Form and Content in Eliot's Poetry
techniques and content in Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' and 'The Hollow Men'
T.S. Eliot?s poetry explores the predicament of human existence in the twentieth-century milieu characterised by an overwhelming disillusionment at man?s finity and resignation at his imperfectability. Accepting his Nobel Prize, Eliot commented, ?poetry may make us a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves?. He made use of a variety of aural and visual imagery and a remarkable breadth of content to evoke these feelings in the reader, and in doing so facilitates an exploration into the depths of our existence. The Hollow Men is the culmination of despair in Eliot?s work. The subject matter of the hollow men trapped in an arid landscape is highlighted by techniques that focus our attention on their predicament. ?Rhapsody on a Windy Night?, written earlier in Eliot?s life, similarly reveals the hopelessness of both past and present. The form and content of these poems work together to foreground the inescapable despair of our existential existence.
The Hollow Men is an episodic free verse poem. Eliot constructs a desolate world, ?death?s dream kingdom?, to explore mankind?s evasion from spiritual intention. The focus of the poem is on the hollow men?s inability to interact with each other and with the transcendental spirituality that is their only hope. The form and range of techniques employed by the poet foreground this predicament and highlight its broad applicability. The title of the poem draws our attention to the importance of the collective personae. The hollow men represent all mankind, and their tragic existence, the poem suggests, concerns us all. The epigraphs evoke a range of associations ? the first, ?Mistah Kurtz?he dead? is a reference to Conrad?s Heart of Darkness, a novel inhabited by men whose actions are equally devoid of ideological or spiritual guidance; and the second, ?A Penny for the Old Guy? is a tragic historical allusion which highlights the impotency of humanity and the way in which our most decisive actions may culminate in nothing more than a whimper.
Rhyme and rhythm highlight the predicament of the frail hollow men and their inability to communicate their condition. The dry, arid landscape is paralleled in the aural imagery of the first stanza. Partial rhymes like ?alas? less? grass? glass? with rasping, coarse sounds give the reader a sensation of the plight of the hollow men. Poetic diction adds to the sensation through the choice of words like ?dry? and ?straw?. The tone is that of exhaustion, yet paradoxically the words do not falter and die as we are given the impression they might; rather, the atmosphere is broken by changes in style. The mode of communication changes in the second stanza, in which the sensations of the first are philosophised. The lifelessness of the hollow men is further reinforced by the repetition of ?the hollow men | The stuffed men?.
The central images of the poem are death?s kingdoms and the eyes. The first mention of the eyes serves to foreground the lack of direction of the hollow men. Those who have ?crossed? to death?s other kingdom? do so with ?direct eyes? ? the very guidance which the hollow men refuse to acknowledge. In their land, ?The eyes are not here?, yet their hope rests on the prospect of these derisive eyes reappearing ?As the perpetual star|Multifoliate rose?. The star is another recurring symbol which draws attention to the plight of the hollow men. Their landscape is one of ?fading star[s]?, which ?twinkle? barely enough to illuminate the image of a ?dead man?s hand?. We are given the impression that soon their landscape will silently descend into darkness. The images of this landscape construct the hollow men as being resigned to a state of suspension, paralysed by their own inability to turn conception into creation, emotion into response; spiritual redemption their only hope.
The poem privileges these supernatural symbols ? eyes, stars, death kingdoms ? over the natural. The hollow men are sightless, colourless, immobile and barely able to speak, while at the same time divine images linger in the landscape. The effect is to highlight man as a finite creature distinct from the transcendental. The ?deliberate disguises? that man constructs for himself fail to hide the ultimate truth about our tragic existence. The frail hollow men remain in their landscape, as Arnold put it, ?Wandering between two worlds, one dead | The other powerless to be born?.
?Rhapsody on a Windy Night? is similarly existential in that it despairs at the sordid memories that man has made for himself, and reflects on our inability to make any meaningful order out of them. The word ?rhapsody? in the title is deeply suggestive; it hints at the pastiche of disparate images which will be used in constructing the rest of the poem. Ironically, however, the ?windy night? lacks the enthusiasm and excitement that the word suggests. The subject of the poem is the persona?s journey down an urban streetscape and an exploration into the ?heterogeneous qualities? of his memory. The images presented to us are thrown into focus by their startling disparity. Despite their undeniable incongruity, some images become motifs which draw our attention to the misery of both past and present.
Eliot was influenced by Bergson?s concept of time as a psychological rather than quantitative measure of existence. In ?Rhapsody on a Windy Night?, time in the present is measured by the streetlamps, but there is also a far more significant change in time between the past and the present. On this point, Eliot subscribed to Bergson?s view:
?The past exists in the present, which contains the future. The concrete and ever present instance of duration is life, for each of us living individuals is his own time?.
By presenting images from both the past and the present, Eliot can articulate the permanence of our existential despair.
The first image is of the streetscape ?Held in a lunar synthesis?. As the poem progresses, the image of the moon becomes tainted; by half-past three ?The moon has lost her memory? and she is presented as being a prostitute who lacks the feminine traits that Western mythology typically associates with the moon. She is now feeble and unable to illuminate the world. This image is consistent with Eliot?s view of ideological developments of his time. Rapid scientific development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused widespread intellectual confusion, and the even celestial bodies were stripped of their mythological significance. In the twentieth century, mankind has lost the guidance of spirituality, even the comfort of tradition; we are, in the words of Sartre, ?condemned to be free?.
The second image of the ?floors of memory? dissolving is metaphorical. Following this, visual images override the metaphysical and are foregrounded as the main discourse of the poem. The recurring image of twistedness is gradually developed in the first stanzas. The persona?s memory is triggered by the ?a crooked pin?, which leads to ?The memory throws up high and dry | A crowd of twisted things?. A coiled spring, a curled tongue and the image of an old crab all feature as twisted and contorted images in the subsequent stanzas. The images thrown up by the past, despite being random and disordered, seem to have one thing in common ? they are all perverted. This motif suggests powerfully the angst that humans feel about the disordered and nature of both the past and the present.
Auditory imagery assists in communicating this angst. In the first stanza, enjambment gives us the impression that the persona is being drawn through the streetscape on a journey through dreams and memories over which he has no control. The simile of street-lamps that ?Beat like a fatalistic drum? reinforces the notion that the lamps dictate the path the persona is to take. The final stanza, by contrast, uses a combination of short and long lines. The effect is that the images of the past are ruptured as the persona arrives at his residence. A return to the present does not offer clarity, however ? we are encouraged to believe that mosaic images which defy order characterise both the past and the present. The absence of rhyming lines in the opening stanzas illustrates the fact that there is no regularity in searching for answers in our memory. In subsequent stanzas, however, the rhyme gives cohesion to similar images. The prostitute, for example, is associated indirectly with twistedness by the rhyme of ?like a grin? with ?crooked pin?. The effect is not to suggest that the images are ordered in any way; rather, to reinforce their significance as being representative of our collective anguish.
Championing the avant-garde, T.S. Eliot pioneered an extraordinary range of techniques that became the foundation of modernist poetry. These techniques enabled him to activate readers? responses to the content of his poems. In The Hollow Men, the despair of humanity is felt in the terseness of the verse, in the barren images and in the suggestiveness of the title and the epigraphs. In ?Rhapsody on a Windy Night?, past and present culminate in a pastiche of images that are constructed in such a way so as to draw our attention to how the desolation of the present will permeate the past. The cohesion of form and content allows these poems to facilitate an exploration into human existence in the twentieth century.
