Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2001 03:27:37 -0800 (PST)
From: Paul Murphy <clitophon-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: dans la nuit de la tombeau


The poems in T.S.Eliot's Inventions of the March Hare
illuminate much of his early and mid-period work and
they certainly underline the fact that Eliot was very
much more productive in this period than was hitherto
thought.  The manuscript of Inventions of the March
Hare was sold to John Quinn, a New York lawyer and
patron of the arts.  Eliot never found out what had
happened to the manuscript, it was bought by the New
York Public Library in 1958.  Eliot was very keen to
excommunicate the work from his canon, declaring it to
be unpublishable material.  Some of the poems were
reprinted when Eliot's letters were published by Faber
& Faber, but apart from this, the poems had not been
given any exposure since the original manuscript left
Eliot's hands.
   Inventions of the March Hare is divided into
several parts.  Firstly, the unpublished poems.  Then
comes an exegesis by the editor, which scrupulously
avoids any critical commentary on the poems, but
limits itself to an exceptionally thorough tracing of
sources.  The value of this exercise is open to
question, since the sources are traced through
labyrinthine reference to works which Eliot may or may
not have had access to.  Then come the ribald poems
which Eliot excised from the notebook.  These are
exercises in ribaldry and they are basically
gratuitous and obscene: they are probably without real
literary merit, even though Wyndham Lewis writes that
they are "excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry".1 
Then follows two appendices which include poems in the
manuscript which found final publishable form, and a
last appendix which highlights influence and
influences on the poems from Eliot's critical writing.
   This essay will deal principally with the poems in
the first section of the book, those which Eliot
considered to be unpublishable.  How much light do
they shed on Eliot's compositional method, the
techniques of his verse, the influences which he
absorbed, and the themes which were to be brought to
fruition in the complete poems of this period which he
eventually published.  Firstly, Eliot's method is one
of gradually stitching small particles into bigger and
bigger wholes.  Thus there are many echoes of images,
style and vocabulary in the manuscript poems of
Eliot's complete poems of this period, and inflections
and echoes which reverberate in his very late work. 
Technically the poems range over a variety of forms,
none of which are classical literary forms, such as
the sonnet or the ode, which Eliot tended to avoid in
any case, but lyrical pieces, satires, urban pastoral
and the prose poem.  In this last category Eliot tends
to analyse particularly atomised states of mind in a
surrealistic manner reminiscent of various
psychoanalytical methods which he may or may not have
been aware of at the time.  The influences are very
completely traced in the notes to the poems: the
influence of Jules Laforgue is particularly noted. 
Finally, the themes are those adumbrated in other
Eliot poems of the same period: urban decay, spiritual
dereliction, unrequited love, symptoms, perhaps, of a
consciousness that has been atomised by a cosmopolitan
experience which is at varying points unpleasant,
nihilistic and degraded.
   The early drafts of Prufrock are interesting: they
lead us directly to the kind of visionary experience
which we have intimations of in the final version of
the poem:

	And when the midnight turned and writhed in fever
	I tossed the blankets back, to watch the darkness
	Crawling among the papers on the table
	It leapt to the floor and made a sudden hiss
	And darted stealthily across the hall
	Flattened itself upon the ceiling overhead
	Stretched out its tentacles, prepared to leap

				(Prufrock's Pervigilium)

The midnight hour is personified as the fever which
rages in the protagonist's head, the darkness as a
cat-like creature, which is then modulated into a
tentacled octopus.  It is indicated that these things
are projections of the protagonist's consciousness,
needing to be personified because of the sudden
estrangement of the ordinary, and the dark and
terrible products of the imagination:

	Where evil houses leaning all together
      Pointed a ribald finger at me in the darkness
	Whispering all together, chuckled at me in the
darkness.

				(Prufrock's Pervigilium)

These disruptions in consciousness are more profound
than those found in the final draft of Prufrock, or at
least indicate a solitary nocturnal world which is
contrasted with a daytime social one.  The adumbration
of a visionary otherness beyond the trite ordinariness
of a polite social world are grotesque and comical,
but never as dark and menacing as the disturbing
visions described here.  (They correlate with the
effects which Expressionist artists and film-makers in
Germany attempted to evoke, see particularly The
Cabinet of Dr Caligari)  There is no need, it seems,
at this conjuncture, for the poet to find correlatives
in the external world for the protagonist's disturbing
perivigilium, for protagonist and poet have seemingly
merged.  This seems a purely autobiographical note,
which is surely why it was excised from the final
version of the poem:

	And when the dawn at length had realised itself
	And turned with a sense of nausea, to see what it had
stirred:
	The eyes and feet of man -
	I fumbled to the window to experience the world
	And to hear my Madness singing, sitting on the
kerbstone
	- I have seen the darkness creep along the wall
	I have heard my madness chatter before day
	I have seen the world roll up into a ball
	Then suddenly dissolve and fall away.

