From Immortal Bird To Enervated Sky: A Brief Riff on Ode To A Nightingale and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

BY JOE WEIL

     In the beginning of Ode To A Nightingale, Keats writes: “”My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains/One minute past and Lethe-wards had sunk.” Some ninety years later, Eliot begins the “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: “Let us go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table.”

    Eliot begins with the imperative: “Let us go.” Yet “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, is the antithesis of the imperative. Eliot’s mock epic tone is further compounded by the speaker’s knowledge of his inconsequence. He is so inconsequential that he can not even fully rise to the occasion of a clown. Keats, for all the passivity of the speaker (he lies in drowsy numbness, listening to the immortal bird) is about the mystical oxymoron of passivity as pure action—to die into eternal life, to sleep in the immortal song. A lot changed in those 90 years between these two wonderful poems.

    Hemlock is a poison, the one Socrates drank. Ether, in 1909, was the anesthesia used to prepare patients for surgery. The romantics were fascinated with states of torpor, the irrationality of dream states, with trance, altered consciousness, the whole itinerary of being out of one’s rational mind— all reason suspended for the sake of the sublime. The modernists do not escape this fascination, but, for them, torpor is expressed in the anti-mystical tropes of keeping busy at inconsequence. Man is not asleep in order to receive divinity. Rather, divinity has become etherized, and man lives under the scenic terms of this enervation.

     Keats is willing to die in order to enter into communion with the nightingale. In point of fact, he makes no secret that he must die in order to be born into the world of night—the poesis of the Nightingale’s voice. He must drink the dull o[iate “to the drains.” This nightingale is timeless, the same bird Ruth listened to over two thousand years before “amid the alien corn.”To journey into the underworld “lethe-wards,” to hold covenant with the immortal, one must “die.” Abraham, when he receives the covenant from Yahweh, is put into a trance state, and the power of Yahweh moves through the severed animal parts, and ignites the holocaust. Abraham takes no active part.

    This is standard operating procedure in matters of the transcendent, and the sublime. Something happens—some aspect of the supernatural or immortal visits and is “received”

Passively—in a state of trance, of “drowsy numbness.” (think the limp hand of Adam receiving the divine spark of God the father in Michelangelo’s painting of the creation). One becomes inanimate, dead in the mortal sense, for the purpose of being reanimated as it were into the sublime. As Kenneth Burke pointed out, heaven and the eternal can be viewed as laudatory terms for death—a state of stasis, an end to history and movement. Using the Benthamite tri-partite registers we can express it as such:

Laudatory: Heaven, eternity, the immortal, the sublime, all breathing human passion far above

Neutral: death, stasis, suspension

Dislogistic: decadence, listlessness, decay, rot, uselessness, super fluidity, seediness

   In the presence of the sublime, one mimics the death-like quality of the eternal. One becomes a fitting scene for the entrance of the gods. Prufrock, on the other hand, is anything if not busy. The roles are reversed. God (the pervasive presence of evening) is asleep, and Prufrock is loathe to wake him. After all, that would be impolite, wouldn’t it? The poem is full of frenetic activities that have almost a Marx Brothers mania to them: the women come and go, there are countless visions and revisions, possible seductions that do not take place, self conscious concerns with thinning hair, a sort of manic pettiness. Even when Prufrock receives the vision and song of the mermaids, it is the one time he is almost sure of something: “I do not think that they will sing to me”( he has heard them sing to each other—a sort of mythic upgrade of the women coming and going and chatting about Michelangelo, a mythic upgrade that fails to raise the stakes, and, rather, transforms the mermaids into a bunch of self-involved society women) He has eavesdropped on the mermaids and they are no more concerned with him than the women who come and go. When he lingers in the chambers of the sea, he is not awaked by the voice of gods, but by human voices: “Till human voices wake us and we drowned.”

    In Prufrock’s universe then, meaningless social acts, the art of keeping busy has taken the place of a truly relational myth—a myth by which the eternal can fully infect the mortal with an aspect of consequence, and the terms of the mortal be raised to the level of eternity. The future is full of possibility which never comes to fruition: “In a minute there is time/for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”  Eliot alludes to Macbeth’s “There would have been time for words such as these.” He also implies: “all sound and fury, signifying nothing,” but, in this case, fury has become niggling complaint and fretting, in short, the bangless whimper of the superfluous man, a man who knows he is superfluous (I am no Hamlet) and yet is loathe to change.

