a close approach to the mood of Donne,

  then worms shall try

  That long-preserved virginity . . .

  The grave's a fine and private place,

  But none, I think, do there embrace,

  the conclusion,

  Let us roll all our strength and all

  Our sweetness up into one ball,

  And tear our pleasures with rough strife,

  Thorough the iron gates of life.

  It will hardly be denied that this poem contains wit ; but it may

  not be evident that this wit forms the crescendo and diminuendo

  of a scale of great imaginative power. The wit is not only combined with, but fused into, the imagination. We can easily recognize a witty fancy in the successive images ('my vegetable love',

  'till the conversion of the Jews'), but this fancy is not indulged, as

  it sometimes is by Cowley or Cleveland, for its own sake. It is

  structural decoration of a serious idea. In this it is superior to the

  fancy of L' Allegro, II Penseroso, or the lighter and less successful

  poems of Keats. In fact, this alliance of levity and seriousness (by

  which the seriousness is intensified) is a characteristic of the sort

  of wit we are trying to identify. It is found in

  Le squelette itait invisible

  Au temps heureux de !'art paien!

  of Gautier, and in the dandysme of Baudelaire and Lafargue. It is

  in the poem of Catullus which has been quoted, and in the

  variation by Ben Jonson :

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  ANDREW MARVELL

  Cannot we delude the eyes

  OJ a Jew poor household spies ?

  'Tis no sin love's fruits to steal;

  But the sweet thefts to reveal,

  To be taken, to be seen,

  These have crimes accounted been.

  It is in Propertius and Ovid. It is a quality of a sophisticated

  literature ; a quality which expands in English literature just at the

  moment before the English mind altered ; it is not a quality which

  we should expect Puritanism to encourage. When we come to

  Gray and Collins, the sophistication remains only in the language,

  and has disappeared from the feeling. Gray and Collins were

  masters, but they had lost that hold on human values, that firm

  grasp of human experience, which is a formidable achievement of

  the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. This wisdom, cynical perhaps but untired (in Shakespeare, a terrifying clairvoyance), leads toward, and is only completed by, the religious comprehension ; it

  leads to the point of the Ainsi tout leur a craque dans Ia main of

  Bouvard and Pecuchet.

  The difference between imagination and fancy, in view of this

&n
bsp; poetry of wit, is a very narrow one. Obviously, an image which is

  immediately and unintentionally ridiculous is merely a fancy. In

  the poem Upon Appleton House, Marvell falls in with one of these

  undesirable images, describing the attitude of the house toward

  its master :

  Yet thus the leaden house does sweat,

  And scarce endures the master great;

  But, where he comes, the swelling hall

  Stirs, and the square grows spherical;

  which, whatever its intention, is more absurd than it was intended

  to be. Marvell also falls into the even commoner error of images

  which are over-developed or distracting ; which support nothing

  but their own misshapen bodies :

  And now the salmon-fishers moist

  Their leathern boats begin to hoist;

  And, like Amipodes in shoes,

  Have shod their heads in their canoes.

  Of this sort of image a choice collection may be found in Johnson's

  Life oJCowley. But the images in the Coy Mistress are not only witty,

  but satisfy the elucidation of Imagination given by Coleridge : I6S

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  This power . . . reveals itself i n the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities : of sameness, with difference ; of the general, with the concrete ; the idea �ith the image ; the individual with

  the representative ; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and

  familiar objects ; a more than usual state of emotion with more than

  usual order ; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with

  enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement . . . .

  Coleridge's statement applies also to the following verses, which

  are selected because of their similarity, and because they illustrate

  the marked caesura which Marvell often introduces in a short

  line :

  The tawny mowers enter next,

  Who seem like Israelites to be

  Walking on foot through a green sea . . . .

  And now the meadows fresher dyed,

  Whose grass, with moister colour dashed,

  Seems as green silks but newly washed . . . .

  He hangs in shades the orange bright,

  Like golden lamps in a green night . . . .

  Annihilating all that's made

  To a green thought in a green shade . . . .

  Had it lived long, it would have been

  Lilies without, roses within.

  The whole poem, from which the last of these quotations is

  drawn (The Nymph and the Fawn), is built upon a very slight

  foundation, and we can imagine what some of our modern practitioners of slight themes would have made of it. But we need not descend to an invidious contemporaneity to point the difference.

  Here are six lines from The Nymph and the Fawn :

  I have a garden of my own,

  But so with roses overgrown

  And lilies, that you would it guess

  To be a little wilderness;

  And all the spring-time of the year

  It only loved to be there.

  And here are five lines from The Nymph's Song to Hylas in the

  Life and Death of Jason, by William Morris :

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  ANDREW M ARVELL

  I know a little garden close

  Set thick with lily and red rose.

  Where I would wander if I might

  From dewy dawn to dewy night,

  And have one with me wandering.

