routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

372 The twentieth century: 1900–45
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.
The ‘I’ here is a persona created in the poem but the character of the ‘you’
is not at all clear. It could refer to us, the readers, or it might be someone
who is invited within the speech situation to accompany the ‘I’, or it may
possibly be another part of the personality of the ‘I’ with the result that
the speaker in the poem is addressing another self, an alter ego. Neither
the identity of the ‘I’ nor the ‘you’ is entirely clear and as a result of such
indefinite pronoun use a sense of psychological unease and division is
suggested. The syntactic structure of the poem also does not wholly
cohere. Is it the streets or the argument that leads to the ‘overwhelming
question’; and how can streets follow and lead at the same time? And
why is the question not asked? Attempts to try to answer these questions
by examining the details of the text only lead to further questions and
further problems as the reader begins to perceive that the journey is more
metaphorical than literal. It is a progress through fragments of thoughts,
memories, and dialogues out of which no arrival seems feasible.
The syntactic dislocation and disorientation are compounded by
an imagistic confusion: does the ‘etherised’ state refer to the sky or to
the condition of the visitors? Similarly, the irregular verse movement is
brought back to a pattern of rhyme at the end of the paragraph but
the rhyme frames a trite and deliberately dismissive rhythm, appropriate
perhaps to the dismissal of unanswerable questions.
Both Eliot and Yeats used fragments from earlier cultural expression
to resist the ruins of the contemporary civilisation which they saw around
them. Both poets sought order and significance in a variety of different
traditions, myths, and beliefs. Eliot expresses this diversity in the different
styles, languages and voices of his early poetry. In his later poetry he
writes in a more consistent style, as he attempts to bring together diverse