Christianity and Literature

Vol. 41, No.2 (Winter 1992)

Apocalypse andWisdom:
The Problem of Tone in T.S. Eliot's Poetry
Cleo McNelly Keams

In biblical criticism the terms "wisdom" and "apocalypse" describe

two different styles and modes of expression as well as qualities of
thought, and each mode relies on certain conventions peculiar to its
way of working to shape its meaning. It is my thesis that T. S. Eliot
deeply absorbed these biblical modes, that he juxtaposed and
counterpointed them to one another in his poetry, and that he did so
not only because of their rhetorical effect but also because of their
appeal to different facets of his own poetic temperament and point of
view. To make this case, I want first to point out some of the tensions
between wisdom and apocalypse by bringing together the various biblical texts and passages in Eliot's poetry in which they occur. I shall
then draw for further analysis of such tensions on Jacques Derrida's
"On an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," a lecture I
essay that touches not only on matters of philosophy but also on matters of religion, literature, and the distinctions between them. Finally,
I shall return to Eliot's poetry, especially "Portrait ofa Lady," The Waste
Land, and Four Quartets, to show the techniques and perspectives that
allowed Eliot to deploy and resolve these tensions in powerful and
effective ways.
Wisdom writing, as biblical scholars have come to define it, is an
aphoristic, proverbial, and somewhat socially conservative discourse,
often anonymous and usually written in an open and accessible style.
It may have an anti-clerical bias, but it generally seeks not to tear down
but to build up the religious and human community, often through a
kind of pluralistic and poetic flexibility which transcends dogma or
dissolves it into higher understanding. Wisdom is associated with the
Greek words logos and sophia, as well as with the Hebrew figure of the
Shekinah. It speaks with the voice of the sage, the tribe, and the tradition; it is a rational voice, low-key and open, in which predominate the
values of equanimity, an acceptance of the cycles and limits of life, and
a quiet celebration of creation.'
121

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

122

CLEO MCNELLY KEARNS

Apocalypse, by contrast, is a highly wrought discourse, often allegorical or at least metaphorical, forsaking the voice of the community
for that of the individual. Apocalypse is neither simple nor open; rather,
it is difficult, visionary, challenging, and sometimes deliberately divisive, splitting its audience into those who "have ears to hear" (cf. Mark
7:16; Rev. 2:7) and those who do not. The etymological roots of apocalypse lie in the Greek apokalupsis and the Hebrew gala, both of which
mean "disclosure," "glimpse," or "revelation" of something normally
taboo. The "truth" thus glimpsed inspires not only recognition but also
sacred terror, especially the terror associated with final judgment and
the end of all things. Furthermore, as a special or intimate revelation,
given only to the privileged who are able to receive it, apocalypse tends
to constitute an oppositional community around its own special vision,"
Hence, where wisdom speaks with the voice of the sage, apocalypse
speaks with that of the prophet; and where wisdom brings simplicity,
consolation, and relief, apocalypse brings complexity, challenge, and
disturbance. Wisdom murmurs in our ears or addresses us in the fields
and streets, using the sustaining voice of entire peoples and cultures. It
is the voice of our deepest recognizable selves, and it compels recognition less by heightened rhetoric than by its profound contact with the
nature of things. Apocalypse is heard when we go apart into marginal
or liminal situations; when we dream, study, fast; when we open the
book, break the seal, unfurl the scroll. It speaks from outside us-or
from the other within-sometimes even as a kind of daemon or form of
possession, heralding profound, perhaps final, discontinuities, judgments, and conversions.
A certain group of biblical texts (Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Job, Sirach,
and Wisdom for wisdom; Ezekiel, Daniel, Mark, and Revelation for
apocalypse) form the loci classici of wisdom and apocalyptic writing in
Western culture, and Eliot draws heavily though not exclusively on some
of these books of the Bible in his work," Wisdom and apocalyptic modes
are not confined, however, to the canonical writings of the West, nor
did Eliot seek and find them there alone. In the Bhagauad-Gita; for
instance, a text Eliot ranked next to Dante's Commedia in value," a
typical wisdom discourse is abruptly interrupted by a particularly dramatic apocalypse. This coup de theatre must have struck Eliot forcefully, for he made careful use of it in his own work, specifically in the
form of direct allusion in "The Dry Salvages" and indirectly, as a general poetic technique, at other points as well.
I shall return to the Gila's influence on Eliot in a moment, but first I
shall establish parameters of wisdom and apocalypse as they appeared
to him closer to home-in the biblical texts just mentioned. Perhaps

