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The metaphysical materiality of Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot's poetry

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The metaphysical materiality of Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot's poetry

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Content THE METAPHYSICAL MATERIALITY OF VLADISLAV KHODASEVICH AND T.S.
ELIOT’S POETRY
by
Sarah Matthews
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES)
August 2024
Copyright 2024 Sarah Matthews

ii
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor and
committee chair Professor Sally Pratt for her steadfast support and guidance. This dissertation
could not have been completed without her attentive and detailed comments and suggestions.
Her work on Russian metaphysical poetry has been critical to my understanding of the tradition.
I will miss our stimulating discussions and will always admire her ability to situate and analyze a
poem.
I am also indebted to my two committee members Professors Colleen McQuillen and
Susan McCabe. Their feedback has been integral to the development of my ideas, especially their
reminders to address the larger context and stakes of this dissertation. They introduced me to key
scholars and provided vital knowledge of the Modernist period and the English tradition.
Many thanks to all the faculty members I have studied with in the Department of Slavic
Languages and Literatures at USC. They have motivated me to be a better scholar and have
provided numerous opportunities for professional development. I am grateful for the supportive
and intellectually rigorous environment they have fostered at USC.
My fellow graduate students have been extremely generous and encouraging. In
particular, I would like to thank Elizaveta Dvortsova, Caitlin Guistiniano, and Dmitrii Kuznetsov
for their honest and insightful feedback and their meaningful and lasting friendships. I could not
have asked for a better cohort and I cannot wait to see all that they will accomplish in the future.
Last but not least, I would like to express my love and appreciation for my family and
friends. They have never lost faith in me or this project. My mother has patiently listened to and
discussed every word of this dissertation in all of its versions. My eternal thanks to my partner
Colton Atkinson. For everything.

iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………. ii
List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………… iv
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………... v
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………. 1
Chapter 1: Object-Oriented and Object-Driven Poems by Vladislav Khodasevich and
T.S. Eliot………………………………………………………………………………………... 15
Chapter 2: Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot’s Individual and Metaphysical
Animals…………………………………………………………………………………………. 73
Chapter 3: Metaphysical and Macabre Remains in Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S.
Eliot’s Poems………………………………………………………………………………….. 121
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….. 162
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………... 172
Appendix: Some of Edward Gorey’s Illustrations of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of
Practical Cats…………………………………………………………………………………. 199

iv
List of Figures
Chapter 2: Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot’s Individual and Metaphysical Animals
Image A: Note to Nina Berberova from Khodasevich with cat drawing……………… 106
Image B: Letter to Virginia Woolf from Eliot as Possum…………………………….. 108
Appendix: Some of Edward Gorey’s Illustrations of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of
Practical Cats
Images C – F: Loosely defined dogs from “The Pekes and the Pollicles”……………. 199
Image G: Well defined cat from “The Pekes and the Pollicles”………………………. 203
Image H: Cat in motion from “The Preface”………………………………………….. 204
Image I: Cat in motion from the “The Contents”……………………………………... 204
Image J: Cat in repose next to a man facing away from “The Naming of Cats”……… 205
Image K: Cat in repose above a man facing away from “Old Deuteronomy”………... 206
Image L: Cat in motion above Scotland Yard from “Macavity: the Mystery Cat”…… 207
Image M: Cats dancing from “The Song of the Jellicles”…………………………….. 208
Image N: Cat standing with white spats next to a woman facing away from
“Bustopher Jones: the Cat about Town”………………………………………………. 209
Image O: Man tipping his hat to the cat in repose above him from “The
Ad-dressing of Cats”…………………………………………………………………... 210

v
Abstract
The poetry of T.S. Eliot and Vladislav Khodasevich, poets who were roughly contemporaries but
born in different countries with different poetic traditions, provides a unique lens to reexamine
and redefine the relation of the material and the metaphysical. The primary objective of this
dissertation is to compare Khodasevich’s and Eliot’s poetry in the context of European
Modernism. My intended audience is broad, including those interested in Modernism, poetry,
English literature, and Russian literature. Scholars of Khodasevich occasionally refer to Eliot in
their works. Scholars of Eliot, on the other hand, to this point have never referred to
Khodasevich. This dissertation is the first serious study dedicated to this pairing. Although
Khodasevich and Eliot are both known for their metaphysical orientation, their poetry is also
undeniably and inescapably material. Their poetry falls into three distinct categories: poems
centered on objects, poems centered on animals, and poems centered on human bodies. These
forms of matter exhibit their own life force and ontological questions are posed in the process. In
my close readings I incorporate the ideas of the New Materialists. Each chapter elucidates ways
in which Khodasevich and Eliot’s metaphysical materiality manifests itself in both form and
content. I aim to demonstrate that interesting and fruitful connections can and ought to be found
among poets who occupy seemingly disparate positions in cultural, literary, and poetic traditions.
Questions that tormented Modernists like Eliot and Khodasevich at the beginning of the
twentieth century still haunt us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the conclusion I
argue that Eliot, Khodasevich, and the New Materialists align in the works of Ol’ga Sedakova.

1
Introduction
In this dissertation I place Vladislav Khodasevich’s poetry in conversation with Thomas
Stearns Eliot’s in the context of European Modernism. On the surface, this pairing might seem
illogical.1 Afterall, Eliot is considered one of the most important English poets, if not the most
important English poet, of his time, whereas Khodasevich is usually overshadowed by his
Symbolist forebearers or by his Russian contemporaries, most notably his fellow poet-in-exile
Marina Tsvetaeva and the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Scholars of Khodasevich
occasionally refer to Eliot in their works, but no serious study dedicated to this pairing exists.2
Through my research, I attempt to fill this gap. But more than that, I argue that in spite of a
stance often characterized as metaphysical, both poets inhabit a world of undeniable and
inescapable materiality.
1 In the opinion of Vladimir Nabokov, a mouthpiece for both Russian and English literature, Vladislav Khodasevich
is “the greatest Russian poet of our time, Pushkin’s literary descendant…, [who] shall remain the pride of Russian
poetry as long as its last memory lives” (83). This quote comes from Nabokov’s “On Khodasevich” printed in
Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel’s The Bitter Air of Exile. Nabokov characterizes T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, as
“not quite first-rate,” and he caustically notes that the name “T.S. Eliot” is an anagram of “toilets.” In Nabokov’s
1964 interview with Playboy he states: “I was ever exposed in the twenties and thirties, as so many of my coevals
have been, to the poetry of the not quite first-rate Eliot and of definitely second-rate Pound. I read them late in the
season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend’s house, and not only remained completely indifferent
to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some
sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did.” In a 1948 letter to Edmund
Wilson, Nabokov wrote a poem in which the following lines are found: “At first my brain was somewhat numbed /
by your somnambulistic numbers, Edmund. / Now, having shaken off that stupor, / I find the latter anagrimes with
‘Proust’ / while ‘T.S. Eliot’ / goes well with ‘toilets.’” Both of these quotes can be found in the “The Meanest
Things Vladimir Nabokov Said About Other Writers” by Emily Temple. It should be noted that Nabokov and
Khodasevich were friends, whereas Nabokov uses his harsh view of Eliot as part of his own self-fashioning.
2 An example of a brief reference appears in a footnote in David M. Bethea’s biography Khodasevich: His Life and
Art, wherein he remarks that Khodasevich’s depiction of time in the two poems “Noon” and “The Encounter” is
similar to Eliot’s concept of “pure time” and “historical sense” (306). Another example of a brief reference comes
from Edward Waysband’s article “The Poetics of Shock: ‘The Pitiful Voice’ in Khodasevich’s ‘Under the Ground,’”
wherein he notes that “Khodasevich’s deliberate orientation toward Baudelaire in ‘European Night’ parallels the
major contemporaneous reevaluation of Baudelaire’s heritage currently associated predominantly with Walter
Benjamin, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valery, and Erich Auerbach” (774).

2
The loaded terms metaphysical and material need to be unpacked to grasp the nuances of
my argument. Combining these terms to create metaphysical materiality might seem paradoxical
because metaphysical relates to “philosophical speculation or intellectual abstraction” and “more
generally to things which are immaterial, imaginary, preternatural, or supernatural,” whereas
material relates to “the physical as opposed to the intellectual or spiritual aspects of things” and
“the terrestrial sphere.”3 Based on these definitions, the material and the metaphysical are
diametrically opposed. This binary emerges in debates on life versus matter, human versus
animal, mind versus body, and soul versus body. Life, the human, the mind, and the soul siding
with the metaphysical and matter, the animal, and the body siding with the material. Artists,
philosophers, and scholars have debated and continue to debate the essence, stability, and
validity of these dichotomies. When it comes to Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry, the roles are
reversed. The material becomes the metaphysical and vice versa.
The metaphysical is a material affair in the English and Russian traditions of
metaphysical poetry. Instead of pure philosophizing on being and the inner workings of the
universe, the quintessentially metaphysical poets are materially or bodily orientated. Andrew
Marvell and John Donne, for example, write of birds of prey, worms, fleas, sex, breasts, arteries,
nerves, veins, pores, blood, bones, ashes, and decay in their poems “To His Coy Mistress,” “A
Dialogue between the Soul and the Body,” “The Flea,” and “Of the Progress of the Soul: The
Second Anniversary.” Fedor Tiutchev and Evgenii Boratynskii write of corks, bowls, cups,
moths, bees, ants, worms, roots, breaths, cheeks, lips, eyelashes, feet, stomach, teeth, blood,
graves, corpses, skulls, and dust in their poems «В душном воздуха молчанье…» (“In the
stuffy silence of the air…”), «И гроб опущен уж в могилу…» (“And the coffin already lowered
3 These definitions come from the Oxford English Dictionary (3rd edition, 2001).

3
into the grave…”), «Тени сизые смесились…» (“The gray shadows mixed…”), «От жизни
той, что бушевала здесь…» (“From the life that raged here…”), «Не верь, не верь поэту,
дева…» (“[Oh] maiden, do not believe, do not believe the poet…”), «Пиры» (“Feasts”), «Две
доли» (“Two Lots”), «Череп» (“Skull”), «Леда» (“Leda”), «Смерть» (“Death”), and «На
смерть Гёте» (“On the Death of Goethe”).4 The poems by Eliot and Khodasevich analyzed in
this dissertation are composed of comparable matter.
Eliot himself notes the microscopic, bodied view of the English metaphysical poets in his
essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). He writes: “Those who object to the ‘artificiality’ of
Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to ‘look into our hearts and write.’ But that is not looking
deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into
the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts” (249).5 Khodasevich and Eliot,
like Racine, Donne, and Marvell, have a penchant for detail and diving deep into minds, bodies,
and things.6 Eliot sees a unity in mind and body in the metaphysical poets and a dissociation of
mind and body in the poetry that follows. He concludes in his essay:
4 Tiutchev and Boratynskii lived and wrote during the nineteenth century. In her book Russian Metaphysical
Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii Sarah Pratt explains why this type of poetry appeared later in
Russia, how there is no direct influence between the English and Russian traditions, but that they share the same
common ground: “This type of nomenclature [metaphysical poetry] suggests a common ground linking the Russian
tradition with the metaphysical poetry of Donne, Vaughan, Herbert, Marvell, and a number of other poets of
seventeenth-century England. Though the possibility of direct influence is virtually nonexistent, the use of poetry as
a means of expressing, examining, and, on occasion, resolving greater spiritual issues is typical of both the English
Metaphysicals and a certain number of Russian poets of whom Tiutchev and Boratynskii are the most striking
examples. In both England and Russia the metaphysical strain had its origins in the practice of some kind of
religious meditation…Many European countries developed some form of metaphysical poetry during the baroque
period…In Russia, which never experienced the baroque in the manner of most European countries, the
metaphysical strain began more hesitantly and blossomed later” (5-7). Tiutchev and Boratynskii’s Romantic
sensibility separates them from Khodasevich and Eliot. For a thorough analysis of Tiutchev and Boratynskii’s poetry
see Sarah Pratt’s book.
5 “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) from Selected Essays 1917-1932, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932,
electronic version.
6 In his biography of Khodasevich Bethea continuously comments on Khodasevich’s “passion for detail” and the
“stereoscopic depth” of Khodasevich’s poems and analyses of other writers. Similarly, Michael Wachtel writes in
the introduction to a bilingual edition of selected poems by Khodasevich: “In contrast [to the undifferentiated and

4
If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson failed to define
metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to inquire whether we may not have
more success by adopting the opposite method: by assuming that the poets of the
seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal development of
the precedent age; and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective “metaphysical,”
consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which
subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared…after the dissociation [of
sensibility], they put the material together again in a new unity. (245)
I argue that Eliot and Khodasevich aspire toward this long-lost unified sensibility of the
seventeenth century in their poetry.
The dynamic relationship between the metaphysical and the material is a central concern
of the Modernist era, making Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry representative of its time. Ranging
from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the Modernist era is characterized
by increasing feelings of alienation and disillusionment caused by industrialization, world wars,
political revolutions, and advancements in the hard and social sciences. Questioning one’s
relationship to the material world and the existence of God or a spiritual realm beyond are
definitive Modernist dilemmas. Some abandon the spiritual and trust only the physical while
others seek for meaning in the divine. In the pursuit of novelty, some reject tradition while others
repurpose it. 7 Khodasevich and Eliot fall on the more conservative side, especially in their later
generic appearance of the physical world in Symbolist poetry], Khodasevich records the mundane with painterly
precision. His method is metonymic; he focuses on a single telling detail rather than sketching a scene in broad
strokes” (19).
7 In Modernism, one’s relationship with the past can be varied and complex. For a more conservative approach, see
the Russian Acmeist manifesto «Утро акмеизма» (“The Morning of Acmeism”) (1912). For a more radical
approach, see the English Vorticist manifestos published in Wyndham Lewis’s first and only two issues of Blast
(1914-1915) or the Russian Futurist manifesto «Пощёчина общественному вкусу» (“A Slap in the Face of Public
Taste”) (1912).

5
years. 8 In the “Introduction” to The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism Pericles
Lewis defines Modernism as a literary and artistic movement centered on crisis: “The crisis of
representation evident in modernism has its roots in other crises: of faith, of reason, of liberalism,
of empire” (2). These crises, and the branch of philosophy known as “metaphysics,” deal with
“the first principles of things or reality, including questions about being, substance, time and
space, causation, change, and identity.”9 These questions frame Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry.
While Khodasevich and Eliot’s experiences of and relationships to Modernism are not
identical, there are many compelling parallels in their biographies. Both Khodasevich and Eliot
were born in the late 1880s, Eliot in St. Louis and Khodasevich in Moscow. Both lived through
the First World War and lived in Europe in emigration. However, Khodasevich’s emigration was
forced by the political situation in the Soviet Union, whereas Eliot chose to live abroad to pursue
his studies and literary career. Both spent significant time in Paris and were highly influenced by
the Symbolist movement.10 Khodasevich and Eliot’s geographical movements are not
8 In both their critical and literary works, Eliot and Khodasevich value tradition. Allusions fill their works and they
often rely on their predecessors when crafting their own personae. Two examples include Khodasevich’s poem
«Памятник» (“The Monument”) (1928) and Eliot’s seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917). A
rich heritage of monument poems exists in Russian poetry, including Pushkin and Derzhavin’s interpretations of
Horace’s ode 3.30 “Exegi monumentum aere perennius…”. By writing his own monument poem, Khodasevich
attaches himself to these literary giants. Although each monument poem is not identical, each considers the
everlasting nature of poetry and the word. Horace, Derzhavin, Pushkin, and Khodasevich recognize that their poetry
will outlive them and that they have played an influential role in Roman and Russian literature. Khodasevich’s poem
begins with the strong statement: «Во мне конец, во мне начало. / Мной совершенное так мало! / Но всё ж я
прочное звено: / Мне это счастие дано» (“In me is the beginning, in me is the end. So little has been made by me!
But still I am a solid link: This happiness has been given to me”) (lines 1-4). Although the speaker might have
accomplished little (the second line could be interpreted as the claim of critics, contemporaries, or state officials who
chose not to praise Khodasevich’s work), he acknowledges his place in the literary chain. His position is locked in,
and this brings him happiness. In his essay, Eliot paradoxically states that a writer is his most individual when his
dead ancestors speak through him most insistently. In other words, being Modern for Eliot and for Khodasevich
does not mean dismissing tradition. In fact, once a new, great work of literature has been produced it affects
everything that has come before it. Everything shifts in the great canon. That is why the beginning and the end of the
canon can be found within the speaker of Khodasevich’s poem. For these poets, one must be rooted in the past if
they want to make anything of themselves in the future.
9 This definition of “metaphysics” comes from the Oxford English Dictionary (3rd edition, 2001).

6
uncommon. Lewis emphasizes the role of migration in the formation of Modernist literature:
“Modernism was a fundamentally cosmopolitan movement, in the root sense of that word, a
movement of citizens of the world and of world-cities, from Woolf’s London to Belyi’s
Petersburg to Cavafy’s Alexandria” (7). Khodasevich and Eliot were intellectual poets and
literary critics who wrote and published some of their best work during the teens and twenties of
the twentieth century.11 In addition to these biographical connections, the metaphysical
materiality of their poetry, as examined in the chapters of this dissertation, reveals how they deal
with the aforementioned Modernist dilemmas in a strikingly similar way and provides the
intellectual rationale for my comparison.
12
The Modernist tendency to fixate on materiality and its effect on humanity is evidenced
by several philosophies and movements. These include the Marxist dialectical materialism so
important to Soviet ideology, Formalism, Futurism, Acmeism, Imagism, and the thought of the
Oberiu. Although each of these groups theorize about the material world and the role of art, their
theories do not always coincide. It has been stated that the “vital point to make about Marxism is
that it is a thoroughgoing materialism, interpreting human social and historical experience as an
10 Eliot primarily through French Symbolists and Khodasevich through Russian Symbolists, but the Russian
Symbolists were influenced by the French (Symbolists). See Bibliography for sources. The Symbolist tenet most
applicable to Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry, as understood in this dissertation, comes from Vyacheslav Ivanov’s
collection of poetry Cor Ardens: “a realibus ad realiora” (“from the real to the more real”). Khodasevich and Eliot
are ingrained in the real as they reach for the more real.
11 In his book In Search of Russian Modernism Leonid Livak advocates for a conceptualization of Modernism as a
culture or cultural community. He outlines the different roles found within a cultural community and what is
necessary for its existence: “The existence of a culture is contingent on the presence of a group that is sustained by a
communal ethos with roots in a shared cognitive system, sensibility, and mythology. In the case of modernism, this
community includes cultural producers (writers, painters, philosophers, etc.) mediators (critics, editors, publishers,
translators, patrons, impresarios) and consumers (readers, listeners, viewers) – roles that can be variously combined
in one individual” (21). Khodasevich and Eliot were cultural producers, mediators, and consumers and are thus
representative of the larger Modernist community.
12 Nina Berberova is a node between Khodasevich and Eliot. Berberova was Khodasevich’s wife and she translated
some of Eliot’s poems into Russian. Her translations of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Hollow Men,”
and “Journey of the Magi” are linked in the Bibliography.

