September 2023 Print

The Crucified Christ in Eliot’s Poetry

By Dr. Matthew Childs

Editor’s note: Parenthetical references in this article refer to page numbers in the 1950 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition of Eliot’s complete poems and plays.¹ All other sources are endnoted.

The writer of faith, insofar as he or she is interested in communicating truth, has quite a challenge in an age of radical disbelief when the necessary means of words and symbols, no longer governed by objective reality, have been stripped of meaning, hollowed out, over-used, sentimentalized, or “transed,” changed to suit the ideological whims of the purveyors of mass media. A modern poet of faith writes for readers akin to Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling, who says in The Moviegoer that despite his interest in pursuing “the search” that he has “only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in [his] head.”² “Human kind / Cannot [and will not] bear very much reality” (118) as the speaker in “Burnt Norton” observes. Hence, direct explicit religious images and ideas are rare in good modern art, which reflects our irreligious age. From beginning to end T.S. Eliot’s poetry presents the profound need for redemption but rarely speaks directly of the means to achieve it, even in his post-conversion work. Even the early poetry is “Christ-haunted,” but more striking direct references to Christ’s sacrifice may be found in “Journey of the Magi,” “Ash Wednesday,” Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Cocktail Party, a play which includes—surprisingly—a crucifixion. The idea manifest in Eliot’s poetry is that Christ’s crucifixion is every man’s vocation, a daily death of self, most eloquently expressed in “The Dry Salvages”:

The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. (136)

The need for redemption, a re-connection with meaning, purpose, and reality is apparent in nearly all of Eliot’s poetry. The major pre-conversion poems depict a profound emptiness, fragmentation, and loss; yet even in these works the idea of the redemptive act is present. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” there is no apparent reference to the cross—though one might see an allusion to the crucifixion in Prufrock’s paranoia about being fixed “in a formulated phrase” “pinned and wriggling on the wall,” (5). As he muses upon his fear of death, the murder of St. John the Baptist comes to mind and in the next stanza he imagines himself a “Lazarus, come from the dead / Come back to tell you all” the answer to the “overwhelming question,” (6). The poem culminates with Prufrock’s pursuit of the mermaids “singing, each to each” suggesting a longing for the supranatural, to linger “in the chambers of the sea. . . Till human voices wake us, and we drown,” (7). Prufrock’s “death by water” is echoed in The Waste Land; the poem about aridity concludes with drowning, rain in the mountains, sailing, and fishing. There are some clear allusions to the Redeemer, His agony, death, and resurrection, which lead to those final images far from the desert. In Part I of the poem, “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,” while reading her tarot cards sees “the man with three staves” and another with “something he carries on his back, Which [she—the purveyor of false religion—is] forbidden to see.” She finishes saying “I do not find / The Hanged Man. Fear death by water” (38-39). Though they are not clear references to Christ carrying and dying on the cross, suggestive elements are there. It is significant and not surprising that the fortune teller is not allowed to see what he carries on his back and that she gives precisely the wrong advice; we should not fear death by water, as the poem eventually makes clear in Part IV, but rather should seek it in baptism and be transformed. In his notes on this section, Eliot says “The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack [of Tarot cards], fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer [author of The Golden Bough: a Study of Magic and Religion that includes figures of sacrificial rituals] and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V.” Part V, the final part of the poem, begins with images easily associated with Christ’s passion and death:

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation . . .
He who was living is now dead (47)

The “hooded figure” Eliot refers to appears a little later, after a despairing cry for water—“If there were water / and no rock . . . If there were the sound of water only . . .” (47). But there is no water before the “flash of lightning. Then a damp gust / Bringing rain” (49)—just as Christ appears to the disciples who are on the road lamenting the crucifixion, sad and confused before their joyful recognition:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded (48)

He Who was dead is now living in the poem—though we must “look ahead up” or elevate our gazes to see Him—because the redemptive effect is immediate: there is no longer rock and no water, and the rain falls suggesting that even the waste land may become fertile. “The Hollow Men” also presents hope, if dim, that the cross may be able to bring some life to modern, “stuffed men,” who “wear / Such deliberate disguises / Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves / In a field / Behaving as the wind behaves” (57). The image of the scarecrow hanging on those “staves” already mentioned in The Waste Land is mankind without the true cross; it is an image of a fruitless crucifixion reflecting the sterile emptiness of Godlessness, even while the hollow man acknowledges the reality of another Kingdom with “a tree swinging / And voices are / In the wind’s singing / More distant and more solemn / Than a fading star.” The hollow man fears that other kingdom of music and light and the poem ends with fragments of the “Our Father” and with a “prickly pear” rather than the cross, though elements of possible redemption are evident (58-59).

