Eliot - Chapter Three

  

                                              Chapter Three

                          "The Dark Night":  Quest for Redemption

 

            While the recurrent motif of Eliot's middle poems, as well as many of the early poems, is that of the spiritual quest for redemption, in the later poems the quest for psychic and spiritual salvation becomes the dominant mythos of the poetry.  In the later poems the pattern of spiritual dissociation recedes, while the secular landscape of the early poems is ritualized into a psychic and spiritual realm through which the quester seeks a transcendent confrontation.  Having reached a nadir of dissolution seen in the imagery of drought, flux and malice, the movement in the later poems present a consciousness generally devoid of secular involvement, concentrated on the spiritual and symbolic aspects of experience.  Now central to the pattern discernible in the animal references is a ritualization of the quest theme in a context of transcendent ordering of consciousness, a movement away from the imagery of the profane world envisioned in the earlier poetry.  The tension of the transition from the experiential landscape of the earlier poems to that of the last poems structures the animal references we shall be examining in this chapter:  The first section of the chapter deals with the serpent references (predominantly those of the "Choruses" from "The Rock") through which the ritualization of the quest for redemption may be discerned.  While the focus of this section is again on the imagery of malice, here, in the context of "The Dark Night," the imagery marks a progression from the dominant motif of the negation rendered in Malice I.  The second section of this chapter considers the recurrent pattern of references to the devouring beast; its thematic function in the context of the spiritual quest, as well as its significance in terms of the patterns of the last poems (discussed in Chapter Four, "The Heart of Light") will be examined.

 

The Serpent:  Malice II

 

            While by no means an extensive symbol in Eliot's poetry, the references to the serpent are suggestive of the language of ritual religion which has increasing significance in the later poems.  although explicit references to the serpent occur primarily in Eliot's "Choruses" for his experimental religious pageant, "The Rock," suggestions of serpent-associated imagery may be discerned throughout the poetry.  For example, the reference to the rat in "The Waste Land" which we considered in the previous chapter.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank,

                                    (p. 43, ll. 187-8)

suggests the serpent of Genesis 3:

            And the Lord God said unto the serpent,  Because thou hast done this, thou are cursed Above all cattle, and above every beast of  the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. (14)

So too, the cat in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," though further removed from the mythic context of the middle and later poems, is described through actions figurative of a serpent-like creature partaking of the processes of dissolution in the corrupted city of man:

"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,

Slips out its tongue

And devours a morsel of rancid butter."

                                    (p. 5, ll, 35-7)

Other serpent-related imagery might be pointed out, the creeping creatures of "A Cooking Egg," for example, but their occurrence in the early poems is submerged or incidental.  However Eliot makes an interesting use of the figure of the A"mortal snake" in the third section of the minor poem, "Five-Finger Exercises," short enough to quote in its entirety:

The long light shakes across the lake,

The forces of the morning quake,

The dawn is slant across the lawn,

Here is no eft or mortal snake

But only sluggish duck and drake,

I have seen the morning shine,

I have had the Bread and Wine,

Let the feathered mortals take

That which is their mortal due,

Pinching bread and finger too,

Easier had than squirming worm;

For I know, and so should you

That soon the enquiring worm shall try

Our well-preserved complacency.

            ("Lines to a Duck in the Park" p. 92)

            Grover Smith calls the piece an exercise in pure allusiveness and imitation, a musical experiment preparatory of the "music

 of the "Four Quartets."  As allusions Smith cites Tennyson's "The Splendor Falls" from The Princess, while he holds that the "eft and snake" invokes Tennyson's The Holy Grail.  Other sources Smith detects include Yeats's  "Host of the Air,