7
encounter with the material realities of the physical world out of which culture has evolved”
(487).13 According to Marxist theory, understanding comes via encounters with one’s material
realities.
In keeping with the materialist emphasis of Marxism, Viktor Shklovsky writes in the
foreword to the influential Formalist work «О теории прозы» (Theory of Prose) that the word is
not a shadow but a thing: «Но слово все же не тень. Слово – вещь» (5). For Shklovsky, the
word is substantive, weighty, and physical, rather than ethereal, transparent, and intangible.
Additionally, the members of Oberiu declare in their manifesto14 that they expand and deepen
the meaning of the object and the word but do not destroy it in any way; the concrete object,
cleared of literary and everyday husks, becomes the domain of art: «В своём творчестве мы
расширяем и углубляем смысл предмета и слова, но никак не разрушаем его. Конкретный
предмет, очищенный от литературной и обиходной шелухи, делается достоянием
искусства». Similar to the Oberiu, the Imagists show a profound respect for the concrete world.
In his essay “A Retrospect,” Ezra Pound dedicates himself to “Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’
whether subjective or objective.” The Oberiu and Imagist’s desire to deepen the meaning of the
object, or the thing itself, while discarding the superficial scrapings that can be attached to it,
recalls Eliot’s discussion of the metaphysical poets who dive deep into the material around and
within them. Rather than remaining surface level, they go directly to the core.
13 This quote comes from the entry “Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary
Theory & Criticism.
14 The members of Oberiu also note in their manifesto that they are diametrically opposed to zaum (the Russian
Futurists’ technique). In Sarah Pratt’s chapter “The Last Gasp of the Avant-Garde and the Continuity of Culture”
she explains how Orthodoxy and the Oberiu “evince profound respect for the concrete world…[while Futurists]
Benedikt Livshits, Mayakovsky, and many of their compatriots approach the material world as utopian invaders
rather than as reverent, if flamboyant, discoverers of the true given order” (100).

8
Osip Mandelstam, a foremost member of the Acmeist group, takes an opposing view of
the relationship between words and things. He writes in «Слово и культура» (“The Word and
Culture”) do not demand from poetry total thing-ness, concreteness, or materiality because this is
the same revolutionary hunger: «Не требуйте от поэзии сугубой вещности, конкретности,
материальности. Это тот же революционный голод». Mandelstam’s labeling of materiality as
revolutionary hunger confirms that materiality was a central concern of the Modernist era. He
continues by questioning why it is necessary to touch with our fingers, why we should identify
the word with the thing, with the object that it signifies because the living word does not signify
the object, but freely chooses its…objective significance: «К чему обязательно осязать
перстами? А главное, зачем отождествлять слово с вещью, с предметом, который оно
обозначает?…Живое слово не обозначает предмета, а свободно выбирает…предметную
значимость». Mandelstam desires to physically distance himself from, not to touch, the objects
tied to words. Unlike the Oberiu and Imagists who envision the poet as the revealer of the word’s
true meaning, the word has full agency in Mandelstam’s view. Although Mandelstam’s
understanding of words and objects differs from the previous groups’, he is still engaging with
the concept of materiality in an interesting and provocative way. His strong self-positioning
against materiality exemplifies how many Modernists deemed it necessary to address this issue.
The invention of the cinematograph and the development of cinema is another example
of the Modernist obsession with materiality, especially in its depictions of the human body on
screen. There is a general consensus among scholars that the cinematic technique of montage can
be reflected in the juxtaposition of images found in Modernist poetry.15 Several scholars discuss
the role of montage in some of Khodasevich and Eliot’s most influential poems, specifically The
15 For more on montage, see sources on or by Sergei Eisenstein in the Bibliography.

9
Waste Land and «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”).16 In Susan
McCabe’s Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film, McCabe agrees with the notion
that the juxtaposition of images in Modernist poetry is akin to film montage. She also
demonstrates how cinema’s material presence influenced Modernist poets, even those who were
ambivalent and, at times, antagonistic toward the medium. McCabe identifies a central
Modernist paradox as the “desire to include bodily experience and sensation along with an
overpowering sense of the unavailability of such experience except as mediated through
mechanical reproduction” (3). She argues that “Cinematic montage and camera work often
exposed the body’s malleability” (3) and “that the medium of film, associated with the cellular,
mutable and hystericized body, offered an important means for many modernists to picture,
project, and reconstruct their fragmented bodies in a ‘drama of dismemberment and
reintegration’” (13). Ultimately, she concludes that “film crystallized a cultural debate in
modernity over the unstable conjunctions between the mind and the sensate body” (3). McCabe’s
ideas on the cultural debate between the mind and the body and how Modernist film and poetry
portray the body speak to my theory of metaphysical materiality in Khodasevich and Eliot’s
poetry.
Clearly, a multitude of meanings associated with materiality in the Modernist era exists.
Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry can be seen as speaking to this larger trend. Khodasevich was
well acquainted with Marxist dialectical materialism, Acmeism, Formalism, and Futurism. He
would frequently position himself in opposition to these groups in his own practice of self16 For example, Jason Brooks’s article “‘Directing the Reader’: Khodasevich’s ‘Sorrento Photographs’ and
Montage” and Helen Vendler’s essay “The Waste Land: Fragments and Montage.”

10
fashioning.
17 Scholars traditionally view Khodasevich’s poem «Жив Бог! Умен, а не заумен…»
(“God is alive! I’m clever and not beyond coherence…”) as a polemic against Futurism. Both
Khodasevich and Eliot were ambivalent and, at times, antagonistic towards cinema.18 Although
Eliot is not linked to the Russian Futurists, Acmeists, or Oberiuty, he was certainly familiar with
Marxist dialectical materialism and Imagism. Eliot’s relationship with Ezra Pound (infamous for
the slogan “Make It New!”), and the latter’s influence on his work, is a major reason why Eliot’s
name, and his watershed poem The Waste Land, are now synonymous with Modernism itself.
Other than Marxist dialectical materialism, the “philosophy” of the Oberiu, and cinema,
the previously mentioned philosophies and movements arose in the early 1910s and met their
demise a decade or two later. Khodasevich and Eliot wrote and published some of their best
poems during this period. For example, Khodasevich’s last four collections «Счастливый
домик» (Happy Little House) (1914), «Путём зерна» (The Way of the Seed) (1920), «Тяжёлая
лира» (The Heavy Lyre) (1921), and «Европейская ночь» (European Night) (1927) and Eliot’s
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), The Waste Land (1922), “The Hollow
Men” (1925), “Ash-Wednesday” (1930) and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). Close
readings of selected poems from these collections comprise the bulk of this dissertation.
Certain scholars discuss the materiality of Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry but not in the
specific context, i.e. the metaphysical materiality of both poets, that I use throughout this
dissertation. In her article “Multiple Exposures of the Photographic Motif in Vladislav
Khodasevich’s ‘Sorrentinskie Fotografii,’” for example, Margarita Nafpaktitis writes:
17 In the introduction to a bilingual edition of selected poems by Khodasevich, Michael Wachtel explains how
“Khodasevich’s poetry can be understood as a cultural barometer of his times,” despite its innovative qualities (21).
18 Susan McCabe addresses Eliot’s relationship to film in the first chapter of her book. For Khodasevich’s view, see
his essay «О кинематографе» (“About Cinema”).

11
“Khodasevich emphasizes the materiality of photographs, perhaps precisely in order to provide
the poema with a sense of physical presence, immediacy, and wholeness that can only be
‘borrowed’ from photography” (391). In addition to the materiality and physicality of
«Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”), several scholars comment on the
prevalence and power of the phenomenal world in Khodasevich’s poetry, especially in his later
works where the material realm becomes nearly impossible for the poet or lyrical speaker to
transcend.19 Similarly, in the introduction to The Essential T.S. Eliot, Vijay Seshadri asserts that
“‘The Waste Land’ is overpowering in its sense of the isolation of the spirit trapped in violent
materiality” (xiv).
I divide Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry into three distinct categories, devoting a chapter
to each one: poems focused on objects, poems focused on animals, and poems focused on human
bodies. These types of matter exhibit their own life force and ontological questions are posed in
the process. I perform formalist readings of several poems by both poets in these chapters and
include biographical materials as well. The first chapter, “Object-Oriented and Object-Driven
Poems by Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot,” addresses the force and animism of both
modern inventions and commonplace items in Khodasevich’s «Соррентинские фотографии»
(“Sorrento Photographs”), «Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”), «Пробочка» (“The Cork”),
«Весенний лепет не разнежит…» (“The babble of spring will not soften…”), and «Встаю
расслабленный с постели…» (“I get up exhausted from my bed…”) and Eliot’s “Preludes” and
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” The speakers in these poems are weakened, alienated,
fragmented, and dehumanized. In the second chapter, “Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot’s
Individual and Metaphysical Animals,” animals are key players rather than lifeless props. The
19 See Bibliography for examples.

12
divide between the human and the animal shifts in Khodasevich’s «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”)
and «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”) and Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus”
and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Khodasevich and Eliot’s personal writings reveal how
animals inform their personalities and relationships. The third chapter, “Metaphysical and
Macabre Remains in Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot’s Poems,” probes the dead and dying
human bodies in Khodasevich’s «В Петровском парке» (“In Petrovsky Park”) and «Золото»
(“Gold”) and Eliot’s The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash-Wednesday.” Their
speakers search and hope for traces of the metaphysical.
The New Materialists, Jane Bennett in particular, guide my close readings.20 My decision
to incorporate the New Materialists could appear unjustified because Khodasevich and Eliot are
not of the same era or mindset. The New Materialists are committed to a liberatory, political
agenda. Susan Yi Sencindiver succinctly captures their aim:
Reworking received notions of matter as a uniform, inert substance or a socially
constructed fact, new materialism foregrounds novel accounts of its agentic thrust,
processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities, whereby matter as
an active force is not only sculpted by, but also co-productive in conditioning and
enabling social worlds and expression, human life and experience…it endeavors to
account for, in Baradian idiom, the co-constitutive ‘intra-actions’ between meaning and
matter, which leave neither materiality nor ideality intact.21
20 Other New Materialists include: Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Vicki Kirby, and Manuel
DeLanda.
21 See Sencindiver’s entry “New Materialism” in Oxford Bibliographies online.
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0016.xml

13
I do not view Khodasevich and Eliot as New Materialists, however the language of the New
Materialists helps me express the intra-actions between meaning and matter in Khodasevich and
Eliot’s poetry. Furthermore, I intend to enrich the discourse originating from the New
Materialists by applying their theories to these unexpected poets.
Leonid Livak’s In Search of Russian Modernism also influences my approach.
22 In the
“Introduction” and the first chapter “The Toponymical Labyrinth of Russian Modernist Culture”
Livak explains how the “thorny issues of typology, terminology, classification, chronology,
periodization, and so forth” have affected Russian Modernist studies (3). According to Livak, we
rarely question the validity and soundness of taxonomical criteria nor “do we really know where
to seek common denominators better suited for conceptualizing Russian modernist practices in
the 1920s-30s than such (geo-) political and aesthetically moot categories as ‘fellow traveler,’
‘Soviet,’ and ‘émigré’” (3). Khodasevich’s place in Russian literary history embodies the
problems Livak outlines. I aspire to prove that Khodasevich is more than an émigré and mere
chronicler of the Russian Symbolist movement.
In the “Introduction” to In Search of Russian Modernism Livak also notes what he cannot
include in the book due to spatial economy and scope. He borrows Andreas Huyssen’s definition
of “transnational,” which “points to the dynamic processes of cultural mingling and migration,”
while explaining that he “will not address, in detail, interaction among national modernist
cultures in and outside the areas under Russian political dominance – that continuous circulation
of people, texts, styles, and ideas allowing us to conceive of transnational modernist culture”
(20). My study closely analyzes this transnational Modernist culture. By placing Khodasevich’s
22 David Bethea, John Malmstad, and Robert Hughes’ works have been foundational for my understanding of
Khodasevich’s poetry. Jason Harding and Jewel Spears Brooker’s works have been foundational for my
understanding of Eliot’s poetry.

14
poetry in conversation with Eliot’s, and identifying the metaphysical materiality within their
poetry, I strive to broaden our understanding and appreciation of both poets and their era, of what
two seemingly disparate literary traditions had in common and, ultimately, what it means to be
material amongst other vital material. My audience includes scholars and others interested in
Modernism, poetry, English literature, and Russian literature. Many of the questions that plagued
Modernists like Eliot and Khodasevich at the beginning of the twentieth century still haunt us at
the beginning of the twenty-first century, especially in the wake of war, natural disasters, and
increasingly hostile rhetoric revolving around intellectual freedom and the role of literature.

15
Chapter 1: Object-Oriented and Object-Driven Poems by Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot
In Khodasevich’s poems «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”),
«Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”), «Пробочка» (“The Cork”), «Весенний лепет не
разнежит…» (“The babble of spring will not soften…”), and «Встаю расслабленный с
постели…» (“I get up exhausted from my bed…”), and Eliot’s “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a
Windy Night,” there is an array of material objects. One finds modern inventions such as the
automobile, motorcycle, radio, streetlamp, and electric saw.
23 There are also objects associated
with everyday life, such as butt-ends of cigarettes, coffee stands, corks, toothbrushes, and
cologne. Referring back to the metaphysical material paradox, the material becomes
metaphysical and the metaphysical becomes material. Khodasevich and Eliot’s speakers express
feelings of alienation, fragmentation, and dehumanization as they experience the liveliness of
these objects. Traditional power dynamics are shifted because the objects, not the speakers, take
the upper hand.
Khodasevich and Eliot are certainly not the first poets in the Russian and English
traditions to include physical phenomena in their poetry. Afterall, most poems include material
objects in one way or another, but the items in Khodasevich and Eliot’s poems are more
powerful than the speakers who are wracked with metaphysical musings. When speaking of the
English tradition, as previously discussed in the introduction, the metaphysical poets use similar
matter in their poetry. Eliot differs from them in that his speakers do not possess their unified
sensibility and the overall tone is more pessimistic. In addition to the seventeenth-century
23 The Russian word расслабленный has a richer, more ambiguous meaning than its standard English equivalents. I
prefer to translate it as exhausted, as will be explained in my analysis of the poem later in the chapter, rather than
relaxed or weakened.

16
metaphysical poems such as “To His Coy Mistress,” “A Dialogue between the Soul and the
Body,” “The Flea,” “Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary” and “A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning,” object poems are clearly connected. The first section of Gertrude Stein’s
Tender Buttons (1914), “Objects,” houses mundane phenomena including metals, coffee, dirt,
cushions, and stamps. Similar items can be found in other famous object poems like “The Red
Wheelbarrow” by the Imagist poet William Carlos Williams. In his essay “A Retrospect” Ezra
Pound enumerates three Imagist principles agreed upon by himself, H.D., and Richard
Aldington: “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use
absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to
compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” Eliot’s
treatment of materiality differs from theirs in that the objects in his poetry exude more vitality
than the speaker. There are more than concise and direct descriptions of the objects. Thoughts,
feelings, and emotions are ever present. To put it simply, there are words in Eliot’s poems that do
not contribute to the presentation of the object.
When speaking of the Russian tradition, Gavriil Derzhavin and Alexander Pushkin are
primary influences on Khodasevich’s poetry.
24 Tobacco, coffee, wine, meat, fish, and clothing
are found in Derzhavin’s ode “Felitsa” (1782). For many, the inclusion of everyday material was
unexpected in an ode praising Catherine the Great. Common items are also present in Pushkin’s
poetry, especially his novel in verse Evgenii Onegin, wherein the pouring of tea is described in
one stanza and Onegin’s toilette in another. Khodasevich’s usage of materiality differs from
Pushkin and Derzhavin’s in that these objects have more power over the speaker than the speaker
does over them. The speakers in Pushkin and Derzhavin’s poetry seem to have complete mastery
24 Khodasevich was a devout Pushkinist and wrote many critical pieces on the famous Russian poet. Khodasevich
was also a biographer of Derzhavin.

17
and control over the world around them. Even if they feign humility or inability to express
adequately their ideas, the form and structure of the poem reiterate their superiority and
invincibility. Khodasevich and Eliot’s styles are unique because the things analyzed in this
chapter are more animate than the human speakers surrounding them. Furthermore, these objects
act like an engine – moving the poem forward through various poetic devices.
The scholarship of Jane Bennett informs my discussion of the animism and agency of
inanimate things in Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry. Bennett, a political scientist interested in
creating a maximally inclusive polity, advocates for granting agency to non-human beings and
even inanimate things in her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. The ethical
task of Bennett’s vital materialists is to recognize “human participation in a shared, vital
materiality” and continuously “cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become
perceptually open to it” (14). She categorizes materiality as a “rubric that tends to horizontalize
the relations between humans, biota, and abiota. It draws human attention sideways, away from
an ontologically ranked Great Chain of Being and toward a greater appreciation of the complex
entanglements of humans and nonhumans” (112). It is crucial to note that Khodasevich and
Eliot’s outlooks are not as positive or inclusive as Bennett’s. I believe that Khodasevich and
Eliot would not consider themselves to be vital materialists and neither would Bennett. The
poems in this chapter are saturated with angst and despair. It is not uncommon for the speakers to
become drowned out or deafened by the “iron grind of cacophonous worlds”25 that encompasses
them. While things do not have souls or emotions as they do in animistic religions, objects are
nonetheless active and have agency of their own, making human figures, including the persona
of the poems, subject to their actions. If the speakers recognize the agency of the material objects
25 This phrase, «железный скрежет / Какофонических миров», comes from Khodasevich’s poem «Весений лепет
не разнежит…» (“The babble of spring will not soften…”) (1923).

