Chapter One
The Sea and the Jungle: Patterns of Consciousness
Eliot is thought of as an urban poet critiquing Eliot, in his essay, The Function of Criticism (1923), posits that, like literature, "the function of criticism seemed to be essentially a problem of order too" (Eliot, 1950:12). Eliot outlines a theory of literature familiar to the readers of Tradition and the Individual Talent. In his essay on criticism, he affirms: "I thought of literature then, as I think of it now. . . not as a collection of writings of individuals, but as an 'organic whole,' as systems in relation to which and only in relation to which, individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance" (Eliot, 1950:12-13). The "organic whole" of Eliot's work and its relationship to the "organic whole" of literature is a fundamental assumption of this study. Within this framework, I will examine the pattern of animal references in the poetry. While the initial unit of reference throughout is the context of an individual poem in which a particular animal image or cluster of animal images occurs, it is the relationship to larger pattern of references that adds a dimension of extensional significance.
Eliot is thought of as an urban poet, critic of the twentieth-century city as a wasteland devoid of natural vitality, so to examine the poetry for its nature imagery, especially its animal references, may at first appear an unlikely path for inquiry. However like all the antithetical tensions in the poetry, the natural world and its mythology and legends are presented in the poetry with an evolving significance enlightening the poetry.
In this first chapter the immediate focus is upon the early poems of Eliot, but the body of his work, nevertheless, informs the patterns developed in the first phase of his writings. Throughout the poetry of Eliot a concern with levels of consciousness is a central issue. In this chapter we shall consider the way Eliot's animal references pattern with two metaphors of consciousness developed in the early poems: "the sea" and "the jungle." The realms of "sea" and "jungle" represent polar psychic landscapes depicted by animal figures ranging from "a pair of ragged claws" to "Apeneck Sweeney."
Creatures of the Sea
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917), textually complex and varied, presents the "sea-drenched" nature of psychic reality at crucial points in Prufrock's interior drama. The presence of sea imagery builds throughout the poem. What appears initially as the incidental detail of sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells (p.3, l.7), finally fits into an intricate pattern of sea imagery present in the poem.
The image of oyster-shells already suggests "hollowness" (compare sawdust: tree shavings, life symbol atomized into a medium to absorb moisture). Beyond this, the reference to oyster-shells suggests William Cowper's "The Poet, the Oyster and Sensitive Plant":
'Twere better to be born a stone,
Of ruder shape, and feeling none,
Than with a tenderness like mine
And sensibilities so fine!
Ah, hapless wretch! Condemn'd to dwell,
Forever in my native shell,
Ordained to move when others please
Not for my own content or ease
But toss'd and buffeted about,
Now in the water and now out.
The desire for invulnerability, to be a stone and yet escape the native shell, the sense of impotence suggests the plight of Prufrock. The tenderness of Prufrock's sensibility finally causes him to wish himself enshelled, disembodied, dissociated, insentient:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
(P. 5, ll. 73-74)
The surrealistic image of ragged claws scuttling in the abyss of silent seas objectifies Prufrock's desire to escape into a pre-reflective consciousness. (Cf. "Murder in the Cathedral," p. 207: "I have lain on the floor of the sea and breathed with the breathing of the sea-anemone, swallowed with the ingurgitation of the sponge.") A similar desire, though in a significantly different context, is expressed in "Burnt Norton," p.120, ll. 117-24:
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude
World not world, but that which is not world.
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit.
In "Burnt Norton" descent is the prescribed mode of redemption willed by the spiritual quester. The descent sought is the dark way of St. John leading to union with the ultimate verity, the positive good after the willing surrender of all that would lead the quester away from his goal of divine union. In "Prufrock," unlike "Burnt Norton," the descent is one sought in despair; it is a mode of psychic nullification rather than of spiritual rebirth. Again in contrast with "Burnt Norton," "Prufrock's" imagery of descent into a world not world is concrete. The language is highly connotative of a sense of destruction, an urge towards annihilation of consciousness: ragged claws (bent, jagged, broken appendages for grasping, clutching), scuttling (alarmed, hurried movement of flight), across the floors (a crossing at the lowest strata of temporal existence) of silent seas (mute, lifeless, rather than primal procreative source). The "silent seas" of "Prufrock" contrast characteristically with the dissonant seas of "Sweeney Erect," p. 25, l.4: "Faced by the snarled and yelping seas." In "Prufrock" the entire image cluster suggests a withdrawal from life, an ultimate ennui with the world of human relationships. It is this sense of human isolation that is the recurrent motif of the early poetry (e.g., "The Waste Land," "each in his prison"). The "silent sea" is a negative realm suggestive of destruction rather than creation or redemption. As Genesius Jones perceives, "in the early poetry we are most often at the bottom of a silent sea. This is not a silence after noise, but a brute silence which has never been stirred to full life. Here the value of life is not so much missed as ignored" (Jones, 1964:203).
