Eliot - Chapter Four

                                       Chapter Four

 

                                   The Heart of Light

 

            If the dark light of St. John dominates the imagery we considered in the previous sections, the animal references we will examine in this chapter lead to a progressive revelation of a light perhaps best characterized as a Dantean white light such as is projected in part four of "Ash Wednesday."  The last poems of Eliot present the psychic quester committed to the attainment of synthesis.  The consciousness organizing the poems is one seeking the center of reality, the timeless moment where "the light is still / At the still point of the turning world," ("Burnt Norton," IV, p. 121, ll. 138-39).  Again the development discernible through the animal references, here those associated with imagery of light, suggests a pattern of changing consciousness.  While the psychic and spiritual quester comes closest to a vision of the "heart of light" in the last poems, the path traversed is one in which the realms of light and darkness are often merged, as the very way to light is of necessity obscured by the complexities of his seeking.  In this chapter, while the emphasis will be on the later poetry, we shall examine some of the images of the earlier poems as they crystallize in a new informing context.  The first section of the chapter, that dealing with various animals associated with light will trace the progression of the quester from the Prufrockian realm of yellow light to the visionary light of "The Four Quartets."  The last two sections focus upon the recurrent references to birds in Eliot's poetry.  While Bird Imagery I deals primarily with the auditory imagery associated with the bird references, the focus in the last section will be upon the recurrent references to wings and flight.  As the pattern of bird references is a dominant one from the outset of Eliot's poetry, bird Imagery I sand II will serve to summarize not only this final chapter, but many of the patterns we have considered throughout the paper.

 

 

                  Animal References and Imagery of Light

 

            The pattern of animal references associated with imagery of light is significant in much of eliot's poetry.  We have already noted the importance of the light symbolism in "ash wednesday," for example, where the psychic and spiritual values of the leopards as well as the unicorns were indicated primarily through the associative light imagery.  In the earlier poetry, too, light symbolism informs many of the animal references.  The dominant contextual darkness of such figures as the rat and serpent (which are, as we have seen, recurrent symbols of malice in Eliot's poems), again suggests the significance of light in the poetry of Eliot.  Although Eliot generally uses the light imagery associated with the animal references in its traditional sense, that is, in its equation with positive spiritual values, the personal significance of light(as well as associative imagery of darkness, luster, color, etc.) in the poetry is suggested by its recurrent relationship to the mythos of the quest which organizes so many of the major poems.  for example, the first quester, Prufrock, confronts an animal figure whose very being resides in the phenomena of light, a lights which, in the secular world, takes on material properties:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs it muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

                                                (P. 4, LL. 15-22)

            The fog-enshrouded world of Prufrock is close to that of "The Waste Land:" "Unreal City, / Under a brown fog of a winter dawn," (I, p. 39, 60-61).  Prufrock shapes his amorphic world much as the speaker of "Conversation Galante" does; like him, Prufrock "digresses" (p. 19) into "mad poetics" (p. 20), projecting his own sensibility upon the world, framing it in images "with which we explain / The night and moonshine; music which we seize / To body forth our own vacuity," (p. 19).  The description of the city transformed by a yellow fog recalls Oscar Wilde's "Impression du Matin:"

The yellow fog comes creeping down

The bridges, till the houses' walls

Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul's

Loomed like a bubble o'er the town.

Prufrock in his night-journey through the half-deserted streets of the unreal city imbued in yellow (the color of age or disease, fade leaves — cf. "etherized," "October") and black ("smoke," "soot") envisions the creature which in the "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" has concrete existence:

"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,

Slips out its tongue

And devours a morsel of rancid butter."

                                                (p. 15, ll. 35-37)

Here, too, the context suggests a decadence destructive of consciousness, a world wherein light itself is corrupted (e.g. "the lamp muttered in the dark," p. 15).  Indeed, the observation itself is made by the streetlamp, and this, as well  as the poem's use of lamp/moonlight imagery throughout, suggests a defection of light from the context of spiritual values (see "Heart of Light," Chapter Four, above).  In "Prufrock"