18
surrounding them, they do so with irony, sarcasm, or pain. Khodasevich and Eliot’s poems create
unequal relations instead of horizontalizing the relations between humans, biota, and abiota. At
the beginning of Vibrant Matter Bennett declares that her aim is “to give voice to a thing-power”
(2). She defines thing-power as “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to
produce effects dramatic and subtle” (6). In this chapter I give voice to the thing-power inherent
in Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry, to elucidate how inanimate objects animate, act, and produce
effects dramatic and subtle in both form and content.
In her article “The Estranging Mirror: Poetics of Reflection in the Late Poetry of
Vladislav Khodasevich” Alexandra Kirilcuk explains how bleak Khodasevich’s fifth and last
collection «Европейская ночь» (European Night) (1927) is, focusing specifically on the sinister
power of reflections:
…the base, ugly aspects of life here below begin to take the upper hand, bringing the soul
down from its lofty realm and trapping it in the world of phenomenal reality…The many
reflections that appear throughout Evropeiskaia noch’ do not merely copy a given image,
but transform it in grotesque and disfiguring ways, thus heightening the nightmarish
quality of the world outside and increasing the lyric subject’s sense of alienation from
that other reality which he attains by means of his poetry. (381)
I agree with Kirilcuk’s description of the collection, but I add to her argument by focusing on the
animism of the material objects themselves rather than the meaning of perception in these
poems. Beginning with «Весенний…» (“The babble…”) and then moving to «Встаю…» (“I get
up…”).
In «Весенний…» (“The babble…”) the speaker lists various things which he loves and
his own place is diminished. The poem’s structure is more attached to these things, especially the

19
electric saw, than the speaker himself. The phonetic quality of the poem mimics the sound of the
electric saw. The diction stresses the physicality and liveliness of the inanimate objects. And the
grammar often demotes the speaker from the subject of the sentence to the indirect object. The
poem reads as follows:
Весенний лепет не разнежит
Сурово стиснутых стихов.
Я полюбил железный скрежет
Какофонических миров.
В зиянии разверстых гласных
Дышу легко и вольно я.
Мне чудится в толпе согласных –
Льдин взгроможденных толчея.
Мне мил – из оловянной тучи
Удар изломанной стрелы,
Люблю певучий и визгучий
Лязг электрической пилы.
И в этой жизни мне дороже
Всех гармонических красот –
Дрожь, побежавшая по кожи,

20
Иль ужаса холодный пот,
Иль сон, где некогда единый, –
Взрываясь, разлетаюсь я,
Как грязь, разбрызганная шиной
По чуждых сферам бытия.
26 (1-20)
The babble of spring won’t melt the glue
of strictly dovetailed prosody.
I’ve come to love the iron grind
when worlds are in cacophony.
The vowels that gape with open mouths
can let me breathe, and freely speak;
in crowds of consonants I hear
the pack-ice chunks that crunch and creak.
I love a tin-drum cloud that shoots
its jagged arrows to the ground;
and sweet to me the electric saw,
26 Some intertextual references for this poem include Fedor Tiutchev’s «Весенняя гроза» (“A Spring
Thunderstorm”) «Люблю глаза твои, мой друг…» (“I love your eyes, my friend…”) and Alexander Pushkin’s
«Виноград» (“Grapes”). In these poems one also finds thunderstorms, lightning strikes, the season of spring, and
noises from nature. However, Khodasevich’s poem is not sexual, whereas «Люблю глаза твои, мой друг…» and
«Виноград» certainly are.

21
its singing, screaming, scraping sound.
For all the lovely harmonies
here in this life, I value dearer
shudders that ripple through my flesh,
the sweaty clamminess of horror,
or dreams in which from being whole,
I burst and splatter everywhere
like mud that’s flinging from a tyre,
whirled off toward some alien sphere.27
In the first stanza, the speaker states that he has fallen in love with the iron grind of cacophonous
worlds. Continuing this metallic theme, the speaker later states that he loves the melodious and
shrill clang of an electric saw. Sharp metallic sounds are typically overwhelming and disturbing,
but Khodasevich’s speaker considers them (as well as lightning strikes, shudders that run across
the skin, and the cold sweat of horror) dearer than all the harmonious beauties in this life. The
adjectives used to describe the clang emanating from the electric saw, певучий (melodious) and
визгучий (shrill), are often used to qualify animate objects, such as humans and animals, or
musical instruments, not mechanical equipment.28 In the second stanza physicality is assigned to
27 Peter Daniels’ English translation from vladislav khodasevich: selected poems (129).
28 These adjectives are grammatically linked to the verbs певать (to sing) and визжать (to shriek). In Tolkovyi
slovar’ russkogo iazyka (The Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language) Dmitrii Ushakov provides examples
which convey their animate qualities: «Певучий голос» (“A melodious voice”), «Визг ребенка» (“The scream of a
child”), and «Визг собаки» (“The yelp of a dog”).

22
consonants and vowels. In the gap of open vowels, the speaker can breathe easily and freely. He
imagines a throng of stacked ice floes in a crowd of consonants: «Мне чудится в толпе
согласных - / Льдин взгроможденных толчея» (lines 7-8). The word толпа (crowd) is most
often used with animate beings that have a body, not letters in the Cyrillic alphabet.29 Moreover,
the throng of ice flows is the subject of this sentence, not the speaker. The throng of ice floes
appears to him, making him the indirect object.
30 This continues in the third and fourth stanzas
(мне мил (…is sweet to me) and мне дороже (…is dearer to me)).
In «Весенний…» (“The babble…”) the speaker praises all things that shudder and
scrape, especially the melodious and shrill clang of the electric saw. Khodasevich uses the
Russian language to his advantage in order to create a similar effect with his verse. In this poem
where the speaker mentions a crowd of consonants, there is an abundance of consonants. In
particular, there are a lot of hushers and velars which are guttural and harsher than other letters,
like sonorants or labials. There are particularly long and difficult words to pronounce, especially
взгроможденных (stacked), разбрызганная (flung off), льдин (ice floes), and взрываюсь
(exploding) with their consonant clusters.
31 The poem is composed of five quatrains written in
29 In Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka (The Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language) Dmitrii Ushakov
explains how the primary meaning of толпа (crowd) is «Нестройное, неорганизованное скопление людей,
сборище» (“A discordant, disorganized crowd of people, a gathering”), citing examples from Alexander Pushkin,
Mikhail Lermontov, and Ivan Krylov. Ushakov goes on to note two different figurative meanings of the word толпа
(crowd). One of them is tied to animate beings: «Обыкновенные, средние люди, масса, в отличие от одаренных,
выдающихся единиц (в языке индивидуализма)» (“Ordinary, average people, the mass, in contrast to gifted,
outstanding units (in the language of individualism)”). The second is not: «Нестройное скопление чего-нибудь
(мыслей, чувств и т.п.)» (“A discordant accumulation of something (thoughts, feelings, etc.)”).
30 Two of Ushakov’s citations, with the verb чудиться (to imagine, to marvel, to wonder, to appear to, to seem to, to
come to), from Dal’ and Pushkin, describe animate beings: «Весь народ чудился этому диву» (“All the people
marveled at this diva”) and «То чей-то шорох, то шептанье, то крики чудятся ему» (“Someone’s rustle, then
whispering, then screams came to him”).
31 When two or more consonants appear next to each other in a word this is called a consonant cluster. The
underlined letters in the words from Khodasevich’s poem are examples.

23
iambic tetrameter. Only three lines (six, eleven, and thirteen) have full realization of stress.32 In
the remaining seventeen lines, the rhythmic flow of the iambs is obstructed. The sound
environment of the poem mimics the clang of the electric saw. Its presence and vitality,
conveyed through theses sounds, causes the speaker to fade into the background.
«Весенний…» (“The babble…”) concludes on a degrading and brutal note. The final
beloved thing or happening that the speaker lists in this poem is a dream in which, he, once
whole, explodes and flies to pieces, just like mud splattered into alien worlds of existence by a
tire. Khodasevich’s speakers often dream of reaching transcendence. 33 However, in this dream
one does not find transcendence. The speaker describes a violent, dirty, and physical descent into
a lower sphere. Mud flying off a car and bursting is neither poetic nor peaceful. In this world of
electric saws and dirty cars, the speaker might as well be a piece of mud. 34 The structure of the
final two stanzas emphasizes the mud’s flight. In the previous three stanzas they all conclude
with a period but in the fourth there is no period. The speaker’s statement continues into the final
stanza. It cannot be contained, just like the mud flung off the tire of the car in this savage dream.
32 Fittingly, these lines are the ones where the speaker describes what is dear to him in this life, when he can breathe
easily and freely, and how he loves the melodious sound of the electric saw. In other words, the meter and rhythm of
the poem reflect the content in these lines because they make it easy to breathe and they are melodious.
33 In her article “The Estranging Mirror: Poetics of Reflection in the Late Poetry of Vladislav Khodasevich”
Alexandra Kirilcuk describes Khodasevich’s poetry as follows: “Scholars from Vladimir Veidle onward have noted
that Khodasevich’s poetic universe is balanced between two worlds: the poet exists in the earthbound world of the
everyday, but his spirit gains access to a higher reality in moments of poetic inspiration” (379). Kirilcuk goes on to
explain how this concept has its roots in Russian Symbolism, but claims that Khodasevich cannot be fully connected
with the movement for his concept of these two worlds is more integrated (379). I agree that Khodasevich’s concept
of these two worlds is more integrated but that it is not by choice. He strives for transcendence but falls shorts. The
material and Modern world ties him down.
34 «Весенний лепет не разнежит…» (1923) is an example of what David Bethea describes as the black irony of the
collection «Европейская ночь» (European Night) (1927) in his biography Khodasevich: His Life and Art. Afterall,
who really loves the screeching sounds of electric saws, clammy sweat, shudders, and dreams in which you splatter
everywhere like mud flying off a tire? Bethea compares the disturbing images of Khodasevich’s late poetry with
those of Kafka (another renowned Modernist writer). Bethea sees in them the same type of irony in which violence
and disfiguration, like seeing yourself explode and fly off in different directions (the prefix “раз” is used twice in the
last stanza of the poem), are “presented in a matter disarmingly flat or understated” (287). The lyrical speaker should
be unsettled by his dream, but he understates its significance by comparing himself to a piece of mud.

24
Bennett uses one of Kafka’s short stories as an example of thing-power in Vibrant
Matter. She labels one of the objects/characters in the short story as “more a subject than an
object…ontologically multiple” (7-8).35 The purpose of this chapter is not to make Khodasevich
into Kafka, but to show that the objects in his and Eliot’s poetry are more subject than object,
ontologically multiple. An active radio exerts power over the speaker in Khodasevich’s
«Встаю…» (“I get up…”), also from his fifth and last collection «Европейская ночь»
(European Night) (1927). The speaker has fought with the radio all night yet remains helpless,
subject to its power. I choose to translate the Russian word расслабленный in the first line as
exhausted rather than relaxed, loosened, or weakened because of his defenseless position.36
«Встаю…» (“I get up…”) was written in February in Saarow (in Germany) in 1923 after
Khodasevich left Soviet Russia, hoping for a swift return, in the summer of 1922. Therefore, the
news coming from the radio, specifically from his beloved Moscow, would have felt distant. The
radio waves’ assault on his body is particularly heavy.
The form of «Встаю…» (“I get up…”) is connected more with the material object than
the speaker, as with «Весенний…» (“The babble…”). In «Весенний…» (“The babble…”) the
speaker was reduced to a piece of mud, and the reader was left with the reverberations of the
electric saw. «Встаю…» (“I get up…”) differs from «Весенний…» (“The babble…”) in that the
35 Odradek, the spool of thread in Kafka’s short story “Cares of a Family Man.”
36 In the section “Avtomatizatsiia po krivoi: shifry i radiofobii” (“Curve Automation: Ciphers and Radiophobia”) in
the chapter “Energiia isoliatsii” (“The Energy of Isolation”) from her book Kanikuly Kaina: Poetika promezhutka v
berlinskikh stikhakh V. F. Khodasevicha (Cain’s Holidays: The Poetics of the Gap in V. F. Khodasevich’s Berlin
Poems) Yaroslava Ananko explains the polysemantic valences of the word расслабленный (weakened / relaxed)
which refers to the history of the healing of the расслабленного in Capernaum, where расслабленный meant
paralyzed (283). She continues: «Исцеление расслабленного состоит в том, что по слову Христа «Встань и
ходи» он исцеляется от болезни. В стихотворении Ходасевича, напротив, лирический герой встает
парализованным, пораженным радиолучами» (“The healing of the paralytic consists in the fact that, according to
the word of Christ ‘Get up and walk,’ he is healed of the disease. In Khodasevich’s poem, on the contrary, the lyrical
hero gets up paralyzed, hit by radio rays”) (283).

25
radio is even more active than the electric saw, as made clear via rhythm and verbal aspect. The
poem reads as follows:
Встаю расслабленный с постели.
Не с Богом бился я в ночи, –
Но тайно сквозь меня летели
Колючих радио лучи.
И мнится: где-то в теле живы,
Бегут по жилам до сих пор
Москвы бунтарские призывы
И бирж всесветный разговор.
Незаглушимо и сумбурно
Пересеклись в моей тиши
Ночные голоса Мельбурна
С ночными знаньями души.
И чьи-то имена и цифры
Вонзаются в разъятый мозг,
Врываются в глухие шифры
Разряды океанских гроз.

26
Хожу – и в ужасе внимаю
Шум, не внимаемый никем.
Руками уши зажимаю –
Всё тот же звук! А между тем…
О, если бы вы знали сами,
Европы темные сыны,
Какими вы еще лучами
Неощутимо пронзены! (1-24)37
I get up weakened from my bed.
It wasn’t God I fought last night –
but prickly rays of radio
shot through me on their secret flight.
All the time, it seems, they run
inside the body’s living dwelling:
Moscow’s turbulent rallying-cries
and all the talk the world is selling.
37 Ananko interprets the meaning of lines five through eight as follows: «…тело становится приемником и
проводником чужих голосов и сообщений, представляющих собой беглый пересказ информационной
радиосводки о состоянии бирж и обращения Коминтерна к мировому пролетариату» (“…the body becomes a
receiver and conductor of other people’s voices and messages, which are a fluent retelling of the informational radio
report on the state of the stock exchanges and the Comintern’s appeal to the world proletariat”) (the reference to the
Comintern’s appeal coming from a note by Malmstad and Hughes) (286). Ananko’s reading of the speaker’s body
becoming a receiver and conductor for other people’s voices and messages aligns with my reading of the poem
because I argue that the radio has control over the speaker.

27
Over my rest they have traversed,
chaotic, undiscernible,
Melbourne’s night-time voices crossed
with night-time secrets of my soul.
And random names and numbers bruise
my open brain, exposed to notions,
undecipherable code,
the crashing thunder of the oceans.
Walking in horror, I can hear
a noise that no one knew before.
I press my hands against my ears –
again that sound! But furthermore…
O sons of European dark,
if only you already knew
that, imperceptibly to you,
more rays will come to pierce you through!38
38 Peter Daniels’ English translation from vladislav khodasevich: selected poems (135).

28
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker states that he did not fight with God in the night, but
prickly rays of radio secretly flew through him: «Не с Богом бился я в ночи, - / Но тайно
сквозь меня летели / Колючих радио лучи» (lines 2-4).39 The technical term for radio wave in
Russian is радиоволна.
40 The decision to use лучи (rays) instead of радиоволны could be
merely formal. The word needs to rhyme with в ночи (in the night). Nevertheless, лучи (rays)
can be interpreted metaphysically and or metaphorically. Rays are metaphysical in the sense that
they are heavenly. They come to the earth from the sun, moon, and sky.41 Rays are metaphorical
in the sense that Khodasevich is living in exile in Germany, desperate for a ray of hope, a
connection to home.42 What makes the poem so tragic is that the radio brings him nothing but
suffering.
The rhythm of «Встаю…» (“I get up…”) expresses the dynamism of the radio and its
waves of information. The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, with a quick and smooth
rhythm. There is very little punctuation in the poem. No punctuation occurs in the middle of lines
six, seven, and eight. The only instance is the period at the end of line eight. Likewise, in lines
nine through twelve, the only punctuation is a period at the end of the stanza, marking the end of
39 Ananko identifies the Old Testament reference to Jacob’s fight/wrestle with God in this line of the poem (284).
And how the technogenic sound replaces the true and transcendent, drowning out the highest healing voice.
Exhaustion does not occur in a dispute with God, but under the paralyzing influence of a household radio:
«Техногенный шум заменяет итсинное и трансцендентное, заглушает высший исцеляющий голос,
измождение происходит не в споре с Богом, а под парализующим воздействием бытового радио» (284).
40 In the field of physics, the word луч (ray) is often used. Ushakov provides the following examples in his
dictionary: «Линия распространения энергии, поток положительных или отрицательных частиц. Термические
лучи. Рефракция лучей. Рентгеновы лучи. Катодные лучи.» (“The line of propagation of energy, the flow of
positive or negative particles. Thermal rays. Ray refraction. X-rays. Cathode rays.”).
41 In Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka (The Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language) Dmitrii Ushakov
explains: «Воспринимаемая глазом узкая полоса света, исходящая от какого-нибудь светящегося предмета.
Косые лучи заходящего солнца. Лучи восходящего солнца. Звездный луч.» (“Perceived by the eye, a narrow
strip of light emanating from some luminous object. Oblique rays of the setting sun. The rays of the rising sun. A
starry ray.”).
42 Ushakov explains the figurative meaning of луч (ray): «Проблеск чего-нибудь. Луч надежды. Луч счастья.»
(“A glimpse of something. A ray of hope. A ray of happiness.”).

29
the sentence. This lack of punctuation forms enjambments, which makes these lines read faster.
The reader has no time to pause as they read them aloud. This quickened pace creates a
heightened intensity. The rhythm mirrors the radio waves that are running throughout the
speaker’s body, tormenting him. The form of the poem is tied to the material object. Full control
lies with the radio, not the speaker.
Bennett’s definition of electricity in Vibrant Matter works as an excellent descriptor of
the radio waves in «Встаю…» (“I get up…”). Bennett analyzes a blackout which occurred in
North America in 2003 and affected 50 million people. She argues that a human-nonhuman
assemblage caused it. In this section she defines electricity as follows:
Electricity, or the stream of vital materialities called electrons, is always on the move,
always going somewhere, though where this will be is not entirely predictable. Electricity
sometimes goes where we send it, and sometimes it chooses its path on the spot, in
response to the other bodies it encounters and the surprising opportunities for actions and
interactions that they afford. (28)
The radio waves in the poem are always on the move, encountering and interacting with the
speaker’s body in unexpected and negative ways. Their actions and movements are transmitted
by the verbs in the poem. In the first four stanzas, they are most often the subjects of a given
sentence, not the speaker. The lines read as follows:
Встаю расслабленный с постели.
Не с Богом бился я в ночи, -
Но тайно сквозь меня летели
Колючих радио лучи.

30
И мнится: где-то в теле живы,
Бегут по жилам до сих пор
Москвы бунтарские призывы
И бирж всесветный разговор.
Незаглушимо и сумбурно
Пересеклись в моей тиши
Ночные голоса Мельбурна
С ночными знаньями души.
И чьи-то имена и цифры
Вонзаются в разъятый мозг,
Врываются в глухие шифры
Разряды океанских гроз. (1-16)
I get up exhausted from my bed. I did not fight with God in the night, but prickly rays of
radio secretly flew through me.
And it seems that somewhere in [my] body Moscow’s rebellious calls and the global
conversation of exchanges are still alive, running through [my] veins.
The nocturnal voices of Melbourne, with their nocturnal knowledge of my soul, have
indiscernibly and chaotically intersected my silence.

