9 - From Coriolan (1931) to ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936)

Summary

After ‘Marina’ Eliot turned briefly to a quite different mode, that of the Coriolan poems (1931). These (‘Triumphal March’ and ‘Difficulties of a Statesman’) seem to have been an attempt to revive an element of social criticism or satire in his poetry. The ‘eagles’ and the ‘trumpets’ of ‘Triumphal March’, and the way the whole display of imperial might modulates at the end of the poem to the bathos of Cyril and the ‘crumpets’, recalls this comic deflation in ‘A Cooking Egg’:

Where are the eagles and the trumpets?

Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.

Over buttered scones and crumpets

Weeping, weeping multitudes

Droop in a hundred A.B.C.'s.

But instead of the crisp concision of that, we get a prose-like free verse, and at one point a deliberately flat listing of armaments (taken almost directly from a book about the Treaty of Versailles of 1918). The prosaic style is appropriate for the speaker – standing (one infers) with the ordinary people lining the way of the military procession, for whom ‘The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving’, a mere noting of outward phenomena without any awareness of consciousness itself. They await the leader, but when he comes he is passive and enigmatic:

There is no interrogation in his eyes

Or in the hands, quiet over the horse's neck,

And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent.

It is difficult to see what attitude the speaker means us to take towards this leader.