Savage Torpor

Wordsworth's remarks about the effects of city-life are, so far as I know (a phrase I find myself using more and more frequently), unprecedented. I'm pretty sure that no one before him had ever claimed that "savage torpor" is a characteristic malaise of cities. As times goes on, however, and the pace of technological and economic innovation picks up, the modern city becomes increasingly problematical--especially it would seem for literary intellectuals. The brilliantly modernistic innovations of T.S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland may obscure the fact that the intellectual and literary tradition of which it is a part was more than a 100 years old when it was written. No one before Eliot, though, had managed to capture in poetry the sound, sense and tone of 'savage torpor' before Eliot pulled it off in one of his earliest poems, Preludes. Here is how it begins:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
And showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And so on. You get the idea, perhaps. Should you care to read the rest of the poem (it is not very long), you can easily find it in, say, The Norton Anthology

Lao Qiao said...

Thanks, Piers, for introducing me to Eliot's "Preludes." which does indeed describe a world of savage torpor, a beautiful expression. My own experience of the city, however, is not one of "dingy shades" or "broken blinds and chimney pots" and certainly not of "ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots." Instead of "savage torpor" I feel a world of distant cooperation, of sympathetic discourtesy, of casual creativity.

I reply: Compare "Preludes" (musical, like Chopin's) to Ww's "Westminster Bridge" sonnet:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

(In other words, the city is most beautiful when the city is being least like a city.) Eliot's poem systematically dulls itself down, deadening all affect (a technique he learned from Baudelaire and Laforgue but that's another story.) That's what I meant by applying Ww's term "torpor" to it. Ww tells us how to feel about the city in his poem; Eliot lets the city in all its poor, dull, torpid, speechless misery speak for itself--at least in the first of these preludes. (This a kind of poetry that did not exist in 1800 and which I doubt that Ww or any other poet of his time could have imagined.) As the city wakes up, he speaks to it or for it in a very indirect way. That 'you' could be and does refer to any inhabitant of those "furnished rooms." "He" could be any more conscious sufferer. When finally the poet speaks (possibly) for himself, he is answered instantly by a voice (possibly his own) much more hardened and innured to poverty who laughs and says that poverty is so much a part of the structure of reality, so universal, that even the worlds revolve like old women gathering fuel in vacant lots.