"Glowed into words": Vivien Eliot, Philomela, and the Poet's Tortured Corpse

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Shannon McRae

Although historically inaccurate, Frazer and Weston influenced many modernist writers, particularly Yeats, Pound, H.D., and Lawrence, all of whom regarded writing poetry as a revival and reenactment of the ancient Mysteries. In The Birth of Modernism, Leon Surette observes that while the essentially skeptical Eliot took Weston's theories less seriously than these others, he found them interesting enough to incorporate them knowledgeably into his poem. (3) Eliot's poetic tradition, with its theme of self-sacrifice and initiation, is similar enough to Weston's Mystery tradition that he could well have had Weston in mind when formulating his theory of poetic impersonality.

While the pre-Christian fertility tales reassert the generative power of the phallus, the Christian Grail legends subsume the phallus into the Word. The only traffic the chaste Grail knight has with the goddess is to ask the right questions in the presence of the Grail maiden: What do these visions mean, and whom does the Grail serve? His correct query results in the Freeing of the Waters, and the Waste Land is made fertile again. Accordingly, in Eliot's version of the legend, the failure of the phallus coincides with the poet's failure of speech in the face of a female as damaged as he. His only remedy for the disastrous failure of language is to appropriate the voices of other poets--past masters of his craft. But even his borrowed words fail to cohere, for women disrupt him continually, their disorderly speech shattering his every attempt at intelligibility. The poetic voice progressively splinters into cacophony, in which the gender distinctions progressively collapse. Failure of the phallus is, in effect, a feminization of an imaginary male body. From this eradication of masculinity the textual body of the poem emerges.

The poet's traditional invocation of the muse calls her into being, to sing to him. Her song, inhuman, originates from no body, and the poet therefore cannot fully consummate his longing for her. In the absence of bodies, his poem becomes simultaneously the space of their imaginary union and the fruition of it--a textual body.

The textual body of The Waste Land is tortured from the outset, and its agonies are implicitly feminine. The opening epigraph invokes by allusion the Cumean Sybil as the poet's muse. Rather than assisting the poet in shaping the poem's body, she pleads for escape from the horrific entrapment in a suffering female body that her prophetic words have earned her.

In a parallel inversion, the solemn Anglican "Burial of the Dead" that opens the poem becomes an act of necromancy, stirring up the buried corpses of "memory and desire" from dead earth. The sprouting corpse evokes the promised resurrection of the dying god/king by whose cyclic sacrifice to the earth mother the barren land is made fertile. Here, however, the masculine corpse is but a fitting mate for the trapped, tormented Sybil.

Consequently the poet, terrified by desire and paralyzed with visions of his own death, refuses his encounter with the goddess. Like Prufrock, the poet in The Waste Land finds himself terrified to the point of paralysis by his inability to wield the power of the word long enough to formulate, even to himself, the "overwhelming question" that successful attainment of his goal requires him to ask. He is reduced to mimicry and appropriation of the voices of others. Thus he brackets the voice of the Hyacinth Girl in quotes, a voice recalled from distant memory, simultaneously resurrecting her, assuming her identity, and pitching himself somewhere between death and vision: "I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence" (136). (4) The Hyacinth Girl is the first in the poem's series of figures that blur the bounds of gender and the nature of desire. "Hyacinth," as has often been noted, evokes Apollo's beautiful boy lover as well as a girl with an armful of flowers.