2010 Kermode EliotandtheShudder

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Frank Kermode Eliot and the Shudder: The Shudder LRB 13 May 2010
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Eliot and the Shudder

Frank Kermode
Tennyson was not a poet for whom T.S. Eliot professed much love, though he was judicious
as well as cool in his appraisals: He has three qualities which are seldom found together
except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety and complete competence. (He means they
must be like Dante.) And he had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton an opinion
that loses warmth when one recalls what Eliot said elsewhere about Milton. (Having a fine
ear is not enough.) When Eliot attends to Tennysonian detail, for instance in Maud, he finds
much to dislike, and pronounces the ravings of the lover on the edge of insanity and the
bellicose bellowings to be false: they fail to make ones flesh creep with sincerity. But In
Memoriam is a different matter; there alone does Eliot find that Tennyson achieves full
expression. He issues, quite insistently, his customary warning: the poem must be
comprehended as a whole. Nevertheless it seems permissible to remember this part on its
own:
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be claspd no more
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
This, Eliot says, is great poetry, economical of words, a universal emotion related to a
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particular place; and it gives me the shudder that I fail to get from anything in Maud.
Shudder is a bit surprising coming from the stately Eliot, though the experience to which he
refers may in some forms be common enough. He certainly experienced it, or something that
puts him or us in mind of it. If the word is used as equivalent to frisson (and lexicographers
defining frisson seem unable to avoid shudder), we can propose a debt to the French, likely
in these years when English poets were influenced, as Eliot was, by Baudelaire and others.
Indeed Eliot, rejecting the 1890s reading of Baudelaire, had made himself the major exponent
of that author as a fierce moralist as well as the poet of limmonde cit, and Baudelaires
book has its share of horrors, shudders and shadows. Huysmans, a disciple of Baudelaire, was
admired by Eliot, and it might be said that his A Rebours would have to be shortlisted in any
shuddering competition, especially as frmir lends support to frissonner. As an admirer of
Huysmans, Oscar Wilde had recourse to the shudder in The Picture of Dorian Gray. A high
proportion of these instances occur in commonplace expressions such as I shudder at the
thought or a shudder passed through whoever it was, examples which tend only to show
that whatever its original force the shudder was susceptible to vulgarisation; but the word
remained capable of describing the horror, or even the beauty, of a bodys response to violent
stimulus. Eliot admired shock and surprise, looked for these qualities in his own verse, and
judged others, as he does Tennyson, by their success in providing them.
Pater speaks of Coleridges taste for the supernatural as a longing for le frisson, a shudder, to
which the romantic school in Germany, and its derivations in England and France, directly
ministered. Some mildly louche shuddering occurs in Coleridges Christabel:
Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
And slowly rolled her eyes around;
Then drawing in her breath aloud
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!
What happens next we arent told, but that shudder, along with other details, suggests that
Christabel may be about to suffer a disagreeable, if romantic, experience. A degenerate
version of such encounters found its place in American terror magazines, descendants also
of Poe, and, according to Wikipedia, known in the trade as shudder pulps.
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Auden could find it possible, on a chilly night in Brussels, to defy the cold with a libidinal
shudder: And fifty francs will earn a stranger right/To take the shuddering city in his arms.
Just recently I heard somebody reading Dracula on the radio; it seems that a taste for some
form of shudder continues to thrive. What seems to be a specialised usage of it is prominent
in the aesthetics of Adorno.
More interesting in this context are the observations of Darwin on the physiology of the
shudder, recorded in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which has
a chapter headed Surprise AstonishmentFearHorror. Among the reactions to a suitable
stimulus are elevation of the eyebrows, protrusion of the lips, erection of the hair and
contraction of the platysma muscle. The contraction of this muscle, which extends from the
collarbone up each side of the neck, can drastically alter the appearance: the jaw drops, the
pupils dilate and so on. The first sensation of fear, or the imagination of something dreadful,
commonly excites a shudder, and a simultaneous contraction of the platysma. The OED
defines the word, but without citing Darwin. The behaviour of the muscle registers a response
to fear, horror, pain or the fear of it, or pain in others, or anger, or sometimes disgust.