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

APOCALYPSE AND WISDOM

123

the most famous of these is the passage from Ecclesiastes: "To every
thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven"
(3:1). This passage has passed directly into popular culture in the form
of a lyric refrain, and this occurrence should not come as a surprise; for
its style, like that of Ecclesiastes throughout, is particularly aphoristic,
proverbial, and transmissable by means of oral tradition. Many other
verses of Ecclesiastes also have this pithy and memorable quality, and
it is worth rehearsing some of them here, especially ones expressing
themes found in Eliot's work: "Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all
is vanity" (1:2, 12:8); "There is no new thing under the sun" (1:9); "For
a dream cometh through the multitude of business; and a fool's voice
is known by multitude of words" (5:3); "The wise man's eyes are in his
head; but the fool walketh in darkness: and I myself perceived also that
one event happeneth to them all" (2:14); "Then shall the dust return to
the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it"
(12:7); "And further, by these, my son, be admonished; of making many
books there is no end: and much study is a weariness of the flesh"
(12:12).
Eliot adopted this wisdom voice and formed it into his own purposes, both in style and in matter, throughout his poetic career. He
also made a number of direct allusions to Ecclesiastes itself. One of the
most notable occurs in Four Quartets. "In my beginning is my end,"
murmurs the opening of "East Coker," and when the poem continues
Ecclesiastes is much in evidence:
In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth. 0-6)5

These and similar passages in Eliot's poetry strike the traditional

note of wisdom writing, and their themes are as much a part of Eliot's
work as they are of the biblical sources on which he draws. These
themes include the cyclical and ephemeral nature of life, the emptiness
of its forms and preoccupations, the illusion that separates the so-called
wise from the so-called foolish, the predictable return of the mutual
aporias of birth and death, and the need for simplicity, equanimity,
and above aU restraint of speech in the face of them. The Buddha
himself, at least according to some traditions, could hardly say more;
nor could the Greek sage Heraclitus, whose comment on wisdom-that
it is logos xounos, open and accessible to all, though we always behave
as if it were our own special purview-introduces Eliot's "Burnt Norton."
Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

124

CLEO MCNELLY KEARNS

This voice of wisdom in the Bible contrasts strongly, at least in some

ways, with the countervailing voice of apocalypse, a contrast requiring
a different, more lengthy kind of citation to capture its unique qualities. Many of the themes and tropes associated with the apocalyptic
voice may be found in Ezekiel, a source on which Eliot drew repeatedly,
from The Waste Land to Four Quartets. A typical passage reads:
And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak
unto thee.... I send thee to the children ofIsrael, to a rebellious nation
that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed
against me, even unto this very day.... And thou shalt speak my words
unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.... And
when I looked, behold an hand was sent unto me; and 10, a roll of a
book was therein; And he spread it before me; and it was written within
and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe. (Ezek, 2:1-10)

The book of Revelation is, of course, the most powerful site of apocalyptic writing in the Bible, precisely because it is both last in canonical
order and concerned with the last things of human life on earth. Here
is a passage:
And I turned to sec the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I
saw seven golden candlesticks; And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the
foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. His head and his
hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a
flame of nrc; And his feet like unto nne brass, as if they burned in a
furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.... And when I saw
him I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying
unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last. ... Write the things which
thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be
hereafter. (Rev. 1:13-19)

The usual themes of apocalypse are here: a glimpse of mysteries

usually veiled, a highly mediated esoteric discourse, a strong and even
ominous prophetic call for immediate response. Even the pace of this
kind of writing expresses an urgency and a desire that contrast strongly
with wisdom's measured patience: "And behold, I come quickly," says
the angel of prophecy to John, "and my reward is with me" (22:12; my
emphasis); or, later, "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let
him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come" (22:17;
my emphasis). Clearly apocalyptic texts are no advocates of discretion,
economy of words, and resignation to the inevitable. Rather, they explode into a multiplicity of visions and voices that seem to mirror one
another to infinity: "Write the things which thou hast seen, and the

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

APOCALYPSE AND WISDOM

125

things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter" (1:19: my
emphasis), the angel repeatedly admonishes the narrator or witness in
Revelation. There is in apocalyptic discourse a mandate to dissemination, in spite of the esoteric nature of the message, that creates a kind
of tension missing from most sapiential texts.
Eliot was as deeply responsive to the apocalyptic voices of the Bible
as to its voices of wisdom. The springing tiger in "Gerontion," who
comes like a thief in the night ("Us he devours" [49]), is a very apocalyptic creature; and the "Son of man" passage in The Waste Land, which
speaks so chillingly of "fear in a handful of dust" (30), perfectly captures a certain apocalyptic tone. There are, too, apocalyptic interludes
or interjections in each of the Four Quartets. One of the more striking
of these, found in "Little Gidding," reads:
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
lies in the choice of pyre or pyreTo be redeemed from fire by fire. (200-06)

