This document provides notes from an English literature class discussing short stories by James Joyce and poems by T.S. Eliot and the war poets. It summarizes the professor's analysis of how the main character Gabriel fails to truly understand his wife in Joyce's "The Dead." It also examines Eliot's style in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," noting its intellectualism, allusiveness, and juxtaposition of images. Finally, it lists poems by World War I poets for the next class and reminds students about participation points.

1. ELIT 46C
Day 15
ELIOT AND JOYCE
AND ALTERNATIVE LOVE SONGS

2. Business / Participation
Memorial Day gift in the discussion forums. I
gave full credit for late questions.
Paper 2 assignment now posted.
◦ Due Friday, June 8.
◦ Will go over on Thursday.
Finish up “The Dead” (1914) and then talk
about “Prufrock” (1915) today.
What we won’t be talking about until
Thursday: World War I.
Participation for today:
◦ 1 point for saying something in our full class
discussion (up to 2 points total).

3. When we left off…
Gabriel was wrestling with Anglo-Irishness.
BUT WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON IN THIS STORY?

4. Gabriel and the difficulty of imagining other people
But if Gabriel is a complex, fragmented
subjectivity, how does he relate to others?
I want to suggest that Gabriel fails, throughout
the story, to imagine other people. And it is his
epiphany in the story when he realizes that he
has failed to fully imagine his wife.
How does he imagine Gretta?
What does he think of her?
Key moment: the stairway
◦ How does he see her here?
“Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in
the dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman
was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow
also. He could not see her face but he could see the
terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt, which the
shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She
was leaning on the banisters, listening to something.
[…]
He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air
that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There
was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a
symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman
standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant
music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her
in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze
of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her
skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would
call the picture if he were a painter.” (2303)

6. Gabriel’s Epiphany
How does he see her here? Completely in terms of
her surface characteristics.
◦ As a symbol (and he cannot decide what it means).
◦ As an image
He does do some imagining of her later. But it’s all
memories of the two of them together—indeed,
Gretta seems to exist almost entirely as an
imaginary construct to him. But that doesn’t bear a
resemblance to the actual Gretta.
What is an epiphany?
◦ common trope in Joyce
◦ what does the word refer to?
◦ how does it manifest?
A moment of realization that leads to revelatory
awareness.
What is Gabriel’s epiphany here?
What is his realization and what does it lead to?
The horrible realization, an hour or two later, that he has
never known her.
“While he had been full of memories of their secret life
together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had
been comparing him in her mind with another.” (2308)

7. The last paragraphs
“Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a
feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form
of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell
the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own
identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and
lived in was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes,
silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes,
the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the
treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon
waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly
drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned
slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon
all the living and the dead.” (2310-11)

8. The last paragraphs
Plot summary of these paragraphs:
◦ forgiveness and love for Gretta
◦ dissolution of his ego, his identity
◦ vision of the realm of the dead and its overlap with the
world
◦ move from specific to universality
◦ also, it’s snowing
What happens to language and style in these
paragraphs?
Who is narrating? Is it still free indirect?
Strongly poetic language—very constructed
language. No longer prose.
Last sentence: what poetic effects do you see here?
◦ o-vowel sounds, sibilance, f-sounds
◦ chiasmus
Representational meaning starts to falter
◦ how can you hear snow falling through the universe?
◦ who is the “their”? “the living and the dead”? Or
Gabriel and his wife? General or particular?

9. Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot 1888-1965
Born in St Louis, Missouri—though to a Boston family with
deep New England roots.
Undergrad and graduate school at Harvard—studied
philosophy
Spent a year in Paris, then back to Harvard.
Fellowship at Oxford as WWI broke out. Never really lived
in America again.
1915: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” published at
Ezra Pound’s recommendation.
Married a woman he didn’t like, worked as a school
teacher.
1922: The Waste Land. (We’ll read for Tuesday.)
1927: converted to Anglicanism and became British citizen.
Commits wife to mental hospital (she dies in 1947).
1948: Nobel Prize in Literature.
1957: marries his secretary. They are happy.
Buried in English countryside, monument in Poet’s Corner.

