Modern American Poetry

New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 145

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat

a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon

the beach.^6

The timid, sexless old man does, however, walk upon the beach, where—in the final
passage that brings to a climax the imagery of ocean (yellow fog, “restaurants with
oyster shells”) as suggesting sex and unconsciousness—he hears in the sounds of the
waves mermaids singing, not to him, but to each other. By relegating his libidinal
self to fantasy, Prufrock makes the split wider than ever. He thus avoids sex; he sings
his love song to his other conscious self, while the girls sing to each other.
This is Eliot’s way of handling character in the early poems. The conscious
self is mechanical, constructed, dead; but it has, as its one last sign of vitality,
sudden, momentary accesses to a buried libidinal life—accesses that only deepen
the split between unconsciousness and self-regarding consciousness. Even the
utterly blank young man in the satirical “Portrait of a Lady”—who puts on
“faces” to cover his lack of response to the lady’s advances, just as he keeps his
“countenance” before the miscellaneous, spectacular happenings in the
newspapers—even this emotionally dead young man has momentary access to a
libidinal life recalling at least things otherpeople have desired:

I keep my countenance,

I remain self-possessed

Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired

Reiterates some worn-out common song

With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

Recalling things that other people have desired.

Are these ideas right or wrong?

The pattern, distinctively post-romantic, is to be found in a poem like

Arnold’s “The Buried Life.” The romanticists portray the conscious self as

connected with the unconscious and suffused with its vitality. In “The Buried

Life,” however, Arnold portrays our conscious existence as an unenergetic

“Eddying at large in blind uncertainty.” “Tricked in disguises, alien to the

rest/ Of men, and alien to themselves,” men are cut off from their

unconscious self—except for an inexplicable nostalgia: