Becoming T. S. Eliot by Stayer Jayme;

Author:Stayer, Jayme;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Two more corners appear in a subsequent stanza. Part of the weirdness of the published poem resides not only in the imagery but in the way those images flow from one to the next. Here in the draft, however, the five repetitions of “corner” are deemed too obvious, and they are later edited down to two. However locally botched, this linguistic effect—the repetition of the same word to refer to different things—is transformed in later stanzas into a truly imagistic logic, such as the “twisted things” that weave through the poem. Even more disconcerting is the imagery of mechanical response in the fourth stanza. With little transition, we first get a cat’s tongue that “Slips out” to eat decaying food, then a child’s hand grabbing a toy, then vacant stares of alienated passers-by, and finally a crab automatically locking onto a stick that the speaker offers. The cat and the crab frame two images of human disinclination: the vacant child and the alienated passers-by. A small illumination that the draft version reveals is Eliot’s care with pronouns. Originally, the cat “flattens himself” and sticks out “his tongue.” Later, the masculine pronouns are switched to neuter, distancing the cat from any human affect. The crab, in no danger of being anthropomorphized, retains the masculine “him.”

Much could be said about Eliot’s meaning here: what the poem has to say about automatic responses, for example. Note instead the way in which Eliot draws the reader through these images, inducing a cumulative effect of unthinking automatism everywhere. A crab gripping a stick is not in itself a striking image. But as the climax of a series of images, the effect is unnerving, as it compares the animalistic response of the crab to the preceding images of human motivation. The humans depicted in the poem are isolated not just from others but from their own desires. As images of alienation, both the cat and the crab will come back in “Prufrock” to comment on human lack of motivation.87

In addition to the logic of imagery that guides the reader through the poem, another deliberate effect the author deploys is an ambiguous syntax. The agrammatical placement of phrases mirrors the logic of juxtaposed images by which the poem proceeds. In original form, the opening is grammatically unsettling, its phrasing without apparent syntactical subordination or relation:

Along the reaches of the street

Held in a lunar synthesis

And all the lunar incantations

Dissolve the floors of memory

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