Evidently the biologist could see that the shudder, though often a trivial matter, was a highly
emotional affair, deeply involved with acts of imagination as well as with more
commonplace reactions to cold or fear. It is easy, then, to imagine an act of reading as
accompanied by shuddering, and that seems to be the context of Eliots remarks on those
lines from In Memoriam. He seems to have used the word shudder rarely but almost always
in relation to experiences one would rather not have, and which are roughly antithetical to
moments of ecstasy. In the middle of a rowdy 17th-century playhouse pit, he says, the
thought of Shakespeare, the feeling and the shuddering personal experience of Shakespeare
moved solitary and unsoiled. How does he know about Shakespeares shuddering personal
experience? He is sure that by vocation the poet knows, is susceptible to the hit, will accept
what Ronald Schuchard calls in Eliots Dark Angel the close connection in Eliots poetry
between the rare moments of ecstasy and the recurring moments of horror. Eliot identifies
the presence of the latter in Charles Williamss novel All Hallows Eve, in which he claims
there is no exploitation of the supernatural for the sake of the immediate shudder. There are
shudder-inducing images of horror in Eliots play The Family Reunion, figures of nightmare
and desire, but sometimes everything moves on a deeper level, where, as in All Hallows Eve,
the shudder is not immediate but is rather a means of access to different stimuli, or perhaps
to ecstasy, or the memory of ecstasies.
Clearly the word shudder belongs to a set that includes fear and horror and is associated
with a powerful physical response. In a recent essay on Francis Bacon in the New York
Review of Books, John Richardson recalls that Bacon aimed his images of his friend George
Dyer at the nervous system, and adds that a woman admirer told him they did indeed
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induce a visceral shudder. That the shudder should be described as a violent physical
response with a strong sexual element will remind us of Y eatss Leda and the Swan:
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead
In an earlier poem, On Woman, Y eats had associated the harshness of the desire between
Solomon and Sheba with the explosive shudder of iron moved from fire and plunged into
water. That is an impressive figure:
Harshness of their desire
That made them stretch and yawn,
Pleasure that comes with sleep,
Shudder that made them one
But Leda and the Swan is the great modern shudder poem. Here the shudder is an erotic
response to apocalypse, to a rape that is also some sort of annunciation. Orgasm is
accompanied, or represented, by cosmic destruction, the broken wall and burning roof and
tower of Troy, and Agamemnon dead. We are to feel this catastrophe by reference to our
own bodies, our visceral shudder; for the huge historical event, the disastrous overture, is to
be understood only there. A word that hitherto did not immediately advertise a strong sexual
sense now, by virtue of Y eatss immense ambition, acquires such a sense. It may tap some
deep reserve of feeling, related to infantile terrors as well as infantile guilt.
What, then, of Eliots shudder? His verse offers many instances of terror, dismay and of the
uncanny. In the early poems there is torture and delight in The Love Song of St Sebastian,
and Narcissus horror of his own smoothness in The Death of St Narcissus. There is
murderous fantasy in The Family Reunion. The figure of Sweeney, who appears in several
poems, belongs to nightmare and the women of Canterbury in Murder in the Cathedral are
well acquainted with horror:
What is the sickly smell, the vapour? The dark green light from a cloud on a
withered tree? The earth is heaving to parturition of issue of hell. What is the
sticky dew that forms on the back of my hand?
So Eliot was sensitive to certain manifestations of the uncanny, and to terrors that might well
cause shuddering. We have now to ask a more difficult question: why did those lines of In
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Memoriam affect Eliot so exceptionally, move him to use shudder as a laudatory critical
term? Of course we may say that Victor Hugo had already done this when he told Baudelaire
that in writing Les Fleurs du mal he was creating un frisson nouveau. And many of us
remember the days when the metaphysical shudder was a stock term in discussions of
Donne and his contemporaries. But in the In Memoriam passage the shudder is not a
metaphysical shudder. In what is as far as I know his only essay on Tennyson, Eliot certainly
intends praise. His first sign of enthusiasm is for a line or a fragment of a line from Mariana,
which, he thinks, offers something wholly new: The blue fly sung in the pane. So far the
youthful Tennyson has excelled as a metrist and indeed is credited with most of the attributes
of greatness without quite deserving to be called great. Y et, Eliot says, this line or fragment
is enough to tell us that something important has happened. Now the line has many clear
merits, it conveys a recognisably melancholy, apprehensive mood of waiting; and it may
conceivably be true to say, as Eliot does, that its effect depends finally on reading sung for
sang. The line belongs to a good poem, rightly praised as a whole; but there was still
something distinctive about it: it got itself chosen. The only explanation offered is that
something important has happened.
