"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
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Woolf was born i ...
's
Hogarth Press
The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond (then in Surrey and n ...
. It is one of the quatrain poems, a mode that Eliot had adapted from the mid-19th-century French poet
Theophile Gautier
Theophilus is a male given name with a range of alternative spellings. Its origin is the Greek word Θεόφιλος from θεός (God) and φιλία (love or affection) can be translated as "Love of God" or "Friend of God", i.e., it is a theoph ...
. The title is a fainter parody of
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication '' Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's ' ...
'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"
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
*
*
{{T. S. Eliot
1910s poems
Poetry by T. S. Eliot
Modernist poems
American poems