Humans have performed dangerous stunts since the beginning of time. These daredevils, deemed as either utterly insane or as possessing death wishes, are usually viewed by society as mere lunatics: people who do not value their lives. On the surface they are laughed at, but underneath the public condescension and jeering they are viewed with a kind of horrified admiration Why is this? It is because these individuals are doing what they love without holding back and with no reservations.
They are fully aware that they are risking their lives and that death is staring them in the face, but they do not care because they are achieving their dreams. These daredevils set themselves apart from the crowd by acting on their desires when most of the world is shell shocked and too afraid to move. In order to live a truly fulfilled and happy life, one must not stand still; he must act as the daredevils do. He must seize every moment. T. S. Eliot captured this idea of carpe-diem and diffused it generously into his poetry. Through the poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” and “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot uses the subject of death and aging over time to demonstrate that life is fleeting; one must not take for granted the opportunities he is given.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, born September 26, 1888, was the youngest child of seven. Being that his family was very affluent, Eliot spent most of his childhood moving back and forth between two homes in St. Louis and Boston. Because he was constantly shuffling around, Eliot often remarked that “he gave up a sense of belonging to either region[;] he always felt like a New Englander in the Southwest, and a Southwesterner in New England” (Bush 2).
He never seemed to fit in, no matter where he went. Like many other members of his family, Eliot attended Harvard University. Though he was incredibly intelligent, Eliot hated the strictness of Harvard and spent the majority of his freshman year on academic probation after not taking his classes seriously (Bush 3). After struggling for some time to find his meaning in life, Eliot discovered his love of poetry from reading a book of Jules Laforgue’s work. He seized this inspiration immediately and began to embrace art of all kinds.
He moved to Paris after graduation and attempted to find a niche for himself there. Unfortunately, he felt just as uncomfortable in Paris as he had in Boston (Sanna 2). Disillusioned, Eliot returned to Harvard and then retreated to Oxford University in England. Pressured by his parents to return home and abandon his poetry, Eliot acted impulsively and married Vivienne Haigh-Wood within months of their meeting (Sanna 2). His conservative parents were shocked; Eliot was known for his cautious, feeble nature and introversion.
Although their marriage was loveless and Vivienne had a history of mental problems, Eliot stayed with her to help her health. Eliot’s life was turned upside down after the death of his father and deterioration of Vivienne’s health. Eliot had a breakdown from the stress and spent a few months in a sanitarium in France in order to recover. When he returned home, Vivienne became increasingly needy and constantly faked illness to get his attention (Sanna 2). Tired of her charades, Eliot checked Vivienne into a mental institution and left her there until her death almost ten years later.
He did not visit her once. After ridding himself of Vivienne, Eliot rekindled his relationship with Emily Hale, whom he had met at Harvard while performing in a play. Though not much is known about their connection, they maintained extensive correspondence throughout their lives. Their letters are sealed and stored at the Princeton University Library under the orders that they not be opened until 2020 (Baker 2). A likely theory is that they were in love, but Eliot never had the courage to marry her.
Ten years after Vivienne’s death, Eliot went on to marry his assistant Valerie Fletcher. Shortly after this marriage, Emily Hale had a severe mental breakdown and was hospitalized. This fueled the rumors about Hale and Eliot’s love affair and her jealousy of his new wife. Eliot’s marriage with Valerie was very happy, and she inspired in him a youthfulness and livelihood that he had never experienced before. Eliot’s health began to take a turn for the worse when he was diagnosed with emphysema, but he no longer feared death.
He died on January 4, 1965 with Valerie by his side, after asserting peacefully that “Death is not oblivion” (Sanna 3). T. S. Eliot’s poetry best aligns with the modernist movement, to which he was an essential contributor. Spurred by the atrocities of World War I, modernist poets searched for ways of expression that fit this new, violent world since “romanticism’s ‘soft’ or emotional expression and its valuing of sensibility and imagination [… ] was inadequate to express a rhetoric of loss and new beginning” (Werlock 3).