31
And someone’s names and numbers are piercing into my exposed brain; discharges of
oceanic storms are bursting into deaf cyphers.
The radio and its waves of information are flying, running, intersecting, piercing, and bursting
(летели, бегут, пересеклись, вонзаются, and врываются). They are active and advance the
poem.
The verbal aspect in «Встаю…» (“I get up…”) communicates the radio’s dominating
animism. The imperfective aspect highlights how the radio is constantly in control and the
perfective aspect conveys that the radio completely harmed the speaker. For example, in the first
stanza the imperfective verb лететь stresses that the prickly rays of radio have been flying
through the speaker all night. It was a continuous process. The verb бежать, which can be both
imperfective and perfective, is used to a similar end in the second stanza because Moscow’s
rebellious calls and the global conversation of exchanges are still running through his veins.43 In
the fourth stanza the imperfective verbs вонзаться and врываться are used because the names
and numbers are piercing into the speaker’s exposed brain and the discharges of oceanic storms
are bursting into deaf cyphers. These repetitive actions, which are violent and disturbing, are
highlighted through the imperfective verbal aspect. Because the end-result of the action is what
matters, the perfective aspect occurs in the third stanza. The speaker explains how the nocturnal
voices of Melbourne, with their nocturnal knowledge of his soul, have indiscernibly and
chaotically intersected his silence. He is powerless to change the outcome. The perfective aspect
and past tense of the verb convey its finality.
43 The use of the verb бежать can also be interpreted as giving a physical body to the radio waves because
something needs legs in order to run. Embodiment is a central and metaphysical issue for Khodasevich and for Eliot
as will be explored in the third chapter of this dissertation.

32
A radio’s ability to readily transmit information and knowledge to people across the
world is what makes it a wonderful and useful invention, but in Khodasevich’s poem the radio
only brings discomfort, unrest, and pain to the speaker.
44 Although information is coming from
everywhere, including Melbourne and Moscow, he feels vulnerable and cut off. The end rhyme
мозг (brain) / гроз (of storms) in the fourth stanza captures the discomfort in his head. The
names, voices, figures, and numbers that reach him physically assault him. He finds no solace in
this device. He is physically exhausted and that is why he wakes up weakened, not relaxed in the
morning. The condition of his body, fatigued, damaged, and exposed, foreshadows those of the
bodies rendered in the third chapter of this dissertation. In Eliot’s The Waste Land a sea current
picks at Phlebas’s bones and it is suggested that graves in The Waste Land and Khodasevich’s
«Золото» (“Gold”) will or could be disturbed in the future. The speaker in «Встаю…» (“I get
up…”) is the only one who truly understands the messages broadcasted («Хожу - и в ужасе
внимаю / Шум, не внимаемый никем»). The final stanza of the poem reiterates this bleak
mood. The speaker laments, crying out to the sons of Europe:
О, если бы вы знали сами,
Европы темные сыны,
Какими вы ещё лучами
Неощутимо пронзены! (21-24)45
44 When discussing Khodasevich’s later poetry in his biography, Bethea remarks that “the details of literary and
political byt (everyday life) began to crowd in [on Khodasevich]” (189). «Встаю расслабленный с постели…» (“I
get up exhausted from my bed”) can be considered an example of this because the news from the radio, certainly
concerning political and perhaps literary byt, is quite literally crowding in on him. They are wedging themselves into
his brain and veins.
45 Malmstad and Hughes identify the reference to Alexander Blok’s poem «Голос из хора» (“The voice from the
choir”) (1910-1914) (365-366). The key lines from Blok’s poem: «О, если б знали вы, друзья, / Холод и мрак
грядущих дней!» (“Oh, if you only knew, friends, / the cold and gloom of the days to come!”) (lines 3-4) and «О,

33
Oh, if you only knew yourselves, dark sons of Europe, through which additional rays you
are imperceptibly gored!
In her book Kanikuly Kaina: Poetika promezhutka v berlinskikh stikhakh V. F.
Khodasevicha (Cain’s Holidays: The Poetics of the Gap in V. F. Khodasevich’s Berlin Poems)
Yaroslava Ananko explains how the epithet темные (dark) works simultaneously in several
semantic fields. One explanation is its connection to the overall motif of darkness in the
collection «Европейская ночь» (European Night) (1927) (289). Another explanation is that
темные (dark) refers to the mysterious and suspicious tone of the poem with its encrypted
messages (Ananko interprets the line about the oceanic thunderstorms as an example of radio
interference) (289). The final explanation of темные (dark) is that it refers to the Europeans’
state of ignorance or unenlightenment. They are oblivious to future events (289). Ananko argues
that the conclusion of the poem shows the speaker’s powerlessness before the automatism of
didacticism. The speaker can only try to edify at the end of the poem with the archaic apostrophe
and exhortation, he is unable to do anything else and thus the relaxation or paralysis at the
beginning of the poem is played out (290). What I would add to Ananko’s reasonings behind the
epithet темные (dark) is that the poem is written in Germany in 1923. Khodasevich has come to
Europe after being forced to leave Soviet Russia. He has survived the Russian Revolution and
the Russian Civil War. He prophetically senses that a similar fate might befall Europe. The First
World War is over in 1923 but the Second World War is coming. The final stanza’s emphasis on
darkness and imperceptibility is a dreadful reminder that the rays of hope and light the speaker
если б знали, дети, вы, / Холод и мрак грядущих дней!» (“Oh, if you only knew, children, / the cold and gloom
of the days to come!”) (lines 28-29).

34
was searching for from the radio the night before are nowhere to be found. He is plunged into
darkness literally and figuratively.
Khodasevich’s poem «Пробочка» (“The Cork”), from his fourth collection «Тяжелая
лира» (The Heavy Lyre) (1921), is extremely compact, yet still displays all the depth of his
metaphysical materiality.
46 In this poem the metaphysical issues of what remains after time has
passed and one’s notion of the self are explored through a cork. The poem consists of a single
quatrain:
Пробочка над крепким йодом!
Как ты скоро перетлела!
Так вот и душа незримо
Жжет и разъедает тело. (1-4)
Cork stopper from a bottle of strong iodine! How quickly you have putrefied! Just as the
soul invisibly burns and corrodes the flesh.
The relationship between the soul and the body is tense and unstable.47 Grisly bodily conditions
are critical to the third chapter of this dissertation. The majority of the bodies in the third chapter
46 Because a lyre is a physical object and its heaviness (тяжелая) can be interpreted as both physical and mental, the
title of Khodasevich’s fourth collection is apt when analyzing the metaphysical materiality of his poetry.
47 In Khodasevich’s poems «Сны» (“Dreams”) (1917) and «Из дневника» (“From the Diary”) (1921) the speaker’s
soul and body are also in tension. In «Сны» (“Dreams”), the speaker tells his soul to step into the boundless
dreamscape while he sleeps: «Ступай, душа, в безбрежных сновиденьях» (line 3). There his soul will be free until
it has to return to his body in unjoyful union once he wakes up: «Где, отрешен от помысла земного, / Свободен
ты… Когда ж в тоске проснусь, / Соединимся мы с тобою снова / В нерадостный союз» (lines 13-16). In «Из
дневника» (“From the Diary”), the speaker’s spirit is trying to break through like a tooth from under swollen gums:
«Прорезываться начал дух, / Как зуб из-под припухших десен» (lines 3-4).

35
do not have burned and corroded flesh as in «Пробочка» (“The Cork”), however, the second
epigraph to Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” alludes to the practice of burning Guy Fawkes’s effigy
(and fireworks) on the fifth of November in the United Kingdom. The imperfective aspect of the
two verbs жечь and разъедать means that the soul is currently burning and corroding the flesh
or constantly burning and corroding the flesh. I prefer to focus on the repetitive function of the
imperfective aspect because it underscores how the soul and body are always in conflict. The
exclamatory nature of the poem (the first two statements are exclamations) and the trochaic
meter (with its hard start and falling movement) lead to a sense of heightened emotion. The
reader senses that the speaker is trying to keep the soul and the body together, like putting a cork
on a bottle of iodine, but his efforts are fruitless. They remain incompatible. The informal
second-person pronoun you (ты) communicates the urgency of the speaker’s voice. The speaker
addresses the cork as if it were a person or a representative of a person, serving as the focus of a
monologue like Hamlet holding the skull and crying out “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him,
Horatio…” in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy.48
Although the disintegration of the cork might have occurred over a long period of time,
the perfective past tense of the verb in the second line and the unique brevity of the poem
clarifies the irreversibility of the result.49 The state of the cork devastates the speaker. In English,
the verb тлеть means to burn without a flame, to smolder, to rot, or to putrefy. The literal
meaning of the prefix пере is to cross but its more abstract meanings – to do something again or
to do something too much – are more applicable in this case. The cork has rotted too long. The
verb тлеть, and its corresponding noun тление, have Biblical resonances as well. In the Bible
48 Hamlet’s monologue appears in Act 5, Scene 1, lines 183-195.
49 Malmstad and Hughes note that, originally, the poem was meant to be longer, but Khodasevich could not think of
a way to extend it. He left the four lines, seeing that it was not necessary to continue (332).

36
they are commonly used when dealing with the flesh and physical decomposition. They denote
corruption, destruction, decay, wasting away, and perishing. For example, in Acts 13:34: «А что
воскресил Его из мертвых, так что Он уже не обратится в тление» (“God raised him from
the dead so that he will never be subject to decay” or “And as concerning that he raised him up
from the dead, now no more to return to corruption”) and in Galatians 6:8: «сеющий в плоть от
плоти пожнет тление, а сеющий в дух от духа пожнет жизнь вечную» (“For he that soweth
to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit
reap life everlasting).50 These biblical verses concerning life and death or salvation and
damnation, add to the grave nature of the poem.
In the previous poems by Khodasevich analyzed in this chapter the material phenomena
remain at the end of the poem often in a more stable position than the speaker. «Пробочка»
(“The Cork”) differs from the previous examples because the cork is completely broken down by
the end of the second line. Nevertheless, comparing the weighty relationship between the soul
and the body to a cork and a volatile chemical is an excellent example of Khodasevich’s
metaphysical materiality.51 This metaphysical issue is addressed through a small commonplace
item.
Eliot’s approach to materiality in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes” makes
them useful comparisons to Khodasevich’s «Весенний…» (“The babble…”), «Встаю…» (“I get
50 Both of these Biblical verses include the noun тление, which corresponds with the verb тлеть.
51 In his biography of Khodasevich Bethea sees the connection between the Metaphysical poets and this poem as
well: “The speaker is apt to draw parallels between the abstract life of the soul and the domestic existence of the
body that might appear farfetched to the traditionalist…The simile, which compares the body to a moldering cork
and the soul, conventionally sacred and pristine, but now dangerously confined, to strong iodine, strikes the reader
as a modern use of the metaphysical conceit…The difference, of course, between one of Donne’s elaborate conceits
and this ironic simile is a matter of context, since Donne might compare his and his mistress’ souls to twin
compasses with the purpose of showing that love, a positive concept, will always keep the compass arms acting in
concert, while Khodasevich’s figure is designed to deflate its abstract tenor” (112-113).

37
up…”), and «Пробочка» (“The Cork”). As in Khodasevich’s poems, objects of the Modern,
urban world in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes” are energetic and forceful. Some
have their own voice, like the street-lamp in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” thus becoming more
vocal and perceptive than the objects in Khodasevich’s poems. But the primary difference
separating Eliot’s poems from Khodasevich’s is the characterization of the speakers. Although
Khodasevich’s lyrical personae are weaker and possess less agency than the things surrounding
them, their identity is clear and their presence is consistent. Their personal thoughts and
experiences make up a large portion of a given poem. In «Весенний…» (“The babble…”), for
example, the speaker lists things which he loves from the phenomenal world and the speaker’s
fight with the radio is at the center of «Встаю…» (“I get up…”). The more generalized lyrical
“I” in Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes” often gets lost or left out.
Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes” were originally published in the
second issue of Wyndham Lewis’s quintessential Modernist magazine Blast in July of 1915.
52
The magazine is itself a vital and vibrant artifact. Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound created Blast
in order to promote Vorticism, a new, English movement in literature and visual art. Vorticism
emerged from and is in conversation with Imagism, Cubism, and Futurism. The cover of the first
issue is magenta pink with the word “BLAST” printed in black on a diagonal line. Inside, the
Vorticist manifesto can be found, which blasts and blesses a wide variety of people, places, and
things (such as England, France, bad music, slippers, a belly, a dandy, snobbery, humor, the
journalist, the specialist, the aristocracy, the proletariat, the years 1837 to 1900, the post office,
Rev. Pennyfeather, Bergson, machines, ports, lighthouses, and steep walls of factories).53 The
52 In Blast, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” is titled “Rhapsody of a Windy Night.”
53 See images of Blast on the Modernist Journals Project’s website. https://modjourn.org/journal/blast/

38
Modernist Journals Project’s website stores the first and only two issues of the magazine and an
introduction to the magazine written by Mark Morrisson. When discussing the cover of the first
issue, Morrisson writes:
Its cover was described by the Chicago modernist magazine Little Review as “something
between magenta and lavender, about the colour of a sick headache,” while the Pall Mall
Gazette jibed that its color was “chill flannelette pink,” like “the catalogue of some cheap
Eastend draper, and its contents are of the shoddy sort that constitutes the Eastend
draper’s stock.”
Clearly, the material aspects of the magazine were a focal point for readers and critics. The
unique design of Blast reflects its revolutionary contributions. Its form mirrors its content, as
with the poems analyzed in this chapter. Morrisson clarifies:
Responses from supporters and detractors alike highlighted the trenchant, adversarial
tone of the magazine. But the talk of flannelette – a cotton imitation of flannel – and East
End drapers, while meant derisively, also demonstrates that the press had perceived the
journal’s efforts to draw upon the promotional energies and industrial culture of British
modernity. Visually, Blast set a new mark for British modernist periodicals, leaving
behind the staid and visually conservative appearance of such otherwise radical
modernist journals as The Egoist, English Review, New Age, and Harold Monro’s Poetry
Review and its successor, Poetry and Drama. To print the magazine, Lewis had turned to
a commercial printing firm, Leveridge & Co., whose own advertising posters used
diagonal text lines and striking layout and font choices (see Leveridge). Yet Blast was a
serious journal of art and literature. It was meant as a bold intervention in a rapidly
changing art world.

39
How serendipitous that in this chapter where I discuss the animacy and agency of physical
phenomena, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes” were published in such a magazine.
The events in Eliot’s poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” from Prufrock and Other
Observations (1917), last four hours, from twelve to four in the morning. The speaker’s general
path begins outside on a Modern, urban street and ends inside in his apartment filled with the
appurtenances of everyday life. In this poem there is a multitude of lively organic and inorganic
objects, including a street-lamp, dead geranium, dress, crooked pin, twisted branch, broken
spring, cat, rancid butter, toy, lighted shutters, crab, dust, cigarettes, key, bed, shoes, cologne,
knife, and tooth-brush. The speaker ponders time and memory via this random assortment of
material stuff.
The most significant entity in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” is the talkative street-lamp.
A lyrical “I” is present but the street-lamp is far more vocal and perceptive than he is.54 The
animacy of the street-lamp is reminiscent of the electric saw in Khodasevich’s «Весенний…»
(“The babble…”) with its melodious and shrill clang. In her section “Natura Naturans” from
Vibrant Matter, Bennett writes: “All forces and flows (materialities) are or can become lively,
affective, and signaling. And so an affective, speaking human body is not radically different
from the affective, signaling nonhumans with which it coexists, hosts, enjoys, serves, consumes,
produces, and competes” (117). Bennett’s descriptors, lively, affective, and signaling, typify
Eliot’s street-lamp. The first mention of the street-lamp in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” comes
in the first stanza:
54 In her article “Rhapsody on a City of Dreadful Night: The Flâneur and Urban Spectacle” Carol Yang notes the
animacy of the city and the powerlessness of the speaker. She writes: “For Eliot the city is both scene and subject”
(3) and “Instead of transferring the consciousness of the narrator to the things he observes, in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy
Night’ the narrator / walker is objectified as an inanimate puppet-like figure who is jerked involuntarily by the street
lamp; he is depersonalized as a passive, inert recorder who relies on the light cast upon him to release the associated
memories” (6).

40
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium. (8-12)
Following this first mention, the street-lamp becomes the driving force. Stanzas two, four, five,
and six all begin with the voice of the street-lamp, marking the time and signaling to the speaker
objects of importance. The anaphora behaves like the beating of “a fatalistic drum,” hammering
home the street-lamp’s “voice.” Stanza two begins:
Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, ‘Regard that woman…’ (13-16)
Stanza four begins: “Half-past two, / The street-lamp said, / ‘Remark the cat which flattens itself
in the gutter…’” (lines 33-35). Stanza five begins:
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

41
The lamp hummed:
‘Regard the moon…’ (46-50)
And finally, stanza six begins:
The lamp said,
‘Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key, (69-73)
The lines in between are like the spaces of the dark in between each street-lamp that the speaker
passes. In these dark spaces, the metaphysical themes of memory, time, and loss are reflected
upon.
The physical markers of time can be seen on countless items in “Rhapsody on a Windy
Night,” testifying that things, organic and inorganic, carry their burdens. In the second stanza the
street-lamp says:
‘Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,

42
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.’ (16-22)
This image of a prostitute is quite macabre, and one can assume that her past has not been
pleasant. After the woman, more haunted things appear. In the third stanza:
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap. (23-32)55
A branch that is so polished it looks eaten smooth, a stiff and white skeleton, and a broken rusty
spring ready to snap are harsh reminders that, over time, things break down as the cork over
iodine in Khodasevich’s «Пробочка» (“The Cork”). Bones are a major through line in the third
chapter of this dissertation. The bones in The Waste Land, for example, cannot lie peacefully.
They are not buried in the ground and they are rattled by rats’ feet. In part II of “Ash55 “A crowd of twisted things” describes Khodasevich and Eliot’s oeuvres because their poems are filled with
distorted and nightmarish images, things, and bodies.

