T. S. Eliot's Head and Heart

Abstract

T. S. Eliot’s Head and Heart John Gordon “But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is glory in blood.” — Virginia Woolf, Diary 1 Historians of science have long observed that in demonstrating the circulation of the blood William Harvey was advancing what today would be called a paradigm, one of long-established authority. Harvey was an Aristotelian and royalist, in fact court physician to Charles I, to whom, calling him “the Heart of his Commonwealth,” he dedicated the 1628 treatise announcing his discovery. 2 It fit into Harvey’s sense of things that in its organization the body should be symmetrical, cyclical, and centered on the organ referred to in that treatise as the body’s “sovereign, the heart.” 3 Over three hundred years later, such a paradigm fit as well into the beleaguered royalism and classicism of T. S. Eliot, as he gave Harvey’s doctrine its most distinguished poetic expression: 4 Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars And reconciles forgotten wars. The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars Ascend to summer in the tree We move above the moving tree In light upon the figured leaf And hear upon the sodden floor Below, the boarhound and the boar Pursue their pattern as before But reconciled among the stars. 5 Eliot was of course aware that such a paradigm had come to seem outmoded, an awareness signaled by the fact that this passage occurs in the division of “Burnt Norton” that in all four of the Four Quartets is deliberately written in what “East Coker” calls a “worn-out poetical fashion” (125). In fact, when Harvey’s monarch does make an appearance in Four Quartets, it is not in triumph, and certainly not as the vital [End Page 979] center of anything any longer of importance, but as the “broken king” (a phrase perhaps owing something to “broken heart”) whose memory helps sanctify the long-abandoned retreat where the narrator seeks to recover communion with that sense of harmony, of “the complete consort dancing together,” first sounded in the “Burnt Norton” passage. This communion is worn-out too, its realization thwarted on all sides by the modern world, as epitomized in “Little Gidding” by Eliot’s expression for the German bomber, “the dark dove with the flickering tongue” (140). That word “flicker” has appeared before, in “Burnt Norton,” when the evocation of Harveyian circularity is counterpointed by a descent into the subway’s “place of disaffection” lit by the “flicker” of an electric bulb. The subway passage, with its familiar blankness and sterility, reads like a transplant from The Waste Land, and in fact to a considerable extent it is just that, a transplant from one kind of organism into another, each with its own distinctive physiology. Seen from the vantage of the latter, The Waste Land and Four Quartets enact a classic opposition between head and heart, re-cast in the light of medical science as an opposition between brain and nervous system and heart and blood; between the flickering and the circulating; between what the doctors of Eliot’s youth had discovered about the way we work and what King Charles’s doctor had discovered; between a modern age of nerves and an older, nobler age of blood. After some initial resistance, medical science following Harvey adopted and extended his account of internal hydrodynamics. The living body was, in the words of one writer, “a hydraulick machine, in which there are numberless tubes properly adjusted and disposed for the conveyance of fluids of different kinds.” 6 This included the nerves, which were also thought to be tubes, transporting some subtle fluid. Failure to confirm this thesis experimentally, however, led to other theories — for a while the vibrating strings of musical instruments supplied the favored analogy — and eventually, around the middle of the eighteenth century, to the explanation that still prevails, that nerves were conductors of electricity. Meanwhile another change was underway which was to make such questions increasingly critical. The development is summed up in Stanley W...