Again an analysis of the progression of imagery in Eliot's poetry reveals a significant contrast between the silence of the early poetry and the stillness of the later poems. While the silence of the early poems suggests an ultimate negation of life, the stillness of the later poems indicates the eternal center of all reality:
Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there,
("Burnt Norton," p.121, ll. 142-50).
The ragged claws of Prufrock lack the form, the completed pattern by which to reach the stillness.
The image of the scuttling claws projects the psychic or spiritual condition of Prufrock, his retrogressive movement, his restless night of going through the muttering retreats of the unreal city. This theme of departure contrasts with Prufrock's psychic or spiritual need. He has not found the way which is
not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future,
("Burnt Norton," p. 121, ll. 126-29)
For Prufrock is sick with desire, and, as the psychic quester of "Burnt Norton" discovers:
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself
Only the cause and end of movement.
Timeless, and undesiring.
(p.122, ll. 164-68)
It is the lovesong of Prufrock alone which is still, mute with a silence before, rather than after speech.
Seen in the image of the ragged claws scuttling through silent seas is an insular realm where the war between Prufrock's vital, instinctual being (his desire to force the moment to its crisis, p.6, l.85) and his rational self or ego (would it have been worth it, after all, p.6, l.87) might cease. As Elizabeth Drew contends, "here on one level, the claws suggest the longing for uncomplicated animal existence. They can clutch their prey and make off with it, without any preface of `Do I dare?' or `Shall I say?'" 2 The "prudery" of Prufrock finally does not allow the awful daring of a moment's surrender/ Which an age of prudence can never retract./ By which only we might have existed, ("The Waste Land," V, p. 49, ll. 403-05).
While in "Prufrock" the creatures of the silent sea are disembodied shells or ragged claws, the whole animal, the crab, appears in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night":
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of stick which I held him,
(p. 15, ll. 43-45)
Here the sea becomes a pool, suggesting the shrunken, fixed world of the speaker. Ironically, it is the crab that acts. Even the crab which buries itself in the sand to avoid exposure, which moves, if at all, in a sideways or backwards motion,3 exhibits greater responsiveness than the other, "shelled" beings of the windy night (e.g. "the woman/ Who hesitates toward you with the corner of her eye/ Twisting like a crooked pin," p. 14, ll. 16-17, 21-22).
Presented in the crab image is a parody of communion sought; "an old crab with barnacles on his back" (figurative of degeneration, degradation4) connects by "gripping" (instinctual reflex) a "stick" (dead or dry remnant of a tree). (Crab itself is from L.G., "to scratch or claw," O.E.D.) The whole event is a memory "thrown up high and dry," part of "a crowd of twisted things" (p, 14, ll. 23-24) in the desperate consciousness of a being whose "floors of memory" are "dissolved," losing "all its clear relations / Its divisions and precisions," (p.14, ll. 5-7). The encounter with the crab is the only contact with life the Speaker of the windy night recalls. But the image of the old crab attacked by parasitic creatures suggests the tendency of life towards decay. (The relationship with physical degeneration and parasitic or malignant growth is further suggested by the association of crab with the disease cancer.) Again, the crab is itself emblematic of the inconsequential. (The crab, in Greek mythology, "nipped Hercules as he fought the Lernean Hydra; Hercules paused only long enough to crush his annoyer and then resumed his flight. Hera, Hercules' enemy, rewarded the crab by placing it among the stars [becoming the faint elliptical constellation of Cancer, containing the Gate of Men,' entrance-way for souls coming from heaven to inhabit their human bodies], but it remained crushed and inconspicuous." 5
In "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" we are presented with the disintegration of consciousness, with a view of a mind which has dissolved its own identity and deposits itself upon objects (e.g. "A broken spring in a factory yard. / Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left / Hard and curled and ready to snap," p.14, ll.30-32). Like Prufrock, the speaker of "Windy Night" is damned to the inferno of the self. For both dwellers of the "Unreal City," though with varying degrees of consciousness, escape into the primal existence of the crab seems a parodic mode of salvation with communion as a perpetual possibility.
