Chapter Two
" The Dry Season "
In Eliot's poetry of the middle period (beginning with Poems 1920) the psychic landscape projected by the creatures of the sea and of the jungle is subsumed in a realm of psychic drought and spiritual sterility — a "dry season" in the consciousness of not only an individual Prufrock or Sweeney, but an entire land. In this chapter we shall examine the nature of the "dry season" from two perspectives. The first section, "The Cricket No Relief," will consider creatures figurative of the drought besieging the psychic and spiritual landscape with which they are identified. The second section of this chapter will focus upon the recurrent image of the "rat" and its symbolic value in the context of the genesis of the "dry season" as well as its function in terms of the "Dark Night" (Chapter Three) which follows.
" The Cricket No Relief "
While in the early poetry the analogy between the external world and the world of the mind or spirit is projected in animal imagery associated with the sea and the jungle,the landscape in the middle poems is characteristically presented through animal images suggestive of a context of psychic and spiritual drought. In "Gerontion," for example, the death-in-life theme resounds in the imagery invoked by an old man (spiritually unregenerated) in a dry month:
Here I am an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, hearing a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
("Gerontion," p. 21, ll. 1-6)
Even the bite of the flies, figures of the inconsequential, the ephemeral, represent an encounter, with a form of heroic existence denied Gerontion. In contrast to a realm wherein life, action is possible (Thermoppylae), Gerontion is trapped in a state of passivity, impotence, knowing neither life ("warm rain"1) nor death ("we have not reached conclusion"). For Gerontion resides in "death's dream kingdom,' no nearer to life than "an after dinner sleep." (Cf. "The Cocktail Party," p. 362:
"And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.")
His land is a decayed land, a waste land unredeemed:
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
(p. 21, ll. 11-2)
Traditionally, the goat is a fertility symbol: it is associated with ideas of potency, authority. The goat of the bestiaries is the emblem of sexuality: "Hrycus the He-Goat is a lascivious and butting animal who is always burning . . . The nature of goats is so extremely hot that a stone of adamant, which neither fire nor iron implement can alter, is dissolved merely by the blood of one of the creatures." 2 Frazer, in The Golden Bough, reports the widespread belief that "the corn spirit often appears in the form of a goat, " while many deities of vegetation, such as Dionysus, are often represented as taking the form of a goat. 3 Whatever the goat's exact allusive value may be, the "goat's cough" "at night in the field overhead," in the context of "rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds" - a landscape of waste — suggests that the image of fecundity merely reinforces the vista of sterility within which Gerontion dwells. But the poem's secular landscape, so characteristic in its ugliness, lifelessness, is soon transformed into the mythic setting of "depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas" (l. 21), the imagery of betrayal and sacrifice, central in the consciousness of Gerontion confronting directly, as Prufrock never does, the problems of knowledge and faith. (As Grover Smith notes, "`depraved May,' the season of denial or crucifixion, returns whenever, in whatever age, apostolic or modern, the life of sense stirs without love. Eliot's `The Family Reunion' repeats the horror: `Is the Spring not an evil time, that excites us with lying voices?' So now it returns and excites the memories of Gerontion. The source of his grief — the passionate cross, . . . is a token of Christ and Iscariot, redemption and the universal fall in Eden." 4)
Gerontion knows only the dry season, the cough of the goat (rather than the Word of the Lamb); the season of Spring is the cruelest for the man old in knowledge and desire, unborn in passionate belief. He remains but "an old man , / A dull head among windy spaces," (15-6). Gerontion, like Prufrock, projects a psychic maze of "a thousand small deliberations" which "protract the profit of their chilled delirium, / Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled," (62-4). Each exists "in memory only" with but "reconsidered passion" 942), unable to surrender the self, relinquish pride. Hence both Gerontion and Prufrock "lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition" (57), though the communion lost by each be of a different order. (In "Prufrock" even the references to Lazarus and John the Baptist remain secularized.) Gerontion in his "sleepy corner" is finally, as the persona of "A Song for Simion" is initially, representative of an existence of mere "dust in sunlight and memory in corners," destined only to "wait for the wind that chills toward the dead land," (p. 69, ll. 6-7), which can but drive him further into his corner of the Waste Land.