10. Eliot’s Style
1. He owed a huge debt to the so-called “Metaphysical Poets” of the 17C: John Donne, Andrew Marvell,
etc.
◦ He wrote a very famous essay on them. Until that point, they were somewhat out of fashion.
◦ One influence of the Metaphysicals is that he is willing to make his poetry unapologetically intellectual. He doesn’t
separate feelings from thought, logic, philosophy, science—much like the Metaphysicals.
2. His project, as he said in the essay on the Metaphysicals is the following:
“The poet must become more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if
necessary, language into his meaning”
◦ why might we need to “dislocate” language in order to get at meaning?
3. One synthesis of points 1& 2 is, as the Norton intro suggests, is:
“his deliberate elimination of all merely connective and transitional passages,
his building up of the total pattern of meaning through the immediate
juxtaposition of images without overt explanation of what they are doing,
along with his use of oblique references to other works of literature
(some of them quite obscure to most readers of his time).”
◦ Can you think of examples of this?

11. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Read along (Norton 2524).
While you are listening, keep track of two
things:
1. How do you see aspects of Eliot’s style that
we just talked about here?
◦ “Intellectual”
◦ Allusive, indirect, “dislocate” language.
◦ Juxtaposition of images with no explanation or
transition.
2. IN ONE WORD, what is this poem about?

12. Plot summary
(Remember: we cite poems by LINE NUMBER.)
“Let us go then, you and I” (1)
Who is he? (NOT ELIOT.) Who is he talking to? And what kind of poetic form does this create?
◦ Dramatic monologue!
Where? Where are we going?
◦ “tea and cakes and ices” (79)
◦ “In the room, the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (13-14)
And what will he do when he gets there? What does he want to do?
◦ “To lead you to an overwhelming question…” (10)
Who is he going to ask this question to? Does he do so?
What does he do instead?

13. Time and Temporality
“And indeed there will be time” (37). For what?
A direct reply to Andrew Marvell
◦ Marvell’s “To Coy Mistress” is all about convincing his mistress
that there isn’t time. That she has to sleep with him NOW.
◦ Marvell: “Had we but world enough and time”
◦ But in Prufrock’s love song, there is plenty of time.
Plenty of time for self-doubt.
But now what happens to time?
“For I have known them already, known them all—”
(49; with revisions in 55 and 62).
What is his position in time in these three stanzas?
What has he seen? What has he experienced? And what is
his reaction to it?
◦ “I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (73-74).

14. And then we are back to the afternoon,
to the question…
“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” (80-81)
Does he have the strength?
◦ Why not?
◦ Who is the “eternal Footman”?
”And would it have been worth it, after all,” (87, 99)
◦ Would it have been worth it? What would she have said?
“That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.”
(97-98; and a version of this in 109-110).
What kind of person is he? What is his role?
◦ “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be” (111)

15. Acceptance?
I grow old… I grow old...
I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids, singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

16. The failure of heroism
I want to read this poem, then, in the context
of the entire English poetic tradition to date.
◦ tradition that is full of romantic and Romantic
ambition and self-expression.
◦ heroic grandeur
◦ self-assertion
◦ vigor, decisiveness, strength.
And this is a modern “love song”—a love song
that is a failure, a poem in which heroism fails.
Why does heroism fail here? Multiple, related reasons:
Social judgment (and fear of judgment):
◦ pinned by a gaze, pinned and wriggling on the wall (56-58)
◦ “They will say…” his hair is growing thin, arms and legs are thin.
(41-44)
The ordinariness and emptiness of modern middle-class life.
◦ coffeespoons, cigarette butts are the measure of his days. (51, 60).
◦ the women have tea and cake and chat about art.
There is no place here for the Romantic heroism of the poetic
tradition.
And ultimately, there is a failure of language here:
◦ “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” (104)
◦ Runs through, I suggest, the entire poem.
◦ Not just to her, but to us.

17. For Thursday: The War Poets
1. Rupert Brooke: “The Soldier” (2019).
2. Siegfried Sassoon: “’They’” (2023); “On Passing
the New Menin Gate” (2026).
3. Isaac Rosenberg: “Louse Hunting” (2031).
4. Wilfred Owen: “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
(2034-35); “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo” (2035-
36); “Dulce Et Decorum Est” (2037); From Owen’s
Letters to His Mother and “Preface” (2041-42).
5. May Wedderburn Cannan: “Rouen” (2043-44).
Participation for today: up to 2 points total.
◦ 1 point for each thing you said in full discussion.