In contrast to the elemental despair figured by the scuttling claws and barnacled crab is the mythic "pastoralism" of the sea, Prufrock's vision of "sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown" in the "chambers of the sea," p. 7, ll. 124, 125:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,
(p. 7, l. 129)
The mermaids in themselves are supernatural, half woman and half fish, merging the human with the creatures of the deep. As projections of the supernatural, they contrast with John the Baptist and Lazarus. The mermaids represent the perversion of the ideal of some kind of spiritual relationship, unmediated and regenerative. As J. E. Cirlot notes, they symbolize the "imagination enticed . . . towards the primitive strata of life."6 They are creatures allurement for mankind, emblems of sex, vitality, beauty, and reflect the erotic basis of consciousness:
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back.
When the wind blows the water white and black.
(p. 7, ll. 121-22)
Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, tells of the association of the mermaid with Marion, sea-goddess, identified with Aphrodite, "love‑goddess risen from the sea." Graves also notes that "in English ballad poetry the mermaid stands for the bitter‑sweetness of love and for the danger run by susceptible mariners . . . . Her mirror and comb stand for vanity and heartlessness."7 In "Prufrock" the mermaids' song recalls the lovesong Prufrock is incapable of singing, becomes a further demonstration of frustrated desire for communion. Even in the realm of Prufrock's private imagination the mermaid's song is not to him: "I do not think that they will sing to me," (p. 7, l, 120). Ironically, the song of the mermaids, like that of the sirens with which they are often identified legendarily has a power to cause a psychic transformation to entice the listener to forget all else, to abandon the self in the sweetness of their alluring, if destructive, song. 8 Prufrock cannot say, as can Antipholus, in The Comedy of Errors:
Oh, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note,
To drown me in thy sister's flood of tears,
Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote,
Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs,
And as a bed I'll take them, and there lie,
And, in that glorious supposition, think
He gains by death that hath such means to die.
Let Love, being light, be drowned if she sink!
(Act III, scene ii, ll. 45-52)
Prufrock, as Elizabeth Drew notes, has only a "glimpse of a life‑rhythm where living creatures delight spontaneously in their natural environment, mastering it and being carried along with its vital energies, (it is this which) Mr. Prufrock's `I' yearns for and will never achieve." 9 Grover Smith concurs, holding that Prufrock "has neither human love nor rejected it, but has cultivated an illusory notion of it which has paralyzed his will and kept him from turning desire into action." 10 Prufrock is finally caught between desire and fulfillment, another "old man in a dry month," knowing only "reconsidered passion," "Gerontion," p. 122, l. 42). Prufrock's consciousness curses him to hear the haunting call of the fabulous creatures of the deep, while he is doomed never to attain communion with the sources of that inner depth which projects them, and out of which alone can come the song of transformation. The mermaids will not sing to Prufrock for they sing only to those who might respond, to the heroic, the living; that is, the "mask" rather than the reality of Prufrock. For Prufrock has already confronted the "silent seas," being himself only half living and half dead, growing, like Tithonus, ever older ("I grow old . . . I grow old") with the sleep of time:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea‑girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
(p.7, ll. 124-26)
The spatial relationships in this final image indicates a psychic or spiritual inversion. The progression of the imagery from water into air suggests a birth pattern. But the birth into the world of exterior reality represents death in terms of the poem. The failure to attain redemption is suggested by the irony of the equation of "waking" and "drowning." Prufrock, who has known all the torment of the psychic quester, realizes no resolution all he has undergone is a mock romantic fulfillment of a "death by water" (Cf. the sea burial of the vegetation cults), out of which he can only be "still born" ("till human voices wake us and we drown"). Prufrock is psychically "drowned" by reality, metaphorically by air, by the suffocation of life as long as he lingers in the chambers of the silent sea, in the dream kingdom where the fantasy of "sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown" can remain an artificial paradise. The sea-girls finally represent, as Cirlot notes of the sirens, "the torment of desire leading to self-destruction of the spirit by bewitchment." Prufrock's "vision has been a delusion into whose waters he has sunk deeper and deeper until, recalled by the intolerable real world by human voices in a drawing-room, he has waked and drowned in his subjective world of dreams. Like legendary sailors lulled asleep by mermaids or sirens and then dragged down to perish in the sea, Prufrock has awakened too late," states Grover Smith. 13 Smith further cites John Masefield's "Cardigan Bay," from Salt-Water Ballads (1902) as a possibly relevant reverberation in the last three lines of "Prufrock":
Delicate, cool sea-weeds, green and amber‑brown,
In beds where shaken sunlight slowly filters down
On many a drowned seventy-four, many a sunken town,
And the whitening of the dead men's skulls. 14
Prufrock finally recognizes he has lived spuriously in unreality. Like the drowned Phoenician sailor, Prufrock finds in life, as Phlebas found in death
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.