Again, it is hardly necessary to point to the themes Eliot's work shares

with the biblical texts here: the impending abolition or at least purgation of life as we know it, the immediacy and irrevocability of death and
final judgment, and the strong emphasis on a moment of truth or vision, a moment "here and now" in which choice and commitment are
demanded. There are common stylistic devices as well: a heightened
use of figurative language, a sense of esoteric meanings hovering just
behind the text, and above all a kind of apostrophe or address to the
reader, a demand that we respond either yes or no to the perspectives
and actions for which the revelation calls.
The problem with these two modes of wisdom and apocalypse is
that, in spite of their occurrence in a single corpus (the Bible, the
Bhagavad-Gita, Eliot's work), they are in great tension with one another. Not only does each have its own distinctive point of view, but
also each in some ways undercuts the other. The wise sage makes the
apocalyptic prophet sound hysterical: the apocalyptic prophet makes
the wise sage sound complacent and banal. One says, "There is no new
thing under the sun" (Eccles. 1:9): the other says, "Behold, J make all
things new" (Rev. 21:5). Eliot, moreover, was equally drawn to both
voices, sometimes at one and the same time. From his earliest days, it
seems, he felt called to be at once prophet and sage, at once the one
who challenges and the one who accepts the recurring fates of peoples,

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

126

CLEO MCNELLY KEARNS

cultures, and souls. Wisdom drew him toward detachment, apocalypse toward engagement, and his work across his entire poetic career
reflects these opposing tendencies.
The coexistence of these very different sapiential and apocalyptic
points of view created for Eliot problems of poetic style and substance
very difficult to resolve. Derrida, writing of course long after Eliot and
for the most part in another discourse, nonetheless finds similar problems in philosophy, and his discussion of these illuminates both Eliot's
predicament and his technical solutions. In "On an Apocalyptic Tone
Recently Adopted in Philosophy,"! Derrida begins with an analysis of
the temperamental, philosophical, and cultural reasons behind Kant's
dislike of what he called a certain "overlordly" tone in philosophy.
Armed with the insights generated by this analysis, Derrida then turns
to a number of Western apocalyptic texts, preeminently Revelation, to
develop his points further. Focusing on a relatively new and controversial translation of this text into French by the scholar Andre Chouraqui,
Derrida uses Revelation to specify some of the tensions generated by
apocalyptic writing in general. In doing so, he wishes to show why the
full estimation of these tensions depends on a recognition of all the
many devices and marks of mediation in apocalyptic texts and on an
acknowledgment of the important but philosophically unspecifiable
function of tone in their construction and transmission. In making this
argument, Derrida also suggests that an appreciation of apocalypse
requires the renegotiation and perhaps even partial effacement of traditional disciplinary and discursive lines between philosophy, religion,
and literature.
Derrida opens his argument with an analysis of Kant's irritation with
that apocalyptic or "overlordly" tone which the German philosopher
finds mystifying and mystagogic in the hysterical and inflated senses of
the term, Kant is clearly irked, says Derrida, by the way those who
adopt such a tone dismiss more cautious and more professionally discrete members of the philosophic guild as mere hacks, as well as by
their countervailing claims to a loftier, more metaphysical, and more
immediate insight into the mysteries of the universe. Apocalyptic pretense also bothers Kant, Derrida claims, because it implies a secret
society of knowers, a kind of false aristocracy or group of initiates who
have privileged information about a transcendental realm which exempts them from the methods, morals, and laws common to the rest of
us.
Derrida attributes Kant's objections to this apocalyptic tone primarily to his preference for sober, informed, sapiential philosophy, the
philosophy of "rational knowing-living" (68), or sagesse de la vie, over
prophetic, ecstatic, emotional philosophy, the philosophy of cosmic

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

APOCALYPSE AND WISDOM

127

revelation. It is natural, Derrida reminds us, that Kant would dislike

lordly and cosmic philosophical stances, because everything he values
tends in the opposite direction toward an open, clear, and democratic
understanding and practice. Unlike his antagonists in the apocalyptic
camp, Kant is above all a philosopher of common or ordinary wisdom,
available everywhere and at all times to men of good will and sound
reason. He does also believe, of course, in the extension and refinement of that wisdom through a critical process undertaken by those
who have devoted disciplined study and moral reflection to the issues
at stake. The results of this process as it evolves, however, should be
open and persuasive to all, and the process of attaining them should be
an ongoing one in which no single philosopher pretends to "have the
last word."
To a certain extent Derrida wishes to endorse Kant's objections to
the apocalyptic tone, with its mystagogues, cult-followers, initiates, and
metaphysicians, and to associate himself instead with Kant's rational
wisdom, his commitment to the ongoing process of philosophical critique, and his democratic and enlightened stance toward knowledge
and revelation. After all, Derrida too is in many respects a traditional
philosopher, concerned with such nuances and distinctions of argument as have most meaning for those who have formally pursued the
study of established philosophical tradition and who are committed to
the furtherance of that tradition by critique, open challenge, and constant revision. Furthermore, he is by temperament anti-apocalyptic,
anti-metaphysical, and anti-hierarchic, dedicated to a systematic critical analysis-a "deconstruction," if that word continues to serve any
purpose, of all that pretends to the rank of universal truth, prophecy, or
special revelation. To put it succinctly, Derrida, like Kant, does not like
stances and texts that try to "have the last word" about anything. For
these and other reasons Derrida is sardonic indeed in this essay about
the popular vogue for pronouncements in knowing or hysterical tones
of voice that "the end is nigh." Of these pronouncements he gives a
somewhat mocking catalogue. We are always hearing, he says, about
the end of everything:
... the end of history, the end of the class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and
morals (that ... was the most serious naivete), the end of the subject,
the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the
earth, Apocalypse Now. (80)