43
Wednesday” the speaker’s bones are laid bare by the leopards who have been feeding on his
body. In «Золото» (“Gold”) a future unknown stranger will dig up the speaker’s skeleton. In the
process, the stranger’s spade will smash the speaker’s skull and the heavy gold coin placed in his
mouth earlier will clang.
Unlike the street-lamp, the cat, child, and crab in the fourth stanza of “Rhapsody on a
Windy Night” move in an automatized way. They do not have original thought or exhibit
agency. Existence in this world is trying for them. The street-lamp says: “Remark the cat which
flattens itself in the gutter, / Slips out its tongue / And devours a morsel of rancid butter” (lines
35-37). The butter has soured yet the cat still eats it, out of necessity. Unlike the second chapter
of this dissertation, there is nothing playful, independent, or metaphysical about this cat. It does
not bond with the speaker like Murr does in Khodasevich’s «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory
of the Cat Murr”). In Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats Morgan and Gus can speak
and cats in general can contemplate their deep and inscrutable singular names without confessing
them to human researchers. The reader pities the cat that is forced to eat such revolting scraps
from the gutter in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” This action is doubly demeaning because the
cat has to physically lower itself in order to do so. The child’s movement resembles the cat’s:
“So the hand of the child, automatic, / Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the
quay, / I could see nothing behind that child’s eye” (lines 38-40). The child’s grab is instinctual,
not thoughtful. The child’s empty eyes cause it to appear lifeless to the speaker and the toy from
the quay would be imperfect, like the spoiled butter. In her book Eliot’s Animals Marianne
Thormählen comments on this cat and child: “In both instances, children and cats are brought
together as illustrators of an ‘external sphere’ which is both alienating and corruptive. In the
‘Rhapsody’ context, both are blindly acquisitive (Eliot emphasises the likeness in the verbal

44
parallel, ‘slips out and devours…slipped out and pocketed’), their greed being directed at filthy
objects” (40-41).56 I agree with Thormählen in what the cat and the child illustrate in this poem.
However, I would argue that they are not motivated by greed, but rather survival. They are
desperate and worn down. The sight of the cat devouring a morsel of rancid butter and the hand
of the child automatically pocketing a toy causes the speaker to remember other objects he has
seen like “a crab one afternoon in a pool, / An old crab with barnacles on his back, / Gripped the
end of a stick which I held him” (lines 43-45). Although the crab is still alive, the barnacles on
its back are a sign that time takes its toll like the rust on the broken spring in the previous stanza.
It behaves in a similar fashion to the cat and the child. Thormählen concurs: “…the crab with
claws that catch the stick also reacts instinctively” (139).57 Barely clinging to life, their actions
are primal.
The fifth stanza focusses primarily on the moon and quality of her memory.
58 Unlike the
other things in the poem, the moon is referred to with the animate pronouns she/her, which is
56 In her book Eliot’s Animals Thormählen’s approach is straightforward. Each chapter is dedicated to “different
animal categories occurring in Eliot’s work” (21). These categories include: dogs, cats, birds, small creatures, rats,
fishes, and miscellaneous. While presenting her own interpretations of these animals, Thormählen accounts for
previous readings by various scholars. The ultimate outcome of her study is “indicating the extent of the variations
found within these supposedly homogenous image groups” (22).
57 The most famous crab in Eliot’s works comes from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I should have been a
pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (lines 73-74). Thormählen spells out the meaning of
the crab in her book: “Basically, the animal is only represented by two words, ‘claws’ and ‘scuttling.’ This reduction
to two terms reflects the speaker’s wish to ‘reduce’ himself to the simplest kind of animal life. Desiring nothing but
release from that external sphere which demands all sorts of social virtues from him – his cooperation, forbearance,
commitment, adjustment, and initiative –, he pours his longing for oblivion into these two lines which express the
one state, the only condition, he is quite sure he could handle…The last line with its insistent sibilants evokes the
only sound he would be compelled to hear in his silent seas, the swell of the waves over his head for which he would
gladly exchange the questions and exclamations of those around him – words and phrases that now reverberate in
his own restless mind…[the irony is] there is not even the merest hint of ‘clawlike’ tenacity or aggressiveness in the
Prufrock character…The adjective ‘ragged’ suggests a similarly wry contrast; the would-be smoothie Prufrock, with
his anxious concern for his balding head and ageing frame, is pathetically concerned with presenting a slick
appearance to the world whose disapproval he fears” (134-135).
58 The moon is widely considered to be one of the key symbols of Romanticism. In her article Yang points out:
“Ironically, it is not only the human narrator who loses the initiative of his personal memory, but also the moon, the
key representative of the Romantic repertoire, that loses its viability as poetic inspiration” (6). Because of this, Yang

45
reminiscent of Khodasevich’s «Пробочка» (“The Cork”), wherein the speaker uses the informal
you (ты) to address the cork as if it were a human being. The street-lamp tells the speaker:
“Regard the moon, / La lune ne garde aucune rancune” (The moon does not hold grudges) (lines
50-51). Additionally, she is openly warm and affectionate: “She winks a feeble eye, / She smiles
into corners. / She smooths the hair of the grass” (lines 52-54). Although these traits seem
positive, she is left alone, withered, with old smells, and no solid memory:
‘The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.’ (55-61)59
Time has certainly affected her, as the other phenomena in the previous stanzas. The loss that the
moon is experiencing is also reflected in the grammar of the poem because this is the first stanza
where the street-lamp loses its qualifier. Instead of “The street-lamp sputtered,” “The street-lamp
muttered,” or “The street-lamp said,” at the beginning of the stanza, it becomes “The lamp
sputtered,” “The lamp muttered,” and “The lamp hummed.”
argues: “‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ twists and negates the Romantic in various directions and to various degrees.
It represents Eliot’s most grotesque deflation, deconstruction, and recomposition of Romanticism” (6).
59 The smells that keep crossing the moon’s brain can be related to Khodasevich’s poem «Встаю расслабленный с
постели…» (“I get up exhausted from my bed…”), wherein the speaker’s open and exposed brain is continuously
impaled by the random names and numbers carried by the radio waves.

46
After the street-lamp advises the speaker to regard the moon, his own recollections come
back to him. One realizes that time is traumatic to one’s memory and its physical container. He
remembers:
…sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars. (63-68)
The memory of dry geraniums recalls the first stanza, wherein the speaker remarks:
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions.
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium. (4-12)

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If a lesson is to be learned from Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” it is the instability and
unreliability of memory. It is maddeningly impossible to recall everything clearly. Eventually the
foundations, all that is solid, give out.
60
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” concludes with the speaker moving inward. He wanders
from the city streets into his apartment:
The lamp said,
‘Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.’ (69-77)
The metaphysical musings on memory and time are linked to the mundane objects of everyday
life, including the speaker’s bed, tooth-brush, and shoes. The isolating feel of his apartment and
life in the Modern world is all the more evident in the final line of the poem: “The last twist of
the knife” (line 78).61
60 See Marshall Berman’s famous book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982). The
title of which comes from Samuel Moore’s 1888 translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels.
61 The image of a piercing knife appears in Khodasevich’s poetry as well. In «Баллада» (“The Ballad”) (1921): «И
музыка, музыка, музыка / Вплетается в пенье моё, / И узкое, узкое, узкое / Пронзает меня лезвие» (And a

48
The poem’s discomforting end contradicts its title. Although a windy night is naturally
turbulent, a rhapsody should feel free with its insistence on improvisation and inspiration. Eliot’s
poem is grim throughout. The final end rhyme life / knife implies that preparing for or living life
is inevitably twisted and violent. The word “twisted” recalls the lines “the corner of her eye /
[which] Twists like a crooked pin,” “a crowd of twisted things,” the “twisted branch upon the
beach,” and “Her hand twists a paper rose” in the second, third, and fifth stanzas. This being the
last twist of the knife implies that the speaker’s sufferings, or man’s sufferings in general, have
already begun. The last twist of the knife is used to make the literal and or figurative wound
worse. To end it all, to cause literal and or figurative death. There is nothing man can do to
change his fate, his position is hopeless. His fate is predetermined. In this way, the last twist of
the knife resembles the fatalistic drum of the first stanza. Russell Murphy explains: “The poetry
keeps up its inexorable sense of meaningless doom right down to the literalness of the ‘last twist
of the knife,’ the bleak and bitter note on which this poem, which had promised, with its title, all
the harmonious comforts of a musical composition, ends” (366).62 Although a rhapsody has the
sense of freedom, the fatalistic drum and the last twist of the knife confirm that no true freedom
is possible.
Eliot’s poem “Preludes,” also from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), is set in the
Modern, urban world. Most of the action takes place on the streets, as in “Rhapsody on a Windy
music, the music of music / is twined in the song of my life, / and piercing me, piercing and piercing, / is the blade
of the slenderest knife) (lines 25–28). English translation by Peter Daniels.
62 Despite this quote, it should be noted that Murphy, unlike myself, finds a positive twist in the poem’s final line:
“The last twist of the knife may not betoken a pleasant ending, but it is still an ending, and a certain order has been
imposed on the less attractive aspects of reality that otherwise gnaw at the edges of consciousness, disturbing the
individual without enlightening him. This new poetic art that Eliot pioneers in a poem such as ‘Rhapsody on a
Windy Night’ intends to be inclusive, to find a place in the poem for a madman shaking a dead geranium and soiled
hems and cigarettes, since they too are all a part of the same common reality, which, if not celebrated, can at least be
poeticized” (367).

49
Night,” or in dingy rooms. A prelude is meant to introduce something important, but the poem’s
overarching theme of emptiness counteracts this convention. By the end of the poem, it seems
unlikely that a bright future is in store for the inhabitants of this city. Moreover, “Preludes”
comes before “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), which,
as previously analyzed, does not portray an optimistic future. The material items in “Preludes”
do not speak, unlike the street-lamp in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” but they are more active
and present than the human subjects. The lyrical “I” does not appear until the end of the poem.63
Time is also a primary topic, as in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” Each section is about a
specific time of day, like the evening or the morning, and often a specific time is mentioned, like
five or six o’clock. The speaker comes to the realization that time is a leveler. It brings order to
the Modern world and therefore no uniqueness is possible. Everything is the same.
Significantly, Bennett’s first example of thing-power in Vibrant Matter is debris. She
retells her experience with a gutter on Cold Spring Lane. In this gutter she saw a glove, pollen, a
rat, a cap, and a stick. She details:
As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing –
between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity
(the workman’s efforts, the litterer’s toss, the rat-poisoner’s success), and, on the other
hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right…stuff exhibited its thing-power: it
issued a call…it provoked affects in me. (4)
63 The prelude was important for the Romantics. William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind;
An Autobiographical Poem is a prime example. The Prelude was addressed to Wordsworth’s dear friend, and fellow
Romantic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth explains the reason behind The Prelude in the preface to The
Excursion: “…it was a reasonable thing that he [the Author] should take a review of his own Mind, and examine
how far Nature and Education had qualified him for such an employment…to record, in Verse, the origin and
progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them.” Eliot’s “Preludes” differs drastically from
Wordsworth’s because the poet is not the primary focus. His presence is minimal.

50
The urban debris on the streets in “Preludes,” certainly betokens human activity, but it also
commands attention, exhibits its own power, and provokes affects in the speaker and the reader.
In part I the winter evening is materially composed, the lyrical “I’ is not dominant, the
objects are. In his book Becoming T. S. Eliot Jayme Stayer says of “Preludes” I: “the speaker is
absorbed into the anonymity the urban setting affords him…Recording the phenomena of rain,
trash, dinner smells, and domestic details (‘broken blinds and chimney pots’), the speaker is
completely detached” (130). As the “winter evening settles down,” (line 1) all that remains is
“the smell of steaks in passageways” (line 2), the “burnt-out ends of smoky days” (line 4),
“broken blinds and chimney-pots” (line 10), a “lonely cab-horse [which] steams and stamps”
(line 12), and “the lighting of the lamps” (line 13). The horse, unlike the animals in the second
chapter of this dissertation, does not interact with the speaker or exhibit any vitality. It steams
and stamps as opposed to the handshaking monkey in the next chapter. Steaming and stamping
are unthinking actions, like the cat devouring the morsel of rancid butter and the old crab
gripping the end of the stick in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” The hyphen attaches the horse to
the cab, underlining its human driven purpose. The cigarette-butts, broken blinds, street-lamps,
and cabs are clear markers of the Modern world. Most of these items are uninviting and
mundane. There is a single human subject in this section, a “you” whom the speaker addresses
but their feet are being covered in the “grimy scraps / Of withered leaves” (lines 6-7) and
“newspapers from vacant lots” (line 8) due to the storm outside. This “you” is not in a position of
agency. The quantity of things in this section outnumbers them. The debris from the street
weighs them down.
Concrete objects from the city define the morning in part II. There is no “you” or lyrical
“I,” people are dehumanized. The two stanzas read as follows:

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The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms. (14-23)64
The “you” from the previous section is nowhere to be found. In fact, there is not a single
identifiable human subject. There are just feet and hands that collectively perform the same
actions – raising dingy shades and trampling the street while pressing to coffee-stands. These
hands recall the child’s automatic hand in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” The grammar in these
lines suggests that the street has individuality and subjectivity. The adjective “sawdust-trampled”
is descriptive and the possessive pronoun “its” indicates possession (“From the sawdust-trampled
street / With all its muddy feet that press / To early coffee-stands”). Consequently, part II is quite
dehumanizing. In the Modern era, time is in charge, dictating man while streets are animate.
64 The mention of “sawdust” should remind the reader of the electric saw in Khodasevich’s “«Весений лепет не
разнежит…» (“The babble of spring will not soften…”).

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When reading “Preludes” II, Stayer notes the “phenomenon of fragmenting the human
body” (132). He states: “Such a depersonalizing effect is the consequence of a cubist rendering
of human fragments” (132). Suitably, the images on the cover and inside the magazine Blast,
surrounding “Preludes,” are cubist or echo cubism.65 However, Stayer’s reading differs from
mine: “Eliot’s depersonalizing is not dehumanizing, rather the opposite. For with such
fragmentation, Eliot’s Puritan temperament is put on hold, and instead of rendering judgment on
moral beings, he can observe fragments in a detached way” (132). Eliot’s depersonalizing and
fragmenting of the self is dehumanizing because the objects gain the upper hand, becoming more
agentive. They, with time, control the poetic world while the human subjects, who are
metonymically referred to by hands and feet, remain distant.
In part III the “you” of the first section returns and has an out-of-body experience,
wherein the contents of their soul are made manifest. Remembering the standard convention of a
prelude, this out-of-body experience could be the important event the preludes are meant to
precede. Nevertheless, the “you” is swiftly brought back to earth. The street, which has been
lively and predominant throughout the entirety of the poem, is what the “you” is left with. The
speaker articulates:
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
65 See images of Blast on the Modernist Journals Project’s website. https://modjourn.org/journal/blast/

53
They flickered against the ceiling. (24-29)
The sordid nature of these images reminds the reader of the other squalid things previously
mentioned, such as burnt-out ends, the newspapers on the ground, the broken blinds and
chimney-poets, the sawdust-trampled and muddy streets, the faint stale smells of beer and the
dingy shades in a thousand furnished rooms. The thousand sordid images do not flicker on the
ceiling forever. They are brought back to the base and material world like so many of the
speakers in Khodasevich’s poems that reach transcendence only to be flung back down to
earth.
66 The speaker utters:
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands; (30-34)
Modern life is neither uplifting nor inviting in “Preludes.” Typically, light coming in is a good
omen but, in this poem, it creeps in, adding to the sinister and despairing mood. And instead of
hearing beautiful songbirds outside, the “you” hears sparrows in the gutters. Thormählen notes,
“…the sparrows in the ‘Preludes’ gutter are suitable props’” (59). Choosing to label these
sparrows as props indicates that they are incapable of demonstrating life. Animals become more
than props in the second chapter of this dissertation. Although the “you” understands the street
66 Some examples include «Эпизод» (“An Episode), «Полдень» (“Midday”), and «Дом» (“The House”).

54
better than the street understands itself, the “you” is left only with a vision of the street. Instead
of seeing and understanding their own self, the “you” is constrained to look at the active, yet
dirty street. And, once again, the speaker is not in a position of agency, some vague and removed
“you” is.
In part IV, the final section of “Preludes,” the city, with its concrete objects, remains
ominously active. A city block has the power to obstruct the skies (across which someone’s soul
is stretched tight) (lines 39-40). In part II there were hands and feet, in this section, there are feet
and eyes:
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes (41-44)
The trampling, insistent feet at four and five and six o’clock repeat the reality that a rigid
timetable, experienced most strongly in the city, makes men automatons no longer whole. This
moment in “Preludes” is reminiscent of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” The speaker in
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” whose nightly preparation (“Here is the number on the door. /
Memory! / You have the key, / The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair. / Mount. / The bed is
open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, / Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life”)
becomes the “last twist of the knife.” Although “Preludes” is written in free verse, the end rhyme
pipes / eyes infers that eyes are just as lifeless as pipes, or that pipes are just as lively as eyes.
The final lines of the first stanza in this section emphasize that the street is vigilant because it has

55
a conscience and it is impatient (“The conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the
world” (lines 46-47)).
In the second stanza of part IV the lyrical “I” makes its first and only appearance.67 The
stanza reads as follows:
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing. (48-51)
In “Preludes” some infinitely gentle thing would inevitably become an infinitely suffering thing
because every thing in this place is fragmented, alienated, and lonely. Only insistent and
impatient things exist here. There is no space for anything gentle, meek, or compassionate.
Bennett reflects on the complex relationship between humans and fuel on several
occasions in Vibrant Matter, which is apt when considering the conclusion of Eliot’s “Preludes.”
The final stanza of the poem reads: “Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; / The worlds
revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots” (lines 52-54). When analyzing the
blackout, an episode from Vibrant Matter previously mentioned in this chapter, Bennett urges
her vital materialists to recognize the multiple agents involved:
67 Stayer notes: “…nothing in the stanza or the previous three preludes sets up the surprising turn: the appearance of
the first-person pronoun” (255). Similarly, in his article “T.S. Eliot and the Lost Youth of Modern Poetry” David
Rosen claims: “In poem after poem [from the March Hare], each clearly spoken by a solitary narrator, Eliot resorts
to the plural, or to the second person, as if his speakers required the support of imagined companions to be heard at
all…The sense of a self is so weak that, for large stretches of the March Hare manuscript, the first-person singular
pronoun disappears altogether…a tic familiar from Eliot’s early official work as well: the ‘Preludes,’ ‘Rhapsody on
a Windy Night,’ the end of ‘Prufrock.’”(478).

