"—But Who Is That on the Other Side of You?": Eliot's Opaque Epiphanies

"—But Who Is That on the Other Side of You?":Eliot's Opaque Epiphanies Abigail Rogers (bio) A recourse from the tedium of modern habituated existence ("I have measured out my life with coffee spoons"1), moments of epiphany appear throughout T. S. Eliot's poetry. Paradigmatic among them is perhaps Burnt Norton's "moment in the rose-garden," where—Eliot's speaker recalls—"the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, / And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, / The surface glittered out of heart of light …."2 In these experiences, a reality beyond the purview of mundane perception becomes suddenly palpable. As Dominic Griffiths explains, "These moments are characterized by an intensity and illumination that create a profound shift in orientation in the person who undergoes them."3 And yet, there is something distinctively unforthcoming about the moments of epiphanic inbreaking in Eliot's poetry. They remain largely muted and elusive impressions, as if only "half-heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea."4 While epiphanic moments pervade Eliot's oeuvre,5 scholarly attention to his poetic epiphanies tends to coalesce around Four Quartets, given its sustained interrogation of "the moment in and out of time."6 End Page 88 This essay, however, explores epiphanic tropes that surface in Eliot's earlier poetry and become more pronounced in Four Quartets. As a backdrop to these poetic epiphanies, I will first consider how "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) and its diagnosis of modern subjectivity is marked by the conspicuous absence of epiphany. Prufrock's self-entrapment becomes a foil to the epiphanic rupture we glimpse in Eliot's initial poem of conversion, "Journey of the Magi" (1927). With its retrospection into some mysteriously transformative experience, the poem stages an "Emmaus" dynamic that would become a hallmark of Eliot's epiphanies. For Eliot, these encounters often yield something that we come to recognize only retrospectively, opening up what philosopher William Desmond would call "an infinity of mystery to comprehend after the rupture itself."7 Famous for its poetics of claustrophobia and paralysis, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" has been called—as its Dantean epigraph would suggest—"a portrait of a man in hell."8 Yet, throughout, the poem encourages us to expect what Charles Taylor has termed the Romantic "epiphany of being."9 For Taylor, Romanticism casts the poet as "a person of exceptional sensibility," whose epiphanies bring "to light the spiritual reality behind nature and uncorrupted human feeling."10 Consider, for example, S. T. Coleridge's apprehension of "the one life within us and abroad" coursing through "all of animated nature" in "The Eolian Harp."11 As Prufrock proposes "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky," readers with this Romantic pattern in mind may anticipate some image of luminous abundance, of "a Romantically ethereal evening."12 But Prufrock quickly dashes any such hopes for an epiphany,13 introducing the grotesque image of "a patient etherized upon a table." From its very start, the evening stroll takes a deflationary turn. (In fact, even the addition of "then" after "let us go" in this opening line already suggests Prufrock's languishing, reticent posture.) As we wind through Prufrock's cityscape, images of depletion abound: "half-deserted streets," empty "oyster-shells" that litter restaurant floors, water that stagnates "in drains," and "soot that falls from chimneys" (4–19). Here, we find End Page 89 no plenitude underlying things. Prufrock's world is characterized by a nauseating sense of vacancy and decay. This deflationary tendency also manifests syntactically. The poem is rife with halts and evasions. In the opening stanza, Prufrock refers to "an overwhelming question" only for the line to dissolve into an ellipsis. Then he quickly diverts our attention: "Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' / Let us go and make our visit" (10–11). This alternation between assertion and withdrawal recurs throughout the poem. A few stanzas later, the possibility of broaching an "overwhelming question" resurfaces (93). But as Prufrock "imaginatively projects what the impossible experience would be like if he could undertake it,"14 he stops short even of formulating what he...