Telescoping of Images in "The Waste Land"

It is especially provocative to read the following quote from Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" when considering how fragmentary The Waste Land is:

"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary [...] in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."

The poem forces us to ask whether Eliot has marshaled the abilities that he values most into a successful work. Does Eliot, after his sojourn in the waste land, "form new wholes"?

That is too large a question for an itsy-bitsy blog post, but I want to look at a technique that Eliot calls “telescoping of images” and attempt to determine whether it has the power to create the unity Eliot refers to. Here's the beginning of Section V, "What the Thunder Says":

After the torchlight read on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

The first thing to consider is Eliot's insistence on the word "after," which begins each of the first three lines of this final section. Eliot tries to focus on a moment after the sturm und drang of life. But I would suggest that this is not just some interlude or a lull; by definition, the moment after the sturm und drang of life is...death. Eliot juxtaposes life and death throughout the poem (along with a corresponding contrast between desire and frustration). But after all these "afters," Eliot actually deposits us in a present that only continues toward an ultimate after, the cessation of movement. That is, he does not offer death, just the act of dying. So, despite the insistence on the possibility of "after," we are only always moving toward "after."

To me, this seems like an example of telescoping images. The telescope metaphor itself exemplifies Eliot’s poetic practice. Looking through a telescope unifies distance and proximity. A telescope allows one the experience of a distant object as a close object. The distant object suddenly is near. [The way some small telescopes operate (that is, by sliding open and closed) also unifies pulling apart and staying together]. In the section quoted above, Eliot seems to unify after and during. The past (the torchlight, the silence, the agony) seem to weigh on the present; they are incorporated into the feeling of the present. Eliot's phrase "structure of feeling" is useful here (from his "Dante" essay). The present is not discrete, nor is the past ever really over.

This complex notion of time and movement is reminiscent of Zeno's paradox. One can never move because one must cross half the remaining distance, but half of that distance must be crossed first, ad infinitum. For Eliot, these are not philosopher's games but real problems of experience. However, they are not problems to be solved so much as they are problems to be captured in artistic expression. Poets get closer to reaching the absolute if they can telescope images into unities. They must create structures of feeling rather than individual responses. If we are conceived of as only "living," then we are separated from our inevitable "dying."

These ideas help make sense of Eliot's claim that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality" ("Tradition and the Individual Talent"). He isn't arguing against emotion in poetry; he suggests that a "personality" is too singular, that an individual's emotional response is devoid of a context from which it can never truly escape. Instead, the poet should aim to achieve a union of past and present, subject and object, self and other. In short, the poet must seek to express the absolute. When Eliot complains at the end of his "Dante" essay that modern poets present "only odds and ends of still life," he offers in his poetry a telescoping of images that pulls these odds and ends into complex layers of time and relation.

Ezra Pound and the Transformation of Genital Fluid

Ezra Pound's postcript to his translation of Remy de Gourmont's The Natural Philosophy of Love begins by accepting as a possibility the idea that the brain is "only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve" (295). Instead of merely being a kooky idea, however, this is a kooky idea that fits well with my reading of Pound's poetry, and in particular fits with the Apollo complex I've been developing to characterize Pound's poetic and philosophical perspective.

It's important to note that Pound uses this idea as a springboard for his aesthetic and practical concerns. In particular, he argues that Gourmont's idea "would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images" (295). There is a direct link between male sexual desire and the creative impulse. While this seems to simply play into that tired old differentiation between men and women as "active" and "passive" principles, it is important to recognize the relation of this idea to Pound's notion of the image. It is not simply that "creative thought is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed" (301); it is also that the "spermatozoic particle" has "a capacity for formal expression: is not thought precisely a form-comparing and a form-combining?" (301).

Pound exerts a certain pressure on the genital fluid to exceed its base beginnings in order to develop into ideas, form-combinings. So my earlier reading of
"Alba" can be developed further by suggesting that the seeming peacefulness of the poem's setting actually represents a dissolution of the self and a passing of the potential energy of the speaker's sperm. Because he is sexually spent, he is also spent of ideas.

Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"

I suppose anyone dealing with Ezra Pound and Imagism must respond to "In a Station of the Metro." I'm going to provide what is likely an idiosyncratic reading, but one I believe is made available by the text itself and Pound's critical statements.

Before I attempt a closer reading, I want to take note of a point made by John T. Gage in his brilliant analysis of Imagism, In the Arresting Eye. He argues that many Imagist poems work by simply juxtaposing two scenes without identifying one as the "figure" and the other as the "ground." That is, the poems are made up of comparisons, but are unlike similes or metaphors in that they don't privilege one of the terms and use another simply to clarify it. By simply giving us the two scenes without a way to relate them, the poem introduces ambiguity.

The part I don't understand about Gage's argument is his contention that the function of this device "is to promote a belief in the harmony of words and things" (86). How does that happen? Gage suggests that this interchangeability indicates an underlying order. But I find this ambiguity potentially more upsetting. I disagree with that large collection of scholars, including Herbert Schneidau, who argue that Imagists seek or achieve some sort of objectivity, or even "the object" itself. Pound is very clear that he doesn't present the object. Instead, Pound defines the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." In short, he presents a complex, not an object. The critic's task is to read the object as a means toward understanding the complex.