In spite of this Kantian scorn for the apocalyptic and for pleas of
special revelation, however, Derrida goes on to argue that we cannot
simply pretend that these modes do not exist or that "real" philoso-

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

128

CLEO MCNELLY KEARNS

phers, philosophers with a sober regard for wisdom as well as truth, do

not ever participate in them. Indeed, as Derrida points out, Kant's
defense of reason itself is in its own way apocalyptic, warning of the
"end" of a period of false metaphysics and speaking of the judgment
that will rain down on all those who continue to threaten his more
rational and enlightened project with mystification. Kant's position is
also in some ways bound up with revelation, for he cannot proclaim
and defend his own project without an appeal to something beyond
the smaller voice of self, some truth or light or telosthat grounds reason
and law. The only way Kant can begin to reconcile these contradictions, Derrida points out, is to insist (although on very shaky grounds)
that, if there is a legitimate discourse of "the end" which can coexist
with rational wisdom, the basis of their coexistence must be a mutual
willingness to forego the inflated rhetoric of poetic discourse.
Derrida draws a clear lesson from this analysis of Kant's contradictory position on the apocalyptic tone, and he takes pains to underline
that lesson forcefully, even didactically. He insists, pace his great predecessor, that we are drawn to rational wisdom philosophies like Kant's
precisely because of those moments in which they speak in another,
more passionate, more apocalyptic key. Nor is this a bad thing. "We
must not," Derrida insists, "forego what compels recognition as the
enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil [vielle), for clarification, for critique and truth." At the same time, however, we must require of that recognition that it "keep within itself enough apocalyptic
desire ... to demystify, or if you prefer, to deconstruct the apocalyptic
discourse itself." Apocalypse, then, has a right to its urgency and its
revelatory claims, but it must also be willing to ask cui bono? It must be
willing to examine and critique "everything that speculates," in the
adventitious or crass or self-serving sense of the term, "on vision, the
imminence of the end, theophany, the parousia, the Last Judgment
and so on" (82).
This call for a self-critical, rational, and disinterested apocalyptic
discourse-what we might call, oxymoronically, a "wise apocalypse"seems, however, in spite of the appeal of Derrida's argument, something of a contradiction in terms. Certainly Derrida himself is aware of
the problems it raises. For what in the world, he himself asks, would or
could allow us to "hear" or "speak" apocalypse in this self-critical and
self-aware way, without being deafened by its desire or overwhelmed
by its apparent immediacy? What on earth could possibly allow us to
respond to such prophetic power without losing touch with a
countervailing wisdom and restraint? For Derrida the practicalanswer
to these questions-and there is perhaps only a practical answer-is
twofold: it entails (1) an awareness of textuality, of mediations, of sets

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

APOCALYPSE AND WISDOM

129

within sets of internal quotation marks-that is, of the apocalyptic text

as composed of a multiplicity of voices with varying degrees of authority, many of them heard or overheard at second hand; and (2) a reopening of the poetic problem of tone.
Leaving aside for a moment the issues raised here for the distinctions between philosophy, literature, and religion, Derrida turns to the
biblical book of Revelation to demonstrate more clearly what he means
by an awareness of mediation and tone. He focuses in particular on
two aspects of this book: its multiple levels of transmission (texts within
texts within texts) and its repeated injunctions to "Wake up!" "Speak!"
"Write!" and "Come!" As Derrida points out, both the mediated
textuality of this book and its urgent but enigmatic injunctions to act
create interesting contradictions. In the first place, there are both
multiple potential senders and multiple potential receivers ofthis message. The readers of this text mayor may not be its original intended
interlocutors, and they are in any case being addressed by several speakers or writers, among them the narrator, his revealing angel, the angel's
mentor Christ, and perhaps even in some sense Divine Authority itself.
Furthermore, as we read, this variety of voices and interlocutors becomes inevitably conflated into one, so that it is no longer easy to bear
in mind these layers of mediation. We tend, then, at times very nearly
to drown in the sheer univocal immediacy of the text, though we are
aware at another level of its polyphonic qualities. Given this situation,
the message we receive becomes very problematic, and our own status
as adequate interpreters comes into question as well.
To specify these problems a little further, Derrida suggests that much
depends, in reading Revelation, on the question of who is calling us to
"wake up," "speak," "write," and "come" and in what tone of voice. If,
for instance, the speaker of this text is simply John of Patmos, its putative author, and the intended recipients are his potential disciples, the
issue will be acceptance or refusal of sectarian allegiance to his cult or
particular version of the Gospel. If our sense of authority shifts, however, to the voice of the angel, or the Messiah, or the deity, or the
"unconscious mind," there will be quite different hermeneutic and practical (not to mention ethical and political) implications and decisions
in each case. Crucial to them, Derrida argues, is precisely the problem
of tone. For example, when the biblical verse says "Come!" the injunction might resound in our ears as a command or an invitation, a promise or a threat, a request or a solicitation, a demand or a plea. Each of
these possible readings presumes a different theology, a different religious (or secular) practice, and a different kind of interpretive community to support and validate its claims. Furthermore, as Derrida so
acutely points out, there is no guarantee, no secure indication, no final

