Abstract
Among the similarities of Animula to The Cultivation of Christmas Trees is their fundamental form: both are essays. The essay-poem Animula traces changes in “the little soul.” It “progresses” from child-like to both offending and perplexed, thence to “irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame, / Unable to fare forward or retreat.” It thus misses (out on) “the warm reality,” the good that is available to and for it, for it denies “the importunity of the blood.” The poem also suggests that “the little soul” comes to live first “after the viaticum,” the final words of the Last Rites, at that point sent on its “way,” its “journey,” born in and with death.
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Notes
John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994), 134.
T.S. Eliot, Animula (London: Faber and Faber, 1929).
Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959).
See B.C. Southam, A Reader’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 243.
Lee Oser, T.S. Eliot and American Poetry (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998), 97.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916 (New York: Viking, 1964).
Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 4:c.480ff. See also An Essay on Man in the same volume.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010), 98.
T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (New York: Putnam, 1930).
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 22.
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© 2014 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2014). Animula: What the Simple Soul Knows, or “Living first in the silence after the viaticum”. In: T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions”. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137479129_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137479129_6
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