The first two major post-conversion poems, “Ash Wednesday” and “Journey of the Magi” both include more direct references to the cross. “Ash Wednesday” associates life—and more precisely life from death—with images of evergreen trees, the juniper associated with purification and the yew with death and resurrection. The poem moves through stages of conversion, a soul’s redemptive movement, as the verse transitions through different parts of the liturgy by way of prayer fragments. By Part V, the penultimate section, we have arrived at Good Friday and hear the reproaches from the cross repeatedly—“O my people, what have I done unto thee”—(65) and the very last line of the poem, “And let my cry come unto Thee” (67), places us at the foot of the altar at the beginning of that same sacrifice in its unbloody form. “Journey of the Magi” includes, in its second stanza, a transition scene profoundly rich in “proleptic symbolism,”³ a series of images which, when taken together, point undeniably to the purpose of Christ’s birth: His death. The Magi have finally made it through the desert and “at dawn . . . came down to a temperate valley, / Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation” (68) The journey of the wise men reflects the journey of Eliot’s poetry. After the misery of the waste land there is moisture, warmth, light, and life. The passage goes on, culminating in what Grover Smith calls “one of the simplest and most pregnant passages in all of [Eliot’s] work” (Smith 124):

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. (68-69)

Here is foreshadowed the newborn Babe’s mission. Not one single image, on its own, can certainly be identified as manifesting Christ’s sacrifice or the Eucharist—the perpetual, vivifying fruit of that sacrifice—but taken together the ties are undeniable. There is living water that turns a wheel grinding wheat that will one day become the Host—note as well the double sense of “beating the darkness”; it is a noise but also the effect of the Light of the world overcoming the prince of darkness. The three trees clearly bring to mind Calvary; the vine leaves over the lintel extend the implication, tying the Passover to the cross under which we see the soldiers casting lots for Our Lord’s cloak. Present also is the traitor’s money along with a reference to the wine that becomes the Precious Blood as the wheat, already suggested, becomes the Host. The white horse suggests Christ triumphant as presented in the Apocalypse. Following this extraordinary and yet subtle presentation of what is to come to the newborn Sign of Contradiction is the profoundly underwhelming, “satisfactory” response of the Magi to the Epiphany. The commentary of the Magi, not the Epiphany itself, is the essential point of the poem because it indicates the effect of discovering Christ in the modern world if He is sought at all. The old men “explorers”—an idea reiterated as a necessity in “East Coker” (129)—“returned to [their] places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation” (69). “[T]his birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, / like Death, our death,” admits the Magi (69). Christ’s birth, which began His journey to the cross—as He explains to Pilate “For this was I born, and for this came I into the world” (Jn. 18:37)— requires the death of the “old man” but it does not necessarily change the outward circumstances of life. The redemption acts internally, silently, invisibly as a spiritual rebirth by way of a death to self in each moment of our everyday lives.

Four Quartets, Eliot’s last long poem, presents the Incarnation explicitly as the source of redemption. The Incarnation alone ties eternity to time, God to man, that “impossible union / Of spheres of existence” (136). Two moments referring to the cross deserve special attention. Early in the first quartet, “Burnt Norton,” Part II, the initial image is puzzling and hardly suggestive of the cross: it is a “bedded axle-tree” in the mud, a piece of broken machinery, horizontally oriented and literally buried in the earth. Significantly, this image of material physical decay is immediately followed by: “The trilling wire in the blood / Sings below inveterate scars / And reconciles forgotten wars” (118). One astute commentator reads this as “the sacramental wire in the blood”⁴ citing the words of Christ Himself: “Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you” (Jn. 6:54). The only enduring antidote to physical decay is spiritual life available to us only in the Eucharist, the vivifying blood, body, soul, and divinity of Christ Who promised “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day” (Jn. 6:55). The blood of Christ “sings” in the soul below the enduring scars or wounds of original sin, though the image also suggests His own most precious wounds from which flowed the blood that gives life to souls and unites all men in the Mystical Body, even reconciling enemies. The stanza concludes with a call to ascend in contemplation from the buried, broken, man-made axle-tree to a living “moving” tree bathed in summer sunlight:

Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars. (119)

We are urged to a higher perspective, to apprehend what goes on below— the sufferings of every day, the conflict between predator and prey—as part of a divine plan or pattern that is only completely understood in heaven. The vertical member of the cross, the eternal, is added to the horizontal or temporal—the “lintel” in “Journey of the Magi”—and at that very intersection is nailed the intersection of time and eternity, the Word made flesh whose blood and its “dance along the artery” is the only way for mankind to ascend from the mud to the stars (118).

The second clear reference to Our Lord on the cross comes in Part IV of “East Coker” as the entire poem advances toward a clear understanding of how we can be sure that time is redeemable, that eternity is real and outside of time, and that Christ can heal all wounds. Part IV begins with Christ, “The wounded surgeon [who] plies the steel / That questions the distempered part,” our fallen human nature— “our, and Adam’s curse” (127) and all our personal faults and weaknesses that can only be healed by the trials and suffering our compassionate healer chooses to send. Part IV ends with the Eucharist and Good Friday:

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good. (128)

The middle portion of Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot’s first play, is a sermon explicitly about Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, with Thomas connecting Christ’s birth to his death. In his third play, The Cocktail Party—which won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play—an actual crucifixion is the topic of conversation at a party. In the last act of the play, which Eliot calls a comedy, Celia Coplestone, while serving as a nurse in foreign lands in a “Christian village” where the natives are dying of the plague, is taken captive when an insurrection “broke out among the heathen” (380). Her body “or at least traces of it” was found and “from what we know of local practices” the character Alex concludes, “It would seem that she must have been crucified / Very near an ant-hill” (381). A crucifixion, quite possibly a martyrdom, in a twentieth century comedy is— to say the least— unexpected, which is part of the point, as is the response from the other characters. They are shocked and recognize that if Celia’s death was “right” then “There must be something else that is terribly wrong, / And the rest of us are somehow involved in the wrong” (385). With the Magi, they recognize a universal guilt that necessitates the cross and a response to Christ’s sacrifice. Like the Magi, the party-goers’ response is not at all a dramatic material or circumstantial change; it is, rather, a recognition that we must live our own lives better, turning the everydayness into meaningfulness: “every moment is a fresh beginning; / . . . life is only keeping on; / And somehow, the two ideas seem to fit together” (387). This is the message about the cross in Eliot’s poetry, and in the life of the Christian: it is not merely an isolated, single, historical action that we commemorate at Easter or even at daily Mass, because Our Lord told us Himself that our daily vocation is to take up the cross and follow Him. At the end of the play, a second cocktail party is about to begin and must begin despite Celia’s death because it is the “appointed burden” of the hosts, just as it is the their “share of the eternal burden” for the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral to go back to their daily lives, but now, having seen the reality of eternity’s interaction with time through Thomas’s martyrdom, fully rather than merely “partly living” (180). Once we have been confronted with the reality of eternity’s action in time, once we have the burden to carry the Light, which is “still / At the still point of the turning world” (“Burnt Norton,” 121) into the daily lives Providence has appointed for us:

We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion. (“East Coker,” 129)

As we hear at the end of each re-enactment of Christ’s death on the cross, the end of Mass is really a beginning: Ite missa est: go, it is sent; it is sent by way of us into our dark, irreligious, sometimes tedious “twittering world” (“Burnt Norton,” 120).

Endnotes

¹ T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950).

² Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (Ivy Books, 1960), p. 128.

³ Grover Smith, T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (Phoenix Books, 1956), p. 123.

⁴ https://thedisciplemd.com/the-sacramental-wire-in-the-blood/