56
To the vital materialist, the electrical grid is better understood as a volatile mix of coal,
sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat,
lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic,
theory, wire, and wood – to name just some of the actants. There is always some friction
among the parts, but for several days in August 2003 in the United States and Canada the
dissonance was so great that cooperation became impossible. (25)
Bennett comments on this fractious relationship between the human and the non-human,
especially humans and fuel, in later passages from Vibrant Matter. According to Bennett,
humans take part in “mass hallucinatory fantasies” in which they believe that “fossil fuels will
never run out” (50-51) and where “fuel is consumed with little recognition of the violence of its
extraction and distribution” (115). Humans are reliant on the non-human. Eliot and the women
gathering fuel in “Preludes” do not share the same twenty-first century perspective as Bennett,
nevertheless, the negative and foreboding mood prevails. The fact that the worlds are revolving
like these women gathering fuel insinuates that this action will be a never-ending vicious cycle
and the command to laugh feels like a hopeless response. The sense of tragic suffering found in
every poem in this chapter repeats.
To conclude this chapter, I focus on two additional poems by Khodasevich
«Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”) and «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento
Photographs”). The materiality of these poems resembles those of «Весенний…» (“The
babble…”), «Встаю…» (“I get up…”), «Пробочка» (“The Cork”), “Rhapsody on a Windy
Night,” and “Preludes” in that the physical phenomena are in dominant and controlling positions.
The objects in «Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”) and «Соррентинские фотографии»
(“Sorrento Photographs”) exhibit their thing-power forcefully in both form and content. The

57
automobiles and the motorcycle, with their own engines, literally drive the poems. As with the
previous Khodasevich poems, the speakers from «Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”) and
«Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”) are more present than Eliot’s
speakers. Khodasevich’s speakers are connected to Khodasevich. His personal memories and
experiences from Russia and Europe are integrated into the poems, while Eliot’s are obscured,
generalized, or missing. Nevertheless, the speakers from «Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”)
and «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”) remain ineffective and isolated.
In Khodasevich’s poem «Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”), also from his fourth
collection «Тяжелая лира» (The Heavy Lyre) (1921), the speaker encounters two automobiles.
The second automobile carries more symbolic weight than the first, but both automobiles display
more strength than the speaker. Generally considered a sign of progress, mobility, and
possibility, the automobile, a modern invention, is a destructive force in Khodasevich’s poem.
68
Because of the speaker’s experience with these two automobiles, he is able to reflect on the
stability of memory which has been a consistent metaphysical topic for the majority of the poems
analyzed in this chapter.
The first automobile draws attention to itself via its sound and movement. It appears in
the first stanza:
Бредем в молчании суровом.
Сырая ночь, пустая мгла.
И вдруг - с каким певучим зовом –
Автомобиль из-за угла. (1-4)
68 In his biography of Khodasevich Bethea writes: “Khodasevich uses the figure of the automobile to suggest the
diabolical incursion of uncontrolled man-made motion into the fragile realm of the dusha (soul)” (236).

58
We wander in stern silence. A damp night, a vacant fog, and suddenly – with what a
melodious call – an automobile comes around the corner.
In comparison to their aimless wandering, and the cold empty night, the automobile is active. Its
melodious call is reminiscent of the melodious clang of the electric saw in «Весенний…» (“The
babble…”). Once again, the adjective melodious (певучий) produces associations with living
beings and musical instruments, not mechanical equipment, or modes of transportation. In the
second stanza the speaker describes the automobile in more detail:
Он черным лаком отливает,
Сияя гранями стекла,
Он в сумрак ночи простирает
Два белых ангельских крыла. (5-8)
It is cast with black lacquer, its glass facets are shining, it stretches into the twilight of the
night two white angelic wings.
Its shimmering finish garners attention. Moreover, it takes up space, by stretching out its wings,
while covering space as it arrives from around the corner.
Nevertheless, the gradual appearance of the second automobile in the fourth stanza
overshadows the first automobile’s dynamic presence.
69 In contrast to the festive look of the
69 The title of the poem, «Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”), might seem ill-fitting because there are two
automobiles depicted. I argue that the title is singular because only one car poses a real threat to the world and the

59
buildings in the third stanza, the light flickered and loomed, scattering the rainy dust: «А свет
мелькнул и замаячил, / Колебля дождевую пыль…» (lines 13-14). This gloomy feeling
continues when the speaker senses the second automobile: «Но слушай: мне являться начал /
Другой, другой автомобиль…» (“But listen: another, different car began to appear to me…”)
(lines 15-16). Repeating другой in the final line is foreboding because the speaker is consciously
emphasizing the peculiarity of this automobile. The two ellipses indicate the speaker’s lack of
words to describe what he is feeling. The gravity of what is about to come is forcefully felt.
The fifth and sixth stanzas stress the speed of the second automobile and its ability to
manipulate the speaker’s memory. The second automobile runs past in bright light, it runs past in
broad daylight: «Он пробегает в ясном свете, / Он пробегает белым днём» (lines 17-18). The
anaphora found in these two lines reiterates that the automobile is alive, more subject than
object. The fact that the car runs is reminiscent of «Встаю…» (“I get up…”), wherein Moscow’s
rebellious calls and the all-worldly conversation of exchanges are still alive, running through the
persona’s veins. The verb used to describe the speaker and his companion’s movement in the
first stanza, брести, means to trudge along or drag oneself along. The verb used twice to describe
the second automobile’s movement, пробегать, means to run past. The car moves forcefully and
swiftly as opposed to the slow shuffling of the speaker and his companion. In Eliot’s “Rhapsody
on a Windy Night” the street-lamp’s mutterings and sputterings are stressed by anaphora. In
«Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”) anaphora underscores the ease and speed of the second
automobile. In the following lines the speaker explains how this automobile has two wings on it
speaker’s well-being. In his biography of Khodasevich Bethea also describes the contrast between the two
automobiles: “Indeed, the automobile whose headlights are transformed into wings appears to fill the speaker’s
nocturnal wanderings with its strange enlightenment. Its miraculous passage might be an act of grace, another
annunciation. But the second half of the poem, which is a sort of photographic negative of the first half, blots outs
the sensation of enlightenment and returns the speaker to a state more perilous than the initial darkness” (236).

60
as well, but the wings on it are black («И два крыла на нем, как эти, / Но крылья черные на
нем» (lines 19-20)). The black wings are certainly more sinister than the white angelic wings of
the earlier automobile.70 The negative traits of the second automobile continue:
И всё, что только попадает
Под чёрный сноп его лучей,
Невозвратимо исчезает
Из утлой памяти моей. (21-24)
And everything that just falls below the black sheaf of its rays irrevocably disappears
from my fragile memory.
Anything the second automobile touches vanishes. Its violent rays are like the radio waves in
«Встаю…» (“I get up…”) that disturb the speaker’s rest and bruise his brain. A frail memory
epitomizes Khodasevich and Eliot’s speakers in this chapter. As things are being lost and
forgotten in this stanza, the enjambments force the ideas of a sentence to drop into the next line,
mimicking what the speaker is describing. The end rhyme попадает (falls) / исчезает
(disappears) underscores the destructive power of the automobile, that anything can fall or
disappear.
70 Peter Daniels’ English translation of this poem compares the color of the second automobile’s wings to a crow’s:
“It rushes through the brightest sunshine, / through the light of day it goes / upon another pair of wings, / but these
are blacker than a crow’s” (lines 17-20). In the original, there is no mention of a crow. Daniels’ choice could have
been dictated by the rhyme scheme or perhaps he was attempting to bolster the contrast between the two
automobiles. Many treat the crow as an omen of sorrow or bad luck as opposed to an angel, the bearer of good news
or a messenger from God.

61
By the end of «Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”), the speaker loses everything and the
automobile dismantles all in its path. He forgets, he loses his bright Psyche: «Я забываю, я
теряю / Психею светлую мою» (lines 25-26). Psyche is a loaded figure.71 She is the
personification of beauty and in Greek her name, Psyche, means soul. She is often represented
with butterfly wings, which is significant considering the automobiles in this poem also have
wings. In psychology, the psyche denotes the human mind, conscious and unconscious. Her loss
can thus be interpreted as the speaker losing not only all that is beautiful in his world, but also
himself. For this reason, scholars like Bethea in his biography of Khodasevich consider
«Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”) as an ultimate “stage of psychic disintegration” (234). In
addition to forgetting and losing his Psyche, the speaker extends his blind hands and he
recognizes nothing: «Слепые руки простираю, / И ничего не узнаю» (lines 27-28). His
encounter with the object has been enfeebling, disorienting, alienating, and dehumanizing as has
been the case with all of the speakers in these Modernist, metaphysical, and material poems by
Eliot and Khodasevich. His blind hands presage the bodies in the third chapter of this dissertation
that are blind literally or figuratively. «Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”) ends with the speaker
declaring the instability and incompleteness of the world ever since the second automobile
arrived:
Здесь мир стоял, простой и целый,
Но с той поры, как ездит тот,
В душе и в мире есть пробелы,
71 For a poem by Khodasevich addressed to Psyche, see «Психея! Бедная моя!» (“Psyche! My poor one!”) (1921).

62
Как бы от пролитых кислот. (29-32)72
Here the world stood, simple and whole, but from the time that automobile began to
move, in the soul and in the world there have been holes as if from splattered acids.
The automobile mars the inner and outer worlds of the speaker, everything is gaping and empty.
One could argue over what the second automobile symbolizes. This poem was written at
the beginning of December in 1921, about six months before Khodasevich was black-listed and
forced to leave Soviet Russia in June 1922. Thus, the automobile could represent the Russian
Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the First World War, or the political upheaval experienced
across Europe more broadly. Each of these catastrophic events caused great pain and upheaval
for Khodasevich. During these trying times, he felt as if he were losing his world. Everything
was crumbling around him. Unfortunately, in 1921, more suffering awaits. Whatever the second
automobile might be, it is clear that it has disrupted Modern life. The contrast of the two words
in the end rhyme целый (whole) / пробелы (holes) succinctly conveys its devastating effects.
The entire stanza has almost full realization of stress, which also hammers home how
catastrophic the automobile has been.
73
In addition to anaphora, rhythm, punctuation, and end rhymes, the verbs spotlight how
the automobiles can do what the speaker does and more. The pronouns reveal how the
automobiles are livelier than the speaker himself. When the second automobile arrives, the
72 In his biography of Khodasevich Bethea also comments on the quality of the simile at the end of the poem: “The
last stanza, with its yoking of spilled acid and psychic damage in an unlikely and bitter ‘unpoetic’ simile, is
especially adumbrative of the endings of many of the poems in European Night” (236).
73 The poem is written in iambic tetrameter with an alternating rhyme scheme. In the final stanza the first three lines
have full realization of stress (the first foot in the first line is a spondee so there is even one additional stress in the
line). The forcefulness of the lines is reiterated by their rhythm.

63
speaker is designated as the indirect object (the dative first-person pronoun is used) and the
automobile is the subject of the sentence. The other, different automobile began to appear to him:
«мне являться начал / Другой, другой автомобиль» (lines 15-16). In the second stanza the
first automobile extends its two white angelic wings into the twilight of the night. The same verb,
простирать, repeats in the seventh stanza when the speaker extends his blind hands. Using the
same verb to express the actions of the automobile and the speaker would cause one to assume
that they share the same power. However, the aftermath of the speaker’s action shows that even
though he can do what the automobile does, the automobile does not have the same negative
results. When the speaker extends his blind hands, everything is unrecognizable. This does not
happen to the automobile. In fact, the lines that follow describe how the nearby buildings became
festive which is a much cheerier result.
The automobiles in Khodasevich’s poem are as much force as entity, as much energy as
matter, and as much intensity as extension. They are as much subject as object. In this they
mirror Bennett’s goal as she attempts to “theorize a materiality that is as much force as entity, as
much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension” (20). This point probably seems obvious
considering that an automobile moves. However, the same can also be said of the other material
objects in Khodasevich’s and Eliot’s poems that have been and will be analyzed in this chapter.
Especially considering that these objects are vital to the overall poetic structure.
Khodasevich’s «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”), also from
«Европейская ночь» (European Night) (1927), continues the thread of vehicles, forces, and
vibrant matter. Double-exposed photographs and a motorcycle structure «Соррентинские
фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”), which is widely considered to be his best work.

64
In the introduction to her book Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern
Russian Culture Molly Blasing identifies Khodasevich’s poem as “one of the most famous
narrative poems in the Russian tradition to feature photographic aesthetics” (19-20). Blasing
argues that “Khodasevich moves beyond the poetics of ekphrasis, instead employing the
photographic trope to suggest more about the nature of memory and the experience of exile”
(20). She succinctly captures the major events and themes of the poem: “The photographic
double exposure operates as a point of departure for a fluid amalgam of memories arising from
places as disparate as Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Italian coast. This poema is about the
collision of time and revolution, and about memory and its fallibility and mutability” (51).74
Although some scholars, like Bethea in his article “Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich’s
Memory Speaks” and Jenifer Presto in her article “Uncanny Excavations: Khodasevich, Pompeii,
and Remains of the Past,” insist on the comic or positive tone of the poem and its life-giving
ending, I argue that once again the objects outweigh the speaker. The double-exposed
photographs and the motorcycle advance the poem while the speaker, surrounded by death and
loss, is left with the ever-familiar knowledge that memory is twisted.
In the beginning of «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”) memory, a
metaphysical construct, becomes material. The speaker likens it to an olive tree. The speaker
declares:
Воспоминанье прихотливо
74 Blasing comments on the relationship between photography and Modernism by quoting Susan Sontag: “Beyond
subject matter, photographs themselves have taken on a certain status as image-object that also delineates the advent
of Modernism, as Susan Sontag argues: ‘Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make
up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the
camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood’” (4). For the relationship between montage,
Modernism, and “Sorrento Photographs” see Jason Brooks’ article “‘Directing’ the Reader: Khodasevich’s ‘Sorrento
Photographs’ and Montage.”

65
И непослушливо. Оно –
Как узловатая олива:
Никак, ничем не стеснено.
Свои причудливые ветви
Узлами диких соответствий
Нерасторжимо заплетёт –
И так живёт, и так растёт. (1-8)
Memory is capricious
as well as contrary –
like the knotty olive,
it cannot be hemmed in.
Inextricably it weaves
in knots of farfetched correspondences
its whimsical branches –
and so it lives, and so it grows. 75
Memory can live and grow like a tree. Memory’s knotted, woven, braided, and twisted essence,
as described in the first eight lines of the poem, is reminiscent of Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy
Night,” wherein memory throws up a “crowd of twisted things” (line 24). One of these twisted
things which memory produces in Eliot’s poem is a “twisted branch.”
75 Bethea’s English translation from “Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich’s Memory Speaks.”

66
After this simile, the speaker introduces the double-exposed photographs and explains
why they appeal to him. In this explanation the camera rearranges and controls all other forms of
matter. The lines read as follows:
Порой фотограф-ротозей
Забудет снимкам счёт и плёнкам
И снимет парочку друзей,
На Капри, с беленьким козлёнком –
И тут же, плёнки не сменив,
Запечатлеет он залив
За пароходную кормою
И закопчёную трубу
С космою дымною на лбу.
Так сделал нынешней зимою
Один приятель мой. Пред ним
Смешались воды, люди, дым
На негативе помутнелом.
Его знакомый лёгким телом
Полупрозрачно заслонял
Черты скалистых исполинов,
А козлик, ноги в небо вскинув,
Везувий рожками бодал...
Хоть я и не люблю козляток

67
(Ни итальянских пикников) –
Двух совместившихся миров
Мне полюбился отпечаток:
В себе виденья затая,
Так протекает жизнь моя. (9-32)
At times a scatterbrained photographer
will lose count of shots and film
and snap a pair of friends
on Capri, beside a little white goat –
and on the spot, not changing film,
he will print over them the bay
beyond the steamer’s stern
and the sooty stack
with a shock of smoke on its forehead.
This winter one of my friends
did just that. Before him
water, people, and smoke intermingled
on the turbid negative.
His friend in half-transparency
hid the features of rocky giants
with his light body, while
the little goat, its legs flung skyward,

68
was butting Vesuvius with its tiny horns…
Though I’m not in love with little goats
(or Italian picnics) –
that imprint of two worlds
telescoped caught my fancy:
concealing in itself a vision,
so does my life flow by. 76
The speaker is drawn to these double-exposed photographs because they are “a visual metaphor
for his own life’s path” (Blasing, 20). The overlapping worlds conveys his merged experiences at
home and in exile.77 In these images, an amalgam of things, animals, and people is found. They
are dynamic, and, at times, humorous, nevertheless, the way they mask, distort, and overturn
once stable phenomena is disconcerting. Afterall, things are swarmed together (cмешались) and
obstructed (заслонял). The poorly taken photographs allow the camera to have control over
everything in the physical realm. It plays with things, bodies, animals, and places as it pleases
like the radio in «Встаю…» (“I get up…”) and the destructive automobile in «Автомобиль»
(“The Automobile”). The poems in the next chapter do not capture animals in the same way as
the little white goat in «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”). Khodasevich’s
76 Bethea’s English translation from “Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich’s Memory Speaks.”
77 In her article Presto reminds the reader of Khodasevich’s father’s profession: “As the son of a professional
photographer, Khodasevich would have been familiar with the strange images produced by accidental double
exposures. There is, to be sure, an uncanny quality to the ‘odd branches’ (prichudlivye vetvi) of the olive tree
entwined ‘in knots of wild correspondences’ (uzlami dikikh sootvetsvii), as well as the double-exposed photographs
taken by the acquaintance of the poet, in which ‘Waters, people, smoke / Blended together on the dull negative’
(Smeshalis’ vody, liudi, dym / Na negative pomutnelom)” (283).

69
animals in particular, the monkey and the cat, are independent and thinking. They are subject to
no one or nothing. They ground and enlighten the speaker.
The speaker recalls three distinct memories in «Соррентинские фотографии»
(“Sorrento Photographs”) as a result of his motorcycle ride. The first memory is the funeral of
Savel’ev, a Muscovite floor-polisher. The second is a Roman Catholic procession that takes
place in Sorrento on Good Friday. And the third is of St. Petersburg, the Neva, and the angel on
the Peter and Paul Cathedral which is reflected in the Bay of Naples with Mount Vesuvius in the
background. These memories about a funeral, Mount Vesuvius, and a procession ooze death,
morbidity, and fear.
The lively motorcycle structurally surrounds each memory. In these moments, its power
and presence are discernible. For example, the beginning of the fifth stanza:
Мотоциклетка стрекотнула
И сорвалась. Затрепетал
Прожектор по уступам скал,
И отзвук рокота и гула
За нами следом побежал. (69-73)
The motorcycle chirped and took off. The headlamp’s beam flickered along the edges of
the cliff, and the reverberation of the rumble and the boom ran after us.78
78 In English, the verb “to chirp” is most commonly used to refer to the sounds that insects or birds make. In
Russian, the verb стрекотнула/стрекотнуть, formed from стрекот (a chirp, chirping sound, chatter, chrr), is used to
describe the sound of machines, insects, and birds.