The vista of desolation seen in "Gerontion" reaches its fullest expression in "The Waste Land:"
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter,the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(come in under the shadow of this red rock),
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
("The Waste Land," I, p. 38, ll. 19-30)
The scene is an ugliness unparalleled in the early poetry, presenting a panoply of dissolution, decay. The psychic and spiritual landscape is reduced to a realm of "stony rubbish": "you know only / A heap of broken images" wherein you "can connect / Nothing with nothing," (p. 56, 301-2). The language is liturgical. Eliot's note cites Ezekiel, 2:1: "And he said unto me, son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee," the context of which is a land equally laid waste:
Be not afraid . . . though briers and thorns be with thee, and thou dost dwell among scorpions (2:6); "Your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken . . ."(6:4); I will scatter your bones round about your altars (6:5); In all your dwelling places the cities shall be laid waste, and the high places shall be desolate, and your idols may be broken and cease, and your images may be cut down, and your works may be abolished," (6:6).
The dominant image in "The Waste Land" is that of the unredeemed land; as in "The Hollow Men" the land is a "dead land" from which even the "cricket" can give "no relief."
Eliot (in the "Notes") relates the "cricket" to the "grasshopper" of Ecclesiastes 12:
Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets . . . (5) or the golden bowl be broken . . . or the wheel be broken at the cistern (6); Then shall the just return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it (7).
The burden of the grasshopper is a death ("because man goeth to his long home") leading to a return ("Then shall dust return unto god who gave it,"). The cricket, being in a land already dead ("what are the roots that clutch, what branches grow"), rather than partaking of a realm knowing the flourish of the almond tree, is neither a burden nor a relief. The motif of the rejection of life and the deadness of the soul which structures "The Waste Land" informs the image. In contrast to the broken images of the Ecclesiastes passage ("the golden bowl be broken, . . . or the wheel be broken at the cistern"), broken images which are released into a further union with earth and with God, the broken images of "The Waste Land" are precluded from such a union. (Cf. "Choruses" from "The Rock": "The cycle of Heaven in twenty centuries / Bring us further from God and nearer to the Dust," p. 96, ll. 17-18.) In "The Waste Land" shadow and dust reside only with the red rock, are heaped with the stony rubbish: Hence there is but "fear in a handful of dust," now only "empty cisterns and exhausted wells" (p. 48, l. 384).
The function of the cricket (related, with the "grasshopper," to the locusts which, in Christian symbology, represents the forces of destruction5) contrasts with Eliot's use of the grasshopper in "Ash Wednesday":
And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang,
scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert,
("Ash Wednesday," pp. 62-3, ll. 84-5, 89-93)
While here, as in "The Waste Land," an arid landscape is presented as the setting of a dissolution, the scattering of the bones in the quiet of the desert in "Ash Wednesday" contrasts significantly with the heap of broken images in the waterless realm of "The Waste Land." In "The Waste Land," far from the blessing of sand in the cool of the day, there exists only the torment of a sun which beats on a shelterless dry land. It is the "circular desert" envisioned in "The Family Reunion":
In and out, in an endless drift
Of shrieking forms in a circular desert
Weaving with contagion of putrescent embraces
On dissolving bone. In and out, the movement
Until the chain broke, and I was left
Under the single eye above the desert,
(p. 277)
in contrast with that desert "on the other side of despair"
(Harry:) Where does one go from a world of insanity?
Somewhere on the other side of despair.
To the worship in the desert, the thirst and deprivation.
A stony sanctuary and a primitive altar.
The heat of the sun and the icy vigil,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . It is the love and terror
Of what waits and wants me, and will not let me fail.
