Let Us Go Then, You and I - Sorry, I'm Busy Tonight

"LET US GO THEN, YOU AND I" - SORRY, I'M BUSY TONIGHT.

Reading Poetry - Theory and Practice

C.M. Bajetta

Lesson plan

Class:

5th year students
upper-intermediate level

Prerequisites:

ideally, the class should have already gone through a general survey of British Literature. This, however, is not strictly necessary; information on the authors quoted can be given succinctly during the class.

Lecture organisation:

2 x 45 mins. lecture + class
lecture preceded by brief warm-up on British poetry (eliciting from students key themes and authors)
followed by sum-up class, random checks and questions, use of websites.

Teaching strategies and tools:

Harvard University Derek Bok CenterGuidelines (allow interruptions, repeat key concepts, encourage personal response)
Use of visual materials, PowerPoint, Internet, but also blackboard to spell names and occasionally words the students may find difficult to understand at first hearing.

Objectives:

taking the cue from the incipit of Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock exposing the students to a (hopefully lively...) introduction to poetry reading.

"LET US GO THEN, YOU AND I" - SORRY, I'M BUSY TONIGHT. – C.M. Bajetta

Slide 2

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table...

(T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1-3)[1]

Nice, isn't it?. But... what does it mean?

"What does it mean?" I think this is the first question we should ask ourselves when we read a piece of literature. First, and above all, what does it mean in itself.

Slide 3

Then, what does it mean for us. Because without the first answer all our thoughts about poetry would be pure moonshine. And without the second, all poetry, very probably, would be useless. [something like the cat in this slide – entertaining... so what?]

Why am I saying this? Do we really need this to read a text?

Slide 4

Of course this reflects my idea of literature. Mind you, there is no way of reading which does not imply - whether consciously or unconsciously - some kind of "theoretical" approach to literature.

Slide 5

All ages have had their ideas about what literature is. Plato and Aristotle (though with remarkable differences) thought of it mainly in terms of mimesis, imitation. For Sir Philip Sidney, in the Sixteenth century, the poet was nothing less than the creator of a "second nature". The Romantics saw it as a means to reach the hidden Mystery which lays "behind" reality, its inner nature. In modern times we have developed a rather sophisticated concept of literature, mainly based of various linguistic theories. (Incidentally, it should be noted that our concept of literature owes much to Plato and Aristotle, as most of western culture).

Slide 6

It is generally agreed, of course, that it is a form of communication. Most modern theory, in particular in these last few decades, has insisted on one basic idea: starting from the text. The text is considered as the only unit worthy of attention. This can be put in various ways: one can insist on the importance of some particular rhetorical devices in a poem, one can show that all novels are shaped upon some similar patterns (the hero sets off on his quest, has to struggle for some reasons, eventually comes back - if he is lucky), some other can emphasize the derivative nature of all language, and say that the socio-cultural context accounts for all that a text contains.

Slide 7

But... are we not missing something? It is no surprise that the French critic Roland Barthes could speak about the "death of the author".

Slide 8

"Let us go then, you and I", back to the quote we started with at the beginning of this class. Who is writing, and what is he trying to tell us? The answers to these questions are deeply linked. You cannot really understand all of what the text means without having some information on the author. On the other hand, all the possible information on the person who composed these verses could not account for all that we can find in this text. This is not as obvious as it may seem. Let us look, once more, at the text.

Slide 9

It might be interesting to note that he is not saying "Hey, mate, fancy going out tonight? The weather's good". And he is not saying "I think it is a most remarkable evening, just look at the clouds over there, on the horizon, how they stretch from east to west, how very picturesque. I would really love to go out for a short walk". In the former case it sounds like an invitation to the local pub for a pint. In the second case we imagine an old lady - or a tweedy academic - pointing out that the sunset is really nice this evening. Eliot is both using a particular "way of speaking" and a particular image. The incipit, the beginning, as you may see, is almost colloquial. But the image is not one we would use to describe a sunset when speaking normally, when we speak, for example, to a friend of ours (in case you do, your friend might get a little worried about you). This image is, in a way, unconventional. The language is not. This is a precise choice. When you speak to a person, you decide how you will address him. For example you speak differently when you have a chat with your mum or when you have to speak to the chairman of the faculty. In other words, you use a particular register. [write on blackboard]

All right. Eliot chose a colloquial register at the beginning of this poem. But this does not explain the image he has used. "Like a patient etherised upon a table". It is a simile [write on blackboard], and indeed, as we have already noticed, a peculiar one; it could be almost shocking. Let us see why. Next to the word "evening" we find something, in this case a person, which is, at the moment, in a horizontal position.

Slide 10

The clouds on the horizon can sometimes have funny shapes: you could imagine a person laying on his back and being there, still. So far so good. But why not simply someone sleeping? The evening is compared to something which is at the same time alive, and yet not fully alive, not able to do anything, and possibly waiting for something. We are speaking about someone who has been anesthetized. And this is not a very pleasant situation, is it? You are usually anesthetized before an operation. So, this image conveys various "ideas". And not all of them are pleasant.

All right. We have seen that this image can be regarded, in a way, as unconventional, at least at first sight. One could say: "of course he is using an unconventional image, he is a modernist, and they were looking for new ways of expression". This is all very well, but let us consider some other images some other poets have used.

