Literacy Links
American Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, asserts that ‘High schools are places where poetry goes to die.’ This is not the case at Mount Carmel. Last Saturday, Year 12 students enjoyed a six-hour Poetry Workshop at the Mount Carmel Retreat Centre where they explored the works of T.S. Eliot as part of their HSC English Advanced course. Throughout the day, students recited poetry near the dam, wrote creatively in the chapel and read a series of critical works in the Writing Club room which overlooks the picturesque property. Three journal entries are captured below.
Journal entry 1
I remember Jane Hirshfield saying that entering a good poem allows a reader to feel, taste, hear, think, and see in altered ways. This is true of my encounter with the poetry of twentieth century Modernist poet T.S. Eliot. In fact, my engagement with Eliot’s body of work saw me thoroughly transformed by its presence and mysterious ways. This is particularly evident with his earlier poems published in the 1917 anthology Prufrock and Other Observations where he powerfully captures the sense of inadequacy, abjection and meaninglessness of modern existence. The paralysis of Prufrock in the dramatic monologue ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’; the squalor and dislocation of urban existence in ‘Preludes’; and the ‘twisted’ and ‘fatalistic’ encounters in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ all communicate a sense of human misery, alienation and disillusionment. Eliot’s enduring poetry gives voice to the twenty-first century’s malaise also. The question ‘Do I dare / Disturb the universe?’ reverberates in our complex world today.
Journal entry 2
Mary Oliver once said that a reader beginning a poem is like someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars. Just as crucially, reading an Eliot poem lets us discover and rediscover our own depth and yearnings. Our consciousness is augmented as we explore Eliot’s movement towards meaning and purpose apparent in his body of work. A glimpse of this transcendent aspiration is clear in ‘The Hollow Men’. Published in 1925, this poem seems to function as a liminal space in Eliot’s creative progression. The text resonates with the paralysis of the earlier poems and yet points to the search for something of a spiritual nature beyond the confines of the physical.
Journal entry 3
In the poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, the speaker’s desperate search for some sense of connection and agency is depicted in ‘I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker’ and ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think they will sing to me.’ This sentiment seems to resonate in Prelude IV with the plaintive cry of ‘some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing’, only to be emphatically silenced by the ending of ‘Rhapsody …’ in ‘The last twist of the knife’. The universality of this modern predicament is conveyed effectively with the utilisation of synecdoche in ‘the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase’, ‘muddy feet that press/To early coffee stands’, and ‘female smells in shuttered rooms.’ Time is a central preoccupation in each of Eliot’s early poems with the very Shakespearean notion of appearance versus reality captured in ‘There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.’ This recognition of the interplay between the true and the false self is particularly Eliotic. ‘Winter evening’, ‘morning comes to consciousness’ and ‘Twelve o’clock’ all situate the speakers and the audience in the relentless movement of time, further emphasising the dehumanising lack of meaning and human connection. All that ‘memory’ provides to counter this ‘fatalistic’ beating of time’s drum are ‘twisted’, ‘broken’ and ‘crooked’ things which urge the speaker and the audience to ‘Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.’ This indeed is ‘The last twist of the knife’.
Ms Clare Murphy
English Coordinator & Literacy Instructional Coach