Whispers of Immortality
Whispers of Immortality | |
---|---|
by T. S. Eliot | |
First published in | Little Review 5.5 |
Language | English |
Lines | 32 |
"Whispers of Immortality" is a poem by T. S. Eliot. Written sometime between 1915 and 1918, the poem was published originally in the September issue of the Little Review and first collected in June 1919 in a volume entitled Poems published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. It is one of the quatrain poems, a mode that Eliot had adapted from the mid-19th-century French poet Theophile Gautier.[1] The title is a fainter parody of William Wordsworth's title of the poem, Intimations of Immortality.
Analysis
The poem was developed in two sections; each contains four stanzas and each stanza contains four lines. The first section where Eliot paid homage to his great Jacobean masters in whom he found the unified sensibility is a kind of "versified critique"[2] of Jacobean writers, Webster and Donne in particular. Both Webster and Donne are praised by the narrator, the former for seeing the “skull beneath the skin”(l.2), the latter for not seeking any “substitute for sense/ To seize and clutch and penetrate;/Expert beyond experience,..”(l.10-12). The apparent oxymoron of a "sense" that transcends beyond "experience" is followed by references to "the anguish of the marrow"(l.13) and the uncontrollable “fever of the bone” (l.16) that are too corporeal for mundane experience. The second section begins with a description of a modern Russian woman Grishkin whose “friendly bust/ Gives promise of pneumatic bliss”(l.19-20). In the following two stanzas, Grishkin is compared to the “Brazilian jaguar” which “does not in its arboreal gloom/ distil so rank a feline smell/ As Grishkin in a drawing room.”(l.26-28) In the concluding stanza, the narrator said that even her charm is the subject of philosophy. Nevertheless “our lot crawls between dry ribs/ To keep our metaphysics warm.”(l.31-32).
References
External links
- An omnibus collection of T. S. Eliot's poetry at Standard Ebooks
- Whispers of Immortality public domain audiobook at LibriVox
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- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
- "Portrait of a Lady"
- "Preludes"
- "Whispers of Immortality"
- "Gerontion"
- The Waste Land
- The Hollow Men
- Ash Wednesday
- Ariel Poems
- "Journey of the Magi"
- "A Song for Simeon"
- Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
- "The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles"
- "Gus: The Theatre Cat"
- "Growltiger's Last Stand"
- "The Naming of Cats"
- Burnt Norton
- East Coker
- The Dry Salvages
- Little Gidding
- Four Quartets
- Sweeney Agonistes
- The Rock
- Murder in the Cathedral
- The Family Reunion
- The Cocktail Party
- The Confidential Clerk
- The Elder Statesman
- Murder in the Cathedral (film)
- Assassinio nella cattedrale (opera)
- Murder in the Cathedral (TV play)
- Canticle IV: The Journey of the Magi
- Cats
- 1981 musical
- 1998 film
- 2019 film
- The Criterion
- Faber and Faber
- T. S. Eliot Prize
- T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University)
- Portrait of T. S. Eliot
- Tom & Viv (1984 play, 1994 film)
- Eliot family
- Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (first wife)
- Valerie Eliot (second wife)
- Henry Ware Eliot (father)
- Charlotte Champe Stearns (mother)
- William Greenleaf Eliot (grandfather)
- E. Martin Browne
- Emily Hale
- John Davy Hayward
- Ezra Pound
- Jean Jules Verdenal
- William Butler Yeats