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

130

CLEO McNELLY KEARNS

grammatical, semantic, or syntactic determinant at all within the text

as to which of these forms of address or tones of voice "should" predominate. We have various clues, signs, and indications of the best
readings, which it is the task of scholarship, criticism, and interpretation (and also, for some of us, of devotion) to note and weight. But
anyone who claims that the text ineluctably compels one reading, one
tone or another, will find it difficult to prove that case.
Derrida cites as a specific passage in which these questions are
sharply focused Revelation 22:17. The King James version reads, "And
the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come.
And let him that is athirst come." (Derrida uses another translation,
with other nuances [92], but the fundamental issue is the same.) "Try,"
Derrida suggests, "to say [or intone] the call 'come' as it is sounded in
this text. You will discover that it can be said in almost every possible
tone, every possible register of voice" (94). How you prefer to render
that register or voice depends very much on who you are, just as who
you are depends very much on how you render it.
This radical indeterminacy of tone and address, Derrida argues, is
the very hallmark of apocalypse, and perhaps of every discourse that
claims to reveal an ultimate truth. We know a text has become apocalyptic or revelational, he concludes, when we no longer know very well
who is speaking or writing, whether human or angel or god or daimon,
and in what tone of voice. In attempting to decide these issues, however, as Derrida is also acutely aware, we have touched on the disciplinary frontier that separates philosophy from literary criticism and
apocalypse from poetry. For it is the task of poetry to speak in multiple
voices and to foreground that aspect of its mode, and it is the task of
literary criticism to decide on the resulting meanings and appropriate
responses.
At this particular frontier, a very vexed one for both Kant and Derrida,
we can perhaps rejoin Eliot as well, for Eliot had his own problems with
the distinctions between poetry and philosophy; and he too, well before Derrida, realized that the practical issue at stake lay in those complexities of address, mediation, textuality, and tone deeply associated
with the tensions between apocalyptic and wisdom modes of writing.
Eliot's writing practice, of course, lay for the most part (although not
exclusively) in poetry as opposed to philosophy, but there is evidence
to suggest that he arrived at some of his positions, both theoretical and
practical, by a similar, highly philosophical route.'
In Eliot's case the philosophy in question was that of F. H. Bradley,
as Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley have reminded us. Bradley
was the late idealist English philosopher who "deconstructed" ethics
and utilitarianism alike in a quasi- or proto-Derrldean way. If Eliot's

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

APOCALYPSE AND WISDOM

131

letters are any indication, it seems, furthermore, that the lesson Eliot
most profoundly learned from Bradley was precisely the lesson of tone.
As he wrote to Lytton Strachey,
Whether one writes a piece of work wcll or not seems to me a matter of
crystallization-the good sentence, the good word, is only the flnal stage
in the process. One can groan enough over the choice of a word, but
there is something much more important to groan over first, It seems
to me just the same in poetry-the words come easily enough, in comparison to the core of it-the tone-and no one can help one in the
least with that. Anything I have picked up about writing is due to
having spent (as I once thought, wasted) a year absorbing the style of
F. II. Bradley-the finest philosopher in Engllsh-Appearance and Reality
is the Education Sentimentale of abstract thought. (299)

As is so often the case with Eliot's apparently casual remarks, he

meant, I think, something far more precise here than his apparently
ofTh.and manner appears to portend. He meant in part that he had
learned from Bradley a certain lesson, almost a trick: that of dealing
with potentially apocalyptic or ultimately compelling material-the
permutations of the Absolute or Final Truth-in an extremely detached,
minimalist, and even clinical style or tone of voice. To put this a little
differently, Bradley taught Eliot that you could, as it were, write Hegel
in the key of Flaubert. Nor did Eliot fail to recognize, having Bradley's
brilliant and effective example before him, that the resulting controlled
dissonance might not only protect the writer against the worst excesses
of apocalypse-those excesses Kant and Derrida alike so cogently point
out-but also generate a rhetorical power beyond anything a more apparently suitable match between style and substance could yield. Eliot's
vocation was for poetry, not prose, but he needed only to apply the
stylistic lesson Bradley's example offered to his own sphere to see its
potential.
Eliot had need of this lesson, for both apocalypse and wisdom have
pitfalls for the poet that are similar to those faced by the philosopher
but that have a particular bearing on the poet's areas of special competence. Among them, as we have seen, are the tonal errors of melodrama and hysteria on the one hand versus banality and portentousness on the other. These dangers lurk everywhere in English literary
tradition, from the hectic fevers of Jacobean drama to the didactic pieties of nineteenth-century prose, and Eliot's particular gift, especially
during his apprentice years, was to render them in such a way as to
make their false notes apparent.
For Eliot knew that before he could give these great discursive modes
of apocalypse and wisdom their full weight, he had to understand their