***

"In a Station of the Metro"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

This is admittedly a complex poem. All I can do is try to offer a compelling interpretation, not necessarily the only interpretation. I'm going to start by suggesting that the two scenes have a much closer relationship than is often posited. Most critics suggest that the two descriptions are quite distinct from one another; the poem's meaning is created by the radical juxtaposition of the two statements. But I think they may be part of the same scene. In particular, I'm interested in the conflation of "faces" and "bough" into an image of human trees.

At first glance, this sounds ridiculous, but it gains more credence when one considers how frequently and powerfully Pound uses the myth of Daphne and Apollo in his work (in which, according to Ovid's version, the love-struck Apollo chases the nymph Daphne until her only escape from his lust is her metamorphosis into a tree). Pound's very early poem "The Tree" is explictly about the myth, and "A Girl" retells the transformation from Daphne's point of view. Other similarities can be found throughout his work, for example, from "Heather" ("The milk-white girls / Unbend from the holly-trees") or from "Dance Figure" ("Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark"). These examples provide a context for reading "In a Station of the Metro" in a similar way. The poetic speaker (or poetic "noticer," since there isn't a figure who takes the role of poetic speaker), mentally metamorphoses the faces into petals on a tree branch.

There are a number of tensions comprised in this fused image. It's perhaps a bit vulgar to rely on simple binaries, but here goes. First, there's insubstantial/substantial. An "apparition" a strange sight, but it's also a ghost, something airy or ethereal. This is contrasted by the heavy clinginess of the petals on the wet, black bough. Even the meter of the second line suggests heaviness with its final three stressed syllables.

A second and related binary is mobility/immobility. "Apparition" acts almost like a verb, like "to appear." The faces and the crowd can be imagined as in motion. But the petals and the bough are stationary, unable to move.

These binaries replicate the tension between the drive toward pleasure and the restriction of that drive. The reader understands that people in motion in the first line are made still in the second line; the animate is made inanimate. Like Daphne's metamorphosis, the move from the first line to the second is a restriction of (Apollo's) pleasure.

Of course, the immobility of the transformation is merely (Apollo's) desire made perpetual, not the satisfaction or quelling of desire. In Ovid:

"'Although thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt
be called my chosen tree, and thy green leaves,
O Laurel! shall forever crown my brows,
be wreathed around my quiver and my lyre"

Apollo carries this desire, this frustration of satisfaction, wreathed around his head and "quiver." Pound's poem captures this feeling not just by the substitution of trees for people, but by the stasis of the image. Pound's description of the genesis of this poem is also helpful:

"Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another, and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion" ("Vorticism").

The appearance of the beautiful faces was followed by the recognition that he could not obtain them, and it was only through the poetic image of the wet, black bough that he was able to obtain them. I would suggest that the poem's juxtaposition of images, without elaborating a logical connection between them, leads to the psychological complex about pleasure's unattainability. Like Freud's notion of the dream-work, in which a dream's manifest content is made up of condensations and displacements of the latent dream ideas (or wishes), this poem is an example of the dream-work. It requires not merely rhetorical analysis to make sense of it, but also psychoanalysis.

Postscript: I added the label "Apollo complex" to this post when I came up with the term on October 25, 2009.

Albas

I guess I've made a promise to write about the poetry of Ezra Pound.... Whoever wrote my oral exam paper proposal promised to shed light on "the structure of desire" in Ezra Pound's early poetry and poetic theory. And now I have to do it...and soon.

My most significant problem is that Pound's theory and his practice don't overlap very well. After reading some of the theory ("Vorticism" and "A Retrospect"), I was convinced that Pound was not interested in -- or at least not only interested in -- a poetry of scientific precision and concision. To me it seemed clear that he saw the image as a productive sort of confusion of objects, a conflation of attributes. The tension or energy of these conflations cut through sentimentality, flaccid commentary, and our received ways of knowing.

This seemed fitting when I read H.D.'s "Oread" and the examples in Pound's critical work. Then I read the poetry, mostly from Lustra. Now I'm confused. At times, I run across examples of Pound practicing what he so fervently preached, but not very often. "Alba" is a great manifestation of his principles (as I see them):

As cool as the pale wet leaves

of lily-of-the-valley

She lay beside me in the dawn.

The most immediate contrast here is the simile that links the lover to physical coolness rather than the warmth of an embrace or of lying next to each other. The cognitive difficulty of this simile slowly disrupts our habituated notion of lovers and warmth. We recognize that the lovers lie together at the end of a night together. Warmth is lost; passion has concluded. The surface tension of coolness where we might expect warmth leads us to the underlying concept of this poem: a contrast of beginnings and endings. As an alba (i.e. a poem about the dawn), the poem celebrates the beginning of the day. But at the same time, it mourns the passing of night's passion. If one takes the beginning of day as a poetic figure for the beginning of life, then we live in a post-pleasure, postlapsarian world. This fits with the origin of lily-of-the-valley in Eve's tears after expulsion from Eden.

So far so good, but then there are so many poems in Lustra that simply don't work this way. Since it's getting late, I'll have to pick this up on another night.