Wordsworth and Eliot.

I make an allusion in my essay to Wordsworth's poem "A Slumber did my Spirit Seal" which follows the lead of Eliot in Burnt Norton Section III.

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.

It is the line "With slow rotation suggesting permanence" that reminded me of the Wordsworth poem. Here it is for any that have forgotten.

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course
with rocks, and stones, and trees.

There is not a direct allusion here, but the correlation (at least in my mind) is pretty high. Wordsworth's poem deals with an existence that feels utterly out of time. "earth's diurnal course" sounds a lot like the metronome of the sea that Eliot speaks of in Dry Salvages. It is not the invention of man, but of an earth that exists outside of our petty mechanism of time. The secret to this ancient time can only be found in the rocks and the stones and the trees that cannot be deciphered. If only we could come into such close proximity with them that we could then understand their secrets. Maybe we could suck on them.

Interestingly, the phrase "no motion has she now, no force" fits very tightly into Eliot's philosophy, or is it the other way around? Eliot mentions that movement is time, so this "she" is obviously outside of it.

Eliot's words make this short poem very poignant. No darkness exists in the slumber with all of the accompanying physical matter, and surely the sensual is successfully drained out of this existence. That is another point that corresponds to Eliot, sensual desire is in time, true love is not.

This poem has always held a dark edge with me, and now seems to more than ever. But maybe it is really a poem of great transcendence and joy. The object of the poem is outside of time and has apparently made the jump into the next "reality." It is into this next world that love becomes a little more pure, a little bit stronger. In some sense, death has always contained an element of hope. We just don't know.