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  Even his name was a buzz word for obscurity, and the word ‘obscurity’ was in turn suggestive of ‘modern poetry’, a term in those days as compelling as the terms ‘simony’ and ‘paralysis’ were for the young boy in Joyce’s story ‘The Sisters’. For the moment, however, the whole burden of this mystery was confined in four pages of the school poetry anthology, a bilious green compendium entitled A Pageant of English Verse. About one quarter of the poems in this book were set each year as part of the official syllabus for the Northern Ireland Senior Certificate of Education, and in our year the syllabus included ‘The Hollow Men’ and ‘Journey of the Magi’. It was the first of these that made the truly odd impression. It was impossible not to be affected by it, yet it is still impossible to say exactly what the effect was:

  Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

  In death’s dream kingdom

  These do not appear:

  There, the eyes are

  Sunlight on a broken column

  There, is a tree swinging

  And the voices are

  In the wind’s singing

  More distant and more solemn

  Than a fading star.

  Whatever happened within my reader’s skin was the equivalent of what happens in an otherwise warm and well-wrapped body once a cold wind gets at its ankles. A shiver that fleetingly registered itself as more pertinent and more acutely pleasurable than the prevailing warmth. A cheese-wire exactness that revealed to you the cheesy nature of your own standards and expectations. But, of course, we were not encouraged to talk like that in English class, and anyhow, like the girl in The Importance of Being Earnest who was pleased to say she had never seen a spade, I had not then ever seen a cheese wire.

  All this is extremely interesting to remember now, for it persuades me that what is to be learned from Eliot is the double-edged nature of poetic reality: first encountered as a strange fact of culture, poetry is internalized over the years until it becomes, as they say, second nature. Poetry that was originally beyond you, generating the need to understand and overcome its strangeness, becomes in the end a familiar path within you, a grain along which your imagination opens pleasurably backwards towards an origin and a seclusion. Your last state is therefore a thousand times better than your first, for the experience of poetry is one which truly deepens and fortifies itself with re-enactment. I now know, for example, that I love the lines quoted above because of the pitch of their music, their nerve-end tremulousness, their treble in the helix of the ear. Even so, I cannot with my voice make the physical sound that would be the equivalent of what I hear on my inner ear; and the ability to acknowledge that very knowledge, the confidence to affirm that there is a reality to poetry which is unspeakable and for that very reason all the more piercing, that ability and that confidence are largely based upon a reading of Eliot.

  Of course, the rare music of ‘The Hollow Men’ was never mentioned in school. Disillusion was what we heard about. Loss of faith. The lukewarm spirit. The modern world. Nor do I remember much attention being given to the cadence, or much attempt being made to make us hear rather than abstract a meaning. What we heard, in fact, was what gave us then a kind of herd laughter: the eccentric, emphatic enunciations of our teacher, who came down heavily on certain syllables and gave an undue weight to the HOLlow men, the STUFFED men. And needless to say, in a class of thirty boys, in an atmosphere of socks and sex and sniggers, stuffed men and prickly pears and bangs and whimpers did not elevate the mood or induce the condition of stillness which is the ideally desirable one if we are to be receptive to this poet’s bat-frequency.

  I was never caught up by Eliot, never taken over and shown to myself by his work, my ear was never pulled outside in by what it heard in him. Numerous readers have testified to this sudden kind of conversion, when the whole being is flushed by a great stroke of poetry, and this did indeed happen to me when I read Gerard Manley Hopkins. From the start something in my make-up was always ready to follow the antique flute of sensuous writing, yet when this kind of writing made its appearance in Eliot – in ‘Ash-Wednesday’, for instance – its very plenitude was meant to render its beauty questionable. It signalled a distraction from the way of purgation:

  At the first turning of the third stair

  Was a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit

  And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene

  The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green

  Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

  Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,

  Lilac and brown hair;

  Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,

  Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair

  Climbing the third stair.

  The fact that within the finer tone and stricter disciplines of Eliot’s poetry these lines represented what he could later call ‘the deception of the thrush’ did not prevent me from being deceived into relishing them. And in that relish two things were combined. First of all, a single unbewildering image was presented. To read the passage was to look across a deep lucidity towards a shaggy solidity, as if in a Renaissance painting of the Annunciation the window of the Virgin’s chamber opened upon a scene of vegetal and carnal riot. Secondly, the language of the lines called in a direct way, in a way that indeed skirted the parodic, upon the traditional language of poetry. Antique figure. Maytime. Hawthorn. Flute. Blue and green. The pleasures of recollection were all there. The consolations of the familiar. So that combination of composed dramatic scene and consciously deployed poetic diction appealed to the neophyte reader in me. To express the appeal by its negatives, the poetry was not obscure, neither in what it was describing nor in the language that did the describing. It fitted happily my expectations of what poetry might be: what unfitted it was all that other stuff in ‘Ash-Wednesday’ about leopards and bones and violet and violet. That scared me off, made me feel small and embarrassed. I wanted to call on the Mother of Readers to have mercy on me, to come quick, make sense of it, give me the pacifier of a paraphrasable meaning and a recognizable, firmed up setting:

  Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

  In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety

  On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

  In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

  Shall these bones live? Shall these

  Bones live?