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

132

CLEO MCNELLY KEARNS

lower as well as higher registers. In his early poems "Portrait of a Lady"

and "The Love Song of I. Alfred Prufrock," for instance, and in "Sweeney
Agonistes," we have almost every possible permutation of worldly wisdom and false apocalypse, as the speakers vie with one another in
articulating attitudes from sophomoric weariness through affected cynicism to rhetorical side glances and stolen looks at the possibility of
death.
Indeed, the apparently minor but always compelling "Portrait" is in
fact a good place to see Eliot's first rather oblique approaches to wisdom and apocalypse at work. "We have been, let us say, to hear the
latest Pole I Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips" (89), the youthful speaker of the poem begins, setting the scene with
what no doubt passed for the height of wit and wisdom among the
young of his circle. We collude with this somewhat callow youth, however, at least long enough to experience the sense of speciousness and
social embarrassment that attend the equally false wisdom of the Lady
who intones:
"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands";
"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see." (44-45,47-49)

There is, however, a deeper resonance than the merely desultory and
pretentious tone of the persona here, a resonance closer to genuine
insight. This resonance is created by striking, though only very faintly,
certain higher apocalyptic and wisdom notes. "Well! and what if she
should die some afternoon?" (114), the speaker in the poem asks. The
question seems at first callow, even infantine, and yet with its brief
glimpse of our common fate it suggests a deeper perspective than
either character in the poem can quite achieve.
This deeper tone is far more fully realized in later and greater poems,
though without ever quite quite leaving behind the more superficial
manifestations Eliot dissected so mercilessly in poems like "Portrait."
Eliot could render, for instance, with uncanny accuracy a pseudo-apocalyptic feeling that is in fact, from a wiser point of view, mere hysteria in
disguise. This tone is aptly caught in "Sweeney Agonistes," which describes for our clinical delectation a moment of psychic collapse when
the "end" does indeed feel "nigh." Sweeney recounts his experience as
a common one, but it is no less compelling for that. It takes place
"When you're alone in the middle ofthe night and you wake in a sweat
and a hell of a fright," when "You've had a cream of a nightmare dream

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

APOCALYPSE AND WISDOM

133

and you've got the hoo-ha's coming to you." Sweeney's diction and
the sing-song and conventional verse pattern in which it is rendered do
their own work of de constructing this specious apocalypse.
Eliot often used the poetic medium to undercut the apocalyptic tone
in this way and to exploit the tensions generated by its collocation with
a "wiser" or more "rational" point of view. His ability to do so was not
simply, however, a matter of poetic technique. It had to do with values
as well as defenses, with matters of discernment as well as matters of
style, and in this respect his work grew incrementally in stature as he
matured. Compare the feeble and febrile "'Ah, my friend, you do not
know, you do not know I What life is, you who hold it in your hands"
with that voice in "The Dry Salvages" which intones:
It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern....
We had the experience but missed the meaning....
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has....
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
(85-86,93, 104-08, 114)

Here we have the same content but an entirely different tone, and the
tone makes all the difference.
Likewise with the Lady's wince-making appeal in "Portrait":
"You can say: at this point many a one has failed.
But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one about to reach her journey's end." (63-67)

The lines' message in terms of content is not really so far from that of
"What the Thunder Said":
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

134

CLEO MCNELLyKE.ARNS
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms. (402-10)

The change in tone, however, is so profound as to alter the content in

almost substantive ways. In both instances the later poems move toward that "enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for clarification, for critique and truth," of which Derrida speaks.
Elsewhere, too, in The Waste Land Eliot offers an apocalyptic moment still a little haunted, perhaps, by mere psychological malaise but
charged as well by a much more profound and persuasive vision of the
abyss. Consider, for instance, that remarkable passage to which I have
already referred and which represents, I think, a high point of Eliot's
mastery of the ambiguities of apocalyptic tone. It begins, "What are
the roots that clutch, what branches grow lOut of this stony rubbish?"
(19-20). It continues, in lines made familiar both by their uncanny
rhetorical power and by their frequent citation:
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (20-30)

The tone in this passage is extremely hard to specify. Part apocalypse and part Gothic shudder, it seems at once urgent with prophetic
vision and faintly aware of the possibility of self-conscious posturing
and pastiche. There is great intensity here and a touch, just a touch, of
the "hoo-ha's" as well. Eliot himself reads this passage, in the one
recording he made of The Waste Land, with a certain stress on the
Gothic shudder-"the horror, the horror," as Joseph Conrad would have
it. But the sheer rhetorical force of the injunction "Come" and the tone
of the line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" break through any
attempt to reduce them to a merely personal malaise, sounding and
resounding, as it were, in so many registers at once that their power
cannot be confined to any single speaker. Here we have discourse that
fits Derrida's definition of apocalypse as speech or writing that seems
to come from somewhere else, a somewhere deeper or higher than the
usual level of consciousness of anyone person, mood, or speaker.