 section four of Baudelaire's "Le Voyage," Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle," and Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress." 1  Smith's analysis of the resonances within the poem is suggestive, but the tenor of the lines addressed "To a Duck in the Park" is far from that of the Tennyson or Shakespeare allusions, for example.  Eliot's poem is structured through ironic juxtapositions.  The speaker compares his own partaking of the Bread and Wine of Communion with the feeding of the "feathered mortals" "pinching bread and finger too."  In a landscape emphasizing the renewal of light ("The long light shakes across the lake, / The forces of the morning quake, / The dawn is slant across the lawn / . . . . / I have seen the morning shine") animal mortality ("eft or mortal snake," "feathered mortals") is contrasted with the eternality of the natural cycle.  The consciousness of the renewal of light to the land, or of spiritual life to the man through the ritual of communion invokes a reality beyond the comprehension of the creatures of the park.  Yet even for the speaker the psychic and spiritual reality of renewal implicit in the scene is perceived against a "well-preserved complacency." For the park, unlike the Eden garden, even in dawn light, is one in which the mortal snake is demythologized into a "sluggish duck and drake." (Aside from denoting the species of water bird, the expression "duck and drake" signifies a pastime of ricocheting stones over the surface of the water so that it shall skip as many times as possible before sinking, figurative of idle or reckless handling of something considered valuable, O.E.D.) The final knowledge of the speaker is one shared by the "feathered mortals":  "For I know, and so should you / That soon the enquiring worm shall try / Our well-preserved complacency."  Ultimately it is the counter (physical rather than spiritual) reality of the "squirming, enquiring worm" which completes the food ritual parodying Holy Communion.  As the worm receives its "dues" from all the mortal creatures of the park.  (Cf. Hamlet, IV, 3:  "Your worm is your only emperor for diet; we fat all creatures else to fat us; and we fat ourselves for maggots.")  As Cirlot notes, the worm, in its connection with death and with the biological stages of dissolution, is like the snake, symbolic of that which destroys or kills. 2 (Cf. "Murder in the Cathedral," p. 208:  "What is woven in the loom of fate / . . . . / Is woven also in our veins, our brains, / Is woven like a pattern of living worms.")  Etymologically, worm and snake are closely related; indeed, "worm" formerly signified a dragon or great serpent, especially that of Teutonic and old Norse legend. 3 But unlike the snake, the figure of the worm excludes the mythic significance of the serpent of the Judeo-Christian tradition and generally lacks the resonances of the language of ritual religion invoked by the snake references in the "Choruses from 'The Rock.'"

            The figure of the snake or serpent functions throughout Eliot's "Choruses" in an explicitly religious context.  In the

"Choruses" many of the concerns of the earlier poems are represented in direct religious terms.  For example, the unreal, fallen city of The Waste Land' is now made concrete as Jerusalem:

And he grieved for the broken city, Jerusalem;

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

So he went, with a few, to Jerusalem,

And there, by the dragon's well, by the dung gate,

By the fountain gate, by the king's pool,

Jerusalem lay waste, consumed with fire;

No place for a beast to pass.

There were enemies without to destroy him,

And spies and self-seekers within,

When he and his men laid their hands to rebuilding the                                                          wall.

                                                (IV, p. 104)

            "The Rock's" Chorus of seven male and ten female figures speak as "the voice of the Church of God."  The choruses and dialogues of the pageant play, as Eliot's prefatory note to the work indicates, were written for a scenario devised by E. Martin Browne and the Reverend R. Webb, to be performed at Sadler's Wells Theater in the Spring of 2934 on behalf of the Forty-five Churches Fund of the Diocese of London.  Eliot claims literal authorship of only one scene of the play and of the choruses, which he acknowledges as expressing his own sentiments.  (T. S. Eliot, The Rock  [New York, 29234], p. 3 [Citations of The Rock below are in reference to this edition.]) (As Carol H. Smith notes, Eliot's "membership in the Church of England not only made him aware of his Christian duty to defend his faith, but it also placed him in a group of active Christian theorists within the church who, though few, were extremely vocal." 4) The scene in the fourth chorus (part of which is quoted above), describing the rebuilding of Jerusalem, functions as an historic parallel to the contemporary need for the restoration of the Temple of God, "the Body of Christ incarnate" (p. 101):

Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either                               rotten or ripe.

And the Church must be forever building, and always                                   decaying, and always being restored.