 the cat remains an abstract form, only an illusion of an animal shape.  The yellow fog cat is constructed upon a series of sensual actions (sliding, rubbing, curling, licking, etc.) suggestive of a cat in both sensuous agility and lethargy.  The primal eroticism of Prufrock's consciousness emerges in the kinetic imagery of the figure, while its repugnance to his sensibility expresses itself in the allusion to putrescent water and unrefining fire ("the pools that stand in drains," "the soot that falls from chimneys") and its final resolution in static circularity and sleep.  As Williamson notes, "with the image of the fog as cat we have another reflection of (Prufrock's) mental state:  desire which ends in inertia.  If the cat image suggests sex, it also suggests the greater desire of inactivity.  The speaker sees the evening in aspects of somnolence, or of action lapsing into inaction, both artificial and natural — sleep and etherization.  The fog's settling down prompts the reflection that 'indeed there will be time' for its more suggestive activity, and for his own." 1 Throughout the conceit of the fog cat the movement is towards the anaesthetizing or dulling of consciousness.  The potentiality of light, vision (cf.  repetition of "window-panes") as well as physical sensation ("rubbing," "leaping," etc.) is compounded and dissipated at the completion of the figure ("And seeing that is was a soft October night / Curled once about the house and fell asleep."). The temporal world is an evanescent as the image in the fog; the dwellers of the city have only as much reality as the illusion of the cat, projecting merely the product of obscuring configurations ("prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet").  Prufrock's quest fails; he seeks the communion which will enable him to escape the inertia of the self-entrapped "I," but his progress is as circular as the path traced in his own fantasy.  The desire for the forms of life, for freedom to act, escapes to consciousness in Prufrock, only to be distorted in the imagery of the unreal city, the thousand sordid images of the restless night, wherein the human form itself is stained by corruption of spirit in the countless private infernos of the imprisoning city.  (Cf. "Preludes III, p. 13, ll. 37-38:  "Or clasped the yellow soles of feet / In the palms of both soiled hands.")  In this world, even the image of the primeval vitality of the cat is dissipated into a quiescent illusion, maintaining its shape, but being wholly devoid of its spiritual essence.  (Cf.  "The sleek Brazilian jaguar / Does not in its arboreal gloom / Distil so rank a feline smell / As Grishkin in a drawing-room,"Whispers of Immortality," p. 33, ll. 25-28.)  The dominance of the shades of yellow and black suggests an atmosphere impenetrable by the light which has a "glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier," which alone "stirs the dumb spirit" even "in the dark time of the year," ("Little Gidding," p. 138, ll. 8-10). 

            In "The Waste Land" the darkness suggested in "Prufrock"is deepened or extended in the mythic structure of the poem.  In part V a vision of a creature of the nocturnal world, the traditional image of gloom and terror synthesizes various aspects of the mythos of the poem:

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towards

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

                                                            (p. 48, ll. 380-385)

Many of the elements of this nightmare vision have occurred elsewhere in "The Waste Land."  Here they cluster in a section which, as Eliot states in his notes, employs three themes:  the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous, and the present decay of Eastern Europe.  The ecclesiastical context of the lines gives significance to the recurrence of the tolling bells (cf. "Burnt Norton," IV:  "Time and the bell have buried the day, / The black cloud carries the sun away," p. 121, ll. 130-31), the anticipation of the identification of the descent and ascent pattern ("upside down in air were towers," cf. "the way up and the way down are one and the same" of Ecclesiastes 12 alluded to in "The Burial of the Dead" (the "empty cisterns and exhausted wells" recall the broken cistern and fountain of the passage).  The theme of present decay sounds again in the image of the falling towers of the city at the violet hour, which may recall the appellation of classical Athens as the City of the  Violet Crown. 2  (While in ecclesiastical symbolism violet signifies penitence, and is generally symbolic of love of truth and truth of love, 3 in "The Fire Sermon" it is merely the evening hour "when the human engine waits" or "strives homeward" (p. 43), the hour which brings the clerk to the typist to engage in a mechanistic rite of indifferent ersatz love.)

            For the bat image Eliot acknowledges (in Poémes 1910-1930, p. 155) being influenced by a painting of Hieronymus Bosch's school, which Grover Smith posits "might have been a panel entitled `Hell' (sometimes called `The Sinful World'), forming a diptych with Bosch's `The Deluge.'  The relevant detail depicts a batlike creature, which dull human features, crawling head first down a rock wall." 4 Smith suggests that Bosch's pattern of translating human degradation into "nauseous anatomical horror," of objectifying, through the malformations of his subjects, man's inhuman vices, is analogous to Eliot's literary technique in this passage:  "The quester in `The Waste Land' has encountered content of his own mind and through it the real state of the world outside him — the spiritual corpses of `all the lost adventurers,' his peers.  In direst plight perhaps is the Chapel itself, a symbol of the Church, through which he is seeking comfort.  Its decay and desolation amount not merely to the conventional delusions besetting the quester in the romances;  they are the actual ruins, the `dry bones,' of formal religion in the Western world." 5  Weston, in From Ritual to Romance, recounts the approach to the Chapel Perilous as follows:

