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Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained In the hollow round of my skull.
His imagery could still compel:
The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer's art.
Shuffling Memories. Eliot had always felt a drive toward theater and a fascination with the problem of bringing verse back into drama. In the judgment of E. Martin Browne, who directed all of Eliot's plays, Murder in the Cathedral is the one most sure of a lasting place in the repertory. But the one that 1,500,000 people (1,000,000 in the U.S.) went to see was The Cocktail Party (1950), that odd, gently versified comedy with its insistent message about sinners and the nature of saints. Three decades after The Waste Land, Eliot's central concern was still
The final desolation Of solitude in the phantasmal world Of imagination, shuffling memories and desires.
Less visibly than his poems or plays, Eliot's criticism transformed the taste of his generation. Almost singlehanded Eliot launched such shifts in taste as the revival of John Donne and the turning away from Milton. Even today and even when it is disputed, Eliot's critical judgment has in most cases defined the grounds of argument.
As a man, Eliot was modest, kind, immensely loyal to his friends. He was thought to be formidably reserved, but that was because he did not like casual chatter and hated to be lionized. Among close friends, he was unfailingly good company. His grave courtesy concealed astringent wit; he also liked jokes of the kind where the cushion, when sat on, makes a rude noise. He was tirelessly, patiently encouraging to young poets who wrote or sent manuscripts to him at Faber & Faber, the London publishing house where for many years he was a partner.
He loved light verse. He would lampoon his friends in clerihews, sometimes addressed letters in rhyme. He put normally light-verse techniques to deadly serious use in Prufrock, The Waste Land and elsewhere. Example:
I shall not want Honour in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.
The effect is startling: funny but instantly sad.
Eliot married Vivienne Haigh, an artist's daughter, in 1915. After 1933, she was almost constantly in an asylum. During the difficult years of her illness, Eliot never spoke of her, but never failed to visit her once a week unless he was out of the country. She died in 1947. In 1957 he married his secretary at Faber & Faber, Valerie Fletcher, a plumply attractive woman nearly 40 years younger. He blossomed. They went dancing, held hands at plays. He even wrote love scenes into his last play, The Elder Statesman (they were eased out by the producer).
End & Beginning. This week, following Eliot's long-standing directions, his ashes are to be placed in the parish church at East Coker, the Somersetshire village from which, in the 17th century, his ancestor Andrew Eliot had set out for America. East Coker is also the title Eliot gave to one of the Four Quartets; the poem's first line is
In my beginning is my end.