Slide 11

The evening has often been linked to rest, and even to that particular kind of rest which is eternal rest, death. Our Foscolo could say "Forse perché della fatal quiete / tu sei l'immago a me sì cara vieni / o sera!"[2]. Thomas Gray linked evening and death in his well-known Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, the incipit of which you may remember: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, / The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea / The ploughman homewards plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me". Here the time of the day and the place he is in elicit a majestic, gloomy meditation.

All right. You could say, "this is the Romantic or Pre-Romantic mood, it is the job of these poets to meditate on life, death and so on, to give us some sort of gloomy atmosphere, and when do you find it most easy to fall into this sort of mood?". Incidentally, it could be noted that quite a few romantic poems are not set at evening or night. But let us keep to the path. I have some more examples in store.

Slide 12

William Collins, back in the 1740s, could say "Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat / With short shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing" (Ode to Evening, 9-10). A bat is pretty common, especially on a summer evening; yet it is not a very pleasant company, and it is often associated with a rather gloomy, and usually disquieting, atmosphere. (In more recent times, D.H. Lawrence gave us a vivid portrait of the effect that the sudden vision of bats at evening can have).

So, to find some disquieting associations with the evening is not at all "modern".

I would like to point out that even the idea of "real" rest, sleep, free from any connotation of death has been used as a means to lead to more worrying matters. If we go back to Virgil we find a particular association. In the Aeneid (cf. IV, 522-532) we read "Nox erat et placidum carpebant fessa soporem / Corpora per terras [...] At non infelici animi Phoenissa". Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), translated it as "It was then night: the sound and quiet sleep / had through the earth the wearied bodies caught [...] not so the sprite of this Phoenician" (in Surrey's Aeneid, IV, 702-715). The Phoenician in question is Dido, mad with love and hate for Aeneas. She is about to commit suicide. Here, rest is opposed to unrest, inability to sleep, and to despair.

So, a calm evening or calm night can be used - and has indeed been used many times - as a background for opposite feelings, to start off a discourse on something that can be quite upsetting. Eliot here - yes, I have gone a long way to say this - is using the evening as a background for the "confession" of a man, and in a few lines he will start speaking about "restless nights" and an "overwhelming question".

Yet, the image Eliot chose is "new". And not only because, as far as I am aware, he used it for the first time. What is new is the way he used it. It is a very short way of conveying a particular feeling of uneasiness.

Now, it is interesting to note that Eliot was trying to find ways of avoiding long descriptions to convey a particular feeling. He wanted to find images that could give a sort of "equation" of feelings. It is significant that he was not alone in this. The Imagist movement and particularly a young poet, T.E. Hulme, [write on blackboard] who happened to die in the very same year in which Eliot published this poem, were struggling towards this goal.

Slide 13

And a person who influenced Eliot a good deal, the American writer Ezra Pound, said that‘an image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. It is also important to remember that this has a long story, which goes back to the French symbolists and to Mallarmé in particular. Eliot, moreover, was particularly interested in the Metaphysical Poets, where we do find many instances of rather shocking parallels and images (think of Donne's "the flea").

He did pay attention to images, he chose them carefully and he knew what he was doing. He knew what other poets had done before him, and what other poets were trying to do at the same time as him. He was doing something "new" exactly because he was deeply aware of what had preceded him, and of what was going on at the time. His poetry would have been quite different had he not met Pound - who corrected part of The Waste Land and had he not read Donne and the Metaphysical Poets.

Now, let us look at the path we have walked so far. We started off by reading a text. We tried to see if there were any possible links with other texts, or at least with other similar attitudes, and we had to dismiss the idea that Eliot's daring image, was - at least, in a way - something typically "modern". Yet we have seen that there was something "new" about it, a particular awareness of what it means to use an image.

In order to do this, we had to look at some segments of the history of literature, and to pay attention to Eliot's biography.

Slide 14

In other words, we have tried to identify the possible sources or some kind of influence - which I have completely made up in this case (!) - and some biographical data. I have mentioned The Waste Land. It is a long poem composed by Eliot which underwent some revisions, and as I have already said, saw the active collaboration of Pound, who commented on and suggested some revisions to the text. In this case it is also very important to understand how this text has come to us, what is its history. How much of Pound is in it, and how much of Eliot's original draft? In some cases - for some other poets - it could even be a question of who wrote which part.

So, we have tried to look at a text and at its author by looking at the same time at the text itself and at the context - or, better, the contexts - that contributed to it.

When we read a text, we meet not only some words on the page, but a man and his personal history. And his personal history is part of a larger history, the history of his time. When we meet someone we have to move towards him if we want to shake his hand. If we want to understand an author we have to enter his world. And this has to be done both by an attentive reading of the text and by an attentive examination of what is "around" that text. To read is to meet a person, it means to accept an invitation. In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Eliot is inviting us to go with him. If we do not accept the task that this implies, to meet him as a person, we will never understand what he means. And consequently we will never fully understand the meaning that his text can have for us. And both losses are quite serious ones. Eliot is telling us: "Let us go then, you and I" let him not find us unprepared. Otherwise...

Slide 15

our only answer could be something like "Sorry, I'm busy tonight". And this really sounds like a missed occasion.

[1] In T.S. Eliot. The Complete Poems and Plays (1969), London, Faber and Faber, 1985, p. 13.

[2] "Alla Sera" in Opere di Ugo Foscolo, ed. M. Puppo, Milan, Editoriale Vita, 1962, p. 12.