in many of the versions A(of the Grail romance)

the hero — sometimes it is a heroine — meets with a strange and terrifying adventure in a mysterious Chapel, an adventure which, we are given to understand, is fraught with extreme peril to life.  The details vary:  sometimes there is a Dead Body laid on the altar;  sometimes a Black Hand Body laid on the altar; sometimes a Black Hand extinguishes the tapers; there are strange and threatening voices, and the general impression is that this is an adventure in which supernatural, and evil, forces are engaged. 6

Traditionally bats have a symbolic value close to that of the dragon (see "Serpent:  Malice II" above);  the serpentine wings unlike the wing pattern we shall consider in Bird Imagery II are considered an infernal attribute. 7  Here the bat is suggestive of the perversion of the spiritual order, "The strange combination of character of bird and beast, which the bat was believed to possess, gave to Virgil the idea of Harpies." 8  Goldsmith, in "The Deserted Village,"  uses the bat as the image of terror:

Far different there from all that charm's before,

The various terrors of that horrid shore;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Those matted woods where birds forget to sing,

But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling.

Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" includes a reference to the bat as the correlative of psychic and spiritual doubt:

The Bat that flits at close of Eve

Has left the Brain that won't Believe.

The bat in its physical resemblance to the rat as well as the bird (symbolic of spirituality, see "Bird Imagery II" below) suggests the perversion of the spiritual order necessitating the spiritual quest.  The combined personal and traditional symbolic value of the bat endow the vision of the quester with a darkness appropriate to his approach to the Chapel.  The gothic atmosphere accompanying the progression to the Perilous Chapel is intensified near the journey's end described immediately following the bat reference in "The Waste Land's: concluding section:

            In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

Co co rico coco rico

In a flash of lightning.  Then a damp gust

Bringing rain.

                                                (p. 49, ll. 385-95)

            The imagery moves from the place of desolation and darkness to the breakthrough of a revelatory light, from the decayed hole in faint moonlight to a flash of lightning.  The images of the singing grass and the dry bones are elements of a recurrent pattern relating to death and resurrection in Eliot (cf. "The Burial of the Dead," "The Hollow Men," "Ash Wednesday," e.g.).  Here the content suggests not only Ezekiel's Valley of the Bones (cited in Part I of "The Waste Land"), but also Weston's account of the Perilous Cemetery which has often combined with the theme of the Perilous Chapel:  "We have, also, a group of visits to the Perilous Chapel, or Perilous Cemetery, which appear to be closely connected with each other.  In each case the object of the visit is to obtain a portion of the cloth which covers the altar, or a dead body lying upon the altar." 9  Weston contends that in the quester's emprise of the Perilous Chapel or Cemetery a double initiation ritual is suggested:  "the Lower, into the mysteries of generation, i.e., of physical Life; the higher, into the Spiritual Divine Life, where man is made one with God . . . 10  Eliot's line "Dry bones can harm no one" suggests the successful initiation into the Lower mystery, as Weston describes it:  "the test for the primary initiation, that into the sources of physical life, would probably consist in a contact with the horrors of physical death."11  The initiation into the Spiritual Life is suggested in the descent to they decayed hole, the entering of the windowless Chapel, and the cry of the cock imaged in the flash of lightning.  (Cf. Weston's citation of Owain Miles, or The Purgatory of Saint Patrick:

'Then with his monks the Priort anon,

With Crosses and with Gonfanon

Went to that hole forthright,

Thro' which Knight Owain went below,

There, as of burning fire the glow,

They saw a gleam of light;

And right amidst that beam of light

He came up, Owain, God's own knight,

by this knew every man

That he in Paradise had been,

And Purgatory's pains had seen,

And was a holy man.'12)

            the cock as a Christian image is regarded as allegorical of vigilance and resurrection;  it expresses repentance and is one of the emblems of the Passion.13  The folk belief associated with the image is that at the cock's cry all apparitions of the night retreat.  The folk belief associated with the image is that at the cock's cry all apparitions of the night retreat.  (Cf. "Hamlet," I, 2:  "The morning cock crew loud / And at the sound it (the ghost) shrunk in haste away, / And vanished from our sight," or Blair's "Grave":

            'The tale

Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly

That walks at dead of night, or takes hist stand

O'er some new-open'd grave; and, strange to tell,

Evanishes at crowing of the cock.')