Let the cricket chirp.
(p. 281)
seen is the contrast of "The Waste Land" (infused with the symbolism of agrarian religions based upon, as Jessie Weston recounts in From Ritual to Romance, fertility rites related to the vegetation cycle) and the "desert" of "Ash Wednesday" (relating to the symbolism of the desert as the place of spiritual trial and divine revelation, located outside the "wheel" of existence, "susceptible only to things transcendent . . . (being) the domain of the sun, not as the creator of energy upon earth, but as a pure, celestial radiance," 6 for example). Ultimately it is a contrast not so much in landscape (although the presence of the living tree in "Ash Wednesday" records a significant progression from the dead tree of "The Waste Land") as in the psychic or spiritual values with which it is infused, or the attitude rom which it is perceived. The consciousness in "The Waste Land" is not "glad to be scattered" nor willing to say "And I who am here dissembled / Proffer my deed to oblivion, and my love / To the posterity of the desert" ("Ash Wednesday," p. 61) not knowing that "it is this which recovers;" but concludes instead with "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," (p. 50, l. 43). Hence the most characteristic voice heard in "The Waste Land" is as that perceived in "The Cocktail Party":
I listened to your voice that had always thrilled me,
And it became another voice — no, not a voice:
What I heard was only the noise of an insect,
Dry, endless, meaningless, inhuman —
You might have made it by scraping your legs together —
Or however grasshoppers do it. I looked,
And listened for your heart, your blood;
And saw only a beetle the size of a man
With nothing more inside it than what comes out
When you tread on a beetle.
(pp. 326-7)
The fragmented dwellers of "The Waste Land" are but "hollow men" whose "dried voices," when not avoiding speech, can only "form prayers to broken stone," (p.58).
In "The Waste Land" the imagery of the land destitute of the waters of psychic and spiritual salvation recurs in another locust-related image:
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
(V, p.48, ll. 354-7).
The setting of dry grass, like the dead tree of the earlier reference, signifies the unredeemed land. (Cf. Our dried voices, when / We whisper together / Are quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass," "The Hollow Men," p. 56). here pagan and Christian symbolism merge. Longed for are not only the "freeing of the waters" to restore fertility to the dry land, 7 but also the purgatorial or baptismal waters. (Cf. "Murder in the Cathedral": ". . . wash the wind! take stone from stone and wash them. / The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and ourselves defiled . . . / . . . . / I wander in a land of barren boughs . . . in a land of dry stones," pp. 213-4.) The suggestion is of a ritual incantation of water as the necessary condition of salvation. The juxtaposition of the cicada, natural figure for that which ravages the land, and the water which might redeem it, or (as in "Death by Water") lead to the condition wherein rebirth becomes a possibility, indicates a progression from the cricket reference of "The Burial of the Dead." The cicada now becomes a "burden" ("If there were . . . not the cicada") paradoxically making "a relief" a possibility. As Drew comments, "St. Paul's linking of baptism and death is the starting point, the biblical scenes evoked in a sequence of powerful sense-images. And the Christian mystery of life through death is linked with the vegetation myths in their great common thundering rhythm of hope and resurrection." 8 The sound of the cicada and the song of the dry grass "singing / Over the tumbles graves" (p. 49, ll. 387-8) finally leads to "a damp gust / Bringing rain" (ll. 394-5).
Between the images of the cricket and the cicada, the landscape of "The waste Land" prefigures a realm in which life (even in its lowest forms) is itself repudiated. Yet it is this very vista of psychic and spiritual desolation which implicitly suggests the possibility of redemption. (Cf. "The Family Reunion": "I believe the moment of birth / Is when we have knowledge of death / I believe the season of birth / Is the season of sacrifice / For the tree and the beast, and the fish / Thrashing itself upstream," pp. 151-2) But for those having only the knowledge of the dry season there seems only "the waste sad time / Stretching before and after," ("Burnt Norton," p. 122).
