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.Becket, out the play had been the glum prognosticators ofby asserting allegiance to a higher power, a higher the expect-nothing school of human misery.Thereorder than the king had violated his trust as a ser- will always be those who, whether in the face ofvant of the king.miracle or martyrdom, will, like the first priest, for 330 Murder in the Cathedralwhom nothing has changed but the cause of his work on theatrical pieces was providing.Virtuallyperpetual fearfulness, find nothing to alter their from the time of the publication of The Waste Landnotion that the world is what it is, but it is through in 1922, Eliot s creative energies had been seriouslythe chorus of the women of Canterbury that Eliot flagging.From this vantage point, a person lookingcan reveal what he calls the type of the common back at Eliot s poetic output in the period underman. These are the most of us, as he will call consideration, from 1923 to 1935, might see noth-them in the Four Quartets, who witness the signifi- ing but success after success The Hollow Men, cance of the world as it unfolds in action and who Ash-Wednesday, the Ariel poems whereas innever quite understand it, but who accept that fact there were few sustained efforts.limit in themselves, rather than flaunting such The Hollow Men appears to have been cob-ignorance as a badge of honor.bled together from bits left over from the unfinishedThe chorus shows that even the hopeless and Sweeney Agonistes, while the first three sectionshelpless who have been downtrodden by both nature of Ash-Wednesday were also published separatelyand their fellow man, particularly in the guise of those and independently, as had been all four of the Arielwho would lead and benefit them, can now find a poems.The latter poems, meanwhile, inasmuch asrenewed sense of both their own and life s worth in a they were a part of Faber & Faber s annual Christ-tragedy such as Becket had just endured.Thus, they mas promotion, were more in the nature of com-can genuinely rejoice, praising and thanking God in missioned than inspired pieces.Indeed, during thethe midst of such an awful moment, with a praise 1930s Eliot had come to feel that he was markingand thanksgivings that reach beyond despair.For time as a poet and had again become convinced,them, Becket s tragic end was not his death but that as he had been at a number of other key junctureshe should have died being, as it were, too good for in his career, that he had exhausted [his] meagerthe world which is not his, but humanity s tragedy.poetic gifts. Aside from Ash-Wednesday, pub- [T]he blood of the martyrs and agony of the saints lished as the decade began, there was the unfin-/ Is upon our heads, they say, confirming what the ished Coriolan, which comprised another Arielknights had argued, but seeing it as their own admis- poem, Triumphal March, and Difficulties of asion of a guilt for Becket s loss, the beginning not of Statesman. Furthermore, like The Rock, this wasmake-believe but of belief.a poetry more in keeping with Eliot s social andThrough Becket s having died in the spirit of his political concerns public themes, that is, rathercause, which is what matyrdom, bearing witness, is than with the sorts of intensely personal, privateall about, he has proved that death is no bar to the themes that had generally beleaguered the typicalfulfillment of the human spirit that devotes itself Eliot speaker to this time.not to the pursuits of the world but to discerning So, then, Murder in the Cathedral signals thethe will of God.In so doing, Becket has come, in first time in some 13 years that, beyond such prosedeath, to embody the essence of the Christian faith works as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticismthat he died professing.As Eliot s Becket himself and After Strange Gods, themselves efforts that hadhad predicted in his Christmas sermon, embraced emerged relatively piecemeal out of the processesby the spirit of Christ, of both his birth and his of series lecturing in 1933, Eliot had conceived anddeath, one can both mourn and rejoice, and with executed a coherent literary piece from start totheir Te Deum, the chorus does just that, singing finish and beginning to end
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