The modernist movement showed a great distaste for the world and a desire to start anew, which aligned and resonated with Eliot’s deep unrest and uneasiness everywhere he settled down, whether it was Boston, Paris, or London (Baldick 1). The modern protagonist is often an extension of the author, such as how Prufrock in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a reflection of T. S. Eliot himself (Werlock 4). Writers wanted to make things new and experiment with writing styles. They manipulated rhyme, meter, and verse to express the actual process of thought and consciousness and the distortion of time (Diamond 2).
Though the 20th century brought scientific advancements like the automobile, it also brought corruption, poverty, and greed that modernists loathed (Diamond 4). They were desperate to abandon the outdated ideas of the past and create a new way of life. Eliot’s works reflected this anxiety, passion, and almost painful sense of dissatisfaction, as if he was not comfortable in his own skin. Within “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot represents age and time through parallelism and situational irony to show that one must not squander his opportunities in life. Parallelism is revalent throughout the poem and is used to present age in a nagging, incessant way. The phrase “there will be time” is paralleled throughout the piece, including in the stanza “There will be time, there will be time / [… ] There will be time to murder and create, / [… ] And time yet for a hundred indecisions” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 26, 28, 32). Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, repeatedly reminds himself of how much time he has; he uses the concept of time to console himself due to his embarrassment of being too afraid to act on his desires.
As the poem goes on to explain, Prufrock does not actually have an endless amount of time, and he begins to age and die. He is “unable to act … and] he consoles himself with the repeated speculation that ‘there will be time’ to act on his social [… ] anxiety” (Persoon and Watson 4). Eliot himself connects with the character of Prufrock because he was known to be extremely introverted and shy; he over-analyzed things until his chance had long passed, much like Prufrock (Bush 1). Another tool that Eliot uses to display the ubiquity of death is situational irony.
In the stanza “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table,” situational irony is used between lines 2 and 3 to show how death disturbingly appears into Prufrock’s thoughts (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 1-3). The reader is not expecting to read such a morbid phrase; “the opening line [… ] invites [the reader] to imagine strolling ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky,’ but [the] expectation of romantic reverie is quickly undercut by the macabre image of’a patient etherised upon a table” (Bloom, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 3). Prufrock is haunted and mocked by images of death. These images remind him of all the things he has yet to accomplish, and how he does not have very much time left to see them out.
This is strikingly similar to how T. S. Eliot felt when he realized just how much he had aged and how he suddenly did not have all the time in the world to fulfill his ambitions (Bush 2). A message of warning against wasting one’s chances in life is depicted through the use of situational irony and parallelism in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. ” Furthermore, “Gerontion” uses allusion and metaphor to portend, through the topic of death and aging, the misery that will come if one does not seize the moment. The poem as a whole alludes to the atrocities of World War I and the destruction of the world in its aftermath. The lines: My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London (“Gerontion” 7-10) exemplify this allusion to World War I.
Within this excerpt, the narrator compares himself to what is described as an exhausted, aged European city in the aftermath of World War I. The “owner” of this “house” is illustrated as having been “spawned,” “blistered,” and “patched and peeled. ” These rough, unforgiving adjectives give the people and objects of this European city a weary, tired characteristic, as if they are both mentally and physically aged before their time, much like how the narrator is. The narrator is referring to “the mind of Europe [… The] tiredness and despair mirror a culture that had reached a dead end and had become both morally and literally bankrupt as a result of World War I” (Murphy, “Gerontion” 11). This allusion “so vigorously establishes an atmosphere filled with regret and resignation” that this sense of despair is projected onto the narrator and allows the reader to feel the speaker’s regrets and lamentations (Murphy, “Gerontion” 10). The speaker’s feelings of inadequacy and weariness are mutual to Eliot’s personal life.