Notes
"The Cricket No Relief"
1. The symbolism of rain, as in Weston's account of the Grail legend, is generally of life, especially fertility; but also "in many mythologies, rain is regarded as a symbol of the 'spiritual influences' of heaven descending upon earth," J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans., Jack Sage (New York, 1961).
2. T. H. White, The Book of Beasts (New York, 1954), pp. 74-5.
3. James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York, 1960), p. 526 ff.; 533 ff.
4. Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, (Chicago, 1965), p. 61.
5. Cirlot, p. 182.
6. Cirlot, p. 76.
7. Jessie L. Weston, in "The Freeing of the Waters" (chapter III of From Ritual to Romance (New York, 1957), p. 26) recounts that the Rig-Veda hymns and prayers, for example, "were devised for the main purpose of obtaining from the gods of their worship that which was essential to ensure their well-being and the fertility of their land — warmth, sunshine, above all sufficient water. That this last should, in an Eastern land, under a tropical sun, become a point of supreme importance, is easily to be understood . . . (Hence) the god who bestows upon them this much desired boon . . . of rain and abundant water is besought, and that the feat which above all others redounded to this praise, and is ceaselessly glorified both by the god himself, and his grateful worshippers, is precisely the feat which the Grail heroes, Gawain and Perceval, rejoiced the hearts of a suffering folk, l. 3., the restoration of the rivers to their channels, the 'Freeing of the Waters.'"
8. Elizabeth Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of his Poetry (New York, 1949), p. 84.
Rat References : Malice I
If there is a single characteristic animal reference in the middle poems, it is that of the rat. In the poems of the middle period the rat becomes a unifying symbol of a consciousness of malice and horror besieging the city of man. The earliest reference to the rat in Eliot's Collected Poems occurs in "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar":
The rats are underneath the piles.
(p. 24, l. 22)
The context of the rat image is a city in decline. The rats attack the very foundations of Venice, a Venice caught in the materialistic world of Bleisteins (V. l. 21). "Rialto" — the quarter of Venice in which the Exchange is situated, for example), subject as Burbank meditates, only to the ruin of time (l. 32). (Cf. the epigraph: "nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus": "Nothing endures unless divine, all else is smoke.") The image of the rat relates to Bleistein's "lusterless protrusive eye" which "stares from the protozoic slime" at the "perspective of Canaletto" whose Venice was not enshrouded in smoke, "the smoky candle end of time" (ll. 16-20). As Grover Smith notes, "Bleistein . . . typifies the commercial travelers, loitering like rats, . . . among the towering monuments of creative intellect." 1 The rats underneath the piles are figurative of a Venice not described in Burbank's "Baedeker," but of a city with "all its ordered civilization dying into a new barbarism, all its light and glory guttering into extinction." 2
The rat is generally figurative of an invasion of the chaotic powers of darkness, destruction. 3 The rat's association with infirmity and death, especially its natural and mythic connection with plague ("the rat was an evil-doing deity of the plague in Egypt and China," 4 for example) informs the recurrent references to the rat in "The Waste Land," wherein the creature dwells in a land already ravaged:
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
("The Waste Land," II, p. 40, ll. 116-7)
Here the rat becomes a concrete image of a land laid waste, a vision of psychic and spiritual impotence aptly (though ironically) symbolized by the fecund species, potent only with the power to destroy. The consciousness here projects the urban horror of "rats' alley" which (in the context of the Grail legend utilized in the mythos of the poem) becomes a parody of a "perilous cemetery" (V. Weston's From Ritual to Romance, p. 177 ff.) of lost bones of broken men. The vision of physical death is presented, while the promise of resurrection is withheld; the bones of the dead men are lost, scattered in a realm of desolation, removed, as in Ezekiel 6:5, from the place of recovery. (Cf. "Ash Wednesday," II). Indeed, in "The Burial of the Dead" the denial of psychic and spiritual life (V. "with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine," the canonical or generative hour, for example) extends to a parodic denial of rebirth:
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
Eliot's note on the concluding lines cites the dirge sung over a corpse in Webster's White Devil:
The ant, the field mouse and the mole
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men.