Smith considers this superstition in his interpretation of Eliot's lines:  "The cock, crowing enigmatically in Portuguese while perched on the rooftree, is the power to disperse the darkness and the shapes that walk by night.  A bird of sacrifice and good omen, it symbolizes the living spirit beyond the dead Chapel, able even now to pour rain upon the land if the quester succeeds."14  Smith holds that the quester fails, and that "the voice of the cock becomes an ironic symbol, for, like Peter, who three times denied his Lord before the second crowing, the quester has abandoned the Hanged Man and has held back the longed-for rain, not at this moment alone, but throughout the quest."15  Williamson, too, suggests that the cock's crow signifies the quester's denial of the higher reality of the myth.  Citing "dry bones can harm no one,"  Williamson comments:  "the quester denies their former meaning; and then, as with Peter, the cock crows, but as if in a French nursery rhyme.  It is another use of the bird sounds that are so significant in the poem, and also of the irony of the naive."16  Eliot's penchant for the onomatopoeia of animal cries is attested to by his note to Part V, line 357, and whether or not we consider his representation of the cock's crow as French or Portuguese need not detain us from noting that the two crows suggested complete the prophecy of Christ as in Mark 14:30:  "Verily I say unto thee, that this day, even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice."  Although the cock's crow testifies to Peter's prophesied denial of Christ, as its sound the penitential tears of Peter affirm, rather than deny, the Higher Life.  (That the value of the cock's cry is affirmative rather than negative is suggested in the interpretation of the bestiaries, for example:  "by testifying devotedly after the cockcrow Peter washed away the sin of the Church, which he had incurred by denying Christ before it crowed."17 

            The affirmative value of the cock is further attested to in classical mythology in which the cock was dedicated to Apollo, the sun-god, because it heralds the rising sun, as well as in Moslem theology, which holds that the cock's chant is heard by Allah as divine melody, and, when the cook ceases to crow, will signify the day of Judgment is at hand.18  Certainly the immediate context of the cock's crow in Eliot — that of illumination and the approach of the longed for rain — suggests the traditional value of its cry.  The implication is that the quester has not failed at the journey's end.  He has brought "The Waste Land" closest to the "Freeing of the Waters"  of spiritual salvation, witness the immediate transition to the communication of the thunder conveying the psychic and spiritual conditions of redemption.

            In "A Song for Simeon" (1928) the conditions of spiritual redemption have been met by Simeon, "just and devout" (Luke 2:25), having to his eighteenth year know sympathy and charity, now only awaiting the "peach that passeth understanding":

            Grant us thy peace,

Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,

Have given and taken honour and ease,

There went never any rejected from my door.

                                                (p. 69, ll. 8-12)

Simeon waits in "the time of tension between dying and birth" ("Ash Wednesday," VI, p. 66, l. 206), the "birth season of decease" (p. 70, l. 21):

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and

The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;

The stubborn season has made stand.

My life is light, waiting for the death wind,

Like a feather on the back of my hand.

                                                (p. 69, ll. 1-5)

Like Gerontion, Simeon is an old man, reduced to passivity, enduring a season of waiting "for the wind that chills toward thee dead land" (p. 69, l. 7).  Simeon confesses that he, like Gerontion, has no longer the passion or desire to live:  "I am tired with my own life and the lives after me"  (p. 70, l. 34); he is detached and has "no ghosts" (p. 22, l. 31).  But Simeon's season is not the "dry month" of "Gerontion" — his vista is not of "rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron merds" (p. 21, l. 12).  The Roman hyacinths blooming in bowls (pagan symbols of death and resurrection19) are not yet those of "depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas" (p. 21, l. 21), for it is a time "Before the  stations of the mountain of desolation, / Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow" (p. 70, ll. 19-20).  Nor is the sunlit snow of hills that of the concluding imagery of "Gerontion":

            Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn

White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

                                                (p. 23, ll. 70-73)

Although Simeon sees his life as a feather on the back of his hand, the "death wind" he awaits is not that of the Trades causing only descent (Gulf claimed) and annihilation (white feathers in the snow).