				(Prufrock's Pervigilium)

In the final version of Prufrock the visionary moments
are muted, bizarre, but finally they seem the products
of a near normal consciousness which apparently wishes
for transcendence of a mundane social scene.  Here the
character's "madness" is seen to sing and chatter,
before the removal to the objective, "I have seen the
world roll up into a ball/Then suddenly dissolve and
fall away."  The poem necessarily unveils the
protagonist's consciousness, but protagonist and
author seemingly merge: without the invisibility of
the Prufrockian disguise, there is the chaos of
complete subjectivity taking over, thus incoherence
must finally find objective coherence in a concrete
image.
   The failure of the unpublished poems in Inventions
of the March Hare is that they often share facets of
Eliot's successful work, but they fail, in different
ways, to take a complete step towards an ironical,
comical or oblique commentary.  For instance, in In
the Department Store, the lady is set to be undermined
and yet raised above the mundaneness and horror, the
derelict and the decayed:

	The lady of the porcelain department
	Smiles at the world through a set of false teeth.
	She is business-like and keeps a pencil in her hair

Here we glimpse a ravaged portrait of a lady, whose
porcelain teeth are at home in the porcelain
department: we feel the underlying ghastliness of the
scene, yet another flawed character whose hopes
revolve around "The summer evening in the park/And
heated nights in second storey dance halls (an echo of
Prufrock's "restless nights in one-night cheap
hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells"). 
But instead of going on to a sharp, pithy retort, a
summation of the lady, we have the lame and blunt,

	Man's life is powerless and brief and dark
	It is not possible for me to make her happy.

This trite and banal adage (which the editor tracks
down to a quotation from Bertrand Russell3) seems to
betray the momentum of the poem, which had been
otherwise interesting in its build-up.  The lady is at
last found to be seemingly interesting, her escape to
the 'second storey dance halls' indicates a life
beyond the placid setting of the porcelain department,
but the poet, it seems, lacks the energy to make a
complete statement, and, in fact, betrays the momentum
and the purpose of the poem by his trite adage.  If
Eliot had gone on to say something more purposeful
about the lady the poem might have been successful,
but its power and momentum is betrayed by a lapse into
inconsequentiality.
   In First Caprice in North Cambridge Eliot again
begins with an echo of a later poem:

	A street-piano, garralous and frail;
	The yellow evening flung against the panes
	Of dirty windows: and the distant strains
	Of children's voices, ended in a wail.

We are reminded of the "street-piano, mechanical and
tired" of the Portrait of a Lady, and, indeed, the
imagery leads us into another of Eliot's poems, Burnt
Norton, the first of the Four Quartets, where we again
find children's voices:

	Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of
children,
	Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

	Even while the dust moves
	There rises the hidden laughter
	Of children in the foliage

But while the poem leads us to consider the ways in
which it echoes and reverberates through the later
poems, again Eliot fails to deliver anything that is
both purposeful and complete:

	Bottles and broken glass,
	Trampled mud and grass;
	A heap of broken barrows;
	And a crowd of tattered sparrows
	Delve in the gutter with sordid patience.

	Oh, these minor considerations.....

The last line is trite and meaningless, whereas the
build-up and rhythm of the poem have led us to expect
rather more.  The rhymes ('glass'/'grass',
'barrows'/'sparrows') are simple and effecting, as is
the vocabulary ('A heap of broken barrows'), which is
strong and concretely rooted.  Eliot is successful
when he posits the sordid and the trivial beside the
universal, but here he is left with a banal adage to
end the poem, totally deflecting the previous build-up
and leaving us with a statement which ends in mid-air.
   Another manuscript poem indicates homo-eroticism
and sado-masochism in Eliot's work.  (Eliot had been
accused of being a homosexual by the theatre critic
John Peter in The Times, but had the story suppressed
by his lawyers).  This is The Love Song of
St.Sebastian.  Saint Sebastian was an early Christian
in Rome, martyred by the Emperor's Praetorian Guard by
being pincushioned with arrows.  (a subject of the
Italian artists of the Quattrocento, and still a
subject of importance in homosexual culture, as he
appears in a recent film by the late Derek Jarmen,
Sebastiane):

		I would come in a shirt of hair
		I would come with a lamp in the night
		And sit at the foot of your stair;
		I would flog myself until I bled

Obviously, Eliot wrote to disguise personality, but he
does indicate the tortuous insecurity of a young man
having an affair of unrequited love with an older
wom/an.  The poem, in fact, seems to say that it is a
woman that the young man is in love with:

		And after an hour of prayer
		And torture and delight
		Until my blood should ring the lamp
		And glisten in the light;
		I should arise your neophyte
		And then put out the light
		To follow where you lead
		To follow where your feet are white
		In the darkness toward your bed
		And where your gown is white
		And against your gown your braided hair.

