“I’m a modernist,” I say, “mostly American,” in one situation, and everyone knows exactly what I mean. I am a literary scholar who specializes in the historical/literary period of roughly 1912 to 1945 or a little after. If I’m in a different group of people, they might be puzzling over my moniker: “Why would she say she’s a modernist? She’s old, but not that old. Does she not fit our postmodern age within which we live?”
I would answer that second group: “I’ve always felt much more at home with the modernists, regardless of what country they come from, than with any other group of writers. I don’t know why, but I ‘get’ their angst, their sorrow, their confusion, their seeming lostness. And most of all I understand that they are always searching for a meaning. There’s a depth to their searching; they don’t seem to just pass off their angst and confusion into some kind of nothingness and meaninglessness—they really want to know what is going on, so they keep searching. As I always told my students, ‘The search for meaning becomes the meaning.’”
That concept, “the search for meaning becomes the meaning” has always resonated with me. After all, isn’t that how we navigate our lives? From one day to the next, aren’t we searching to understand, searching to find our moorings, searching for a center?
But even amongst the modernists, the way to search—and the way to find—took many divergent paths. Some, like Hemingway, found it in a kind of machismo that belied his underlying depression; some, like Fitzgerald, found it in a kind of hedonism which was fueled by alcoholism. Two who took very different paths, while using some similar words to write about their journeys were W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot.
Yeats, in one of his most anthologized poems, “The Second Coming,” published in 1919, begins with the words: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. “
What a dismal picture! It is, of course, a picture of the world as Yeats saw it following World War I. Where was the center? Everything that had seemed solid and inviolate had fallen apart. Innocence was lost, drowned in a sea of blood. But worst of all, a sense of conviction, a sense of rightness and goodness in the world had disappeared, to be replaced by “passionate intensity”—but to what end?
There’s no denying that such a bleak attitude as Yeats’ fits the time period and many of the people in it. In fact, T. S. Eliot, early in his poetic career, would probably have concurred. In his poem “The Hollow Men,” published in 1925, also as a response to World War I and the changing culture after the war, Eliot includes these images, spread throughout several lines: “This is the dead land/This is cactus land/ Here are stone images/. . . The eyes are not here/There are no eyes here/In this valley of dying stars/In this hollow valley.” Later he says that the “star. . . Of death’s twilight kingdom/ [is]the hope only/Of empty men.” The dreariness, the lack of sight, the lack of direction, is only made worse by Eliot’s final assessment: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”
That makes a person want to curl up and die. His “whimper may be worse” than Yeats’ directionless “intensity.” Oh, but something happens to Eliot that doesn’t happen to Yeats—he gets religion! In 1927 he converts to Anglicanism, and suddenly this man has a center. In more than one place, but especially in his 1935 short drama Murder in the Cathedral, about the martyrdom of Thomas a Becket, Eliot writes about the “still point” at the center of the wheel. Instead of the center flying apart like the “widening gyre,” the center is held in stillness, or, as he puts it in another phrase, In fixity, where both “action is suffering/And suffering is action.” Motion in both, but held in tandem as fixed entities—a center. And, of course, the main character Thomas finds his still point, his center, as he realizes that he will be martyred, not for his own glory and not for posterity, but for the glory of God. He confesses, “I have had a tremor of bliss, a wink of heaven, a whisper/And I would no longer be denied; all things/Proceed to a joyful consummation.”
Perhaps it’s slight, but it is a difference—and such a difference! Towards the end of “The Second Coming,” Yeats creates a most disturbing haunting image: “A shape with lion body and the head of a man,/A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” is slowly moving through a desert, desert of twenty centuries making. Yeats hands us “the second coming” with the words, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” Obviously, Yeats is thinking beyond the typical turn-of-the century-religious thought that Jesus would come a second time to save the earth. Here the “rough beast” will come to fulfill all the nightmares of a place where “things fall apart” and the “center cannot hold.”
On the other hand, Eliot in his 1927 poem that also features Bethlehem, gives us a much different take on the first coming of Christ to the earth. The poem “Journey of the Magi” follows the journey of the traditional wise men from their comfortable homes to the east through a very rugged journey following the guiding star. They suffer coldness, recalcitrant camels, disappearing camel drivers, and “cities hostile and . . . towns indifferent.” Finally, they come to a temperate valley, a valley which is filled with religious symbols—”three trees” stretching against the sky, a “white horse” galloping away, three men “dicing for pieces of silver,” and “feet kicking the empty wine skins.”
None of that, of course, is what these wise men were looking for. This old wise man, telling the tale, says that when they arrived, “not a moment too soon/Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.” And, of course, we readers are right there with the wise man, finding the place where the babe lay to be satisfactory to us as well.
But that is not the end of the poem—the wise men return home after paying homage to the babe. As he reflects on the experience, this wise man realizes, “I had seen birth and death.” He even says that “we had evidence and no doubt. . . . this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, out Death.” And he was never again “at ease here, in the old dispensation.”
At first, to most of us, we would write this off as depressing, just another modernist example of lostness and sorrow. Oh, but it is not. It is the experience of every Christian, is it not? That new center for us, represented by the birth—and death—of our Lord Jesus Christ, gives us a still point from which to grow, from which to find our own suffering in action and action in suffering—but it is not the shifting sands of Yeats’ slouching “rough beast.” We may not be at ease, just as the wise man was no longer at ease, but our dis-ease solidifies our center, not in the “old dispensation” of rules and laws, but the new dispensation of the love and peace that Christ gives to his followers.
Works Cited
Eliot, T. S. Murder in the Cathedral. Harcourt Brace, 1963.
Eliot, T. S. “The Hollow Men.” Selected Poems. Harcourt Brace, 1964.
Eliot, T. S. “Journey of the Magi.” Selected Poems. Harcourt Brace, 1964.
“The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men
“The Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_of_the_Magi
“Murder in the Cathedral” by T. S. Eliot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_Cathedral
“The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)
A Myriad of Things 