quiet americans Empire, which was itself but a prelude to the Holy Roman Empire, which was
itselfbut a shadow of the Platonic Christian other world.^62 In ‘Little Gidding’ the
embattled Empire of Britain under siege is resplendent with this eschatological
light, like the blinding glare of midwinter spring.
The more refracted light producedby Prynne’s thickening of discursive per-
spectives affords an opportunity to consider the history of sovereign nations and
patrolled borders in relation to, and as just one aspect of, the history of different
kinds of movement, alongside, for example, the atomistic movement of biological
cells, the body as the site of ‘glandular riot’, the traffic of goods and wares, the circu-
lation of money, the currency of language, the movement of individual persons, and
ultimately the ‘molecular friction’ of whole peoples drifting precariously across the
earth’s for the most part also invisibly moving crust (our ‘drifting lives’ are them-
selves ‘underlaid by drift in the form ofmantle’^63 ). The poet plays spectacularly with
scale: what becomes of a people or tribe if you see it as merely the sum of its atoms?
To look at history in such terms is to demythologize nationhood and imperialism:
Imperialism was just
an old, very old name for that
idea, that what you want, you by
historic process or just readiness
to travel, also ‘‘need’’—and
need is of course the sacred daughter
through which you improve, by
becoming more extensive. Competitive
expansion: if you designate a
prime direction, as Drang nach Osten
or the Western Frontier, that’s to
purify the idea by recourse to History
beforeit happens. Envisaging the chapter-
head in the historical outline as ‘‘the
spirit (need) of the age’’—its primary
greed, shielded from ignominy by the
like practice of too many others.
That
of course isnotexpansion but acquisition
(as to purchase the Suez Canal was merely
a blatant example): the true expansion
is probably drift, as the Scythians
being nomadic anyway for the most part
slipped sideways right across the Russian
steppes, from China by molecular friction
through to the Polish border.^64(^62) See e.g. Frank Kermode, ‘Introduction’, inSelectedProseofT.S.Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode
(London: Faber, 1975), 21. 63
Prynne,‘NumbersinTimeofTrouble’,inPoems,17.^64 Prynne,‘DieaMillionaire’,13–14.