Eliot insisted strongly that poems must be treated as wholes, making this point
unambiguously in his approach to In Memoriam, just as he did in his 1929 essay on Dante:
Dantes poem is a whole you must in the end come to understand every part in order to
understand any part. Or: We cannot extract the full significance of any part without
knowing the whole. It is a doctrine he could have learned from Baudelaire, who applied it to
the whole of Les Fleurs du mal: Je rpte quun livre doit tre jug dans son ensemble. But
The blue fly sung in the pane is a line valued for its own qualities, or a line of such fineness
that the alteration of a single syllable could make it better or worse, with nothing expressly
said concerning the whole excellent poem except that we should not favour some passages
over others, or profess to choose a fair sample. Y et the stanzas Eliot chooses, the lines that
induce the shudder, are obviously singled out, and their selection justified by their
contribution to an experience of religious despair (which applies to the whole poem) and by
their technical dexterity, which must be studied in its particular instances, and may be
rewarded by the readers frisson of discovery.
It is in his brilliant responses to such particular instances, rather than in his apprehensions of
philosophical or theological wholeness, that I find Eliot at his most impressive as a critic. In
the passage I quoted from In Memoriam we may be impressed by the guilty thing,
borrowed from Wordsworth but Wordsworths High instincts, before which our mortal
Nature/Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised are not now to be redeemed, are no longer
truths that wake,/To perish never. Tennysons truncated allusion is worthy of Eliot himself,
and so is the double sense of but far away, where we begin by identifying a reference to the
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absence of Tennysons friend Arthur Hallam, in whose memory the poem is written. But at
once the phrase but far away is shifted into another sentence, and what is becoming audible
is the noise of life. Finally, we face the unhappiness of that noise, the cold rain and the bleak
street; and, in the distortions of the final tetrameter the wrenched placing of bald and blank,
the terminal shudder.
Eliot had a sort of physiology of poetry. In his lecture The Three Voices of Poetry he agreed
with Gottfried Benn when he spoke of an imagined meeting between a creative germ and
language. The poet cannot know what words he wants until he has found the words. The
nascent poem is a burden, relief follows its birth: the poet may experience a moment of
exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation. Here is
a remarkable mixture of satisfactions, physical, spiritual, close to mortal, and we need to
remind ourselves that the metaphor is obstetric, shadowing a dangerous childbirth, a cause of
shuddering. Eliot believed, with Housman, that there was a connection between illness and
creativity, as once there was held to be in melancholia, the therapeutic melancholy cultivated
by Renaissance artists.
This sequence of symptoms is recapitulated or mimicked by Eliot in another account of
creative reading. A letter to Stephen Spender on this topic has, since its publication in 1966,
become famous: Even just the bewildering minute counts; you have to give yourself up, and
then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say, before you have
wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. Of course the self recovered is never the same
as the self before it was given.
A word or two about this bewildering minute will lead us to ask whether what the reader
gives himself up to is necessarily his own. Eliot came upon the expression during his
remarkably profitable early studies in Jacobean drama. Here are some lines from Tourneurs
(or Middletons) The Revengers Tragedy, now familiar because of Eliots interest, but at the
time he pointed out their distinction, known only to readers who had a special interest in this
sometimes decadent writing; it was, as he put it, a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be
regarded with fresh attention:
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
The speaker is addressing a skull; and of the words he speaks the word that struck Eliot was
bewildering. It so happens that there is no textual justification for bewildering the original
is bewitching. But Eliot found bewildering much the richer word and proceeded to steal it.
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If, as I think, the only textual support for bewildering was supplied by John Payne Collier,
the Victorian scholar and forger, we can even say that Eliot chose a reading he knew to be
fraudulent just because he liked it better. (Y ou need authority to do that, and Eliot had some
to spare: compare the acceptance into English dictionaries of the word juvescence, a mistake
he never corrected; the language had to move over to admit the upstart.)
Bewildering appears in Eliots essay on Tourneur, again some years later in After Strange
Gods, and, most illuminatingly, in that letter to Spender, where the bewildering minute is
the one during which the reader submits to the thrill frisson, shudder of the passage, and
after which the critic must emerge from the spell and consider his or her experience. And this,
I am convinced, is how, as a rule, he worked. We could provide other reasons for Eliots long
fascination with bewildering, but an aura of specifically sexual depravity would have to be
part of it because the sexual is what is here under protest and correction. Eliot liked his great
persons to suffer for their faults: Brunetto and Francesca in the Inferno; the erring wife in A
Woman Killed with Kindness; Baudelaire.
