Modern American Poetry

(^146) Robert Langbaum
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life.
And sometimes, in rare erotic moments, we have access to our buried self:
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we
know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
The buried self is non-individual; it is the life force. It is well that it is buried,
for man would with his meddling intellect “well-nigh change his own
identity,” but is in spite of himself carried, by the unregarded river in his
breast, to the fulfillment of his biological destiny and “genuine self.”
In Eliot, the self is buried even deeper than in Arnold and is even less
individual. The buried self is, in The Waste Land,extended in time through
unconscious racial memory. When the upper-class lady, aware of inner
vacancy, asks: “‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?/ ... What shall we do
tomorrow?/ What shall we ever do?’”—the protagonist answers by
describing the routine of their life:
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon
the door.
On the surface, his answer confirms her sense of vacancy; we shall fill our
lives, he is saying, with meaningless routines. But there is also a positive
implication, deriving from the poem’s underlying patterns, that these
routines are unconscious repetitions of ancient rituals. The morning bath
recalls rituals of purification and rebirth through water. The game of chess
recalls not only the game played in Middleton’s Women Beware Womenwhile
destiny works itself out behind the door, but also all the games, including the