  My panic in the face of these lovely lines was not just schoolboy panic. It descended again in my late twenties when I had to lecture on ‘Ash-Wednesday’ as part of a course for undergraduates at Queen’s University, Belfast. I had no access to the only reliable source for such teaching, namely the experience of having felt the poem come home, memorably and irrefutably, so the lecture was one of the most unnerving forty-five minutes of my life. I scrambled around beforehand, snatching at F. O. Matthiessen’s The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, and George Williamson’s A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot and D. E. S. Maxwell’s The Poetry of T. S. Eliot. But whatever they had to say in their commentaries had nothing to fall upon, or to combine with, on the ground of my reader’s mind. The poem never quite became a gestalt. Nowadays, I talk about it more freely because I am not as shy of the subject as I then was: purgation, conversion, the embrace of an air thoroughly thin and dry, joy in a vision as arbitrary and disjunct from the usual as the vision of the leopards and lady in a white gown – all this offers itself far more comprehensively and persuasively to someone in his late forties than to someone in his late twenties.

  The Lady is withdrawn

  In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.

  Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.

  There is no life in them. As I am forgotten

  And would be forgotten, so I would forget

  Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said

  Prophesy to the wind, to the wind on
ly for only

  The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping

  With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

  Those qualities which created resistance in the first place now seem to me the valuable things about this work. The sense that the poem stood like a geometry in an absence was what caused my original bewilderment. I sensed myself like a gross intrusion, all corporeality and blunder in the realm of grace and translucence, and this unnerved me.

  Nowadays, however, what gratifies me most is this very feeling of being privy to an atmosphere so chastely invented, so boldly and unpredictably written. Things like bones and leopards – which pop into the scene without preparation or explanation and which therefore discombobulated me at first – these things I now accept not as the poet’s mystifying whim but as his gift and visitation. They are not what I at first mistakenly thought them: constituent parts of some erudite code available to initiates. Nor are they intended to be counters for a cannily secluded meaning. Rather, they arose airily in the poet’s composing mind and reproduced themselves deliciously, with a playfulness and self-surprising completedness.

  Of course, it is true that a reading of the Earthly Paradise cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio prepares one for the rarefied air of Eliot’s scene, just as some familiarity with Dante will take from the unexpectedness of the leopards that start up in the very first line of Section II of ‘Ash-Wednesday’. Yet it is wrong to see these things simply as references to Dante. They are not hostages taken from The Divine Comedy and held by Eliot’s art in the ascetic compound of his poem. They actually sprang up in the pure mind of the twentieth-century poet and their in-placeness does not derive from their having a meaning transplanted from the iconography of the medieval one. It is true, of course, that Eliot’s pure mind was greatly formed by the contemplation of Dante, and Eliot’s dream processes fed upon the phantasmagoria of The Divine Comedy constantly, so the matter of Dante’s poem was present to him, and Dante had thereby become second nature to him. Dante, in fact, belonged in the rag-and-bone shop of Eliot’s middle-ageing heart, and it was from that sad organ, we might say, that all his lyric ladders started.

  Given the habitual probity, severity and strenuousness of Eliot’s mind, one has therefore no difficulty in crediting him with his right to those moments of release when his nerves threw patterns upon the screen of the language. Yet needless to say, back in that window-rattling classroom in Derry in 1956, with rain gusting up the Foyle Estuary and the sound of the chapel bell marking the beginning and end of each forty-minute period, these kinds of thoughts were far in the future for a candidate in Α-Level English. All that fellow wanted was to be able to get a foothold on the slippery slope of the prescribed poems. In the case of ‘The Hollow Men’, his teacher gave him just such a foothold by driving into the poem a huge extraneous spike labelled ‘Loss of Faith in Modern World and Consequences for Modern Man’. There at least was one way of subduing the querulous, outcast melodies of the poem to the familiar tolling of the bell of Faith. The modernist canon was to be co-opted by the ideology that rang the college bell, and indeed it must be said that the rhetoric of the poem’s distress connived with the complacencies of the college’s orthodoxies. The fraying quotations from the Lord’s Prayer and the general tone of litany (which was so much part of our daily round of prayers) all tended to co-opt the imaginative strangeness, formal distinctness and fundamental difference of this poetry into the emulsifying element of our doctrinally sound young heads.