    To be nothing is no barrier to mystical experience. Keats’s speaker is brought to nothing so that eternity may enter. In point of fact, it is necessary in mystical terms to become “nothing.” To be “a little something, but not really that at all” is, in a sense, far worse a fate than nothing: to be the lukewarm, the tepid modern man. In 90 years, a reversal has transpired: one goes to sleep by ceaseless activity, none of which has consequence. For Keats, “sleep” is the true activity of human consciousness. Sleep is the laudatory and transcendent, the pure “act” of man, and in his poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats, by going to sleep, eats his peach:

And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees;

To woo sweet kisses from averted faces—

Play with their fingers, touch their shoulders white

Into a pretty shrinking with a bite.”

    Both Eliot and Keats play with the mystical oxymoron of sleep as wakefulness, and wakefulness as sleep, but Eliot’s Prufrock wakens only to drown. The speaker in Ode To A Nightingale asks: “Do I wake or sleep?” “But whereas “Ode To A Nightingale is a poem in which the mortal tastes of the immortal, and permanence/impermanence share true relation, Love Song” is a poem of  very social non-relation. Stuff happens ( or is always on the verge of happening), but it is not even enough to amount to nothing. It is, rather, a little something, but not even exactly that: “That is not it at all.” One thing and then another happens, or almost happens, and none of it is of consequence. The evening which lies inert, enervated, put to sleep, can no more infect the speaker with cosmic import, then ‘talk of Michelangelo can raise the women above the level of social chit chat: “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Prufrock is not only an attempt at anti-romanticism, but anti-mysticism as well. Prufrock can not sit still, but he can not move either—except through all the petty tropes of the social construct .Both poems begin with a simulation of death, of a state of numbness.  To enter night is to enter a sort of living death, a state of unconsciousness, of altered consciousness. But the speaker in Prufrock remains fully awake to the trivial, and even his fear of being trivial becomes a fashionable fear of inconsequence. No mystical union of the mortal and the eternal takes place. There is no covenant except with distraction and inconsequence. Eliot projects this numbness then onto the cosmos itself. It is  the scenic ground zero of all that occurs. If the evening is etherized, it invokes the sense of an impending surgical procedure.  Although this procedure would seem to take place upon a living evening, it is, in reality a post mortem—an autopsy. The romanticism of night and death is muted, blasphemed against by turning away from the romantic tropes of night toward a sort of clinical image repertoire. This blaspheming against the romantic via the clinical is furthered during the whole of the poem by the sense that, whatever the operation is, it is most certainly botched.

    Keats’s poem is relational: mortal poet and immortal bird, each infecting the other with their own qualities—the bird becoming poetry, and the poet becoming the sublime forlorn. Eliot’s poem, for all its insistence on a “you and I” is non-relational. It is all about the failure to enter into true relationship, to receive a covenant. Worse still, Prufrock clings to his inconsequence since it is the one thing he can be sure of. Forlorn in his case becomes always a dividend and mild sense of disappointment.

      Eliot would seek many years later to remedy the impossibility of the modern sublime by returning to a sort of arch-conservative faith, yet, even in his late poems of faith, there is a contingent sense of alienation. One may be social, seedy, indulge in the questions of whether or not to eat a peach, but no true relation is possible. Eliot’s “love song” is all about emotional paralysis—the impossibility of “forcing the moment to its crisis.” Keats’s Nightingale is all about entering fully into the crisis of the mortal creature who can intuit immortality, but who must remain tied to the ephemeral. The mystical oxymoron of the immortal within the transient, and the transient within the immortal is still valid. Lament still has its significance. The great crisis in Eliot’s poem is that there is no crisis, only the awful, soul enervating experience of a trivial and seedy urbanity. The voice of the poem insists “there will be time” (an allusion to Macbeth’s: “There would have been time for words such as these: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace)” This is not a statement of hope, but of ennui.

     What draws these poems together is simulation of death-states in relation to the afflatus of night and song—of rising or sinking to the occasion. In Keats’s universe, the sublime is still possible. In Eliot’s, the sublime has become a form of Bovarism. Keats’s speaker can enter the apostrophic absurd. The poet can address an immortal bird. Absurdity maintains its gravitas. By the time of Prufrock, the absurd has been reduced to a sort of radical and self-aware ineffectuality. Eliot’s mastery of pastiche, of irony, of the anti-romantic and anti-mystical left succeeding poets in a bind. Prufrock is a great poem, but Eliot’s great poem is based on the tropes of greatness being dead. Williams saw Eliot as retrograde, a mere rehash of late 19^th century agnosticism, and the British stanzas. Hart Crane, a worshipper of Eliot’s technique, rebelled against the loss of the sublime, against the nihilism of Eliot by answering with his long poem, The Bridge. In Benthamite terms, Keats raises the absurd to sublimity. If the neutral term is the absurd, Eliot lowers the absurd to the level of the pedestrian and vapid. Lament becomes pathos. This may have been useful as a corrective to bad remakes of Dover Beach , but as a fashion, it had no staying power, and for a good thirty years it did become the fashion. Auden was saturated with it. Once you have torn down all the idols, being comfortably inane and sad over your tea and toast makes for a dangerous poetics. In the hands of lesser writers it led to a sort of witty and gimmicky sense of enervation and despair. The seediness of Eliot’s industrial landscape gives way to the hard boiled detective novel and, worse, the “my aren’t we empty ? Tennis anyone? Sort of drawing room comedy. Still A great poem can not be faulted for having a destructive effect. But if Samuel Johnson is right, Keats’s great poem is the greater for its moral force. To attack the tired tropes of transcendence is of great value. To affirm the core truths of existence is greater still. I admire both poems and count them among my favorites, but, if forced to choose, I choose Keats.