It will appear that Eliot was able to stretch a whole theory of poetic composition and criticism
over a stolen word, a word of shuddering power. Such kidnappings are clearly related to
shudders, else why steal them? Near the end of Gerontion we read of De Bailhache, Fresca,
Mrs Cammel, whirled/Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear/In fractured atoms. This
bear is another 17th-century import, found, as Eliot pointed out in The Use of Poetry and the
Use of Criticism, in George Chapmans Bussy DAmbois: fly where men feel/The burning
axletree, and those that suffer/Beneath the chariot of the snowy Bear. Note that Chapmans
bear is snowy, Eliots shuddering. The constellation Ursa is said to spin around the pole; its
circuit will be cold and snowy. Chapman is invoking extremes of hot and cold; and Seneca, in
the passage from Hercules Furens which is at the root of these allusions, has his hero asking
ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine/ glacialis ursae? For glacialis Chapman offers
snowy; Eliot wants his usual deviation from the original, and arrives, doubtless via the idea
of Ursa as cold, at the shuddering bear.
We may be certain, when we observe Eliot either quoting or misquoting the same passage
repeatedly, that he has been hit or struck by the originals, as in the first phase of his formula:
surrender, then contemplate, then do something about it. And these characteristic
adaptations (mature poets steal) show up in other and more remarkable ways. Here, for
instance, is another favourite passage, this time from Middletons The Changeling. At the end
of the play, when all is lost, Beatrice-Joanna addresses her father:
I am that of your blood was taken from you
For your better health; look no more upont,
But cast it to the ground regardlessly,
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Let the common sewer take it from distinction.

Knowing what we now know, we can see how Eliot might have reacted (almost
shudderingly) to this remarkable speech. He quotes it admiringly in his essay on Middleton
and refers to its context elsewhere, in Tradition and the Individual Talent and in Philip
Massinger. He would admire the directness of the language used to affirm Beatrice-Joannas
guilt, and the last line, with its yoking together of sewer and distinction, the nasty
particularity of the one confronted by the grand abstraction of the other, could probably score
high in a shudder contest. It has a quality Eliot always praised: that perpetual slight
alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations,
allowing a fusion in a single phrase of two or more diverse impressions, as for example in
Shakespeares strong toil of grace.
In Middletons play the passage, and the sense of the passage, are not quite as Eliot reports
them; he has made the speech over for his own purposes. The first line, correctly rendered, is
I am that of your blood, not I that am of your blood (as Eliot has it). In preferring the
incorrect version Eliot assumes accordingly that the lines are about family honour when the
true reading makes it plain that Beatrice-Joanna has a different figure in mind: the shedding
of her blood is compared to an act of bloodletting, phlebotomy, the medical opening of a vein,
and not a blood sacrifice to satisfy family honour. The sewer carries away enough bad blood
to assist in a cure. The mistake diminishes the passage and reduces the force of distinction by
associating it narrowly with blood in the sense of honour; whereas, with the reading I am
that of your blood, distinction has a metaphysical force. This also manifests itself in The
Phoenix and Turtle with the idea of two distincts, division none. Or: throw away the blood,
allow it to mix indiscriminately with the contents of the sewer, the common sewer, that
drains the filth of a whole city. I admit that the wrong reading is hovering nearby.
Sometimes the initial shudder is strong enough to shake the shudderers grip on the language
to which he or she is reacting. Eliot misquotes Middleton again from the same scene of The
Changeling: De Floress I loved this woman in spite of her heart reads in spite of my heart.
There are other less spectacular mistakes; they are of the sort made by other fierce readers,
especially when they have positions to defend.
The shudder can be induced by the shock of metaphor in its extreme form, the conceit,
which is dangerously liable to cause giggles rather than shudders. As Dr Johnson and others
always knew, the metaphysical conceit may be little more than a joke, a flash of wit, as
when, to take the first example that comes to mind, Abraham Cowley describes the killing of
Abel by Cain in his epic poem Davideis: I saw him fling the stone, as if he meant/At once his
murder and his monument. This trick calls forth no shudder, it is only a trick. However,
there are also conceits that possess a high degree of beauty and seriousness. The other day I
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came almost by accident on a conceit of the imaginative kind that has the same machinery
as the funny ones but is shockingly serious. It occurs in a poem by Thom Gunn, long
meditated, it seems, but published only in Boss Cupid in 2000:
One image from the flow
Sticks in the stubborn mind:
A sort of backwards flute.
