Abstract
Marina is a readers’ favorite, owing in part at least to its being seen as positive. The relatively extensive commentary on the poem proves to be a mixed bag, with speculations concerning the applicability to Eliot’s own life and generally running from the sanguine to the joyous. As a dramatic monologue, the poem is complex, the speaker—Pericles— not quite all that he seems to be. His daughter has returned from a shipwreck that, it had been presumed, took her life—she is now, for many, a Christ-figure. She does not speak, and her father focuses on “images” of her. His tone and his words begin to suggest guilt for having constructed a faulty ship, in which his daughter very nearly lost her life.
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Notes
Elizabeth Drew, T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), 128, 131, 126, 127.
George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis (New York: Noonday, 1953), 187.
Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 272–73.
Lee Oser, T.S. Eliot and American Poetry (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998), 110.
John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994), 145.
Eliot, quoted in B.C. Southam, A Reader’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 246–47.
Eloise Knapp Hay, T.S. Eliot’s Negative Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982), 5, 89–90.
Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000), 175.
T.S. Eliot, “The Pensées of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 408.
T.S. Eliot, Marina (London: Faber and Faber, 1930).
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
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© 2014 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2014). Marina: “Living to live in a world of time beyond me”: Recognizing, Perceiving, and Understanding. 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_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137479129_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
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