Although the subject matter and language of the poem
are often cringingly embarrasing, it does underline
the theme of perverse sexuality in Eliot's work,
whether it is through a straightforwardly homo-erotic
poem like The Death of Saint Narcissus, or merely the
unfulfilled sexual relationship of the typist and her
suitor in The Waste Land.  But this work is less
successful in indicating anything much more than a
self-indulgent and torturous suitor.  Indeed the poem
itself is self-indulgent and sickly, with its
insistent repetitions, unimaginative vocabulary and
predictable situation: 'I should arise your
neophyte/And then put out the light/To follow where
you lead/To follow where your feet are white'.  The
rhyme neophyte/white/light is lacking in pointedness
or clarity, and just seems to be an attachment to ease
the meter, or make the poem more pleasant on the ear. 
Eliot had used rhyme with great pointedness in, for
instance, the Portrait of a Lady, where the triplet
fate/rate/late underlines the failing security of the
lady.  But here it is a mere ornate attachment, and it
underscores the banality of the writing and of the
poem.
   These early poems lead us into the themes which
dominate Eliot's later work, even the vocabulary,
rhyme and diction echoes the style of his later work,
or rather of the more successful poems of the same
period.  They may be seen, in fact, as adumbrations,
in miniature, of the Collected Poems.  Dreamlike and
uncanny effects are evidenced, as if Eliot, too, had
an interest in some form of psychoanalysis:

		Introspection

		The mind was six feet deep in a
		cistern and a brown snake with a tri-
		angular head having swallowed his
		tail was struggling like two fists
		interlocked.  His head slipped along
		the brick wall, scraping at the
		cracks.

This is an attempt by the poet to bring a hallucinatic
or dreamlike state to consciousness: it seems to
borrow from Dante's Inferno, where the damned are
buried upside down in cisterns.  The image of the
snake also seems to borrow from Buddhism, and its ying
and yang symbol.  Eliot would hardly have been aware
of Freud, and the new science of psychoanalysis, but
some of his work evidences an awareness of visionary
and dreamlike states, which were part of the debate of
psychoanalysis, through the work of Freud, Jung and
latterly, Jacques Lacan.  Interestingly Eliot choses
to abnegate both rhythm and rhyme, as in a poem like
Hysteria (which appears in the Collected Poems), where
a direct revelation of an alternate state of
consciousness is depicted, without any outline of a
social context being given.  Eliot, therefore,
utilises this prose poem whenever he wishes to escape
the logic of ordinariness and social context.  Jacques
Lacan depicts a similarly bizarre dream in his Ecrits:

	I remember the dream of one of my patients, whose
	aggressive drives took the form of obsessive
phantasies;
	in the dream he saw himself driving a car,
accompanied
	by the woman with whom he was having a rather
difficult
	affair, pursued by a flying-fish whose skin was so
transparent
	that one could see the horizontal liquid level
through the
	body, an image of vesical persecution of great
anatomical
	clarity.5

Here we have a correlation between the dreamlike
states evidenced in Eliot's poetry and a description
by Lacan of a patient's fantastic daydream, which
relates, obliquely his 'rather difficult affair'. 
Lacan writes: "These phantasmagorias crop up
constantly in dreams, especially at the point when
analysis appears to be turning its attention on the
most fundamental, most archaic fixations."6  The Eliot
poem may be the relaying of one of these 'archaic
fixations', whether it be a description of the
purgatorial/infernal state of man, or a masturbatory
sequence, in which latent fears and repressions are
brought to consciousness.
   In the short sequence of poems discussed in this
essay we have contrasting examples of Eliot's style,
from the rejected drafts of Prufrock to the prose
poem.  In many ways the poems are failures, and the
possible reasons why Eliot rejected them as
unpublishable have been noted above.  That they were
rejected but survived as a manuscript in a New York
library is all the more surprising given the author's
willingness to suppress them.  Perhaps Eliot did feel
that they should survive, but he personally had no
wish to preserve them, but gave them into the hands of
John Quinn.  This deliberate act uncovers a real
anxiety over the evaluation of the writing, but
nevertheless accompanies a definite act of
suppression.  This dichotomy, of suppression and
preservation, reveals the feelings and thoughts which
lie behind the eventual re-emergence of these poems. 
Had Eliot not written the poems for which he is now
famous these squibs preserved in Inventions of the
March Hare may have just languished in the archives of
the New York Library where they were discovered, or
been passed on as the juvenalia of an obscure writer. 
But they are the literary remains of a writer of
genius and deserve our attention as such.

