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‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’: A literary examination of John

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Cornelia Cook
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‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’ says Sweeney in T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. Sweeney is telling the awful parable of the man he knew who ‘did a girl in’ and wasn’t sure which of them was alive and which dead. In the world of Sweeney’s experience ‘That’s what life is. Just is ... Life is death’.

When you’re alone like he was alone/You’re either or neither/I tell you again it don’t apply/Death or life or life or death/Death is life and life is death/I gotta use words when I talk to you/But if you understand or if you dont/That’s nothing to me and nothing to you ...

Words here are strained to accomplish their explanation (how can ‘life’ be ‘death’ when the words signify opposites) and as they stretch they give up multiple significances to unfold un-thought-of meanings. If Sweeney’s friend Doris says (whether of Sweeney’s ‘canibal isle’ where life is ‘birth, and copulation, and death’, or of the proposed ‘crocodile isle’ idyll of ‘Morning/Evening/Noontime/Night’), ‘That’s not life, that’s no life/Why I’d just as soon be dead’, she may not only be expressing a simple equality of preference, but saying that on an isle with no telephones, gramophones, cars or trains, only fruit and flowers and sameness, death will come just as surely and as soon as in the busy world of sights and sounds and doings. When Sweeney picks this up and says ‘That’s what life is. Just is’, he may allude to the quality of life—hurried, mechanised, or slow-dropping hypnotised—as death or to the incontrovertible fact that the end, the fulfilment, of all life is death.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 72 , Issue 852 , September 1991 , pp. 365 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Eliot, T.S., The Complete Poems and Plays, New York, 1962, pp. 74–85Google Scholar.

2 The Prelude as a whole is part of John's gospel as it stands. That some verses are often claimed not to have belonged to a hypothetical original does not affect the point made here. The same observation applies to the last chapter of the gospel, to which reference will later be made.

3 Chorus I from ‘The Rock’, Complete Poems and Plays, p. 96.

4 John: A Greek‐English Diglot for the use of Translators, The British and Foreign Bible Society, 1961.

5 Raymond Brown renders that ‘do not belong to’, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (xiii—xxi), New York, 1970, p. 757Google Scholar.