The poker that she held up
Breathed from the holes aligned
Into her mouth till, filled up
By its music, she was mute.
Whether gas pokers still exist I dont know. What allows this cruel joke certainly fit to be
judged a metaphysical conceit to succeed is the coincidence that the poker resembles the
flute in being punctuated along its length by a row of holes, though in this instance gas, not
human breath, flowed through the holes into the suicides mouth, in a dreadful silent music.
This is horribly serious, far beyond a joke.
Somebody remarked that Eliot would find irresistible a line such as Donnes a bracelet of
bright hair about the bone. Other moments in Donnes work may be less likely to produce
shudders than smiles, mere tributes to ingenuity, but Donne certainly had the power to
transform and deepen entertaining conceits into poems of incomparable depth and
complexity, poems of the order of the Nocturnal upon St Lucys Day, where an opening
series of witty comparisons drawn from astronomy and alchemy becomes a search for the
quintessence of nothingness (I am re-begot/Of absence, darkness, death; things which are
not), for a nothing that thinks its way into becoming something beyond any ordinary
nothing:
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
The mood of the period permitted the bringing together of poems bewilderingly dark or rich,
like this one, or like Air and Angels, with others that seem mere vers de socit, sexy jokes
like, say, Community, not less witty but less dark, in search of the giggle rather than a
shudder.
Eliot lost his love for Donne; it was consumed by his passion for Dante. His sympathy with
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that poet ensured that for most of his life he would confess discipleship. He would match
Dante against Goethe and, possibly with a little more circumspection, against Shakespeare.
His achievement was not only to give the English a clearer idea of what it meant to be a great
poet but to demonstrate how metaphor could combine with narrative and produce passages
of Italian calculated to provide all the stages of poetic apprehension he had defined. Writing
about Dantes encounter in Canto 15 of the Inferno with his old master Brunetto Latini, Eliot
clearly experienced the desired frisson. Brunetto in defeat, in hell, is said to resemble one of
those who race for the green flag at Verona; and of them he seemed like him who wins, and
not like him who loses. For the success of this image of pride in defeat, represented by the
apparently redundant or ornamental green flag, Eliot said he had been unprepared by
quotation or allusion. He discovered it for himself and for us, mentioning that it possessed
the quality of surprise which Poe declared to be essential to poetry. The surprise causes a
reaction like a shudder. One does not need to know anything about the race for the roll of
green cloth, to be hit by these lines, Eliot says.
I have almost successfully avoided that word hit, but here it is used by a poet who attributed
high importance to that first
early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror a moment
which can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated integrally; and yet
which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger
whole of experience; which survives inside a deeper and a calmer feeling. The
majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the
majority of human passions: Dantes is one of those which one can only just hope
to grow up to at the end of life.
This is a fine tribute not only to the verse that caused the hit that causes the shudder, but to
the wholeness that is required for its accommodation.
I suppose that in the nature of the case, when the poets concerned are of the highest powers,
there will be moments at which some but not all will experience the frisson. Such a passage is
the one about Brunetto. Those lines must be known to pretty well the entire educated public
in Italy. This is important because extreme familiarity can preclude the shudder, rather as
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, for us, shrinks to a proverb. We need a touch of
mystery.
Eliot has a fine passage on some lines in the last scene of Antony and Cleopatra. He is
comparing Shakespeares treatment of Cleopatras death with the lines written by Dryden at a
similar point in All for Love, his play on the same subject; both writers drew on Plutarchs
Life of Antony. Cleopatra is dead. In Shakespeares version a Roman soldier enters, sees the
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dead queen and asks Cleopatras attendant, Charmian: What work is here, Charmian? Is this
well done? And Charmian replies: It is well done, and fitting for a princess/Descended of so
many royal kings./Ah, soldier! Then she too dies. Dryden makes his Charmion answer thus:
Y es, tis well done, and like a Queen, the last/ Of her great race. I follow her.