Notes

1) Christopher Ricks ed., Inventions of the March
Hare, pp305

2) Ricks ed., Inventions of the March Hare, pp213-214

3)Ricks ed., Inventions of the March Hare, ppxi

4) Jacques Lacan: Ecrits, pp12

5) Lacan, Ecrits, pp12

Though some of the poems in Inventions of the March
Hare are unsatisfactory in their conclusions, others
offer intimations of Eliot's later work, some have a
completeness which offer to the reader directions
which Eliot may never have taken, but which offer up
tantalising possibilities.  One such piece is The
Burnt Dancer.  Here, perhaps, the poet discovers a
voice which may have been suppressed, sometimes behind
his massive erudition, which he displays in his longer
poems.  Although the  poem erupts in the most
pretentious/Eliotian way with a requisite quotation
from Dante, there is within the poems movement,
direction and diction a simplicity which Eliot may
have fought hard to uncover, and which may offer an
entirely new facet to our appreciation of his poetry:

		Within the yellow ring of flame
		A black moth through the night
		Caught in the circle of desire
		Expiates his heedless flight

Eliot is closer to the natural rhythms of song,
perhaps of the Parisian chanson, with its simplicity
of situation, diction and relation to the everyday. 
The subject is a moth flying into the flames of a
lamp, 'O danse mon papillon noir!', the refrain echoes
at the end of each stanza.  As the moth dances its
rhythmic movements enter the mind of the persona
depicted within the poem, just as the atonal music
interpenetrates the mind of the suitor in Eliot's poem
the Portrait of a Lady.  In his discussion of the poem
Christopher Rick's calls the poem Dantesque, 'This
Dantesque poem of TSE's The Burnt Dancer, points
towards the Dantesque section of Little Gidding,
including II 92-3:
		unless restored by that refining fire
	Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
- lines indebted to Dante (Arnaut Daniel, Purgatorio
XXVI 133-48).  The epigraph is Inferno XVI 6: 'beneath
the rain of the sharp torment'.'1  Of course Ricks
makes much of the 'Dantesque' elements of the poem,
including the epigraph, but what is most striking
about the poem is that it moves towards a songlike
simplicity, and away from the baroque complexities of
the published poems of this period.  [What is most
intriguing about the poem is that it is so seemingly
out of character, and that Eliot's dependency on his
erudition falters suddenly to reveal an altogether
different line of development, which is also apparent
in other poems, such as The Waste Land and the
Quatrain poems, particularly in the last section of A
Game of Chess (where Eliot was criticised as being
elitest and snobbishly condescending towards the
working class women), and in a play like Sweeney
Agonistes.  Sometimes the disguise of the Harvard
scholar/Professor manque falls away to reveal a
softer, more appealing persona.  Unsurprisingly, Ricks
emphasizes the erudition and intellectual achievement
of Eliot, but does this make for great poetry, or is
Eliot successful when he is simply not trying to be
seen as clever?  Obviously the pro and anti Eliot
camps have contrasting and valid insights.  Ricks,
however, is clearly taking things too far in his
editing of Inventions of the March Hare.]
   The black moth is a stranger from a 'distant star',
drawn to dance in the flame, yet an alien presence,
and alienated from the world of emotions and morals,
the cloistered world of Prufrock or Portrait of a
Lady, a visitor, perhaps, from a dark and distant
world, where intellectual and moral values are
suspended.  But the moth is associated with the
tropics, 'Mozambique or Nicobar', thus reminding us of
the tension between the civilised and the savage in
Eliot's poetry, which is iterated in such poems as
Circe's Palace and The Waste Land.  The moth has a
message 'not with human meaning' - here perhaps
Eliot's verse technique crumbles a little as he
depends on a weak syllable to bear the stress and the
rhyme:

		Dance fast dance faster
		There is no mortal disaster
		The destiny that may be leaning
		Toward us from your hidden star
		Is grave, but not with human meaning

In prosody it is generally inadvisable to let an
unstressed syllable either end a line or bear a rhyme,
and here Eliot lets it do both: the style, diction,
and rhythm of the poem are jarred by this, and the
intonation at this point is almost professorial and
pedantic, as if the moth were suddenly being examined
under a microscope to elicit its 'human meaning'.  But
perhaps this is more a sign of Eliot's immaturity as a
writer, than an indication of a fundamental flaw in
his technique.  
   In the third stanza the moth is again represented
as a product of the protagonist's consciousness:

		Within the circle of my brain
		The twisted dance continues.

