poetry.
Eliot's plays address, directly or indirectly, religious themes. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) deals in an appropriately ritual manner with the killing of Archbishop Thomas a Becket, using a chorus and presenting its central speech as a sermon by the archbishop. The Family Reunion (1939) deals with the problem of guilt and redemption in a modern upper-class English family; combining choric devices from Greek tragedy with a poetic idiom subdued to the accents of drawing-room conversation. In his three later plays, all written in the 1950s, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman, he achieved popular success by casting a serious religious theme in the form of a sophisticated modern social comedy, using a verse that is so conversational in movement that when spoken in the theater it does not sound like verse at all.
Critics differ on the degree to which Eliot succeeded in his last plays in combining box-office success with dramatic effectiveness. But there is no disagreement on his importance as one of the great renovators of poetry in English, whose influence on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals was enormous. His range as a poet is limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) deficient; but when in 1948 he was awarded the rare honor of the Order of Merit by King George VI and also gained the Nobel Prize in literature, his positive qualities were widely and fully recognized?his poetic cunning, his fine craftsmanship, his original accent, his historical importance as the poet of the modern symbolist- Metaphysical tradition.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock1
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piii scosse. Ma per cio cche giammai di questo fondo non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, senza tenia d'infamia ti rispondo,2
1. The title implies an ironic contrast between the 2. 'If I thought that my reply would be to one who romantic suggestions of 'love song' and the dully would ever return to the world, this flame would prosaic name 'J. Alfred Prufrock.' stay without further movement; but since none has
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2290 / T. S. ELIOT
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its 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.
And indeed there will be time3 For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands4 That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?' Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair? (They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!') My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear 3. Cf. Andrew Marvell, 'To His Coy Mistress,' is true, I answer you without fear of infamy' line 1: 'Had we hut world enough, and time.' (Dante, Inferno 27.61?66). Guido da Montefeltro, 4. Works and Days is a poem about the farming shut up in his flame (the punishment given to false year by the Greek poet Hesiod (8th century B.C.E.). counselors), tells the shame of his evil life to Dante Eliot contrasts useful agricultural labor with the because he believes Dante will never return to futile 'works and days of hands' engaged in mean- earth to report it. ingless social gesturing.
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THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK / 2291
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin? (They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!')
45 Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all?
50 Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall3 Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
55 And I have known the eyes already, known them all? The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin
60 To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all? Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
65 Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume? And how should I begin?
70 Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . . I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.6