While the rodent image of the allusion is deferred to the later references to the dead in "The Waste Land," the wolf that's foe to men is transfigured into the dog that's friend to men. Drew notes that the dog "was a common symbol of aid to rebirth. Isis collected the pieces of the dismembered corpse of Osiris with the aid of dogs." (She also cites Petronius' Satyricon, C. 71, 'I beseech you to fasten beside the feet of my statue a dog, so that because of your beneficence I may attain to life after death.') 5 The allusion to the nature ritual in which the burial of the seasonal god suffering a ceremonial death so that a ritual rebirth may come is disrupted in "The Waste Land"; renewed life, more than death, is feared (V. "Keep the Dog far hence," e.g.). The compounding of human, animal and vegetable forms, which Jessie Weston discusses in From Ritual to Romance, suggests the "community of the Life Principle," while the idea of a constantly recurring cycle of Birth, Death and Resurrection, or Re-Birth, of all things in nature" 6 is broken in "The Waste Land": In the dead land, April is the season not of growth but of the confirmation of psychic and spiritual desolation. Rather than rebirth, spiritual death is represented:
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
("The Waste Land," III, pp. 42-3, ll. 185-92)
Drew comments upon the complex pattern of allusions woven into the lines:
The wind (now) turns to a cold blast bringing first the contrapuntal melody of Marvell. But the sound of 'Time's winged chariot' and the vision of 'deserts of vast eternity, are contracted to the rattle of the bones and of the grinning death's head, 'the chuckle spread from ear to ear.' Spenser's river and the sea in The Tempest shrink to 'the dull canal,' the Grail Castle to the gashouse. The protagonist, the Fisher King and Ferdinand melt into a single figure. But no magic creeps by upon the waters telling of a sea change. Only the slimy rat 'crept softly through the vegetation': the bodies seen do not lie 'full fathom five,' but 'naked on the low damp ground'; the bones are not turned to living coral. Nor are they those of the men who were 'sea-swallowed, though some cast again' into a new life. 7
The rat creeping through the vegetation, dragging its slimy belly (serpent-like) on the bank of the dull canal, prefigures a fallen realm wherein each possibility of redemption is dissipated: The vegetation is besieged. The water is polluted. The kingdom of the dead is but a mockery of the underlying mythos of regeneration. The speaker "fishing in the dull canal," in the psychic evening of a spiritual winter, is engaged in the Life Cult ritual (V. Weston, p. 114 ff.) the meaning of which is vitiated, witness the recurrence of the rat image among the dead knowing no reason of restoration:
White bodies naked on the low deep ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
(p. 43, ll. 193-6)
The vision of the dead is fragmented: The setting shifts within the sentence from the white bodies on the low damp ground to the bones in a low dry garret., The image of the white bodies suggests the value of the dead of the old life in "Ash Wednesday":
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.
("Ash Wednesday," p. 62, ll. 59-62)
But unlike the spiritual quester of "Ash Wednesday," who seizes the image of a physical death in the process of ascension to spiritual life, the quester of "The Waste Land" envisions a realm in which the dead are desecrated, subject year to year only to a spiritual desolation prefigured by the omnipresent rat of the sterile landscape, in contrast to the white leopards and Rose Garden of "Ash Wednesday." The bones, though symbolic of the belief in resurrection, 8 being rattled by the rat's foot only year to year, are again more suggestive, not of the promise of regeneration as in "Ash Wednesday," but of a deadness of the spirit leaving only a material reminder of the fate of doomed men in a disordered land. As Cleanth Brooks notes, we see but "another image of a sterile death from which no life comes."9 Even though the imagery is once more resonant with the latent symbolism of hope, of spiritual salvation implicit in the latent symbolism of hope, of spiritual salvation implicit in the fusion of the various myths of redemption, the vision of death at this point in "The Waste Land" is closest, not to that of "Ash Wednesday," but to the image of the death-in-life of "The Hollow Men":
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
("The Hollow Men," p. 56, ll. 1-10).