            In the symbolism of St. Gregory, the feather is the emblem of faith and contemplation.20  (Cf. Psalm 91:4:  "He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust:  his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.")  Simeon is not a "gull against the wind."  He has seen the salvation attested to by "the still unspeaking and unspoken Word," and knows therein his consolation.  He would see no further sign, nor rage against the darkness swaddling "the word within a word, unable to speak a word" ("Gerontion," p. 21).  Simeon's life is light, part of that "light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel" as the account of Simeon in Luke 2:  makes clear he is not trapped in "a wilderness of mirrors," caught in a "thousand small deliberations."  Simeon relinquishes the "ecstasy of thought and prayer" (l. 29);  he makes no claims to the "ultimate vision" of "Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair" (l. 28), though he has seen salvation.  The years of walking in the city of man have not bereft Simeon of his faith, nor left him with memory only.  The "heart of light" has been disclosed through him revealing, not silence, but the promise of "Our peace in His will."

            The spiritual light envisioned in "A Song for Simeon" is celebrated in the hymn to Light of the tenth Chorus of "The Rock":

            O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!

Too bright for mortal vision.

O Greater Light, we praise Thee for the loss;

The eastern light our spires touch at morning,

The light that slants upon our western doors at evening

The twilight ever stagnant pools at batflight,

Noon light and star light, owl and moth light,

Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.

O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!

 

                                                (pp. 112-13, ll. 21-29)

Throughout the "Choruses" the value of light is established as that of "the visible reminder of Invisible Light" (IX, p. 112, l. 54), the reflection of the Greater Light "too bright for mortal vision."  Here the images of the physical world are those of the creatures identified with the nocturnal phases of the daily cycle of light, with dusk or twilight, and with night.  The bat, which in "The Waste Land" contributed to an atmosphere of gloom and terror, of spiritual decadence, here is a participant in a pattern of diminishing light leading to "darkness (which yet) reminds us of light" (p. 114, l. 59).  so, too, the owl and moth evoke, not darkness, but light.  The moth, compelled towards light, circling it until it is wholly identified with its essence, suggests, even in its ephemeral life, the spiritual impulsion.  The owl, the type of nightly vigilance, is part of the pattern of "small lights of those who mediate at midnight" (p. 113, l. 33).  The physical light of the glowworm, illuminating the grassblade suggests the "living lamp" of Marvell's "The Mower to the Glow-worm:"

Ye living lamps . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . that portend

No war nor princes' funeral

Shining unto no other end

Than to presage the grass's fall.

The glimmering light recalls the small creatures perceived "through the dust, through the night" of "Difficulties of a Statesman:"

Fireflies flare against the faint sheet lightning

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Come with the sweep of the little bat's wing, with the small flare of                the firefly or lightning bug,

'Rising and falling, crowned with dust, 'the small creatures,

The small creatures chirp thinly through the dust, through the                      night.

                                                                        (p. 88, l. 29, 54-56)

The greater Light, hidden in the world of time, is yet reflected in the lowliest of its creatures.  The dim light which still reveals in a dark, transient world the principle of eternal Light is suggested throughout the "Choruses." 

            In the second Chorus the movement of the light of the spirit of God moving over the face of the dark waters of the earth (cf. Genesis 1) is likened to endurance of the tortoise, carrying on his back, as in the Hindu myth of the tortoise (Chukwa),20 the lantern of the world:

. . . the Spirit which moved on the face of the waters like a lantern set on the back of a tortoise.

                                                                        (p. 100, l. 140)

The image evoked is again that of a lowly creature, persevering through the seas of temporal existence, of the transitory fact of animal life endowed with cosmic Light, the eternal truth of Light patterning the darkness it traverses.  While our Light is "dappled with shadow," though "we see the light but see not whence it comes," (p. 113), the Light Invisible still "fractures through unquiet waters" (113), eternally kindles even the darkness of our night.  It is this verity which the fourth part of "Burnt Norton" proclaims:

            After the kingfisher's wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

As the still point of the turning world.

