How T S Eliot can help you

Poetry shouldn’t stand alone. It’s about, and part of, life. T S Eliot, often feared as impenetrable, captured, in much of his poetry, the humdrum mundanity of the everyday. As you rattle along on your way to work, you’re probably thinking more about how you can move that person’s briefcase from being jammed under your armpit than poetry, but when Eliot first came to London he lived in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, Greek Street in Soho, and later in Baker Street, and understood very well the way a big city works.

Take a listen to The Wasteland, for instance, and you’ll see how he captures the working day and the anonymity of the city.

City workers

TS Eliot is believed to have written part of The Waste Land in a seaside shelter in Kent, and took a bus to it every weekend. He was at that time an employee of Lloyds Bank on Lombard Street, and so was a commuter himself. He makes a reference in The Waste Land to commuters flowing over London Bridge: “I had not thought death had undone so many”, he says, watching people trail like zombies to begin another day.

Cafes

In his poem “A Cooking Egg”, he mentions ABC cafes, (Aerated Bread Company) a mainstay of British towns in the early 1900's, the equivalent of a sandwich chain now. Has anyone ever better described the mid-afternoon desolation of a dull cafe?

“Over buttered scones and crumpets
Weeping, weeping multitudes
Droop in a hundred A.B.C.’s.”

Even our hero in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock says “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

It’s astonishing when he wrote a line like that, that Eliot got quite so indignant about being referred to as “melancholy”.

Trains

In The Dry Salvages he describes a scene familiar to any train traveller, the secret relief that a farewell is over, and the enforced leisure of a train journey. Substitute the word “mobiles” for “periodicals” and nothing’s changed....

“When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.”

Home Time

Back to The Waste Land now for more everyday city living. There’s something very touching about the intimacy of “drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays”. This captures the experience of the first generation of independent working women, living by themselves on small incomes and eating what was still a relatively new concept, convenience food in tins.

“The typist home at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, 225
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.”

Everyday language

And while the typist is drying her underwear, he has patrons leaving a pub in the city night, exchanging salutations. “Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.” The conversation between the women about the gammon, and their husbands, is familiar to anyone who’s eavesdropped in a pub.

“If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said,
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling."

Social convention

He writes splendidly about the conflict between the internal and external life – the bitter thoughts masked with a cheerful smile, as convention commands. So as you sit opposite a woman who seems to be pulling an entire beauty counter out of her handbag on the train in the morning, think of Eliot in Prufrock:

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”.

Staying in the moment

In Four Quartets, we even get a glimpse of how to lift ourselves out of mundanity and into something more meditational. Eliot surprises with his sudden veer into the esoteric every now and again – he was interested in yoga and meditation and frequently brings a little mindfulness, or its equivalent, into his work. As the train sways and your eyes close, think of this, from ‘Little Gidding’:

T S Eliot sitting next to a microphone at the BBC (1941)

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

And in ‘East Coker’:

"In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

Eliot’s writing about everyday life in a big city, melancholy as can be, lifts us up above the drudgery, and gives us a glimpse of a shared experience through an acute phrase. You don’t have to know anything about meter or twentieth century poetry to feel an affinity with the description of someone ‘drooping’ over a cup of coffee or the strange rituals of train travel. We can cross the centuries to recognise each other, and ourselves.