  So far the resemblance is more striking than the difference,

  although we might just notice the vagueness of allusion in the

  last line to some indefinite person, form, or phantom, compared

  with the more explicit reference of emotion to object which we

  should expect from Marvell. But in the latter part of the poem

  Morris divaricates widely :

  Yet tottering as I am, and weak,

  Still have I left a little breath

  To seek within the jaws of death

  An entrance to that happy place;

  To seek the unforgotten face

  Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me

  A nigh the murmuring of the sea.

  Here the resemblance, if there is any, is to the latter part of The

  Coy Mistress. As for the difference, it could not be more pronounced. The effect of Morris's charming poem depends upon the mistiness of. the feeling and the vagueness of its object ; the

  effect of Marvell's upon its bright, hard precision. And this

  precision is not due to the fact that Marvell is concerned with

  cruder or simpler or more carnal emotions. The emotion of

  Morris is not more refined or more spiritual ; it is merely more

  vague : if anyone doubts whether the more refined or spiritual

  emotion can be precise, he should study the treatment of the

  varieties of discarnate emotion in the Paradiso. A curious result

  of the comparison of Morris's poem with Marvell's is that the

  former, though it appears to be more serious, is found to be the

  slighter ; and Marvell's Nymph and the Fawn, appearing more

  slight, is the more serious.

  So weeps the wounded balsam; so

  The holy frankincense doth flow;

  The brotherless Heliades

  Melt in such amber tears as these.

  These verses have the suggestiveness of true poetry ; and the

  verses of Morris, which are nothing if not an attempt to suggest,

  really suggest nothing; and we are inclined to infer that the

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  suggestiveness is the aura around a bright clear centre, that you

  cannot have the aura alone. The day-dreamy feeling of Morris is

  essentially a slight thing ; MarVell takes a slight affair, the feeling

  of a girl for her pet, and gives it a connection with that inexhaustible and terrible nebula of emotion which surrounds all our exact and practical passions and mingles with them. Again,

  Marvell does this in a poem which, because of its formal pastoral

  machinery, may appear a trifling object :

  C L O R I N D A . Near this, a fountain's liquid bell

  Tinkles within the concave shell.

  D A M O N .

  Might a soul bathe there and be clean,

  Or slake its drought ?

  where we find that a metaphor has suddenly rapt us to the image

  of spiritual purgation. There is here the element of surprise, as

  when Villon says :

  Necessite Jaict gens mesprendre

  Et.faim saillir le loup des boys,

  the surprise which Poe considered of the highest importance, and

  also the restraint and quietness of tone which makes the surprise

  possible. And in the verses of Marvell which have been quoted

  there is the making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar,

  which Coleridge attributed to good poetry.

  The effort to construct a dream world, which alters English

  poetry so greatly in the nineteenth century, a dream world

  utterly different from the visionary realities of the Vita Nuova or

  of the poetry of Dante's contemporaries, is a problem of which

  various explanations may no doubt be found ; in any case, the

  result makes a poet of the nineteenth century, of the same size as

  Marvell, a more trivial and less serious figure. Marvell is no

  greater personality than William Morris, but he had something

  much more solid behind him : he had the vast
and penetrating

  influence of Ben Jonson. Jonson never wrote anything purer than

  Marvell's Horatian Ode ; this ode has that same quality of wit

  which was diffused over the whole Elizabethan product and

  concentrated in the work of Jonson. And, as was said before, this

  wit which pervades the poetry of Marvell is more Latin, more

  refined, than anything that succeeded it. The great danger, as

  well as the greatest interest and excitement, of English prose and

  verse, compared with French, is that it permits and justifies an

  exaggeration of particular qualities to the exclusion of others.

  Dryden was great in wit, as Milton in magniloquence ; but the

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  former, by isolating this quality and making it by itself into great

  poetry, and the latter, by coming to dispense with it altogether,

  may perhaps have injured the language. In Dryden wit becomes

  almost fun, and thereby loses some contact with reality ; becomes

  pure fun, which French wit almost never is.

  The midwife placed her hand on his thick skull,

  With this prophetic blessing: Be thou dull. . . .

  A numerous host of dreaming saints succeed,

  Of the true old enthusiastic breed.

  This is audacious and splendid ; it belongs to satire beside which

  Marvell's Satires are random babbling, but it is perhaps as

  exaggerated as :

  Oji he seems to hide his face,

  But unexpectedly returns,

  And to his faithful champion hath in place

  Bore witness gloriously; whmce Gaza moums,

  And all that band them to resist

  His u1zcontrollable intent.

  How oddly the sharp Dantesque phrase 'whence Gaza mourns'

  springs out from the brilliant contortions of Milton's sentence !

  Who from his private gardens, where

  He lived reserved and austere,

  (As �f his highest plot

  To plant the bergamot)

  Could �)' industrious valour climb

  To ruin the great work of Time,

  A11d cast the ki11gdoms old

  l11to a11other mold;

  The Pict no shelter now shall find

  Within his parti-coloured mi11d,

  But, from this valour sad,

  Shri11k underneath the plaid:

  There is here an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones,

  which, while it cannot raise Marvell to the level of Dryden or

  Milton, extorts an approval which these poets do not receive from