“We have loved the stars too deeply to be afraid of the night.” Richard Hundley set these striking lyrics to his 1959 composition, “The Astronomers,” and offers us a profoundly optimistic image for the seeker of light in what seem to be dark times. My series, “Life and Light,” aims to briefly but honestly explore the apparent darkness of modern literature and consider where there may be glimmers of light, narratives that present a brighter vision than the time’s defining literary themes: the break with tradition, alienation of the individual, doubt and disorientation, rejection of the transcendent, and so on. Some 20th century authors manage to depict the modern confusion and, from under the burden of their own culture, insist on promoting a more humane vision. Among these men and women who have caught my attention — and perhaps chief among them — is T.S. Eliot (1888-1965).
Eliot’s real significance, I hold, is the journey-like movement of his work from frustration and confusion to meaning and context. The poet began to publish during World War I, distinguishing himself early on in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and “The Waste Land” (1922). These poems, especially, are recognized as landmarks of modern literature and provide a valuable picture of the modern attitude. In later poems, notably “Ash Wednesday” (1930) and The “Four Quartets” (1936-1942), he attempts to offer, as Greg Wolfe puts it, “timeless moments of grace” by tracing “the journey of the isolated self [from fragmentation] toward integration…a renewed sense of the presence of the past, and fleeting glimpses of union with God.” As such, Eliot is a primary figure to whom we should look if we are seeking “life and light” in literature.
The poet’s early work admits a deep loss. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” we hear of “an overwhelming question,” a man who has “measured [his] life out with coffee spoons,” claiming “I grow old…I grow old…” and we come away with a thoroughgoing sense of alienation, detachment, and despair. “The Waste Land,” a cryptically disjointed poem (at least on the surface) presents a barren climate in which can be found leftover fragments of bygone tradition. Eliot threatens to “show [us] fear in a handful of dust.” When the poet claims, “I have shored these fragments against my ruin,” however, we get a sense that he sees something in the fragments that may ward off utter loss. Helen Gardner writes that “The Waste Land” should be read as “an Inferno which looked toward a Purgatorio.” And perhaps Gardner is right. In his notes on the poem, Eliot explains that the final section’s booming “DA…DA…DA…” refers to a fable of the Divine Thunder in the Hindu Scriptures, in which the Thunder roars, “Control yourselves; give alms; be compassionate.” F.O. Matthiessen concludes that if there is any source of salvation in the modern experience, it comes, “only through sacrifice,” as we see in the Thunder’s roar. If in Eliot’s poetry, as in Dante’s, the pilgrim must first journey down in order to go up, then Wolfe’s, Gardner’s, and Matthiessen’s interpretations of “The Waste Land” allow for the possibility of recovery.
In Eliot’s later work, poems like “Ash Wednesday” and “The Four Quartets, we find fragments being recovered and pieced back together into something new. In “Ash Wednesday,” we find the lines, “Redeem/ The time. Redeem/ The Unread vision in the higher dream…,” and references to a “place of grace” for those who seek “the face,” and a “time to rejoice” for those who acknowledge “the voice.” Appropriate for such a Lenten, Purgatorial poem, we even find in its closing the prayer of a suffering soul: “Teach us to care…/ Teach us to sit still/… Our peace in His will/…Suffer me not to be separated…” Eliot wrote this poem while he worked as an air raid warden during World War II, often encountering London’s fires and rubble from the bombings. In “The Four Quartets,” Eliot offers something more. He writes that, “The only hope, or else despair/ Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—/ To be redeemed from fire by fire.” He refuses to ignore the fires—literal and figurative—and chooses to see redemption through the flames. He seeks to redeem what has been lost of time and place by pointing the reader to “the still point of the turning world,” one permanent, axiomatic center around which meaningful human existence can rotate. Russell Kirk writes that Eliot “points out the way to the Rose Garden that endures beyond time, where seeming opposites are reconciled” and directs our attention to things “more enduring than wars and rumors of wars.” Eliot submits that recovery lies in what is transcendent and permanent.
For Eliot, religion brings the individual and society out of modernism’s “dark night of the soul.” The magnitude of his prolific literary contribution, however, does not enable us to significantly know that his answer is the right one or that there is a truly right one. Whether or not Eliot’s vision is in any sense true or whether it is merely helpful to us, it does seem to shine some sort of light into the darkness of the 20th century. If all we can take away from Eliot’s work is an encounter with his personal experience of transcendence, then we’ve found some “life and light” and, hopefully, a renewed desire to continue the search.