Rhyme and Reason. - Review - book review

National Review, July 9, 2001 by Jeffrey Hart

Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot, by Denis Donoghue (Yale, 326 pp., $26.95)

Is T. S. Eliot a great poet, and if so, what is the nature of his greatness? Intelligent people have been debating this question since 1915, when "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" first appeared in Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine. Literary critic Denis Donoghue now offers to demonstrate Eliot's greatness by closely examining his use of language. This is supremely important because Eliot expanded the possibilities of our language, and consequently our possibilities of cognition.

Donoghue has been absorbed by Eliot's poetry for decades, both as a professor at New York University and as a man of acute sensibility. In Words Alone he has given us the best book written so far about Eliot. He settles one major question after another, and reinforces his authority with careful and decisive readings of the poems. He also weaves in his own critical arguments with colleagues going back to his days at University College in Dublin, where he studied under the well- known scholar and critic Donald Davie. Donoghue's interlocutors in this project-too many to name here-contribute valuably, even in disagreement. In this sense the book is not only a work of criticism and elucidation but a work of art that, drenched in time and the ongoing conversation about Eliot, manages to bring it all to a point of clarification that has the character of inevitability.

Central to this project are the words of Eliot's poetry, how they work and to what effect. Donoghue takes his title from Yeats's lyric "The Song of the Happy Shepherd." That short poem begins, "The woods of Arcady are dead, / And over is their antique joy." The poetic homeland of Arcady is now, in effect, a wasteland. The last line reads, "Words alone are certain good."

The shepherd may believe this, at least for the joyful moment of his song. But neither Eliot nor Donoghue believes that "words alone are certain good." As Donoghue shows through his explication of Eliot's poetry, words are indeed one way towards certain good, but it is a difficult way. The order of words, slippery as they are, may reflect or point toward an order beyond words.

Donoghue is an extraordinarily good reader of Eliot's words, and here his reader wishes to cry out, "Yes, attentiveness is all!" Consider what he does with ten very familiar lines from the 1925 poem "The Hollow Men":

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind's singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Donoghue aptly comments that Eliot's words here "remain as bizarre as Mallarme's." But then he goes to work. "The authority of these lines is so unquestionable, yet so irregular, that commentary seems defeated," he observes. He notes that some have identified "death's dream kingdom" with the lost souls in Canto III of the Inferno. The "eyes that do not appear may be those of Beatrice, prefigured by the sunlight on a broken column. If that is true, the passage may enact a moment of will, only incipiently achieved but corresponding to the movement from Inferno through Purgatorio to Paradiso."

Plausible enough. But Donoghue concludes that the authority of the passage is a verbal authority. It has to do with rhymes and slant rhymes that connect "dare" and "appear," "are" and "star," "column" and "solemn," "swinging" and "singing"; the alliteration of "dare" and "death's dream kingdom," "This" and "There"; the repetition of "There" and "Eyes." Such verbal procedures create the authority-impossible to reject-of a kind of incantation.

"That 'eyes are sunlight on a broken column,'" writes Donoghue, "can be true only according to a logic of imagination or association as distinct from a logic of reason . . . The whole effect is of figures seen in a dream in which one state moves into another without syntactical intervention." This is brilliant and convincing. Donoghue says that the "I" in the passage is an unidentifiable pronoun, certainly a defensible view. "I" may be a "hollow man." Perhaps, however, "I" is the pilgrim of The Waste Land, the man who has in his bones the civilization of Europe from Homer through the present, and who here has moved beyond the wasteland.

Donoghue does very well, to be sure, with the great familiar texts. But there are two short poems of Eliot's that he is able to bring forward into major status: the early "La Figlia Che Piange" (The Weeping Girl) and the Ariel poem "Marina." He immensely enriches one's sense of both. He does not-but I am inclined to-associate the emotions of "La Figlia" with Emily Hale, the elegant young Boston woman with whom Eliot began an intense but mysterious relationship around 1912. She reappears at the beginning of "Burnt Norton" and was devastated when Eliot failed to marry her after the death of his first wife Vivienne. He burned her letters to him; his letters to her, more than a thousand, will remain sealed at Princeton until well into the present century.