Chapter IV
"Marina": Illocutionary Force.
A short personal poem is selected here for a close reading and analysis.
“Marina” has been taken out of the chronology of Eliot’s works to show
how diligently Eliot refined his tools to embrace metaphysical reality in his
later writings. This poem is a fine example of playfulness that language
signifies. The impulse behind it is a substantial one--of a literary language
over-dependent on the connotative power of words and the symbolic power
of music. The verse form displays the use of language that is unquestionably
vernacular. It is marked by an intimate, yet unassertive tone and a modest
lyric artistry. The whole sense of intricate surface and deeper evocation of
music appear to be a direct influence of Mallarme and Wagner. Its fabric is
a poetic imitation of Wagner’s peculiarly intricate and comprehensive inter­
relatedness of texture. The purpose of the study of this poem is to have a
glimpse of true reality behind the appearance and to unravel the symbolist’s
deeper truth behind the sharper-focused surface. In fact, in Eliot’s poem
stress is laid on economical representation of a brilliant visual reality--a
special feature of his verse form, exhilarating in its complexity.
It is
powerful and moving in its multi-dimensional aspects that touch the
depth of consciousness.
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“Marina” is completely different from Eliot’s earlier work. Here,
“the savage, satiric or despairing picture of the contemporary scene
disappears altogether”1. Instead, it is a dramatisation of the inner world.
There is a sense of renewal that pervades “Marina”. It tells of a moment
of transcendence when all that belongs to the death-haunted atmosphere
of doubt and failure is transformed into a new radiance of hope. There is
discernible a grace in the intangible, dreamlike and half-comprehensible
figure of Marina. However, she is projected against the strange beauty of
seascape background available to the world of senses.
Her world is an amalgam of nature and spirit. This union sheds a
new light, both on the individual and the universal.
Nevertheless,
“Marina” is an intensely personal poem under its thin dramatic disguise.
It objectifies new spiritual centre in the life of the poet.
There is a
complete absence of any such centre in the modem world, as depicted in
The Waste Land.
In contrast to Eliot’s earlier poetry, it shows a social
and religious structure converging on a figure that otherwise represents
material force and secular power.
But hidden from all the organised
mechanism of the turning world is the still point that she represents. This
still point is a mystery in the poem. Its mystic vision does not reveal its
source except so far as
it is something hidden within the world of
physical nature and of time, something that is distinct from both. This
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central symbol of the still point in the turning world is the concept that
regulates the entire pattern of Eliot’s later poetry. Here, it is skilfully
presented through verbal mechanism that displays itself in a special unity
of sound structure. In fact, the choice of words determines the semantic
structure of “Marina”. To appreciate its special features, attention must
be
focused
on
the
fine
details of intricate
structure and its
organisation.
Eliot disrupts the syntagmatic axis to reach the pattern of rhetoric.
This syntagm disruption is achieved in two ways. First, by the piling of
paradigmatic axis with recurring images and second by artfully breaking
the continuity of the syntactic structure. This is done mainly to represent
the discovery of life in a world haunted by death. The epigraph ironically
recalls an entirely different type of experience. Harcules unknowingly
kills his children in a state of madness. He gradually returns to sanity to
ask the question: who he is. He also realises his loss and ruminates on his
sad lot.
The poet has used pre-texts to gain an essential link with the
literary past. The title in the present case is the name of the heroine of
Shakespeare’s play, Pericles.. She was the daughter of Pericles who
was bom at sea and was lost. She was miraculously found by him when
she had grown into a woman.
For the portrayal of the subject of
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recovery, the poet breaks linear movement and removes the crucial
cohesive ties. The essence of the syntagmatic axis is its power to express
relation of, and in, space and time, without which we are unable to
perceive meaning in existence. In the poem, the connections from line to
line are made largely by the less overtly cohesive devices of repetition
and parallelism.
These devices, along with complex patterning of
cohesiveness, promote the experience of disorientation felt while reading
the text. Obviously, the range of syntagmatic and paradigmatic options
have been extended with the aim of escaping the tyranny of space and
time. This liberates the words from the fixity of a domain and creates for
them an independent realm, a context in which the things draw their
associative significance. Thus, poetry begins to aspire to a language that
is simple and direct. However, it does not mean that poems themselves
are simple. The language of the poem is heavily patterned. The speaker
asks what place, what region of the world is this. Possibly, in the poet’s
mind there might be some part of New England that he has been visiting.
In the opening part of the text, the poet succeeds in creating
force of wonder through lexical repetition. The repetition also suggests
the lack of premeditation. The piling up of the opening line is done
without the use of commas.
A characteristic feature of ordinary speech,
it is often associated with unsophisticated style of children’s narratives
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and medieval chronicles.
It also goes back to the oral techniques of
composition and delivery, common in old English poetry. Besides, this
type of recurrence is a characteristic of ballad technique. Thus, lexical
repetition, in conjunction with grammatical parallelism, also serves as a
feature of many kinds of rhetoric. The typical instances are anaphora as
well as the repetition of words at the beginning of successive clauses..