  Obviously, the domestication of ‘Journey of the Magi’ was easier still. The three wise kings had been part of the folk life of our Catholicism, part of the Christmas crib, the Christmas gospel and the Christmas card itself. Moreover, the idea of conversion was also familiar to us. Losing your life to save it, abandoning self to begin the path of illumination – no problem there. And no problem for me in the reek of actual country when a horse rushes away or a dank green valley moisture generously irrigates the reader’s nostrils. High modernism, high Anglicanism and the low-lying farmlands of Co. Derry came together in a pleasing exhalation or – as Eliot himself might have called it – an ‘efflux’ of poetry. No problem either when three trees on the skyline were said to prefigure the crucifixion, or when the hands dicing among the empty wineskins prefigured the hands of the Roman soldier dicing for Christ’s robe at the foot of the cross. This poem required no spike driven into it to give us a grip. On the contrary, it seemed so generously provided with doctrinal spikes of its own that we could not help being pinned down by its images and its orthodoxy:

  Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

  Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

  With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

  And three trees on the low sky,

  And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

  Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

  Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

  And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

  But there was no information, so we continued

  And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

  Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

  The familiarity of the matter of this poem gave us the illusion of ‘understanding’; or perhaps the ‘understanding’ was not an illusion, the illusion being that ‘understanding’ its content and the crisis it embodied was the equivalent of knowing it as a poem; a formal event in the language; an ‘objective correlative’. We knew its correlation with conversion and with Christmas, but not its artistic objectivity. Those three trees were never allowed time to manifest themselves in the mind’s eye as trees before they were turned into images of Calvary; nor were the hands at the wineskins allowed to be written hands-in-themselves before becoming inscribed symbols of the division of Christ’s garments. It was a paradoxical destiny for a poet such as Eliot whose endeavour had been to insist on the poetriness of poetry being anterior to its status as philosophy or ideas or any other thing.

  *

  At Queen’s University I packed myself with commentaries and in particular advanced upon The Waste Land with what help I could muster in the library. I even read chunks of Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. I began to hear the music and to attune myself, but chiefly I obeyed the directives of the commentaries and got prepared to show myself informed. Yet perhaps the most lasting influence from this time was Eliot’s prose, all assembled and digested by John Hayward in a little purple-coloured Penguin book, the particular tint of purple being appropriately reminiscent of a confessor’s stole. There I read and re-read ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, essays on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, on Milton, on Tennyson’s In Memoriam. On the music of poetry. On why Hamlet doesn’t make it as a play, as an objective correlative. But most important of all, perhaps, was a definition of the faculty which he called ‘the auditory imagination’. This was ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back … [fusing] the most ancient and civilized mentalities.’

  It was not in the context of this definition that Eliot commented upon the dramatic efficacy of the lines from Macbeth, spoken just before the murder of Banquo:

  Light thickens,

  And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,

  Good things of day begin to droop and drowse.

  Nor did he invoke it when he discussed the exquisitely direct yet profoundly suggestive line spoken by Othello, ‘Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.’ Nevertheless, Eliot’s revelation of his susceptibility to such lines, the physicality of his ear as well as the fastidiousness of its discriminations, his example of a poet’s intelligence exercising itself in the activity of listening, all of this seemed to excuse my own temperamental incapacity for paraphrase and my disinclination to e
ngage a poem’s argument and conceptual progress. Instead, it confirmed a natural inclination to make myself an echo-chamber for the poem’s sounds. I was encouraged to seek for the contour of a meaning within the pattern of a rhythm.

  In the ‘Death by Water’ section of The Waste Land, for example, I began to construe from its undulant cadences and dissolvings and reinings-in a mimetic principle which matched or perhaps even overwhelmed any possible meaning that might be derived from the story of Phlebas’s fate. In the heft and largesse of the poem’s music, I thought I divined an aural equivalent of the larger transcendental reality betrayed by the profit-and-loss people of the City of London, those merchants and clerks who come into the poem as a somnolent rhythmic flow of shades over London Bridge. I began to stop worrying about Phlebas’s relation to the Drowned Man and the effigy of Osiris cast into the water; all that was important as a structural principle but the breath of life was in the body of sound:

  Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

  Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

  And the profit and loss.

  A current under sea

  Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

  He passed the stages of his age and youth

  Entering the whirlpool.

  Gentile or Jew

  Ο you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

  Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

  At this stage of readiness to listen, I was also lucky enough to hear Eliot’s poetry read aloud by the actor Robert Speaight. I had made an introductory foray into Four Quartets but was finding it difficult to retain any impression unified and whole in my mind. The bigness of the structure, the opacity of the thought, the complexity of the organization of these poems held you at bay; yet while they daunted you, they promised a kind of wisdom – and it was at this tentative stage that I heard the whole thing read aloud. That experience taught me, in the words of the poem, ‘to sit still’. To sit, in fact, all through an afternoon in Belfast, in an upstairs flat, with a couple of graduate students in biochemistry, people with a less professional anxiety about understanding the poetry than I had, since in their unprofessional but rewarding way they still assumed that mystification was par for the course in modern poetry.