As in The Portrait of a Lady the exterior world and
the interior consciousness of the protagonist
interpenetrate one another.  The moth is as much the
fantastical product of the protagonist's psyche as an
entity in itself, a product of the unconscious
perhaps.  (perhaps the 'distant star' where it came
from is a metaphor for the unconscious??)  Tritely and
succinctly Eliot rhymes on the penultimate syllable of
the last lines to elicit the inescapability of the
moth's fate, to burn in the flames of the candle:

		O strayed from whiter flames that burn not
		O vagrant from a distant star
		O broken guest that may return not

		O danse danse mon papillon noir!

The lines bear a romantic nostalgia that succeeds
strangely in evoking the fate of the moth, rather than
being merely whistful.  The lines seem to bear feeling
and a real intimation of the eternal and infinite,
contrasted with the transigency of the moth's dance in
the flames.  
   Another prose poem of Eliot's Suppressed Complex
touches upon Eliot's (amateur) interest in
psychoanalysis:

	Suppressed Complex

She lay very still in bed with stubborn eyes
Holding her breath lest she begin to think
I was a shadow upright in the corner
Dancing joyously in the firelight.

She stirred in her sleep and clutched the blanket with
her fingers
She was pale and breathed hard.
When morning shook the long nasturtium creeper in the
tawny bowl
I passed joyously out through the window.

The poem is divided into two stanzas, metre and rhyme
having been dispensed with.  Obviously it is the
woman's suppressed complex that is personified in the
shadow 'Dancing joyously in the firelight'.  Eliot is
clearly investigating the realms of female sexuality,
which he touches upon in other early poems, such as
Circe's Palace.  Freud's discussion of dreams is
apposite to this poem, where dreams are portents of
unconscious repressions and supressions.2  The 'shadow
upright in the corner' is clearly a personification of
the woman's vivid sexual fantasy, presented to us as a
sort of succubus.  Eliot's depiction of surreal,
dreamlike conditions, where he touches upon
psychoanalytical subjects is always depicted with this
prose poem - perhaps formal poetic devices are too
constricting to depict static unconscious states, and
the looseness of the prose poem offers a more
approriate vehicle.  It is interesting to note the
variety of forms that Eliot utilises and the material
which he deems appropriate to each form.  Eliot writes
that: 'I have remarked recently a recrudescence of the
poem in prose - not only in France, but in England;
not only in England, but in America'3.  It is also
significant that he never uses Classical forms, like
the ode or sonnet.  For Eliot, it seems, new vehicles
are needed.  (for instance, the form of The Waste Land
where a lyric piece - Death by Water - is inserted
within four other pieces, perhaps to break up the
rhythm of the work, which is otherwise a philosophical
poem - this same form is used in the Four Quartets) 
For Eliot, as for any other great writer, form is a
natural extension of subject matter, and the two, form
and content, harmonise.  The lesser writer often fails
in his/her attempt to find content which will
harmonise with form, or to be successfully innovative.
 This is why the poetry of James Joyce, for instance,
is so stolid, for he seldom strays from conventional
poetic forms, and conventional diction and style. 
Paradoxically, the great prose innovator was stolid
and conventional in rhyme.
   Clearly the woman's suppressed complex is her
desire to attain sexual fulfillment, a male suitor is
absent so her desire must be for a fulfillment which
lies beyond a male/female relationship.  Perhaps the
woman's desire is for a female suitor, but this
possibility is only hinted at, and perhaps it is only
possible to see this through a Post-Freudian
sensibility, that is as a deliberate Post-Freudian
construction.  Here Eliot actually touches upon
repression, that classical Freudian concept, and
clearly recognises the complex of psychological
motivations that make up feminine sexuality.  He may
have been touching upon something that was in the air
at the time, and our own construction of the poems
meaning/s is motivated by a historical perspective
that includes cultural tropes that have clearly
altered since Eliot's historical period.  But this
interpretation of the poem is deliberately
disregarding of cultural/historical denominators and
is not an attempt to reconstruct a period, or to
explain why cultural tropes have altered.  However, we
can see how Eliot may have inbibed psychoanalytical
concepts, perhaps without his having a very clear idea
about what they were actually about.  It is notable
that Freud and other psychoanalytical schools altered
more through their applications in popular art forms,
such as film, than through any popularity of Freudian
texts among the general populace.  Perhaps this is why
we now have a popular account of Freudianism which
Eliot's poem, albeit in a quite vulgar fashion,
utilises.
   The final poem in this section is The Engine.  It
is another prose poem, but it does not deal with the
surreal, psychoanalytical material which Eliot had
incorporated into the other prose poems:

The Engine

I

The engine hammered and hummed.  Flat faces of
American business men lay along the tiers of chairs in
one plane, broken only by the salient of a brown cigar
and the red angle of a six-penny magazine.  The
machine was hard, deliberate, and alert; having chosen
with motives and ends unknown to cut through the fog
it pursued its course; the life of the deck stirred
and was silent like a restless scale on the smooth
surface.  The machine was certain and sufficient as a
rose bush, indifferently justifying the aimless
parasite.