70
At the beginning of the eighth stanza, the motorcycle flies under a crag in winding twists:
«Мотоциклетка под скалой / Летит извилистым полетом» (lines 131-132). Without the
motorcycle, the speaker’s memories would not be triggered as in Eliot’s “Rhapsody ono a Windy
Night,” wherein the speaker’s reminiscences are created by the vocal and perceptive street-lamp.
These items are active while the speakers are passive in their recollections. Without them, no
memories would be induced.
79
The memories that the motorcycle and double-exposed photographs arouse in the speaker
are not cheerful or promising. Overall, the final stanza is grim and the last statement is a
question:
Воспоминанье прихотливо.
Как сноведение - оно
Как будто вещей правдой живо,
И так же дико и темно
И так же, вероятно, лживо...
Среди каких утрат, забот,
79 Blasing also notices how the photographs and the motorcycle drive the poem: “Although the notion of doubleexposed photographs brings forth a set of mismatched memories from the speaker’s present and former lives, this is
not a poem that offers ekphrastic descriptions of any particular photographs. Rather, the idea of two worlds, two
pasts, coexisting in the same photographic image, or within the experiences of a single individual, propels the poet
to unspool memories of his past in an almost cinematic fashion. Illuminated by the projector-like headlight of a
motorcycle speeding through the hills of the Amalfi coast, Khodasevich’s Italian setting and the memories that
emerge there from a former life in Russia provide readers with a good deal more than descriptions of photographic
images” (21). In his article, Bethea labels the motorcycle as a figurative vehicle for the poem and also comments on
the speaker’s passive and observant position in the sidecar: “The work’s initial source was Khodasevich’s eightmonth retreat (September 1924-April 1925) in Maxim Gorky’s villa in Sorrento and the memories surrounding that
visit. The more recent memories constitute the work’s narrative frame, and the literal and figurative vehicle of the
narrative is young Maxim’s (Gorky’s son’s) motorcycle, which speeds through the Italian hills near Sorrento with
the poet in its sidecar. As often happens in the ironist’s world, he is allowed to go along for the ride, to observe the
countryside from his privileged seat, and to fantasize freely, while the driving is left to someone [or something]
else” (59).

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И после скольких эпитафий,
Теперь, воздушная, всплывёт
И что закроет в свой черёд
Тень соррентинских фотографий? (173-182)
Memory is capricious.
Like a dream, it seems
alive with prophetic truth,
but is just as wild and obscure
and, probably, just as false…
Amidst what losses and troubles,
and after how many epitaphs,
now, belonging to the air,
will it surface,
and what shall overlay in turn
the shadow of Sorrento photographs? 80
The first line of this final stanza repeats the first line of the poem. Convoluted, wild, and dark are
the essential qualities of memory. The question mark at the end of the poem emphasizes the
bleakness and uncertainty of the future. Whatever is going to overlay the double-exposed
Sorrento photographs will emerge only after such troubles, losses, and cares.
80 Bethea’s English translation from “Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich’s Memory Speaks.”

72
In Khodasevich’s «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”),
«Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”), «Пробочка» (“The Cork”), «Весенний…» (“The
babble…”), and «Встаю…» (“I get up…”) and Eliot’s “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy
Night” phenomena encountered display more vitality than the speakers that tell of them. They
compel the poem forward structurally and thematically. Khodasevich and Eliot’s speakers
begrudgingly or sorrowfully become aware of the outside world and its vital materialities. At
once, Khodasevich and Eliot’s speakers are removed and entangled, amassed and isolated. The
dissonance they feel is characteristic of their era.

73
Chapter 2: Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot’s Individual and Metaphysical Animals
Remembering mind can be a stand in for metaphysical and body a stand in for material,
in the past, many insisted a rational mind separates humans from animals. They believed animals
were non-sentient beings. Later developments regarding animal studies proved the earlier
assumption to be false. Animals, and other non-humans, can think, feel, and act.81 In the words
of Bennett: “Since Kafka’s time, the gap between human and animal has narrowed even further,
as one after another of the traits or talents thought to be unique to humanity are found to exist
also in nonhuman animals. It is no longer so controversial to say that animals have a biosocial,
communicative, or even conceptual life” (53). In the Modernist era, the animal problem was both
controversial and salient. This is Carrie Rohman’s thesis in Stalking the Subject: Modernism and
the Animal:
My point here is that modernism emerges as a privileged site for the discursive
consideration of animality at a number of junctures. The post-Darwinian crisis in
humanist identity, the production of imperialist otherings, the development of
psychoanalysis, the modernist revolt against Enlightenment legacies of rationalism, the
twentieth-century eruption of linguistic convention, all these dynamics shape an acute
engagement with the discourse of species in literature of the period. The trajectory of this
study, therefore, traces modernism’s own dramatic reckoning with the animal. (27-28)
81 See the biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s understanding of “Umwelt.” See also the work of posthumanist and animal
studies scholars Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe. Regarding other non-humans, a tree’s ability to think, for
example, can be found in works like Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the
Human and Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

74
Rohman’s perspective on the Modernist era and its fixation on the animal establishes how
Khodasevich and Eliot’s animal poems are not accidental.82 Their speakers encounter the animal
as they reckon with ontological questions.
Oxana Timofeeva also examines the hierarchical relationship between humans and
animals in the preface to her book The History of Animals: A Philosophy. She defines the two
types of discourse:
Philosophers have always made the distinction between human beings and animals,
giving rational thought, language or the awareness of death as criteria. There are two
types of classical philosophical discourse that focus on the animal: the discourse of
exclusion begins from the ethical and ontological predominance of the ‘human,’ whereas
the discourse of inclusion insists on the affinity of all levels of being. (93)
Despite how oppositional these discourses of exclusion and inclusion are, Timofeeva stresses
that both discourses share the same function “to establish or conserve a certain order of things”
(93). Although Eliot and Khodasevich are not directly or consciously contributing to these
philosophical debates, their poetry resonates with the above discourses.
The discourses of inclusion and exclusion, which Timofeeva delineates, are mixed in
Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry. Their portrayals of animals are varied and complex. The gap
between the human and the animal fluctuates. In the previous chapter Eliot’s animals were either
props that filled in the scene, like the sparrows and cab-horse in “Preludes,” or creatures that
behaved mechanically, bent solely on survival, like the crab and cat in “Rhapsody on a Windy
82 In her chapter “Imperialism and Disavowal” Rohman claims: “The displacement of animality onto marginalized
groups served as a fundamental modernist thematic that sought to purify Western subjectivity and thereby
discursively maintain the imperialist power dynamic” (29). In this chapter Rohman performs close readings of
several of Eliot’s early poems, including Sweeney Agonistes, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “Sweeney Erect,”
and “Burbank with a Baideker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” where this displacement occurs, focusing on women and
Jews. In Rohman’s opinion, Eliot fears humans’ proximity to animals instead of embracing or advocating for
becoming-animal. Although I agree with Rohman, animality is not negative in the poems of this chapter.

75
Night.” The camera in Khodasevich’s «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”)
toyed with the little white goat. It was made to butt Vesuvius with its horns and its legs flung
skyward, overlapped with other things. Its positioning was subject to the camera’s will. In
comparison with the material objects, the animals’ role was subordinate. These depictions of
animals would seemingly widen the gap between the animal and human but the lyrical speakers
in those poems were just as powerless, thus narrowing the gap. In Khodasevich’s «Обезьяна»
(“The Monkey”) and «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”) and Eliot’s “The
Hippopotamus,” and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, animals are dynamic and mindful
actors not props. They act, think, and have a voice of their own. A monkey is noble and
enlightened, a hippopotamus turns out to be more redeemable than the church, and cats possess
independent and unique personalities. The animals provide meaning, connection, inspiration,
comfort, and a strong sense of individuality, not the humans. Connections are formed between
the animal and the human but complete equality among all levels of being does not exist.
There are two major reasons why I analyze «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”), «Памяти кота
Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”), “The Hippopotamus,” and Old Possum’s Book of
Practical Cats in this chapter. The first is a desire to provide alternate examples to those of the
first chapter and the second is because these poems83 have been characterized as “comic,”
“childish,” “satirical,” “ironic,” and “light.”84 I argue that these poems purport to claim that
83 Animals appear in Khodasevich and Eliot’s “serious” poems as well. Their speakers often express similarity with
or desire to be like animals, particularly after times of crisis. For example, the speaker in Eliot’s poem “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” remarks “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent
seas” (lines 73-74). The speaker’s soul in Khodasevich’s poem «Эпизод» (“An Episode”) manages to leave its body
but is forced to return to it by the end of the poem. The speaker describes the pain and effort this return causes him
by likening it unto a snake forced to put back on its shed layer of skin.
84 In his article “A Hunger for Seriousness? T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hippopotamus’” Rick de Villiers comments on how
others have labeled Eliot’s poem “The Hippopotamus” as “glib,” “satirical,” pseudo-scholarly,” “superficial,” and
“immature” and how Eliot himself was dismissive toward it: “Eliot himself never made any claims for the poem and
even confessed that, unlike ‘Burbank’ and the Sweeney poems, it was not meant to be serious” (62-63).

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animals possessing a metaphysical side is humorous, childish, and ridiculous but what Eliot and
Khodasevich are actually suggesting is that it is humorous, childish, and ridiculous not to believe
that animals possess a metaphysical side. Khodasevich and Eliot address some of their deepest
metaphysical concerns in these animal poems. I also include examples from Khodasevich and
Eliot’s personal writings to illustrate how animals help them construct their image of themselves.
Beginning with the monkey, one of the closest animals to humans genetically, I turn to
Khodasevich’s poem «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”) from his third collection «Путем зерна»
(The Way of the Seed) (1920). The warm countryside replaces the cold urban world of the first
chapter in this blank verse narrative poem. The speaker meets a Serb with his monkey and offers
the Serb water upon his request. The monkey responds to the speaker’s gesture of kindness with
a handshake. This handshake causes the speaker to feel whole, connected to the past and to the
monkey. Their handshake might seem comical to the reader, nevertheless, the announcement of
war at the end of the poem grounds it and highlights the speaker’s staidness. World War I began
when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip.
Nevertheless, de Villiers sees “The Hippopotamus” as an early example of Eliot’s hunger for seriousness and I agree
with him. Murphy shares a similar opinion to de Villiers: “Despite its reputation as light verse – in the sense of the
witty and the satirical – the obvious religious references and overtones of the poetry of ‘The Hippopotamus,’ for just
one example, ought to put the reader instantly on guard” (248). Poems from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
are often anthologized in works like The Oxford Book of Comic Verse and The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. In
his article “T. S. Eliot’s Autobiographical Cats” Henry Hart summarizes the early critics’ negative appraisal of
Eliot’s collection: “For years critics pooh-poohed Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as if it were – in the words
of the Eliot scholar Burton Raffel – little more than ‘pleasant, inoffensive and unremarkable’ light or nonsense
verse” (382). Thormählen aligns with Raffel: “The whimsical humor and mock-deferential tone of Old Possum’s
Book of Practical Cats is absent from the Prufrock collection, the 1920 Poems, Ash-Wednesday, The Rock, and the
plays…the inclusion of the Possum cats in a discussion of Eliot’s feline imagery would hardly be mandatory. These
animals represent a totally different side to the poet – that of the nonsense-verse virtuoso – and despite the
fascination that they appear to hold for many people, it is hard to look upon the Possum book as being anything but a
more or less appealing bagatelle” (39-40). Contrary to Raffel and Thormählen, Hart believes, as do I, that there is
more to Eliot’s collection than meets the eye. Bethea comments on the “dramatizing irony” of Khodasevich’s
«Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”) in his biography of Khodasevich (178). I see more than dramatizing irony in
Khodasevich’s poem. Malmstad and Hughes quote Berberova in their notes to Khodasevich’s posthumously
published poem «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”): «Ходасевич не дооценил эти своих
стихов при жизни, он считал, что они написаны “на случай”» (“Khodasevich underestimated these poems of his
during his lifetime; he believed that they were written “just in case”) (388). In my opinion, «Памяти кота Мурра»
(“In Memory of the Cat Murr”) is a serious undertaking.

77
Austria-Hungary held Serbia responsible and declared war on July twenty-eighth. Russia came to
Serbia’s aid. As a result, Germany declared war against Russia on August first. Given this
context, the reader would expect the speaker of «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”) to form a strong
connection with the Serb, not his animal companion. The simple and straightforward form of the
grounded and serious moments builds during the epiphanic moment.
The inspiration for «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”) comes from Khodasevich’s own life.
Khodasevich met a Serb and his monkey at his dacha in Tomilino (a small town southeast of
Moscow) in 1914. Malmstad and Hughes note that it is interesting to compare Khodasevich’s
poem with Ivan Bunin’s poem «С обезьяной» (“With a Monkey”) (1907) but do not provide an
explanation (315). In my reading of both poems, I argue that there are several similarities
between the two poems but key differences as well. Bunin’s poem is also set in the hot
countryside with its dachas. There is a monkey and a wandering man, but, this time, a Croatian,
not a Serb. The monkey drinks in Bunin’s poem as well, but a Jewish woman provides the water
(«…большой стакан воды / Даст с томною улыбкою еврейка» (lines 18-19)). Overall, I assert
that Bunin’s poem is more despairing than Khodasevich’s. In Khodasevich’s poem, the speaker’s
experience with the monkey allows him to feel whole and connected to the past. The monkey is a
source of comfort and friendship. Bunin’s monkey, on the other hand, is fatigued: «Зверок
устал» (line 21). There is something childish and senile in her sad eyes: «И детское, и
старческое что-то / В её глазах печальных» (lines 5-6). The monkey’s gaze is like that of an
old man-child tormented by melancholy: «взор старичка-ребёнка / Томит тоской» (lines 21-
22). Bunin’s poem concludes with the monkey retreating slowly into the shadow of a plane tree,
very unlike Khodasevich’s monkey who sits atop the Serb’s shoulder like an Indian Maharajah

78
on an elephant. There is a role reversal in Khodasevich’s poem – the monkey begins chained and
imprisoned and ends elevated, an enlightened being.
Khodasevich’s «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”) begins with the speaker setting the scene,
including descriptions of the weather, the Serb, and the monkey. In these lines, wherein the
matter-of-fact details of the scene are laid out, the form of the poem is plain and simple,
especially its grammar, meter, and syntax. They read as follows:
Была жара. Леса горели. Нудно
Тянулось время. На соседней даче
Кричал петух. Я вышел за калитку.
Там, прислонясь к забору, на скамейке
Дремал бродячий серб, худой и черный.
Серебряный тяжелый крест висел
На груди полуголой. Капли пота
По ней катились. Выше, на заборе,
Сидела обезьяна в красной юбке
И пыльные листы сирени
Жевала жадно. Кожаный ошейник,
Оттянутый назад тяжелой цепью,
Давил ей горло. (1-13)
It was hot. The forests were burning. Time tediously dragged on. A rooster crowed at the
neighboring dacha. I went out beyond the gate. There, leaning against the fence, on the

79
bench, a vagrant Serb, thin and dark, was dozing. A silver heavy cross hung on [his] halfnaked chest. Drops of sweat were rolling down it [his chest]. Higher up, on the fence, a
monkey in a red skirt was sitting and greedily chewing the dusty lilac leaves. A leather
collar, pulled back by a heavy chain, was squeezing her throat.
The essential detail of this passage, the leather collar and heavy chain, establishes that the Serb is
master over the monkey. There is a wide gap between the human and the animal, but this gap
will narrow by the end of the poem. As to be expected with a blank verse poem, the meter is
standard unrhymed iambic pentameter.85 There are three sentences in the first two lines of the
poem. The first two sentences are only two words in length, 86 with a noun and an imperfective
verb in the past tense: «Была жара. Леса горели.» (“It was hot. The forests were burning.”). In
the third sentence there are three words – a noun, an imperfective verb in the past tense, and an
adverb «Нудно / Тянулось время.» (“Time tediously dragged on.”).87 Although the brevity of
these sentences would seemingly create a fast rhythm, the punctuation forces the reader to pause
awkwardly in the middle of the line. Additionally, in this section of the poem, there are seven
85 There are a few exceptions. Line ten is iambic tetrameter, line fourteen is iambic hexameter, line nineteen is
iambic trimeter, line thirty-two is iambic hexameter, line forty-one is iambic hexameter, line fifty-three is iambic
trimeter, and line fifty-four is iambic hexameter.
86 Typically, Khodasevich’s sentences are more complex and lengthier. Considering the poems from chapter one, for
example, a sentence often spans an entire stanza (four lines) as in «Встаю…» (“I get up…”) and «Автомобиль»
(“The Automobile”). It is not uncommon for a sentence to span two stanzas (eight lines), as in «Весенний…» (“The
babble…”), or even reach nine lines as in «Соррентинские фотографии» (“Sorrento Photographs”). The sentences
in these poems are longer than two or three words. They have complex structures with subjects, direct and indirect
objects, nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, possessive and demonstrative pronouns, participles, gerunds, prepositions,
conjunctions, and dependent and independent clauses.
87 In the first thirteen lines of «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”), until «Давил ей горло», there are ten conjugated
imperfective verbs in the past tense (была, горели, тянулось, кричал, дремал, висел, катиться, сидела, жевала,
and давил). There is a verbal adjective (бродячий) formed from another imperfective verb (бродить). There is one
passive past tense participle (оттянутый) formed from a perfective verb (оттянуть), one conjugated perfective verb
in the past tense (вышел), and one past tense gerund (прислонясь) formed from a perfective verb (прислониться).

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instances of enjambment (lines one, two, four, six, seven, nine, and ten) which also force the
reader to pause in unexpected moments. The structure of these lines feels monotonous, just like
the tediously dragging time on this hot summer’s day.
88
Lines thirteen through fifty-five go beyond the ordinary minutiae being described in the
first part of the poem. The speaker relates the request for water and the resulting handshake. The
speaker’s handshake with the monkey alleviates the metaphysical struggles of where humans
find connection and meaning in this world. The lines read as follows:
…Серб, меня заслышав,
Очнулся, вытер пот и попросил, чтоб дал я
Воды ему. Но, чуть ее пригубив, –
Не холодна ли, - блюдце на скамейку
Поставил он, и тотчас обезьяна,
Макая пальцы в воду, ухватила
Двумя руками блюдце.
Она пила, на четвереньках стоя,
Локтями опираясь на скамью.
Досок почти касался подбородок,
Над теменем лысеющим спина
Высоко выгибалась. Так, должно быть,
Стоял когда-то Дарий, припадая
К дорожной луже, в день, когда бежал он
88 Without analyzing the grammatical details of these lines, as I have done, Bethea comes to a similar conclusion:
“Having in effect lulled the reader to sleep with prosaic description…” (179).