Eliot wrote “Gerontion” when his personal failure in marriage and career “coincided with the graphic horrors of World War I to leave him in an acute period of darkness” (Weiskel 3); Eliot was filled with regret after being too afraid to marry his on-and-off lover Emily Hale and after realizing that he no longer had time left to do so (Baker 1). In addition, metaphor is used to express how time has affected the narrator and to give insight into the narrator’s perspective of himself.
One metaphor in particular, “My house is a decayed house,” is of interest (“Gerontion” 7). Within this line, the narrator refers to a “house. ” This aforementioned house is a metaphor for the narrator himself. The narrator is empty, hollow, and decaying: a shell of the man he once was. He has arrived “at the point in life where no time remains except that for reviewing the past and summoning the courage to face death” (Weiskel 3). He is “the shriveled remnant of [… his] particular failures”: a man completely and utterly deiected. efeated, and resigned to the belief that he will die without accomplishing his goals (Weiskel 3).
Allusion and metaphor are utilized through age and time to express the regret that will come if one does not embrace their chances. Finally, “The Hollow Men” stresses the importance of not misusing one’s opportunity through employing imagery and syntax to portray death and aging. Syntax is used throughout the piece to shift the tone from forlorn to anxious and positively frantic and incoherent.
This use of varying sentence structure is best exemplified by the stanzas: For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper (“The Hollow Men” 92-98). At the beginning of these lines, the Hollow Men are so distressed that they cannot properly recite the prayer they are choking out. By the end, they are blatantly frenzied and maddened, and the true cause of their anxiety is revealed: they are terrified of death.
They are preoccupied with “the way the world ends,” and in their case it ends pitifully and cowardly, “not with a bang but a whimper. ” Eliot’s hollow men “do not have the courage or the passion even to curse the darkness. Rather, they accept their self-willed fate, their pitiful tale ending” (Murphy, “The Hollow Men” 12). They are too cowardly and pitiful to take advantage of their lives and separate themselves from the crowd. They simply exist: they are paralyzed and sit idly between the two extremes of life.
This relates to Eliot’s message that one must take advantage of their life and distinguish themselves in a meaningful way; the hollow men do not do this and thus they pay the price. Eliot most likely wrote this poem about himself since he often felt uncomfortable, as if did not fit in with his surroundings (Sanna 2). He felt like he was paralyzed with fear and unable to act. Furthermore, the device of imagery is employed to give descriptions of just how sad, cold, and dead the hollow men are.
The hollow men’s appearances are most evident through the phrases: We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices [… ] Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass (“The Hollow Men” 1-9). Both visual and auditory imagery is prevalent throughout this excerpt. The men are visually described as being dry and empty, like scarecrows. These “empty effigies are puffed up, lacking embodiment or substance” (Bloom, “The Hollow Men” 4).
They are essentially dead; they are dried up and decaying, with no life left in them. The reader can hear their voices: weak, unconfident whispers that sound like “rats’ feet over broken glass. ” The men are filled with despair for the situation they are in; “no one speaks up: [… ] they are trapped by depression and indolence, drained of any vitality” (Bloom, “The Hollow Men” 4). The men are too afraid to speak up for what they want, so they miss their opportunity to be happy in life and become stuck in a kind of miserable limbo between life and death.
Eliot accentuates this misery that the hollow men experience in an attempt to warn readers and plead them not to become as desolate as the men. Imagery and syntax delineate the idea that if one does not seize the chances that are handed to them in life they will soon become as isolated and dead as Eliot’s hollow men. By stressing the idea that life is evanescent, T. S. Eliot insists that it is imperative to one’s own health and well being that he capitalizes on his opportunities and lives without fear.
If an individual stays locked within his comfort zone, too afraid to venture out and see other aspects of the world, he will die filled with regret. Eliot is warning his readers of one simple message: Do not be a “Hollow Man” and view the world from the outside. He urges readers to realize their goals and do whatever is necessary to reach them without fear of failure or embarrassment. There is no greater tragedy than a life lived in vain, and spending one’s existence confined in a self-imposed box of anxiety and doubt is no way to live at all.