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

APOCALYPSE AND WISDOM

135

Nor is this the only instance of Eliot's use of a very complex tonality
and high foregrounding of mediation to allow wisdom and apocalypse
to sound together and over against one another. There are a number of
instances of his calculated deployment of all the devices of textualityincluding parody, irony, indirect discourse, quotation within quotation, and the use ofvarious personae-to distance or shade these modes
and to sound out their false as well as true notes. Thus we hear or
overhear in "A Game of Chess" the voice of genuine wisdom beneath
Tiresias's rather jaded "And I Tiresias have fore suffered all" (243), and
we detect or even half-create the voice of true apocalypse beneath the
bartender's conventional "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME" (141). As his
poetry matures, Eliot is increasingly able to isolate, pinpoint, and explore these nuances of tone in apocalyptic and wisdom modes without
the need for masks or dramatic personae like the Lady and Sweeney to
protect him from their worst excesses.
In Four Quartets, for instance, much of the drama that sustains these
long and compelling poems consists precisely in pitting one tone, one
mode, against another in an endlessly shifting series, a series in which
the speaker or speakers are not just a single consciousness but a multiple and at times even a collective one. In these poems the tone runs
the gamut from the lower and higher registers of wisdom to the lower
and higher registers of apocalypse, using one to counterpoint and at
times even deconstruct another. Eliot achieves this counterpoint in
two ways: first by juxtaposing a wisdom passage with an apocalyptic
one in a way that relativizes them both, and then by rendering typically
apocalyptic themes in a typically wisdom tone of voice.
When, for instance, after Munich Eliot felt again with renewed intensity that so-called wisdom might all too easily lend itself to an eclipse
or evasion of prophecy, he used apocalyptic vision to undercut and
relativize it in a sharp and decisive way. "East Coker" begins, as we
have seen, with classic and typical wisdom discourse echoing
Ecclesiastes 3. "In my beginning is my end" (1), it murmurs, and conjures up human beings
Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. (39-45)

The mode changes dramatically, however, in Part II, which intro-

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

136

CLEO McNELLY KEARNS

duces an apocalyptic lyric, much heightened in tone:

Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Lconids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the lee-cap reigns. (61-67)

Flights like these are relativized again, in tum, when we are reminded,
in the best Derridean manner, of their persistent textuality, their restriction to a particular place and time, a particular speaker, with a
particular set of previous texts and positions ringing in his ears. "That
was a way of putting it," continues "East Coker," "not very satisfactory:
I A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, I Leaving one still
with the intolerable wrestle I With words and meanings" (68-71). The
effect is to draw sudden attention to the mediated aspect of the cosmic
revelation, its casting in a particular and possibly dated mode of address and tone of voice. Wisdom then receives a further and even more
devastating analysis, this time at its own level of diction:
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets. (73-77,79)

To juxtapose wisdom and apocalypse in this way is both to dramatize

and to call into question their differing angles of vision.
The effects I have been describing here depend, however, not only
on a dominant or apparent suitability of tone to content but also, as in
Eliot's reading of Bradley, on a subdominant or subversive relation
between them. Sometimes Eliot speaks the message of apocalypse in a
low-key wisdom voice and the message of wisdom in a very intense
and apocalyptic one. Nowhere do we see this more effectively than in
Eliot's use of the Bhagauad-Gita in the third of the Four Quartets. It is
this particular instance of wisdom discourse versus apocalyptic discourse which best reveals, I think, both their diametrical opposition
and their mutually qualifying conjunction in Eliot's work.
The Gita offers one of the more dramatic moments in all religious
writing, for in it a typical wisdom discourse, celebrating the virtues of
equanimity, duty, acceptance of life's cycles, and respect for the world

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

APOCALYPSE AND WISDOM

137

as it is, is interrupted by one of the more terrifying apocalyptic visions

in world literature. In this book we hear or overhear Arjuna, the hero,
ask to see Krishna, the incarnate Lord, as he truly is, not as hitherto in
the poem under the veil of a human body. Arjuna is given a vision so
intense and so powerful that it completely undoes the yogic wisdom
and inner balance he has struggled so hard to achieve. "I am time
grown old, creating world destruction," Krishna responds,
set in motion
to annihilate the worlds;
even without you,
all these warriors
arrayed in hostile ranks
will cease to exist. (11)