                                                (p.1010

Literally the need is for the building of churches:

Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore;

Let the work not delay, time and the arm not waste;

Let the clay be dug from the pit, let the saw cut the stone,

Let the fire not be quenched in the forge.

                                                (p. 102)

The church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without;

For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while there is time of prosperity

The people will neglect the temple, and in time of adversity they will decry it.

                                                (P. 101)

The natural or temporal direction is toward decay, the wasted temple by the dragon's well.

            The dragon, like most serpents in the Western tradition, is generally symbolic of the principle of evil:  "In the hebrew sacred books the serpent or dragon is the source of death and sin, a conception which was adopted in the New Testament and so passed into Christian mythology . . . As  an ecclesiastical symbol it has remained consistent to the present day.  Wherever it is represented it means the principle of evil, the devil and his works." 5  "The word was used in the Middle Ages as the symbol of sin in general and paganism in particular, the metaphor being derived from Revelation 12:9 (where, in the allegory of the fall from heaven, the dragon appears as "the great dragon. . . . that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world") and Psalm 91:13, where it is said that the saints 'shall trample the dragon under their feet.' " 6  The dragon of the well in the Choruses suggests further the etymological association of dragon and "guarding" or "watching" (the Greek word drakon comes from a verb meaning "to see," "to look at" or "watch":  "In classical legend the idea of watching is retained in the story of the dragon who guards the golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides." 7)  The direct source of the reference in the "Choruses" is Nehemiah 2:13:  "And I went out by night by the gate of the valley, even before the dragon well, and to the dug port, and viewed the walls of Jerusalem, which were broken down, and the gates thereof were consumed with fire."  The context again is a city laid waste, denied the waters of the well of life:  "Why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers' sepulchers, lieth waste, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire? (2:3). "then said I unto them, Ye see the distress that we are in, how Jerusalem lieth waste, and the gates thereof are burned with fire: come, and let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we be no more a reproach," (2:17).    The theme of building that which, being subject to the principle symbolized by the dragon, tends toward decay, structures the work.  Suggested throughout is the necessity to combat the chaos dragon, creature and creator of the darkness, eternal enemy of mankind and co-author of his Fall, ever to be slain by the culture heroes of each age. 8  hence the Builder's song of the pageant juxtaposed with the Lord's Prayer:

Ill done and undone,

London so fair.

We will build London

Bright in dark air,

With new bricks and mortar

Beside the Thames bord

Queen of Island and Water,

A House of Our Lord.

                        ("The Rock" (New York, 1934), p. 19)

As the Workmen chant, "If men do not build / How shall they live? / . . . . / . . . In this street / There is no beginning, no movement, no peace and no end / But noise without speech, food without taste. / Without delay, without haste / We would build the beginning and the end of this street.  / We build the meaning," ("The Rock," p.11).  The contemporary "timekept City," like the old Jerusalem, needs forever the restoration of meaning to experience:

. . . thousands travel daily to the timekept City:

Where My Word is unspoken,

In the land of lebelias and tennis flannels

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

The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court.

And the wind shall say:  "Here were decent godless                                                  people:

Their only monument the asphalt road

And a thousand lost golf balls."

                                    ("The Rock," p. 30)

For

Those who sit in a house of which the use is

            forgotten: are like snakes that lie on moldering stairs, content in the sunlight . . .

And the others . . . they say, "This house is a nest of           serpents, let us destroy it."

                                    ("The Rock," p. 39).

            Creation and destruction, the counter principles of God and the Serpent to which man is drawn, forms the dynamics of man's experience.  As the Agitator says in the drama,

                        Well, I'll tell you what you can do right now, see?  Sabotagin'!  that's the word.  As soon as them soulless an' 'eartless workmen as is so pig-'eaded 'as knocked off for the night. an' everythin' is quiet, you go an' mess the place up as much as you can.  Break up the bricks, muck up the mortar, and above over the walls where they ain't set yet.  That'll 'elp the show 'em we're in earnest!