("The Waste Land," IV, p.46, ll. 314-.7)
The negative function of the sea in "Prufrock" finds its counterpoint in the sea imagery of the later poetry. Contrasting with the "silent seas" of "Prufrock" and recalling the "snarled and yelping seas" of "Sweeney Erect" (p. 25, l. 4), is the analysis of the "voices of the sea" in "The Dry Salvages":
The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard; the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water.
("The Dry Salvages," p. 131, ll. 24-31).
The imagery is of destruction subsumed in creation: the "menace and caress" of the sea. The dominant vehicle is both "Sweeney Erect" and "The Dry Salvages" is that of the pained cries of the dog: the sea "lulls," "yelps," "whines," imagistically presenting not only the sound of the sea, its many voices, but also the menace of the "wave that breaks on water." (The imagery possibly includes a reference to the mythological association of dog as "the companion of the dead on their `Night Sea Crossing,' which is associated with . . . resurrection." 15) The concern with death and the quest for redemption is explicit in "The Dry Salvages":
Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
(p. 131, ll. 51-4)
The echoing answer of the "voices of the sea" points to the deceptiveness of time, told in the paradoxical "silenced sound" of the "voiceless wailing:"
Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
there is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
(p. 132, ll. 69-72; 81-4).
As Drew notes, "In `The Dry Salvages' the emblem of time is water, appearing in human life as the river of racial experience which runs in man's blood, and the sea of the vast flux of time on which he is afloat, and the life-element itself from which he developed."16 The sea is itself timeless, or it "measures time not out time" (p. 131, l. 35), a time revealed in what it "tosses" upon the "beach":
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone,
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men.
(p. 130, ll. 15-24)
The counterpoint of river and sea, the rhythms of man and of earth, reveals in destruction ("torn seine," "shattered lobsterpot," "broken oar") endless creation: "starfish", "hermit crab," whale." These creatures of the primal sea represent a pattern not to be lost, as "our losses"of "broken oar/and gear of foreign dead men" are lost. Rather the beached life, leaving the whirlpool of the sea exhibits to our curiosity the timeless realm of forms unending. As Grover Smith comments, "The sea is the great unfathomed reservoir of the world's dateless evolution, encroaching society, continually tossing ashore 'hints of earlier and other creation,' and often engulfing men by reversion in its abysses."17
The hints of earlier and other creation are in themselves part of the "ground swell, that is and was from the beginning," (p. 131, l. 48). Suggested in the compounds "star" and "fish" (and, to a lesser extent, in "hermit" and "crab") is the relationship between the celestial and the physical' a communion of heaven and earth. The fish symbol, as Jessie Weston's lengthy discussion of the fish symbol in From Ritual to Romance demonstrates, is a life symbol. Weston notes that the fish is associated with
deities who were held to be specially connected
with the origin and preservation of life . . .
who were supposed to lead men back from the
shadows of death to life . . .([Hence] the fish
symbol of early Christianity, the icthys anagram
as applied to Christ, the title of 'fishers of
Men' bestowed upon the Apostles, the Papal ring
of fishermen . . . [and the Judeo-Christian practice
of the sacramental fish-meal]: the tradition that at the end of the world, Messiah will catch the great fish Leviathan, and divide its flesh as food among the faithful. 18)
The whale (whose mammalian backbone, like the compounds "star‑fish" and "hermit crab," suggests a merging of different realms of form and time). It symbolizes, as the "cosmic fish" the whole of the formal physical universe." (Cirlot records that the whale also suggests the progress the of the world across the sea of `unformed' realities or worlds dissolved or yet unformed.)19
The hints of earlier and other creation reveal, in their natural and symbolic association tie permanence of life beyond the seeming flux of forms in time (cf. "the tolling bell"). The sea which "reaches into granite," and its life which reaches into rock, proclaim, beyond the "silent seas" of the early poetry, in a voice descanting ("though not to the ear, / The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language," p. 134, ll. 149-50), the endless journey of life:
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who come to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgements of the sea, Or
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
(p. 135, ll. 165-72)
The quester here, unlike the psychic quester of the early poetry, finds in the sea "the trial and judgment" of primordial life unending (see "not fare well / but fare forward"). This is not the "silent seas" of "scuttling claws" sought by the retreating consciousness of a Prufrock. The hits of earlier and other creation seen in the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage (its "starfish," "hermit crab," "whale's backbone") is finally of
the impossible union.