Here the psychic and spiritual desperation is conveyed in a landscape of waste extending to the men whose interior reality is obliterated. The complex mythos of "The Waste Land" is flattened to the meaningless ritual of hollow men whispering (as do the figures in "Gerontion") the incantation which, in their dry season, is no longer viable, pp. 57-8) The image of rats' feet over broken glass compounds suggestions of sterile suffering, futility and corruption with fragmentation and despair. (Cf. "There are no eyes here / In this valley of dying stars / In this hollow valley / This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms," p. 58.) We see here the "dry cellar" of consciousness, the psyche emptied of all but the spiritual malice of nothingness (the solipsism not of "lost / Violent souls," but of hollow men). The effigies of men are stuffed with illusory, meaningless internality ("headpiece filled with straw," p., 56), a mockery of life that is infused with any viable principle: "shape without form, shade without color, / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion," p. 56. Being dissociated from living identity, they must "borrow every changing shape / To find expression" ("Preludes," p. 11, ll. 109-10):
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer —
(p. 57)
But the expression is that of further disguisement, the borrowing of animal masks, especially animal externality, by which the speaker, like the other hollow men, might escape consciousness of the predicament of being human, the burden of spiritual confrontation ("let me be no nearer"). The speaker, willing the "deliberate disguise" of a rat's coat or crowskin, finds even a debased material form in a world of spiritual formlessness ("In a field / Behaving as the wind behaves") is preferable to the kingdom of living-death in which he dwells. As Grover Smith notes,
the speaker takes refuge in apathy; he desires to think of himself only as a scarecrow. He shrinks from everything but concealment among the other hollow men . . . The scarecrow symbol . . . is appropriate to designate not only the ineptness and spiritual flaccidity of the speaker, but, like the 'tattered coat upon a stick' in Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" (1927), his inability to attain love. 10
The psychic and spiritual dissociation of the hollow men (men "with nothing more inside than what comes out / When you tread on a beetle," "the Cocktail Party," p. 327), of those who "have gone through life in sleep" ("The Family Reunion," p. 234) in a dreamcrossed land, climaxes in a willed mock-crucifixion of "crossed staves in a field," a parody of a sacrificial act not without redemptive reverberations (cf. the invocation of the 'multifoliate rose," the "perpetual star"). The hollow men, in revulsion from the sterility of their existence, unlike Prufock or Gerontion, relinquish all pride,though they seem to betray life itself in the process. For the hollow men have descended lower than Prufrock or Gerontion or even the quester of "The Waste Land" — into the
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property
Dessication of the world of sense
They have known
Inoperancy of the world of spirit,
("Burnt Norton," pp. 120-1, ll. 117-25)
which is the only way for those having succumbed to the depths of darkness prefigured by the recurrent image of the rat.