II

After the engine stopped, I lay in bed listening while
the wash subsided and the scuffle of feet died out. 
The music ceased, but a mouth organ from the steerage
picked up the tune.  I switched on the light, only to
see on the wall a spider taut as a drumhead, the life
of endless geological periods concentrated into a
small spot of intense apathy at my feet.  "And if the
ship goes down" I thought drowsily "he is prepared and
will somehow persist, for he is very old.  But the
flat faces..."  I tried to assemble these nebulae into
one pattern.  Failing, I roused myself to hear the
machine recommence, and then the music, and the feet
upon the deck.

The choice of subject matter is caught between the
work of the Futurist poets, with its insistence on the
machine and the Modern Age, and a surreal dream.  The
scene is set aboard ship, and there are several veiled
references to the First World War, particularly the
word 'salient'.  A salient is a piece of land which
juts out of a defensive line, famous salients being at
Verdun and Ypres.  They were often scenes of heavy
fighting, the Germans promised to bleed France dry at
Verdun, but they only succeeded in creating a futile
deadlock, where neither side gained advantage.  This
might be compared with other military language which
Eliot uses, for instance his use of the word
'demobbed' in the scene with the working class woman
in The Waste Land.  Pound advised Eliot to use this
word, he perhaps being more familiar with military
terminology.  Eliot had tried to join the war effort
by joining the American navy, but had his application
turned down, and instead took a job in Lloyds bank
(thus incurring the hostility of English men who had
been demobbed and could not find jobs after the war
4).  So this scene on board ship might be a lyrical
substitution for the naval career that Eliot was
denied.  "And if the ship goes down" - which they
certainly did, for instance the Lusitania and, before
the war, The Titanic had been sunk, and perhaps,
again, Eliot is ruminating on the naval career which
he was denied.
   Unlike the other prose poems which have been
examined The Engine has no psychoanalytical content,
but has a dreamlike movement and meaning.  'Flat faces
of American business men lay along tiers' reminds us
of lines in Prufrock where disembodied faces are
'composed' to put a polite veneer upon society, but
also sneeringly underlining a superficial and banal
social scene.  Eliot's characters reach towards a
spiritual transcendence which, in Prufrock, for
instance, is articulated as 'the overwhelming
question' - the engine is a form of 'objective
correlative', to use a rather overused Eliotian
phrase, for the internal malaise of the male
protagonist.  Instead of attempting to depict the
internal intellectual disruptions of the male
protagonist, the engine is utilised as a
metaphor/symbol/trope.



 

   A brief chronology of the poems in Inventions of
the March Hare is given by Ricks in his introduction
(ppxxxviii-ppxlii).  It appears that the poems were
written between November 1909 and 1915, but Ricks is
unable to date some of the poems (The Little Passion:
from "An Agony in the Garret", Introspection, While
you were absent in the lavatory, Inside the Gloom, Do
I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?, O Lord,
have Patience, Hidden under the Heron's Wing, The
Engine I-II, In Silent Corridors of Death)  There are
therefore still more scholarly puzzles to be
unravelled in the text.  It would seem that the poems
were composed in the period during and after Eliot
left Harvard for a career as a peripatetic scholar in
France, Germany and England.  The subject matters of
the poems reflect the experiences of an urban
wanderer, sometimes unpleasant and sordid experiences
are pushed to the forefront and it would be
interesting to deduce the kinds of biographical
details which are behind these, though this is beyond
the scope of this work.
   The manuscript was given into the hands of John
Quinn, who died in 1924, and disappeared for fifty
years to re-emerge in the New York library.  Eliot,
who died in 1965, was never to learn of the fate of
this material, though he would have wished that it be
left unpublished.  For historical and scholarly
reasons the material has been published by Faber and
Faber.  It would seem that the material is mostly
incomplete and fragmentary, but some of the poems are
interesting and, to most, might have merited
publication, though whether Eliot was being
over-critical of his own work, or felt a vague
dissatisfaction with it is impossible to say. 
Nevertheless he decided not to publish and the
material has only re-emerged in recent times.  It is
unusual that the early work of possibly the greatest
poet of the Twentieth-Century disappeared for almost
fifty years, paralleled, perhaps, in music by the
Nineteenth-Century's loss of the work of JS Bach which
fell out of favour until it was rediscovered by Felix
Mendelsohn.  However, the vast body of Eliot's work
has never fallen out of favour, as Bach's did, but
these lost poems are something of a unique discovery.
   The experience of an urban wanderer is brought into
focus in the poem Interlude: in a Bar.

