I’ve been doing some research on T.S. Eliot’s brief journey through
aestheticism on his way to becoming a religious poet and a moralist with a reactionary critique of modernity—and I can’t think of any clearer
demonstration of the change in his poetry than the contrast between one of his
most famous Christian poems, “Journey of the Magi,” and a very early untitled
poem, known in Eliot circles as “At Graduation 1905.”
Eliot wrote the latter poem, an ode, when he was 16 years old, and read it at
his graduation from Smith Academy. His
greatest literary influence at the time was Edward Fitzgerald’s famous
translation of an 11th century Persian work, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Fitzgerald’s rather free translation had attracted a cult following in certain
English literary circles ever since it appeared in 1859, and had gone through
several expansions and editions over the course of the late nineteenth
century. It was particularly popular in
Pre-Raphaelite circles, and later among the aesthetes of the Rhymer’s Club in
the 1890s. One can see why: it was a
kind of antidote to the moralistic poetry of such Victorian heavyweights as
Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. Here’s a
fairly typical stanza, in which we are urged to see the world as temporary, as
without any great moral meaning:
The Worldy Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turn Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.
“The Charge of the Light Brigade” it ain’t. Instead of duty to Queen, country, and God,
we find a world almost existentially absurd, a world in which the momentary
fleeting impression of beauty is what matters.
Bohemians like Dante Gabriel Rossetti loved Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát, and it anticipates both Pater’s
aestheticism and the whole emphasis on a poetry of fleeting impressions, loaded
with imagery of transience, that we get with Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and
other 1890s types.
Fitzgerald certainly came as a relief to the young T.S. Eliot, who had
grown up in an oppressively strict and moralistic family milieu. When I read his recollections of encountering
the Rubáiyát, I thought immediately
of John Stuart Mill’s recollections of first encountering Wordsworth and the
“culture of the feelings” after his narrow, Utilitarian upbringing. Here’s Eliot:
I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald’s Omar which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me. It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious, and painful colors. Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne.
There’s reason to wonder just how Eliot found a copy “lying about,”
since he grew up in a household where even Tom
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were
banned, and the Rubáiyát is both
agnostic and (on occasion) just a bit racy. But I digress.
Here’s a representative stanza of Eliot’s graduation ode. The influence of Fitzgerald’s agnostic,
aesthetic ethos is clear enough:
We go; like flitting faces
in a dream;
Out of thy care and
tutelage we pass
Into the unknown
world—class after class,
O queen of schools—a momentary
gleam,
A bubble on the surface of
the stream
A drop of dew upon the
morning grass.
“Graduation addresses,”
says Eliot biographer James E. Miller Jr., “are generally supposed to be
inspirational, saying, in effect: now go forth and live a life of great
achievement and fulfillment. Eliot,
therefore, must has startled his listeners.”
Indeed! This is a poem without
moral exhortation, without homiletic reassurances. This is a poem in which fleeting moments of
beauty are the best for which we can hope—an aesthete’s poem.
Two stanzas from the poem offer an early version of one of Eliot’s
recurring motifs: the return to a place long left behind, and the difference
felt by those returning (the most famous instance is in “Little Gidding,” where
Eliot writes “We shall not cease from exploration. And the
end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place
for the first time”). Notice the
alienation felt by those who return to Smith Academy after graduation:
Standing upon the shore of
all we know
We linger for a moment
doubtfully
Then with a song upon our
lips, sail we
Across the harbor bar—no
chart to show,
No light to warn of rocks
which lie below,
But let us put forth
courageously
As colonists embarking on
the strand
To seek their fortunes on
some foreign shore
Well know they lose what
time shall not restore
And when they leave they
fully understand
That though again they see
their fatherland
They there shall be as
citizens no more.
We don’t get much by way
of an explanation for this alienation—and this itself is significant. Eliot, at 16, gives us a sense of
separateness without any specific moral attached to it. Those who return are no longer at home in the
place they’ve left, but we’re not given any moral to attach to this story. It’s not that the world has corrupted them,
and they must touch base with the virtues embodied in the old school. Nor is it that they’ve become Real Men, who
must put aside childish things and get back out into the jungle where they
compete with one another to push back the frontiers of darkness and spread the light
of empire. What we have is a mood,
without a moral: the very stuff of impressionism and aestheticism.
Flash forward to 1927, and
we find Eliot touching on his ‘return’ motif, but quite differently. Eliot was now 39 years old, had settled in
England, and had just been baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church. It was a move that rattled his deeply
Unitarian family back in the U.S., and that puzzled his English friends, who
tended to be secular intellectuals. When
Eliot went to visit I.A. Richards at Cambridge, for example, Richards and his
friends were surprised to find Eliot carrying a “large, new, and to us
awe-inspiring Prayer Book,” and were a bit flummoxed by the demands of Eliot’s
faith, being “suddenly made much aware of our total inability to advise him on
(or even discuss) the character of the various Services available on Sunday
mornings.”
This was a new Eliot, and
one of the poems that he published in 1927, “Journey of the Magi,” captures
both his sincere Christian commitment and his sense of alienation. After recounting the travails of the magi on
their way to the nativity, and loading the poem up with imagery foreshadowing
the crucifixion, the poem concludes with the return of one of the magi to the
kingdom he’d left behind:
All this was a long time
ago, I remember,
And I would do it again,
but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that
way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were
different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for
us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places,
these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease
here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people
clutching their gods.
I should be glad of
another death.
This is the first point in
the poem where we’re made aware of the speaker’s silent interlocutor, a scribe
figure to whom he dictates his accounts.
And of course, since the accounts we have of the journey of the magi are
scriptural and without any mention of the magi's return, there’s a suggestion that the speaker’s words, which he twice
insists be recorded, have not been recorded— that they've been suppressed by
someone who did not want such discouraging comments to be put in front of the
faithful. And the comments are
discouraging, telling us of the pain of conversion, of how one’s rebirth as a
Christian is also a death of one’s former self.
The nature of the pain is significant: it comes in the form of
alienation from one’s people. One returns,
as one does in Eliot’s graduation ode, to find that one no longer belongs. Unlike in the graduation ode, though, there’s
a specific moral to the story: though conversion is difficult, and though it
leads to a rift with those one loves (we may think here of Eliot’s shocked
family, or of his puzzled friends at Cambridge), conversion is not to be
reversed. The speaker suffers from his
sense of difference, but it’s important that he never raises the possibility of
re-conversion: he’d rather have “another death”—a literal one— than that.
Set side by side with the
graduation ode, “Journey of the Magi” looks very much like a moralist’s poem. Its ethos is one of religion, and poetry at
the service of religion, rather than aestheticism, and the appreciation of the
passing moment as the highest of goods.
If Eliot’s graduation ode was a poem of moments, “Journey of the Magi”
aspires to be a poem of the intersection of the timeless with time.