(p. 121, ll. 137-39)

Here indeed is the "ultimate vision" of light upon light (p. 70), the movement from the transitory light of the kingfisher's wing, to the eternal light at the center of all reality.  Here the lesser light of the physical, turning world and its destiny of "silence" (cf.  discussion of the "silent sea," Chapter One, above), is contrasted with the greater light and "stillness" of the spiritual center.  The kingfisher, or halcyon, is associated with a variety of classical and medieval legends concerning its genesis, life cycle, and death.  A widespread medieval belief associates the bird's brilliant hues with the light of the sun:  The kingfisher was held to be a plain grey bird, but it "acquired its present bright colors by flying towards the sun on liberation from Noah's ark, when its upper surface assumed the hue of the sky above it and its lower plumage was scorched by the heat of the setting orb to the tint it now bears."21 

            In part IV of "Burnt Norton" even the sun is darkness in contrast to the kingfisher's light:  "The black cloud carries the sun away," (p. 121, l. 131).  Another legend associates the kingfisher with "stillness."  The proverbial "Halcyon days" originates in the well-known legend referred to by aristotle, Ovid, Pliny, etc.) of alcyone, daughter of Aeolus (the wind god), and wife of Ceyx.  In grief over Ceyx, lost at sea, Alcyone threw herself into the waters after him, when the gods, out of compassion, changed the two into birds, the Alcyon or kingfisher.  Through the influence of Aeolus, at the time of the bird's nesting (the winter solstice), "all gales were hushed and the sea calmed so that their nest might ride uninjured over the waves during the seven `Halcyon days.'  Variant or further development of the fable assigned to the halcyon itself the power of quelling storms."22  Eliot alludes to the "halcyon day" in "The Dry Salvages:"

Time the destroyer is time the preserver

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,

Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;

On a halcyon day it is merely a moment,

                                                (p. 133, ll. 117, 120-22).

In "burnt Norton," the immediate context of the kingfisher reference, "Chill / Fingers of yew be curled / Down on us?"  (p. 121, ll. 135-37), suggests not only the season of the becalmed sea, but also the pattern of death and resurrection latent in the myth.  Another belief associated with the kingfisher, that of divination of the source or direction of the wind ("it was supposed that the dead bird, carefully balanced and suspended by a single thread, would always turn its back toward the point of the compass from which the wind blew"23), further suggests the relationship of the bird to the wind, that is, the creative breath or spirit, the image of the "still point of the turning world."

            The symbolic richness of the kingfisher contributes considerably to the otherwise generally abstract language of the concluding lines of the fourth section of "Burnt Norton."  The image presents two of the fundamental paradoxes recurring throughout Eliot's later poetry:  the metaphysical concept of the still point at the center of the turning world and the transience and permanence of light.  We have traced the contrast of the temporal and eternal light through "Simeon" and the "Choruses."  Here the eternality of Light at the point of permanence in a world of flux, the revelational center of stillness which restores the ever-extinguished light of the world, is heralded.  The kingfisher image of "Burnt Norton" projects what the quester or the Fisher King, coming "at night like a broken king" ("Little Gidding," p. 138, l. 27), required:  the restoration of the light of the turning world in the revelatory Light of unchanging Spirit.  It is only after the grace of Light answering light (and darkness), "when the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one" ("Little Gidding," 145), that the "darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing," ("East Coker," p. 127, l. 257).

 

 

 

                                             Notes

 

                                ("The Heart of Light")

 

1.         George Williamson, A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot (New York, 1957), p. 60.

 

2.         Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, revised and enlarged edition (New York, n.d.), p. 210.

 

3.         Brewer's, p. 941.

 

4.         Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays:  A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago, 1965), p. 95.

 

5.         Smith, p. 95.

 

6.         Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York, 1957), p. 175.

 

7.         J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans., Jack Sage (New York, 1961), p. 22.

 

8.         T. F. Thiselton Dyer, English Folk-Lore (London, 1878), p. 115.

 

9.         Weston, p. 178.

 

10.       Weston, p. 182.

 

11.       Weston, p. 182

 

12.       Weston, p. 185.

 

13.       Ernest Ingersoll, Birds in Legend, Fable, and Folklore (London, 1932), p. 151.

 

14.       Smith, p. 95.

 

15.       Smith, p. 95.

 

16.       Williamson, p. 150.

 

17.       T. H. White, The Book of Beasts (New York, 1954), p. 151.

 

18.       Brewer's, p. 218.  (Another affirmative symbolic value attributed to the cock's cry is that cited by Ingersoll, p. 110:  "It is a tradition that at the moment of the Great Birth the cock crowed Christus natus est! Hence as early as the 4th century arose the belief in the crowing always on Christmas eve — a legend alluded to by Shakespeare:  somesay that ever `gainst that season comes / Whereon our Savior`s birth is celebrated, / The bird of dawning singeth all night long.'"

 

19.       Brewer`s, p. 480.

 

20.       Brewer`s, p. 912.

 

21.       "Kingfisher," Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th. ed., XV, 808.

 

22.       "Kingfisher," EB, 808.