Modern American Poetry

(^158) Robert Langbaum
It is in Part Vthat the Grail legend becomes most explicit, and explicit
in its Christian interpretation. The protagonist might be said to repeat in his
own progress the evolution of the Grail legend, as described by Jessie Weston,
from pagan ritual to Christian romance.^10 Even those female lamentations
which precede the protagonist’s arrival at the empty chapel—and which refer,
as Eliot’s note explains, to “the present decay of eastern Europe”—recall the
lamenting voices of unseen women that, in certain versions described by Miss
Weston, the Grail knight hears amid the desolation of the Perilous Chapel.
When in the final passage the protagonist becomes both Quester and Fisher
King, there is a powerful recapitulation of the disorder that has been the
poem’s main theme. We are given a most poignant sense of the incoherent
fragments that stock the cultural memory of Europe.
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih.
Yet all these apparently miscellaneous fragments speak of purgation—
whether through the refining fire of Dante’s line, or the melancholy of
Nerval’s ghostly Prince, or the purposeful madness of Kyd’s Hieronymo—or
else they speak of desire for salvation, as in the line from the Latin
Pervigilium Veneris: “When shall I become as the swallow?”
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The line turns to a
positive purpose the fragmentation upon which the poem has been built.
They point to a tradition which, though in disarray, is all we have to draw on
for salvation. The fragments are in many languages because all European
culture is being tapped, going back to its earliest origins in the Sanskrit
Upanishads. As the protagonist, through association and memory, makes his
identity, he is able to give the fragments a new order. They are made to issue
in the three Sanskrit precepts—give, sympathize, control—upon which the
protagonist has already meditated, and which are to guide him toward that
peace, signified by shantih,which passes understanding.