It would probably not be hard to get agreement that if there is a hit here it is in the words
Ah, soldier! Eliot glances respectfully at Drydens version, but Dryden doesnt have that Ah,
soldier! which Shakespeare adds to Plutarch. I could not myself, he says, put into words the
difference I feel between the passage if these two words Ah, soldier! were omitted and with
them. But I know there is a difference, and that only Shakespeare could have made it.
Commenting on this, Christopher Ricks remarks that if he had to instance one paragraph
from Eliot to show that he was a great critic, he would choose this.
It is a generous commendation, and some shudders will probably endorse it. But there is a
more important point raised by the words: It is well done, and fitting for a
princess/Descended of so many royal kings. There is no need to call kings royal, they already
are royal when acknowledged to be kings. But it is the splendid redundancy of royal that
enables the hit. Plutarch has noble kings, which is not good enough; and the soldiers remark
is blurred: one of the soldiers [seeing Charmian] angrily said unto her Is that well done?
Shakespeares soldier is disturbed but not said to be angry. The scene, as Shakespeare very
well understood, represented a critical moment in world history and the Roman soldier is
properly included in it. The soldier may be essential to the shudder. Explanations of
Charmians words, her sigh, are likely to be complicated, will have to go deep.
We immediately have another instance of this need in Eliots remarks on the closing lines of
the play. Octavius, viewing the queens body, exclaims:
O noble weakness!
If they had swallowed poison, twould appear
By external swelling; but she looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.
We are told by Plutarch that although Caesar was marvellous sorry for the death of
Cleopatra, yet he wondered at her noble mind and courage. In discussing this moment, Eliot
first reminds us of another favourite passage in the Inferno: a crowd in hell peers at Dante as
an aged tailor peers at the eye of his needle. It is a striking line, remembered also by Y eats,
also somewhat shudderingly.
But Eliot says that the purpose of this type of simile is solely to make us see more definitely
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the scene. He then quotes Shakespeares lines, wishing to show they differ from Dantes in
not being explanatory, and in being expansive. He then expresses his admiration for the
episode of Paolo and Francesca (as I remarked, he seems to have had a particular admiration
for people who were both beautiful and damned, and for a theology to match), and claims
that we can get as much out of that episode as from reading a whole Shakespeare play. His
ground for believing this is largely, it seems, that the Commedia is all of a piece, whereas
finding the pattern in Shakespeares carpet is difficult because of the range and variety of the
plays, which, he believes, have to be seen as one great work. In fact it seems to me that these
Dantean comparisons direct attention away from Shakespearean passages like Octavius
reaction to Cleopatras body.
Those lines are surely as firm a proof of genius as Charmians words to the soldier. Plutarch
speaks of Octavius disappointment at losing the living Cleopatra, and Shakespeare converts
his words into a poetry of loss in language which combines the response of an officer seeking
evidence as to the cause of death, on the one hand, with, on the other, the phrase few can
avoid being hit by: As she would catch another Antony/In her strong toil of grace. A sort of
seemly violence contracts the language, which, as Eliot noted, presents a fusion into a
single phrase of two or more diverse impressions. Grace can justly be thought of as a trap,
and the sexual game with Antony is suddenly moved out of the reach of common metaphor.
Eliot admits that Shakespeares image is absolutely woven into the fabric of the thought; and
he is certainly aware of the power and complexity of the lines: the whole of Cleopatras
disastrous power over men and empires is evoked in it. Y et he still favours the passages from
Dante because they have what he argues to be a rational necessity that is lacking in
Shakespeares.
Shakespeare himself doesnt make much use of words like shudder and shuddering. Not
surprisingly Timon needs one of them, and another occurs, in Portias mouth, in The
Merchant of Venice. Y et all of us know by the hits we have experienced or endured that there
are passages that possess extraordinary power to surprise and to make ones flesh creep with
sincerity. Let me take a final example from The Winters Tale, a work of enormous rhetorical
and linguistic range. The repentant Leontes is tormented by faint and presumably deceptive
signs of life in the supposed statue of his dead wife, until he says: Still methinks/There is an
air comes from her. What fine chisel/Could ever yet cut breath? However fine the workman,
statues cannot be made to breathe; but we nevertheless experience this marvellous
intermediate phase when stone is magically refined to breath and the revelation of
Hermiones living presence, another even greater miracle, will follow.
Vol. 32 No. 9 13 May 2010 Frank Kermode Eliot and the Shudder
pages 13-16 | 5827 words
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2010 Kermode EliotandtheShudder

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Eliot and the Shudder

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