What a Poem Does Instead of What it "Means"

As a writer, as someone who is tinkering around with the composition of poems, you should be more concerned with what a poem "does" than with what it "means." Meaning is paraphrase, and any good poem surpasses its paraphrase. It can not surpass what it "does," for what it does is what it is. Does it rhyme? Does it use short lines, long lines? Is the line important to the success or failure of the poem (despite endless blather about the "line" in poetry, most free verse is, indeed, prose with line breaks). Does the poem effect you emotionally or intellectually, or in some brackish water between the emotional and intellectual? Is it letting you enter it's activity or does it remain aloof, and, if so, is the aloofness accidental (a failure on the part of the poet to make herself clear) or is it strategic? Does the poem end up somewhere else than from where it first embarked? Are its images consistent with a mood, or does it show conflicting moods through its imagery? If there is a single "meaning" then is that meaning too obvious for your tastes?

This last question leads us from the poem to the reader. What is the reader doing? We all carry a preconceived notion of "poem" in our minds, some sort of ill defined yet stringent template. The mind makes a decision almost instantly when encountering a new aesthetic wrinkle. The neurons either fire off in favor of the new possibility, or they refuse to fire, and we refuse to fire for many reasons. I will name three here:

1. We've seen this sort of thing in another form before, and, even though it is new, it feels old and tired to us.
2. We are comfortable in our boundaries as to what a poem can be, and we will not admit this new upstart to the club.
3. We don't have enough information yet about what a poem can be, and so we can't process this new wrinkle.

I will give you three reasons why the neurons might fire off and aesthetic pleasure occur:

1. The poem is doing something new, yet it touches some part of us that says "that's just so - exactly" and we are excited, as if this newness also were the ancient return of the seasons - a new fall or spring or winter. This is what I call the great accomplishment of the "anciently sudden" and "suddenly ancient." The thing isn't just "new," not just novel - it seems inevitable, as if we should have always known it. My god, why didn't I think of that? Truly original (as opposed to merely novel) work always has this feeling of inevitability. Not everyone responds to it. Many readers are incapable of trusting the new because they yearn for something that anchors them to a tradition. They are limited (all readers are limited). Others only like something if it is new (but they, too, are limited. and will like the poem only because it is novel, which may be as bad as disliking it because it is new). Great poems touch both the strings of our hard wiring (our ur poem - our ideal), and those new strings which the brain seeks to grow - the new synapse, the new way of firing off.

An intelligent reader picks up a new poem with all the curiosity of an ape looking at a new stone. Will it be a good weapon for cracking bone and sucking out marrow? Will it be good for something? If not, perhaps its unique color is enough for the pleasure it gives.

A reader needs to examine his or her aesthetics, to know what he or she gets pleasure from, before judging the poem before him. Often, it is not the poem, but the reader who is limited. Just as often, the poem sets off an alarm of previous boredom or disdain. It's cliched, it talks about fairies, "I don't get it" whatever. An editor from Barrow Street said: "We don't like poems that use I and my." He qualified this by adding: "Of course, good poems are written using I." The editor was giving useful information. He was saying this rule was one enforced by aesthetic preference - an intentional aesthetic. We will become a better reader if we know our intentional limits (I don't read rhymed poetry, etc, etc). We will become great readers and critics if we know are unintentional limits.

So the effective way to read a peer's work is to: 1, gather as much information as possible as to what the poem is doing or attempting to do. and 2: know ones aesthetic boundaries, both intentional and unintentional.

In a work shop, intentional boundaries should be the exclusive to the teacher. Unfortunately this is not the case, and the participants often impose intentional rules that have no place. Learn to inhabit the poet's intention and limits - not your own. You can do this by examining why you may like or dislike a poem as much as by examining the poem. This is just and confers dignity upon the poet's intentions. Know your own limits-- especially the unintended ones. You can learn what you don't like, and avoid it in your own poetry. You can also learn what gives you pleasure and attempt to incorporate it into your work. So, when you ask what a poem is doing, try to figure out its intended and unintended effects. Remember this rule: when reading anything, we are also reading and revising, or failing to read and revise ourselves.