Across the room the shifting smoke
Settles around the forms that pass
Pass through or clog the brain;
Across the floors that soak
The dregs from broken glass

The walls fling back the scattered streams
Of life that seems
Visionary, and yet hard;
Immediate, and far;
But hard...
Broken and scarred
Like dirty broken finger nails
Tapping the bar.

Obviously this epiphany has much in common with the
The Waste Land:

'On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.'

In this section of The Waste Land Eliot is
prophetically ruminating on the fragmentariness of
experience which seems beyond cognition ("I can
connect/Nothing with nothing."), just as the scene in
the bar is immediate, but also "Visionary, and yet
hard".  The intimation of the eternal and infinite
within the purely temporal is a theme of Eliot's early
work (particularly the "Overwhelming question" posited
in Prufrock), and also indicates the Bradleyan
Absolute, an entity which bears the meanings of
transcendence and omnipotence.  So life seems to
encapsulate the Absolute while also being so
overwhelmingly real, the "shifting smoke" and "The
dregs from broken glass".  Although this poem is
slight it encapsulates in miniature some of the
preoccupations of Eliot's later work, the language is
visceral and the imagery complete.
   In the poem Afternoon there is another intimation
of the Bradleyan Absolute:

The ladies who are interested in Assyrian art
Gather in the hall of the British Museum.
The faint perfume of last year's tailor suits
And the steam from drying rubber overshoes
And the green and purple feathers on their hats
Vanish in the sombre Sunday afternoon

As they fade beyond the Roman statuary
Like amateur comedians across a lawn
Towards the unconscious, the ineffable, the absolute

There are echoes of Prufrock:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michaelangelo