                                                                        ("the Rock," pp. 40-1).

or as the Chorus chants,

. . . the Son of Man was not crucified once for all,

The blood of the martyrs not shed once for all,

The lives of the Saints not given once for all:

but the Son of Man is crucified always

And there shall be Martyrs and Saints.

And if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps

We must first build the steps:

And if the Temple is to be cast down

We must first build the Temple.

                                    ("The Rock," p. 42).

Although "man is joined spirit and body /. . . . / Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple" (p. 76), "we are encompassed with snakes" (p. 39).  (As Cirlot notes, "the snake is symbolic not of personal sin [or of personal sin only] but of the principle of evil inherent in all worldly things . . . [Hence the allegory of the] snake is basic Biblical symbolism of the Tree of Life encircled by the snake and signifying the principle of evil; [suggesting] . . . the close relationship between life and corruption as the source of all evil . . . [the] subversion of the spirit that brings about death of the soul."9  We are encompassed by snakes taking various forms:

. . . encompassed with enemies armed with the

                                    spears of mistaken ideals;

Encompassed with enemies armed with the swords

                                    of the will to power,

Encompassed by enemies armed with the deadly

                                    gas of indifference.

                                    (p. 78)

Man, caught between a world encompassed with snakes, and the Temple of Light, experiences what the Rock ("Watcher, Stranger, Witness, Critic [p.8], St. Peter and the Church) foreknows:

I have known two worlds, I have known two worlds of                                death,

All that you suffer, I have suffered before,

And suffer always, even to the end of the world.

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

There shall be always the Church and the World

And the Heart of Man

Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and                                     chosen,

Valiant, ignoble, dark and full of light

Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate.

                                    (p. 47)

And man, as the Chorus declares, "in their various ways" must, "shivering and fluttering," swinging between darkness and Light,

. . . struggle in torment towards God

Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing,

and man without God is a seed upon the wind:

driven this way and that, and finding no place

of lodgement and germination.

They followed the light and the shadow, and the

light led them forward to light and the

shadow led them to darkness,

Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils

rather than nothing: crying for life beyond

life, for ecstasy not of the flesh.

                                    (p. 49)

            F. O. Matthiessen, in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, notes that "it is one of (Eliot's fundamental assumptions that men cannot avoid worshipping something, whether they know it or not." 10 The contemporary problem approached from varying perspectives in so many of Eliot's poems, that of the failure of belief, is rendered directly in "The Rock," as Eliot has the Chorus expound,

Men have left God not for other gods, they say,

            but for not god; and this has never happened

            before

That men both deny god and worship gods, professing         first Reason,

And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or     Race, or Dialectic.

The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells

            upturned, what have we to do

But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards

In an age which advances progressively backwards?

                                    (p. 51)

Eliot has Blomfield, bishop of London, Builder of many churches, "who built in a time which was no better time than this" (p. 53), denounce those "preaching something they called neutrality in religion (as performing) nothing less than treason against the truth!" (p. 54) Again the Chorus laments that "our age is an age of moderate virtue / And of moderate vice / When men will not lay down the Cross / Because they will never assume it," (p. 57).  "Like all men in all places," among the hearers of the Word are "a few good men, / Many who were evil, / And most who were neither," (p. 56).  The worshipping of snakes of trees, of devils rather than nothing, which in primitive or anthropological terms was related to the basic or archetypal performances of man confronting the conditions of his humanity, partaking in the ritual drama of primordial gestures of tribal mythology, 11  is seemingly demythologized in the modern world.  Our age, advancing "progressively backwards," has disguised its snake cults into the godheads of "Reason, Money, Power, Life, Race or Dialectic," its rituals into the taking of tea and toast.  Man, without God, with his Church disowned, both denies God and worships gods.  (Cf. Revelation 13:

            And they worshipped the dragon which gave

power unto the beast:  and they worshipped

the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast?

