Modern American Poetry

(^148) Robert Langbaum
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?”
The shocking substitution of “corpse” for “seed” reminds us that corpses are
a kind of seed, and that this truth was symbolized in the old vegetation
rituals. We find gardening satisfying because we unconsciously repeat the
ritual by which gods were killed and buried in order that they might sprout
anew as vegetation. Even more surprising is the connection of Stetson with
the ships at Mylae—the naval battle where the Carthaginians or Phoenicians
were defeated by the Romans. The passage is a haunting recognition scene
in which conscious recognition derives from unconscious recognition of
another life. The protagonist unconsciously recognizes his fellow gardener
as also a fellow sailor and Phoenician; for they are devotees of rebirth, and it
was the Phoenician sailors who carried the Mysteries or vegetation cults
around the Mediterranean.
The heavily ironic final lines return us to the modern situation:
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—
mon frère!”
Instead of Webster’s “keep the wolf far thence that’s foe to men” (White
Devil, V, iv, 113), the friendly Dog (perhaps, as Cleanth Brooks has
suggested, modern humanitarianism) is the more likely animal and the more
likely danger. Webster’s dirge says it is good for the dead to be buried, and
Eliot tells why—by digging up the corpse, the Dog would prevent rebirth.
But we are all, protagonist and hypocrite readers, with our advanced ideas
that cut us off from the natural cycle, engaged in a conspiracy against fertility
and rebirth. So we return to the theme with which Part Ibegan: “April is the
cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land”—the fear of sex, of
burying the seed that will sprout.
In The Waste Land, the buried life manifests itself through the
unconscious memory of characters from the past. There is already some
reaching toward this method in “Prufrock,” where Prufrock consciouslythinks
he might have been John the Baptist, Lazarus, Hamlet. But the emphasis is
on the ironical disparity between these legendary figures and Prufrock’s
actual character or lack of character. Prufrock does not in fact fulfill the