The language of the poem is precise without being
pedantic, the visionary element of the poem is
encapsulated in the final stanzas where the ladies
"fade beyond the Roman statuary/Like amateur comedians
across a lawn".  An interesting similie, since not
only are the women like comedians, but they are also
amatuer: the point of this is ridicule, perhaps there
is an overwhelming sense of omnipotence on the part of
the writer and also something patronisingly
condescending in his attitude.  This is a tendency in
Eliot to condescend to those beyond his immediate
intellectual/social/cultural melieu, like the scene
with the working class women in The Waste Land, it
also indicates an insularity and insulation from the
reality of their melieu.  This indicates a fundamental
insecurity which Eliot may have felt because of his
American background, and his stance seems aristocratic
and elitest.  He also seems to invite the reader into
participating in his prejudices by indicating that his
condescending stance is the normal one.  Perhaps
English and British culture has opened up since
Eliot's day and we now have a wider definition of
culture which can encapsulate the high art of the past
and the popular culture of the present, as well as a
broadening out of the British class system with
working class people able to participate in the
University, for instance.
   Some of the preoccupations and evident failings of
Eliot's stance are adumbrated in these early poems,
they are in fact a seedbed for work which was
completed at the same time or perhaps a little later
chronologically.  Rick's reading of the poem Afternoon
appropriately does not condescend to give an
evaluation but proceeds on the dour path of reference
hunting, which is either a source of mystification or
complication or both.  Appropriately he cites the
Bible and Byron (The Destruction of Sennacherib),
hunting grounds for references to things Assyrian, but
does nothing with his fruitless task except provide
more and more fodder for scholarly pedants.  In his
editing of Inventions of the March Hare Ricks
uncritically echoes Eliot's technique in the most
sycophantic of fashions, and can only appeal to the
sort of intellectual snobs who accept Eliot's work
without without the slightest feeling of opprobrium. 
Instead of this, it is possible to appreciate the
beauty and grandeur of Eliot's work but still feel a
sense of distance from the values which Eliot sought
to impose or superimpose upon us.  His sense of being
a cultural elite was clearly shared by Pound - who
sought to create a tradition in himself - though some
of Pound's work also intimates greatness.
   These are contextual problems with Eliot's text and
with Rick's editing of the text that are nevertheless
important in order to differentiate between Rick's
text and this reading, for the context with which I
wish to view Eliot is slightly divided between
admiration and critique, just as Ricks is evidently
uncritical and wishing to be regarded as an
aristocratic and possibly autocratic interpreter of
Eliot's text, which just stops short of admitting that
Eliot is a quasi-divinity.  Eliot was evidently a very
well read person, but possibly not possessing of the
encyclopeadiac knowledge which Ricks seeks to ascribe
to him: could any person possibly be as erudite as
this anyway, and if so does it really enhance the
poetry at all, or just serve as a distraction for
academic minds?  Evidently great poetry and
significant art of all kinds is not or should not be
wholly dependent on the sort of multi-layered
knowledge which Ricks seeks to ascribe to Eliot, this
knowledge should serve the purpose of the artform and
should form an organic whole, rather than be a
disparate collection and cultural baggage deliberately
displayed to impress/mystify the reader.  (as a brief
aside, it will be necessary later on to integrate my
comments on Rick's text into this more appropriately,
possibly in an introduction.  Obviously Ricks has
provided us with an extremely useful scholarly basis
for approaching this text and I don't want to attack
his work too much, except to say that its basis is
somewhat erroneous/ideologically
misconstrued/methodologically flawed.  I suppose, as
with my criticism of Eliot that this is a tightrope
act, poised between critical admiration and
condemnation.  Does a critic necessarily have to
admire his/her subject anyway?  I suppose it would be
hard to write a book about a writer that one did not
admire, but possible.)
   The links between Eliot and the German composer
Richard Wagner are palpable enough, from Eliot's
quotation from Tristan und Isolde in The Waste Land to
its lietmotif where chopped pieces of quotation are
assembled and re-assembled in varying patterns. 
Obviously Wagner's achievement is by far the greater,
on a superficial level the two men seem to resemble
each other, both being associated with the extreme
Right in politics for most of their lives, and both
being supreme innovators in formal terms. However, at
a deeper level Wagner and Eliot differ quite markedly:
in his youth and middle age Wagner was associated with
the German Left, participating, like Karl Marx and
Frederich Engels, in the 1848 Revolution - Wagner
almost lost his life in the 1848 revolution in Dresden
and was exiled for 11 years from Germany for his
participation along with figures like the Russian
Anarchist Michail Bakunin.  The contradictions of
German political life perhaps crystallise in the
figure of Richard Wilhelm Wagner, but he was certainly
not simply the crypto-Nazi that many people have taken
him for.  Eliot heard many of Wagner's operas at
Harvard, and, like the Irish Modernists, James Joyce
and Samuel Beckett, became a Wagnerian. (Joyce quotes
from Wagner in both Ulysses and Finegan's Wake and
Beckett played Wagner to his students at Trinity, when
he should have been lecturing to them!)  Thus,
Wagner's influenced many of the Modernist writers -
who it may be said may or may not have formed a
homogeneous grouping - and, of course, a preceding
generation of French writers, as well as composers as
diverse as Claude Debussy and Gustav Mahler.
   Wagner is indicated in early poems like The
Portrait of a Lady where the lady and her suitor are
mockingly implicated as a set of doomed lovers, like
Tristan and Isolde.  Their liebstod is as real as
their rather dithering and faltering relationship, and
like many of Eliot's characters they live out a
disenchanted and disengaged existence.  In Eliot's
poem Opera we have a another mention of Tristan und
Isolde which clearly had especial relevance to him:

Tristan and Isolde
And the fatalistic horns
The passionate violins
And ominous clarinet;
And love torturing itself
To emotion for all there is in it,
Writhing in and out
Contorted in paroxysms,
Flinging itself at the last
Limits of self-expression.

We have the tragic? oh no!
Life departs with a feeble smile
Into the indifferent.
These emotional experiences
Do not hold good at all,
And I feel like the ghost of youth
At the undertakers' ball.

The contrast between the tragic epiphany presented on
stage and the unheroic nature of existence is again
underlined by Eliot.  Eliot seems to be all for the
sordidity and actuality of experience which is always,
for him, somewhat short of tragedy.  But this is also
a theme of the Modernists, who clearly felt that there
was a problematic between the heroic status of the
past and the decadence of the present.  It is iterated
in Ulysses with its obvious borrowing from the
Classics, as a formal theme is interposed on the
sordid actuality of existence.  Thus "Life departs
with a feeble smile", rather than leading us to the
sublime - "Into the indifferent".  It seems that the
fragmentation of formal structures is a sign of
uncertainty or incoherence and this is indicated in
the poem Opera where the tragic structure of Tristan
und Isolde is undermined by the reality of degradation
and sordidity.  Obviously over-seriousness is always
apt to be undermined and Wagner is often lampooned as
being a creator of grandiose and rather boring operas.
 (see the contemporary cartoon of Wagner hammering a
note into a recalcitrant ear)  Clearly Eliot stands
between admiration of Wagner but nods towards the
actuality of relationships and the ways in which they
fall short of tragic grandeur.  But Eliot too insists
on grandeur and intellectual snobbery which we in turn
have the facility to undermine and recognise the
posturings and the now outdated attitudes which he
sought to suture.  


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