APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
There are two Eliots in my life. My son would have been the third, but my husband denied that request . . . just as he had been when six years earlier I had suggested we name our daughter Poem. (Bal actually laughed at me out loud with the earlier suggestion . . . the second time around he had expected enough to just give me a quick, vigorous shake of the head, without bothering to comment. )
One can easily guess the place the Eliots hold that I wanted to draw their name into the most intimate realms of my every day speech. I love them as I am able to love few authors. It is within the novels of George Eliot that I first encountered a literature that sensitively imagines community and association as a matter of the spirit and the imagination rather than of custom or convention . . . and it is from reading the poems of T.S. Eliot that I learned the weight of a tear.
As an undergraduate, my reading of T.S. Eliot’s poems continually returned to the passages in which the speaker’s language faltered at the threshold of a moment of great emotional weight or beauty:
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 35
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
I understood this experience, and wrapped myself in the words as if they were a familiar, timeworn shawl I had forgotten I owned. Through the course of reading his canon, I discovered the heart of light recurred again and again, and came to understand it as a moment of transcendence, an encounter with beauty which lies beyond the ordinary range of perception.
For Eliot, as with many metaphysical poets, such encounters bore the weight of a tear. . . absences which were immeasurable, but weighty indeed.[1] No matter the significance of the event in the speaker’s life, he could only ever falter over the threshold of silence, unable to express just what it was that he experienced. (Eliot’s poems are filled with such silences — talked through, around, buried, but never named.)
And yet while these moments of transcendence end, they are silently mourned and suffered for in the days and years to come. How “Ridiculous the waste sad time/Stretching before and after,” as Eliot states in The Four Quartets.
Yet when I was younger, I overlooked a seemingly small detail . . . there are two people present in this passage. The hyacinth girl and the one who saw her, whose very ability to communicate was stifled by the transcendent beauty he had seen in and through her.
In fact, these moments of experiencing transcendent beauty in Eliot’s poetry never happen alone. They always take place when the speaker is accompanied by a woman whom he presumably admires or loves in some fashion.[2]
Over many years of loving Eliot, I have become more sensitive to the presence of that other person present during the heart of light moments of the poems, but I am left to wonder what it was that filled her eyes in those moments.
Had they seen or experienced the same thing? Could something so seemingly impossible to share as a trancendent moment of beauty be shared? One will never know, given there was only silence, the speaker’s solipsistic sense of waste. . . in the sad time stretching before and after.
As I have matured, the true weight of the tear in Eliot’s poetry is not carried by the loss of that transcendent moment, but by the silence that exists between the two people present to it, in its wake.
Today I read Eliot knowing it is the words that are absent — the words framing emotions felt but not explored, the words that are thought but not said, the words that are muttered under the breath and unheard, the words brushed aside— these are the tears which possess the most weight.
[1] The weight of a tear. It is an image I have returned to again and again for the philosophical paradox it poses. When a cloth tears, what physical weight is lost by the minutest of fissures in the fabric? What psychological or emotional weight is added by the absence? There certainly is weight possessed by absence . . . but the exact measure of that weight remains uncertain, immeasurable.
[2] Many Eliot scholars believe it is Emily Hale, Eliot’s childhood friend and longtime correspondent.
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