A sense of the cosmic backdrop, so to speak, revealed by this vision

conditions our reading of the rest of the Gita, its immediacy lingering
and resonating against the continuing wisdom discourse which follows. This whole sequence, moreover, comes to us, as does the revelation of Iohn ofPatmos, at second hand. It is all, as the frame of the Gita
takes pains to make clear, entirely overheard, overheard and reported,
by one of Arjuna's opponents. Part of the drama of the Gita, then,lies
in the way we are both made aware of and then challenged to forget its
textuality, its multiple levels of address, its quotations within quotations. The whole takes place, to quote "East Coker" again, "As, in a
theatre," when "The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
I With a hollow rumble of wings ... I And we know that the hills and
the trees, the distant panorama I And the bold imposing facade are all
being rolled away" (113-17).
Eliot captures both the immediacy and the power of that vision of
the Gita, as well as its textuality and theatrics, in "The Dry Salvages."
The passage in question demonstrates the accomplished technique of
rendering apocalyptic vision in a dramatically low-key wisdom voice.
Eliot states, first, a typical theme: "It seems, as one becomes older, I
That the past has another pattern." He then modulates, rather unexpectedly, though only by slow degrees, toward the Gita's point. "Now,
we come to discover," he goes on, and he might be speaking of either
the vision or the experience of reading it, that "the moments of agony"
are "likewise permanent I With such permanence as time has."
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

138

CLEO MCNELLY KEARNS

On a halycon day it is merely a monument,

In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was. (114, 117-23)

This apocalyptic message, however, is followed in turn not by a lift but

by a tremendous drop in tone. "I sometimes wonder," the quartet
continues, "if that is what Krishna meant- I Among other things-c-or
one way of putting the same thing" (124-25):
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been
opened. (126-28)

The passage then comes to rest in an aphorism that might come directly out of Ecclesiastes: "You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is
sure, I That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here" (130-31).
It is this subtle interplay of themes and tones at many levels of textual mediation that makes Eliot's handling of wisdom and apocalypse
so powerful. Eliot establishes here, with extraordinary passion coupled
with extraordinary control, a unified stance toward the materials of his
art conditioned both by the simplicity of the sage and by the urgency of
the prophet. This stance helps him to construct the point of view from
which, in other contexts, he makes the particular aesthetic, ethical, and
political judgments for which he is at once famous and notorious. These
judgments may be right or wrong, but they do at least have the merit of
a certain achievement behind them. For Eliot's poetry, in spite of its
reduction to a "monument" or a "seamark," nevertheless in the "sombre season" or the "sudden fury" is "what it always was": a rock against
which the reader's sense and sensibility can test themselves again and
again without ever fully exhausting either its strength or its resistance
to facile readings and interpretations."
Princeton Theological Seminary

NOTES
1 For an introduction to biblical criticism on wisdom writing, together with
suggestions for further reading, see Murphy.
2 For an introduction to biblical criticism on apocalypse and eschatology,
see John J. Collins and also Adela Yarbro Collins.
3 See Smith for a thorough overview of Eliot's use of his sources, including
the major books of the Bible.
4 See Selected Essays 219. For a fuller discussion of the influence of the

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015

APOCALYPSE AND WISDOM

139

Bhagauad-Gita on Eliot's work, see my T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions.

5 Eliot's poetry is quoted throughout from The Complete Poems and Plays.
The numbers in parentheses after quotations from his poetry refer to lines, not
pages.
6The lecture which became this essay was first delivered at a conference on
Derrida's "Les Fins de l'homme" at Cerlsy-la-Salle in 1980. It was then translated and published in the biblical journal Semeia and republished, with emendations, in the Oxford Literary Review. At about the same time the proceedings
of the conference were published in French by Editions Galilee. My treatment
of the argument is a free rendering of what I take to be its gist, made with the
intent of opening up a highly elliptical discourse to as wide a readership as
possible. Naturally this process has its dangers. Consultation with the
"original(s)" is advised.
7 Eliot's philosophical position, its consistency, and its importance to the
rest of his work are just beginning to come into scholarly perspective. For
further references see Brooker and Bentley.
6This essay is a revised version of the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture for 1991,
sponsored by the T. S. Eliot Society and delivered at its annual meeting in
September of that year.

WORKS CITED
The Bhagauad-Gita: Krishna's Counsel in Time of War. Trans. Barbara Stoler
Miller. New York: Bantam, 1986.
Brooker, Jewel Spears, and Joseph Bentley. Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits ofInterpretation. Amherst. U of Massachusetts P, 1990.
Collins, Adela Yarbro. "The Apocalypse (Revelation)." The New Jerome Bible
Commentary 996-1016.
Collins, John J. "Old Testament Apocalypticism and Eschatology." The New
Jerome Bible Commentary 296-304.
Derrlda, Jacques. "On an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy."
"tLes Fins de I'homme' (A partir du travail de Jacques Derridai:" Cerisy-IaSalle, France, 1980. Trans. John P. Leavy, Semeia 23 (1982): 63-97. Rpt.
Oxford Literary Review 6.2 (1984): 3-37.
- - . Les Fins de l'homme. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1982.
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, 1962.
- - . The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898-1922. Ed. Valerie Eliot Vol. 1. New York:
Harcourt, 1988.
- - . Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1964.
Kearns, Cleo McNelly. T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and
Belief. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Murphy, Roland. "Introduction to Wisdom Literature." The New Jerome Bible
Commentary 447-52.
The New Jerome Bible Commentary. Ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A.
Fitzmeyer, and Roland E. Murphy. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1990.
Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning.
2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.

Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015