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled.
(p. 136, ll. 220-3).
In "East Coker" this final vision of reconcilement of time and eternity seen in the "impossible union of spheres of existence" is exhibited by the creatures of its "sea of life":
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is
my beginning.
("East Coker," p. 129, ll. 202-9)
Here is a "stillness" not of "silent seas", rather of reconcilement: a further union, the deeper communion of flux and permanence ("we must be still and still moving"). Now the dark cold and empty desolation of the silent seas becomes transposed into the ":many voices of the sea": "The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise." The "petrel," the small sea bird whose name is etymologically associated with St. Peter, "Fisher of Men" ("petrel": orig. pittoral, L. possible dim. of Petrus, St. Peter, O.E.D.), creature of the air, joins the porpoise, the sea dweller (the "most common cetacean in the seas round the British Isles"20) imagistically uniting "spheres of existence."
While the porpoise fits into the general pattern of fish as life symbol, it also relates to the special symbolism of the dolphin with which it is often equated. (The Greek dolphis designates both porpoise and dolphin, for example.) Cirlot notes that "the dolphin by itself is an allegory of salvation, inspired in the ancient legends which show it as friend to man."21 In "The Waste Land" Eliot uses the image of the dolphin in an ironic context as perhaps another "withered stump of time":
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the colored stone
In which sad light a carved dolphin swam.
("The Waste Land," II, p. 40 ll. 94-6)
The setting of the dolphin is the Cleopatra section of "A Game of Chess," and thus possibly relevant is the reference to "dolphin" in Shakespeare's "Anthony and Cleopatra," V, ii, 88-90:
His delights
Were dolphinlike, they showed his back above
The element they lived in.
Recalled is a mode of life not "drowned" by "human voices," a time when "delights" like "dolphins" dwelled "above / The element they lived in," rather than in the silent "chambers of the sea." but the dolphin of "The Waste Land" is seen in the "sad light" of the "withered stump of time." Far from the image of delight, the dolphin of "The Waste Land" exists in the Unreal City as but a "carved" figure, the fixed, abstractable form of what is generally a symbol of ever-renewing life.
It is the realm of the porpoise, not the "carved dolphin," which finally redeems the "withered stump of time": "In my end is my beginning" ("East Coker," p. 129, l.209). The form of the completed pattern is endless, they cycle of death and birth "with no before and after, / But a lifetime burning in every moment" ("East Coker," p. 129, ll. 193-4), making it impossible to see "the moment of . . . greatness flicker" ("Prufrock," p.6, l.84). Rather than "linger in the chambers of the sea," old men (in the spiritual sense) ought to be explorers (spiritual questers). For as the conclusion of the "Four Quartets" reveals, the exploration leads to the Paradisal Garden of Innocence restored:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time,
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning:
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea,
("Little Gidding," p. 145, ll. 241-53)
The old men of the "Four Quartets," unlike the old men of the Unreal City — its Gerontions and Prufrocks, are explorers finding "another intensity, a further union" which transforms the dark cold and empty desolation, the dry land and silent sea, into the mystic reality heard "in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea."
Notes
Creatures of the Sea
1. Genesius Jones, Approach to the Purpose: A Study of the Poetry of T. S, Eliot (New York, 1964), p. 203.
2. Elizabeth Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of his Poetry, (Nev York, 1944), p. 3, 3. Cf. Aristophanes, Pax, 1083. "You cannot make a crab walk straight", or Hamlet to Polonius: "Yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go backwards,"
4. Barnacles generally attach themselves to inanimate objects, rocks, wharves, etc. Barnacles also suggest a form of torture, O.E,D.
5. Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, Ed., Maria Leach (New York, 1950), p. 185.
6. J. S. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, tran., Jack Sage (New York, 1961), p. 185.
7. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York, 1966), p. 185.
8. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, rev. and enlrg. ed. (New York, n. d,), p. 840.
9. Drew, p. 35.
10. Grover Smith, T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, (Chicago, 1965), p. 17.
11. As Drew (p.36) suggests: Prufrock has "withdrawn into passive daydream, where the 'arms that are braceleted and white and bare' caress and crown him."
12. Cirlot, pp. 183-4
13. Smith, p. 20
14. Smith, note 13, p. 305.
18. Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York, 1957), pp. 124-8.
19. Cirlot, 102.
20. "Porpoise," Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th. ed., XXII, 106.
21. Cirlot, 81.
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