These techniques are used as significant means to heighten emotion.
Such reiteration contributes to the unity of evocative sound-patterns.
Further, the rhetorical questions are
used as an emotive device to
suggest the speaker’s outburst: “What seas what shores what grey rocks
and what islands/ what water lapping the bow.”
The core of monosyllabic vocabulary like “seas”, “shore”,
“grey rocks” generates a sonorous sweet music of a familiar seascape.
The primordial symbol, “water lapping the bow,” introduces another
romantic element.
“Water” is always regarded to be an agent of
redemption. While the scent of pines deepens the mystical vision, the
“woodthrush singing through the fog” liberates the imaginative fancy
to enable it to wander over distant lands. The speaker expresses a
sense of wonder: “What images return/ O my daughter”.
The second section exposes the flow in the form of random
thoughts going through his head within a certain time interval.
The
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transitional markers are psychological or mystical rather than logical. The
word images highlight the dramatic show of four of the deadly sins. The
poet generates sufficient force to make the sacramental pronouncements:
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Thus, , the flow of these images of greed, pride, sloth and lust emerges
from experience of everyday life. The images return from the world of
death to relate themselves to Hercules’s horror of unnatural death.
Through epigraph his vision is oriented towards the theme of awakening
in Senaca. The hero under a spell of madness kills his family. After the
deed, he falls into a deep slumber. But when he awakens into his right
mind he tries to locate himself in the altered situation. There is a gradual
realisation of horror as he discovers the consequences of the heinous
crime. However, in Eliot’s poem, the depiction of sins is more of a
general nature than any such unnatural deed.
But the profundity of
conveyed in rhythm accompanying the polysyllabic words.
Gradually,
the
lengthening
shadows
of death
“become
unsubstantial, reduced by a wind, / A breath of pine, and the woodsong
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fog”.
The enveloping
“woodsong fog”, however, gathers into an
epiphanic vision brought about by “this grace dissolved in place”. There
is an unfolding of the haze as the speaker makes an effort to come to
terms with a new reality : “What is this face, less clear and clearer / The
pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger-/Given or lent? more distant
than stars and nearer than the eye”.
In the interest of lyric economy and functional intensity, the
poet is keen to leave out the obvious connectors like interrogation or
exclamation marks. In order to attain a state of emotional reticence, he
deploys
various
condensation
devices,
and irony.
viz.,
symbolic
association,
metaphoric
For example, the locating questions in the
beginning and ending imply a menace as well as a relief to the speaker
whose befogged ship is facing “a grace dissolved in place.” However, the
location is not so much geographical as psychological,
a state mind.
Thus, she is to be located and known by the images that return to him. Of
course, the daughter is a personification of hope or some possibility of it.
For the speaker, the sharp images have become unsubstantial now.
But
they are replaced by more tangible ones that evoke a sense of wonder.
Some of the these locating images are remarkable in capturing the
essence of the fleeting vision. The poet has successfully translated his
perception of grace in to images. They not only relate the daughter to
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the speaker but also dissolve in the lapping water or fog. The speaker
attends to the faint perception of “Whispers and
small laughter
between leaves and hurrying feet / Under sleep, where all the waters
meet.”
The poet has chosen a liturgical cadence to convince himself of the joys
of Marina. He celebrates her discovery through the artful manipulation of
literary form. It also answers some of the puzzling questions related to
the journey of the soul, though tentatively yet effectively. “Marina” is
Eliot’s short poem, intense and sensuous. The poet uses core vocabulary
items in creating a meaningful context. For example, in the first section
lexical sets like “grey rocks”, “water lapping the bow”, “scent of pine”
and “woodthrush singing through the fog”, build up a sensuous scene. In
the second section lexical chain is snapped to accommodate the images of
death. In the choice of lexical sets, the poet is governed by the rhythm of
meaning. It is not a logical choice; it is more radical or too personal.
Therefore, it does not cohere into a logical text. Further, the repetition of
indefinite pronoun, “those”, and lexical item, “death”, slackens the pace
of rhythm. The involved syntax adds to the matter-of-fact prosaic quality.
There is abundance of deicetic words that lean on the context for
meaning. They also generate an autonomous text that demands an extra
textual knowledge on the part of the reader. For instance, the expressions
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“like those who sharpen the tooth of dog” and “those who glitter with the
glory of the humming bird” make a case of parallelism and contrast.
Thus, the identical structures and the fore-grounded lexical items reveal in
their patterning an ideological area of poet’s conviction. The poetic text,
in its complex structural-semantic fabric with reinforcing references,
highlights the message:
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
In the objective-metaphoric mode the poet, thus, steers the way clear
for the progress
of soul away from
recovery of grace in the form of Marina.
the
commonplace
to
the
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References
1 Elizebath Drew, T.S. Eliot: The Design of His poetry(Lon&on: Eyre and
Spottiswoode, 1950), p. 102.