Yet while the hollow men "had the experience," they "missed the meaning" ("The Dry Salvages," p. 133, l. 95). As Smith comments:
The figurative straw dummies of the poem suffer both physically and spiritually . . . They are all but damned; and not for nothing is there an allusion here, as in "The Burial of the Dead," to the third canto of the Inferno, where those who 'lived without blame, and without praise,' are doomed to abide at Acheron without crossing into hell . . . The scarecrows, loitering beside 'the tumid river' . . . are trapped in Ezekiel's valley of bones, where . . . their suffering seems futile. 11
The hollow men, in spiritual destitution, can only await "through the dark cold and empty desolation" ("East Coker, p. 129, l. 207) the restoration of meaning vivifying experience. "Theirs is the 'dream kingdom' where the eyes (of spiritual confrontation) are but a memory. They must invade the 'other kingdom,' the 'twilight kingdom' of actual death, which, after further purgatorial trial, may vouchsafe to them (a way to redemption) . . . And here, apparent hell is potential, though unrealized, purgatory." 12 For finally the hollow men must approach the realm where even the rats, like "the agents of hell disappear," where only remains the reality of what they now but fear in dream, to reach that kingdom which "beyond death is not death." Their progress, through the spiritually required way of descent, must be as that described by the Chorus in "Murder in the Cathedral":
The agents of hell disappear, the human, they shrink and dissolve
Into dust on the wind, forgotten, unmemorable; only is here
The white flat face of Death, God's silent servant,
And behind the face of Death the Judgement
And behind the Judgement the Void, more horrid than active shapes of hell;
Emptiness, absence, separation from God;
The horror of the effortless journey, to the empty land
Which is no land, only emptiness, absence, the Void,
Where those who were men can no longer turn the mind
To distraction, delusion, escape into dream, pretence,
Where the soul is no longer deceived, for there are no objects, no tones,
No colors, no forms to distract, to divert the soul
From seeing itself, foully united forever, nothing with nothing,
Not what we call death, but what beyond death is not death,
(p. 210).
But the realm which "beyond death is not death," wherein progress towards the place where "the eyes reappear / As the perpetual star / Multifoliate rose" (p. 58) might replace the meaningless "going round" in the "cactus land," remains the ambiguous "hope only / Of empty men." As Drew notes, while "active 'descent' is the only possible step from the 'essence' of the (speaker's) present despair . . . his 'world ends' not in any self-chosen dark night of the soul, but in a sense of tormented, whimpering vacuity," 13 the self-enclosed sterility of the "dry cellar" of psychic and spiritual consciousness.
The psychic and spiritual landscape of "The Hollow Men," as that of "The Waste Land," is finally one knowing best the malice of the rat as consort of the forces of dissolution, "weaving with putrescent embraces / On dissolving bond" ("The Family Reunion,"p.356), a panoply of desolation. Through the "operations" of the rat, the land seems but a realm of "protozoic slime" in which life (and death) becomes a meaningless material state characterized by formlessness and waste. It is ultimately a psychic and spiritual inferno which is envisioned in "the dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying" ("Ash Wednesday, p. 66, l. 192), which as in "The Hollow Men," transforms the "world without end" into the "valley of the shadow of death" — a death as illusory as the life destitute of all its properties of redemption. After such knowledge, the only way that remains is through "the death of hope and despair" ("Little Gidding," p. 139, l. 62) out of the Dry Season of the Waste Land, into the Dark Night when men, no longer "dodging their emptiness," ("Choruses from 'The Rock,' VII, p. 105, l. 19) might be "through passion and sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being" ('The Rock,' p. 108, l. 41), might find through "the darkness of God" ("East Coker," p. 126, l. 113) the last Kingdom of Light.
Notes
(Rat References: Malice I)
1. Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago, 1965), pp. 50-1.
2. Elizabeth Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of his Poetry (New York, 1949), p. 42.
3. J. E. Cirlot in A Dictionary of Symbols, trans., Jack Sage (New York, 1961), p. 259, notes that in Egypt, for example, the rat symbolized utter destruction.
4. Cirlot, p. 259
5. Drew, pp. 74-5. Various other interpretations of the "Dog" reference, including not only the Dog Star, Sirius, "herald of the rising of the Nile Waters," but also the Dog as anagram for God, have been suggested by the critics.
6. Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York, 1957), pp. 35, 36.
7. Drew, p. 79.
8. Cirlot, p. 29.
9. Cleanth Brooks, 'The Waste Land': "Critique of the Myth" in Modern Poetry and the Tradition (North Carolina, 1939) p. 152.
10. Smith, 104-5.
11. Smith, 105-6.
12. Smith, 106.
13. Drew, 97.
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