Axis Mundi: Spatial Construction Of The World In T.S. Eliot's Three Major Poems

The concept of time as a linear sequence is subverted by the experience of time as an all-encompassing flux or spatial existence. This fresh understanding in turn reinforces the more relative and subjective view of space, which yet does not excite enough critical interest. Similarly, in most current research, there is no thematic study of space in Eliot's poetry, although the importance of time as a theme has been recognized fairly by Eliot scholarship. Therefore, the present study is to clarify the meaning of space as it develops through Prufrock, The Waste Land and Four Quartets, and to show that the ultimate concern of human life is largely determined by ideas of space. If the infernal space in Prufrock is to emphasize the death-in-life existence, the void space of The Waste Land describes spiritual desolation of modern people, the climax of Eliot's "infernal" vision. Landscapes in Four Quartets are about actual places in which the divine Word is incarnated, thus pregnant with the sacredness. On the basis of the theological implication of space, the heightened world of four levels is further generalized: heaven, unfallen world, fallen world and demonic world. Its ideological urgency is to stress the interrelated relationship from highest to the lowest, which therefore can be conceived metaphorically as the axis mundi, a vertical line running from the top to the bottom of the cosmos. In Burnt Norton, Eliot develops such a "full vision of the axis mundi, its top among the circling stars, crossing the line of ordinary experience at "the still point of the turning world," and going below a world associated both with the London subway and Homer's Hades to a world of death. Meanwhile, he identifies "the still point" with the Incarnation. By Incarnation, the divine world and our world of experience have a significant communication, promising the possibility of salvation from the fallen world to the divine world above. Meanwhile, this communication is also charged with a peculiar intensity: the vision of experience begins to be a vision of hell, and the vision of innocence begins to a vision of paradise. Therefore, the infernal vision of the modern world in Prufrock and The Waste Land begins to be a vision of the sacred space by religious experience of grace or the Word dissolved in place.The main body of the present study is divided into the following three parts:The first part deals with the infernal space in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It points out first that Eliot, as a well-known poet, draws his urban imagery principally from the city of St Louis. Then, it proceeds, with Prufrock's experience of the external world as the start point, to disclose the protagonist's anguished sense of imprisonment and of the impossibility of escape from hell. Eliot first uses Dante to place the modern city within the context of Dante's vision of hell; the poetic infernal space is later reinforced by Prufrock's wriggling experience of alienating or insidious places, and his inability to choose between death and life. Finally, it ends with a defining statement of "Death's Dream Kingdom" of Prufrock.The second part probes into the void space in The Waste Land, the climax of Eliot's "infernal" vision. It is achieved by juxtaposition of symbolic and actual landscapes, and truthfully presented from four aspects of the dead land, the unreal city, the blank sea, and the enclosed room. On the one hand, Eliot uses symbolic landscapes of the dead land and the blank sea to envisage the frustrated vision of love and happy. On the other, his imagery of the unreal city and the enclosed room comes from London in reality, which functions to reach the highest meaning of the living death of city life.The third part expounds the sacred space in Four Quartets. The central reality of incarnation enters our consciousness, through felt experience of actual places in which grace is dissolved. The discovery of rose-garden is experienced in the garden of Burnt Norton, while the Eliot's ancestral home Coker in East Coker is associated with the lost home of Adam and Eve, and with the wisdom of humility learned there. Meanwhile, the understanding of irremovable original sin "within us" and the voyage of faithful life "all about us" is framed by exploitation of metaphysical conceit of river and sea in The Dry Salvages. In Little Gidding, the purifying fire of God is communicated effectively between the poet and the dead in both the secluded chapel at Little Gidding and London streets. The final part also concludes the whole poem with central vision of grace dissolved in place.The conclusion elucidates the dynamic nature of space as a whole, which is illustrated by an overall pattern of U-shaped parabola reaching its bottom with the void space in The Waste Land, and moving upward with the sacred space in Four Quartets. In fact, the infernal and sacred spaces are inseparable because only through the infernal or void space can space be redeemed. This is accomplished in communication with the Word, the "still point" of Axis Mundi crossing with the "turning world." In this sense, Eliot cherishes religious experience as the ultimate antidote to modern life.