Who is able to make war with him? (4)

            And all that dwell upon the earth shall

worship him, whose names are not written in

the book of life of the Lamb slain from the

foundation of the world. (8)

In the "timekept City" to which "thousands travel daily" only the reality of time, which the Rock urges man to heed only the reality of time, which "thousands travel daily" only the reality of time, which the Rock urges man to heed (e.g., "In every moment of time you live where two worlds cross, / In every moment you live at a point of intersection, / Remember, living in time, you must live also now in Eternity," p. 52) can secure man from the realm of the beast:

The great snake lies ever half awake, at the bottom of the pit of the world, curled

In folds of himself until he awakens in hunger and moving his head to right and to left prepares for his hour to devour.

but the Mystery of Iniquity is a pit too deep for mortal eyes to plumb.  Come

Ye out from among those who prize the serpent's golden eyes,

The worshippers, self-given sacrifice of the snake,

                                    (p. 52)

            the vision of the pit of darkness, realm of the mythic snake, counter principle of extinction, spiritual death, worshipped in self-sacrifice by those prizing the golden eyes 12 of the beast which would devour them, concludes the pattern of references we have been tracing throughout the "Choruses."  The language here, again, is that of ritual religion; the poetry of the quest for spiritual redemption is built through Biblical resonances, liturgical rhythms in cadence with "the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the season" (p. 85). 13  It is through such orchestration that the solitary struggle in the eternal Heart of Man, swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate, is conveyed.  In this context, even the vision of that primal darkness projected in the recurrent specter of the serpent, leads ultimately toward the realm in which there is "night no more," but only "Light of Light" (p. 86), when the serpent shall be vanquished by the apocalypse of the "Lamb" (p. 86).

 

                                                       Notes

                                        (The Serpent:  Malice II)

 

1.         Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays:  A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago, 1965), p. 254.

2.         J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans., Jack Sage (New York, 1961), p. 359.

3.         Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, revised and enlarged edition (New York, n.d.), pp. 969-70.

4.         Carol H. Smith, T. S. Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice (Princeton, 1963), p. 78.

5.         "Dragon," Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., VIII, p. 467.

6.         Brewer's, p. 304.

7.         Brewer's, p. 304.

8.         MacEdward Leach in Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, Ed., Maria Leach (New York, 1950), pp. 323-4, notes the widespread motif of the dragon-flight or dragon-slaying, among which are "numerous dragon-slayer stories with local heroes as protagonists, heroes usually famous in other legends and myths . . . Some of the most famous of these dragon-slayers are: Perseus, Marduk, Hercules, Apollo, Siegfried, St. Michael, St. George, Beowulf, Arthur, and Tristan."  Brewer's (p. 304), citing Psalm 91:13, where it is said that the saints "shall trample the dragon under their feet" lists some of the numerous representations of saints with dragons:  "St. Michael, St. George, St. Margaret, Pope Sylvester, St. Samson (Archbishop of dol), St. Donatus, St. Clement of Metz; St. Romain of Rouen, who destroyed the huge dragon, La Gargouille, which ravaged the Seine; st. Philip the Apostle, who killed another at Hierapolis in Phrygia; St. Martha, who slew the terrible dragon, Tarasque, at Aix-la-Chapelle; St. Florent, who killed a dragon which haunted the Loire; St. Cado, St. Maudet, and St. Pol, who did similar feats in Brittany; and St. Keyne of Cornwall."  Also noted is the representation of the dragon, symbolizing sin or Satan, at the feet of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and that St. John the Evangelist is sometimes represented as holding a chalice, from which a dragon is issuing.

9.         Cirlot, 273, 275.

10.       F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York, 1959), pp. 202-3.

11.       V. James G. Fraser, The Golden Bough (New York, 1960), p. 620 ff., or "Serpent-worship," EB, XXIV, p. 676.

12.,      Cf. Exodus 32:31:  "Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold."

13.       Matthiessen, p. 160, cites Eliot's introduction to Savonarola:  "In genuine drama the form is determined by the point on the line at which a tension between liturgy and realism takes place," which has some relevancy to the mode sought by Eliot in "The Rock."