I really do enjoy T.S Eliot. He is such a brilliant man. As I read his poetry though, I felt sorrowful, but not depressed (like I did at times with Frost). No, Eliot's poetry affects multiple emotions. In his poem "The Hollow Men" Eliot uses senses, mostly dominantly, sight. Near the beginning of the poem, he inserts almost abruptly, "Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion;" What? How can you have shape without form or shades without color, or gesture without motion? Contradictions? Possibly.
eyes
eyes
eyes
voices
singing
images
lips
eyes
eyes
speech
sightless
eyes
Falls the Shadow
Falls the Shadow
Falls the Shadow
This is the way the World Ends
Bang
Whimper
Throughout the poem, the word "eyes" is referenced 6 times, with other allusions to sight and other senses addressed. Yet, at the end of the poem, Eliot presents three circumstances where "Falls the Shadow" meaning, theses are areas you can't SEE, you can't necessarily feel, you can't touch. To be honest, I don't know exactly what to do with this, but I feel like there is significance in this. Why would he want his reader to see and hear throughout the beginning of the poem and contrast it with the opposite? I'm not sure. As much as I enjoy his poetry, it is still quite ambiguous to me, a little bit over my head, where sometimes I feel an emotion, or significant thought and other times, such as here, I don't know what to think. Maybe I'm over-thinking.
I want to compare this poem to one by Deborah Ager. The title of the poem, "Alone" addresses her senses and uses them to paint a lonely picture. Rather than sight, she uses touch and smell.
Over the fence, the dead settle in
for a journey. Nine o'clock.
You are alone for the first time
today. Boys asleep. Husband out.
A beer bottle sweats in your hand,
and sea lavender clogs the air
with perfume. Think of yourself.
Your arms rest with nothing to do
after weeks spent attending to others.
Your thoughts turn to whether
butter will last the week, how much
longer the car can run on its partial tank of gas.
The last stanza in her poem is similar, though very different, to Eliot's. She turns to thoughts, untouchable and emotionless that contrast sharply with the stanza above. She is left alone with her thoughts.
Eliot is left somewhere in the shadows.
I like how you compare their different uses of the senses. "Eliot is left somewhere in the shadows" is pretty much the most accurate thing I've read all week.
ReplyDeleteI have to disagree with you on point, though. You said in the last stanza of Ager's poem she turns to thoughts, not emotions. But I get a certain feeling from that last stanza. I don't know what emotion it is, something along the lines of I-will-kill-the-bext-person-who-breathes-in-my-space-I'm-so-tired. But I definitely know her feels.
Good job! I enjoyed it! :)
I'm really glad you chose to analyze this poem over "The Wasteland". That poem confused the heck outa me. As I read through this poem you have up, the repetition of "sight" is mentioned a lot. He's definitely getting his point across, ya think? By the end of the poem, I guess he just needed to make his contrast definite with use of "shadows" or not seeing. His poetry has always been hard to understand for me as well.
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