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Пред мощною фалангой Александра.
Всю воду выпив, обезьяна блюдце
Долой смахнула со скамьи, привстала
И – этот миг забуду ли когда? –
Мне черную, мозолистую руку,
Еще прохладную от влаги, протянула…
Я руки жал красавицам, поэтам,
Вождям народа – ни одна рука
Такого благородства очертаний
Не заключала! Ни одна рука
Моей руки так братски не коснулась!
И, видит Бог, никто в мои глаза
Не заглянул так мудро и глубоко,
Воистину – до дна души моей.
Глубокой древности сладчайше преданья
Тот нищий зверь мне в сердце оживил,
И в этот миг мне жизнь явилась полной,
И мнилось – хор музыкой и волн морских,
Ветров и сфер мне музыкой органной
Ворвался в уши, загремел, как прежде,
В иные, незапамятные дни.
И серб ушел, постукивая в бубен.

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Присев ему на левое плечо,
Покачивалась мерно обезьяна,
Как на слоне индийский магараджа.
Огромное малиновое солнце,
Лишенное лучей,
В опаловом дыму висело. Изливался
Безгромный зной на чахлую пшеницу. (13-55)
…The Serb, having heard me, woke up, wiped off [his] sweat, and asked me to give him
water. But, having barely sipped, – is it not [too] cold? – he placed the dish on the bench,
and immediately the monkey, dipping [her] fingers in the water, grabbed the dish with
both hands. She drank, on all fours, leaning [her] elbows on the bench. [Her] chin almost
touched the planks, [her] spine arched high over [her] dark and balding head. So, it must
be, Darius once stood, crouching at a wayside puddle, on the day he fled before
Alexander’s mighty phalanx. Having drunk all the water, the monkey swept the dish from
the bench, stood up and – will I ever forget this moment? – extended [her] black,
calloused hand, still cool from the moisture… I have shaken hands with beauties, poets,
leaders of the people – not one hand displayed a line of such nobility! Not one hand has
ever touched my hand so like a brother’s! And, God knows, no one has peered into my
eyes so wisely and deeply, truly – into the depth of my soul. That beggarly beast revived
in my heart the sweetest legends of deep antiquity, and, in that moment, life seemed to
me complete; and it seemed as if a choir of luminaries and sea waves, winds and spheres

83
was bursting in my ears with organ music, thundering, as it did before, in other,
immemorial days.
And the Serb left, tapping the tambourine. Crouching on his left shoulder, the monkey
swayed rhythmically, like an Indian Maharajah on an elephant. The enormous raspberry
sun, stripped of [its] rays, hung in the opalescent smoke. A thunderless heat poured out
onto the stunted wheat.
Although the Serb asks the speaker for water, he barely sips it and places the dish on the bench.
These actions suggest that he did not ask the speaker for water for himself but for his monkey.
Out of concern, he was testing the water’s temperature. The monkey, in contrast to the Serb’s
sipping, immediately and greedily gulps the water. Her positioning stresses her animal nature.
Afterall, she dips her fingers into the water, drinks on all fours with her elbows on the bench, her
back arched, and her chin nearly touching the ground. Without losing her physicality, the
monkey portrays her humane side. She extends her hand in gratitude in response to the speaker’s
compassionate gesture.89 In this moment, she behaves nobly, causing the speaker to declare that
beauties, poets, and leaders of the people have never displayed a line of such nobility. He likens
her stance unto the Persian King Darius III. The monkey shares Darius’s humble position.
90
Furthermore, the speaker compares the monkey to an Indian Maharajah atop the Serb’s shoulder.
The end rhyme обезьяна (monkey) / магараджа (Maharajah) emphasizes the affinity between
89 The monkey’s calloused hand reminds the reader of other animals in this dissertation whose bodies reflect the
passage of time, like the crab with the barnacles on its back from “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.”
90 Malmstad and Hughes and Bethea mention that Gershenzon was opposed to this grand comparison. Bethea writes:
“Gershenzon, for one, objected to these lines with their literal comparison of a Persian king to a wretched simian”
(179).

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the monkey and the great king.91 Remembering the context of World War I, the speaker should
bond with his brother and fellow Slav but bonds with the monkey instead. He feels a brotherly
connection to the monkey («Ни одна рука / Моей руки так братски не коснулась!» (lines 36-
37)). She is the only one capable of understanding him, peering into the depth of his soul. The
speaker feels complete and linked to the past because she revives the sweetest legends of deep
antiquity in his heart. The gap has narrowed between the speaker and the monkey.
The poem’s form in lines thirteen through fifty-five reflects the climax of the narrative –
the speaker’s handshake with the monkey and ensuing epiphany. The speaker becomes
increasingly animated and verbose. The sentences are long, spanning several lines and they have
complex grammatical structures, utilizing nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, possessive and
demonstrative pronouns, subjects, direct and indirect objects, interjections, and independent and
dependent clauses. In comparison with «Была жара.» (“It was hot.”) (line 1) and «Леса
горели.» (“The forests were burning.”) (line 1), this sentence, for example, is far more elaborate:
Глубокой древности сладчайше преданья
Тот нищий зверь мне в сердце оживил,
И в этот миг мне жизнь явилась полной,
И мнилось – хор музыкой и волн морских,
Ветров и сфер мне музыкой органной
Ворвался в уши, загремел, как прежде,
В иные, незапамятные дни. (41-47)
91 In the Oxford English Dictionary, “maharaja” is defined as: “In South Asia: (the title of) a person of high rank,
esp. a prince.” Remembering that this poem is written in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, this rare
occurrence of an end rhyme makes it even more substantial.

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That beggarly beast revived in my heart the sweetest legends of deep antiquity, and, in
that moment, life seemed to me complete; and it seemed as if a choir of luminaries and
sea waves, winds and spheres was bursting in my ears with organ music, thundering, as it
did before, in other, immemorial days.92
In addition to the increased sentence length and additional grammatical components, these lines
also contain dashes, ellipses, exclamations, question marks, repetitions, and negations which
express the speaker’s emotional engagement. For example:
И – этот миг забуду ли когда? –
Мне черную, мозолистую руку,
Еще прохладную от влаги, протянула…
Я руки жал красавицам, поэтам,
Вождям народа – ни одна рука
Такого благородства очертаний
Не заключала! Ни одна рука
Моей руки так братски не коснулась!
И, видит Бог, никто в мои глаза
Не заглянул так мудро и глубоко,
Воистину – до дна души моей. (30-40)
92 Note that the English translation does not account for word order. In Russian, word order is generally more free
than in English.

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…And – will I ever forget this moment? – extended [her] black, calloused hand, still cool
from the moisture… I have shaken hands with beauties, poets, leaders of the people – not
one hand displayed a line of such nobility! Not one hand has ever touched my hand so
like a brother’s! And, God knows, no one has peered into my eyes so wisely and deeply,
truly – into the depth of my soul.
The speaker’s fervor is on show. This section begins with a rhetorical question «этот миг забуду
ли когда?» (“will I ever forget this moment?”) (line 30). It goes without saying, that the speaker
will never forget it. Afterall, he has taken the time and effort to put the encounter on paper,
which will ensure he and others remember it always. Following this rhetorical question, which is
set apart by dash marks, comes the pinnacle moment when the monkey extends her hand to the
speaker. The ellipsis afterwards creates tension, then the speaker returns with these definitive
exclamations – not one hand displayed a line of such nobility, and not one hand has ever touched
my hand so like a brother’s! The negations and repetitions found in these statements («ни одна
рука… Не заключала! Ни одна рука… не коснулась!») make them forcefully felt. In Russian
the double negative is more assertive than its English counterpart. If one were to translate the
Russian literally, it would be “not one hand…did not display! Not one hand…did not touch!”
This section concludes with another powerful negation – God, knows, no one has peered into my
eyes so wisely and deeply, truly – into the depth of my soul. If translated literally, «никто…Не
заглянул» would be “no one…did not peer.” The strong negatives convey the “humanity” of the
monkey as opposed to the lack of connection with other human hands and eyes. Not one hand,
i.e. not one human hand, has ever touched his hand so like a brother’s. No one, i.e. no human,

87
has ever peered into his eyes so wisely and deeply. The speaker’s intensity in this moment verges
on melodrama, like a scene out of a Dostoevsky novel.
93
The concluding line of the poem undercuts this regenerative exchange between the
monkey and the speaker. The final statement is isolated, separated from the previous stanza. The
sentence is bare and straight to the point: «В тот день была объявлена война.» (“On that day
war was declared.”) (line 56). At four o’clock in the afternoon, on August first, nineteen fourteen
(July nineteenth, nineteen fourteen in the Old Style) Germany declared war on Russia. This piece
of unexpected news jolts the reader. In the previous stanza the speaker describes the monkey and
Serb’s departure. He comments on the weather (as in the beginning of the poem) – the enormous
raspberry sun, stripped of its rays, hung in the opalescent smoke. A thunderless heat poured onto
the stunted wheat. It is as if the news of the declaration of war is the thunder that was missing
from the previous lines, foreshadowing gloom and darkness.
After reading the final line of the poem, one might question why the speaker chose to
recount his personal experience with the Serb and the monkey in the countryside away from the
action of the war. This ironic and melodramatic poem about a monkey unveiling a metaphysical
side becomes extremely weighty. Perhaps Khodasevich’s intention was to show that connection
can be found in the most unlikely places even during the most difficult and inhumane times.
A comparison between a hippopotamus and the “True Church” is the foundation of
Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus” from Poems (1920). The speaker ponders the actions and final
resting place of the hippopotamus and the “True Church.” Ironically, the transcendent is found in
93 In the letter dated September 9th, in the novel «Бедные люди» (Poor Folk), “His Excellency” («его
превосходительство») forgives the clerk Makar Devushkin’s mistake in an important document, presents a
hundred-ruble note to Devushkin after seeing his worn-out uniform, and shakes his hand. This handshake causes
Devushkin to feel equal to “His Excellency” and he implores Varvara Dobroselova to pray to God for “His
Excellency” because he shook his unworthy hand and thus returned him to himself, resurrected his spirit, and made
life sweeter forever.

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the hippopotamus not the “True Church.” The form of the poem reinforces this and connects
humans to the hippopotamus rather than the church. The poem’s nine stanzas read as follows:
The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.
Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.
The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.
The ‘potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

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At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.
The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way –
The Church can sleep and feed at once.
I saw the ‘potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.
He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below

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Wrapt in the old miasmal mist. (1-36)
Scholars like Rick de Villiers in his article “A Hunger for Seriousness? T. S. Eliot’s ‘The
Hippopotamus’” and Christine Meyer in her article “Some Unnoted Religious Allusions in T. S.
Eliot’s ‘The Hippopotamus’” examine the weighty and religious aspects of the poem.94 Rather
than focusing on these religious allusions or pigeonholing Eliot’s religious views to a specific
denomination, I focus on Eliot’s nuanced portrayal of the hippopotamus in the poem and its
relevance in terms of the metaphysical material debates. Without much thought, one would label
a hippopotamus as material and the “True Church” as metaphysical because the church is
constructed to help man become like God and reach the celestial realm, whereas a hippopotamus
is generally known for its aggression and size and is weighed down, tied to the terrestrial realm.
Several of the speaker’s statements, especially at the beginning of the poem, support this
94 The most obvious Biblical references in “The Hippopotamus” include mentions of the “True Church” and the
reference to Matthew 16:18 (“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my
church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”) in the second stanza: “While the True Church can never
fail / For it is based upon a rock” (lines 7-8). Another famous religious reference is to William Cowper’s religious
poem “Light Shining out of Darkness” which begins with the line “God moves in a mysterious way” and which
Eliot changes to “God works in a mysterious way” (line 23). Christine Meyer identifies a subtler reference to the
fortieth chapter of Job: “The attempt to link ‘The Hippopotamus’ to Gautier’s ‘L’Hippopotame’ in more than meter
and rhyme scheme has perhaps been responsible for the failure to note the close parallel between the description of
behemoth (identified by Biblical scholars as the hippopotamus) given in the fortieth chapter of Job and the opening
lines of Eliot’s poem” (241). Meyer notes allusions to several hymns (from the Unitarian Methodist hymnals) as
well (242-245). Rick de Villiers identifies the source of the poem’s epigraph (“And when this epistle is read among
you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans.”) as Colossians 4:16. He writes: “Eliot introduces his
own heretical twist by presenting the sentence, first, without quotation marks and, second, as complete. Uncited and
void of any signs that they are lifted from an outside text, the words marry into the body of the poem…Without any
mark of distinction to set it apart, the sacred text becomes secularised…And though the smaller and italicized font
suggests the epigraph is not quite part of the poem proper, the lack of referencing punctuation effects a divorce
between the sentence and its original spring. The apostrophe now gains proximity and immediacy, pertaining not to
an antiquarian society but to the present audience. It further transforms Eliot’s poem itself into an epistle to be read
and heeded” (64). He goes on to explain Eliot’s editing of Colossians 4:16 in his epigraph and Eliot’s use of a
second epigraph in American editions of the poem up until 1969 (64-65). Ultimately, he concludes: “The epigraph,
though it lent lucidity to its counterpart, was ultimately not included in the Collected Poems. Whatever Eliot’s
reason for the eventual omission, the epigraph taken from Colossians – when thoroughly excavated – divulges those
two vices which ‘The Hippopotamus’ attacks: spiritual pride and the submission to institutionalized codes of
behavior” (66).

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contrast. The “broad-backed” hippopotamus is “merely flesh and blood,” which is “weak and
frail, / Susceptible to nervous shock” (lines 1-6). His steps are “feeble” (line 9) and have the
potential to “err” (line 9). He is busy “compassing material ends” (line 10) and resting “his belly
in the mud” (line 2). And, at mating time, “the hippo’s voice / Betrays inflexions hoarse and
odd” (lines 17-18). The “True Church,” on the other hand, “can never fail / For it is based upon a
rock” (lines 7-8). It rejoices “at being one with God” (line 20). The poem’s structure overall
manifests the diametric relationship between the hippopotamus and the “True Church.” “The
Hippopotamus” is one of Eliot’s nineteen twenty quatrain poems and it has an alternating rhyme
scheme, a rhyme scheme which captures the essence of a comparison perfectly.
95
Nevertheless, the poem’s comic and blasphemous conclusion divulges the activity and
animism of the hippopotamus, unlike the inert and stationary church. In the final stanzas of the
poem, the “‘potamus take[s] wing / Ascending from the damp savannas” (lines 25-26). Quiring
angels surround the hippopotamus, singing and praising God in loud hosannas (lines 27-28). The
hippopotamus shall be washed clean by the blood of the Lamb, washed as white as snow by the
kisses of virgin martyrs, enfolded by heavenly arms, and be seen performing on a harp of gold
among the saints (lines 29-34). While “the True Church remains below / Wrapt in the old
miasmal mist” (lines 25 & 35-36). This surprising ending complicates one’s initial
characterizations of the hippopotamus and the “True Church.” Eliot implies, like Khodasevich in
«Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”), that the metaphysical and transcendent can be found in the most
unlikely beings. The monkey and the hippopotamus do not lose their animality but gain the
metaphysical. The hippopotamus has the capability to rise above as opposed to the powerless
95 Other nineteen twenty quatrain poems include: “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Sweeney
Among the Nightingales,” and “Whispers of Immortality.” Eliot and Ezra Pound borrowed the form from the French
poet Théophile Gautier.

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church trapped below. Moreover, Eliot suggests that institutions which are centered on the
celestial in theory can become mired in the terrestrial in practice.
This unexpected ending invites the reader to reexamine the poem. Upon close reading,
the poem’s form, especially its punctuation, rhyme, and verbs, narrows the gap between the
human and the animal. In “The Hippopotamus” the church is always capitalized and three times
out of six it has the capitalized adjective “True” before it. These occurrences of capitalization
convey importance and formality. The hippopotamus, in contrast, is always written in lowercase
letters and four times out of six it is shortened. “Hippo” appears in the third and fifth stanzas and
“potamus” in the fourth and seventh. These instances of lowercase letters and abbreviation
denote proximity and informality, implying that the speaker is talking about a close friend. In a
similar vein, the first end rhyme of the poem, hippopotamus / us, indicates that us, i.e. the reader
and the speaker, are connected to the hippopotamus.
The verbs in this poem stress the mobility and agency (however imperfect) of the
hippopotamus and the “True Church’s” immobility and passivity. In the first two stanzas of the
poem the hippopotamus’ seeming firmness is transferred to the “True Church” and his
vulnerable physical form is revealed. In the third stanza:
The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends. (9-12)

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The hippopotamus is active (taking steps) while the church is fixed (never stirring). The
alliteration “need never” reiterates the church’s rigidness. Additionally, the church is the object
not the subject of the sentence in the fourth stanza: “But fruits of pomegranate and peach /
Refresh the Church from over sea” (lines 15-16). In the fifth stanza the hippopotamus’s hoarse
and odd inflexions are heard during mating time, while “every week we hear rejoice / The
Church, at being one with God” (lines 19-20). The fact that the verb “rejoice” comes before the
subject “The Church,” which is separated and moved to the following line, reinforces the action
itself and not the church’s ability to perform the action. Grammatically, it should be “But every
week we hear The Church rejoice.” In the sixth stanza the hippopotamus is once again mobile:
“The hippopotamus’s day / Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts” (lines 21-22). In this stanza the
church “can sleep and feed at once,” but it is implied, by the dash, that this is God’s doing, not
the church’s: “God works in a mysterious way – / The Church can sleep and feed at once” (lines
23-24). In the end, the hippopotamus takes wing, ascending (lines 25-26). He is washed clean
and embraced by those in heaven. The church is stuck on earth, surrounded by a harmful
substance: “While the True Church remains below / Wrapt in the old miasmal mist” (lines 36-
36). Ultimately, the verbs linked to the hippopotamus, along with the punctuation and end
rhymes, place him closer to man. Although he errs, he is making progress. In this way, he is
more like man who sins and repents. Consequently, he ends up among the saints, washed clean,
white as snow, instead of wallowing in the mud of the damp savannas.
Continuing the idea that an animal is metaphysical, not just material, and deserving of
heaven, I turn to Khodasevich’s uncollected poem «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the
Cat Murr”).96 In this poem the speaker laments the death of his beloved cat Murr and
96 Malmstad and Hughes note that the poem was published posthumously in the journal Opyty, under the title «На
смерть Кота Мурра» (“On the Death of the Cat Murr”), with the note that these poems were given to them by Nina

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contemplates when he will join him in “those gardens beyond the fiery river” with other
distinguished poets and animals. As seen in chapter one, Khodasevich’s own experiences
influence the poem. In John Malmstad and Robert Hughes’ notes to the poem in their edited
volume of his collected works they quote Khodasevich’s wife Nina Berberova: «В 1931 году
умер черный кот Мурр и тогда же были написаны эти стихи» (“In 1931, the black cat Murr
died, and these verses were written at the same time”) (388). The poem functions as an
everlasting monument to the speaker’s esteemed friend and its form emphasizes the grave nature
of their relationship. The poem reads:
В забавах был так мудр и в мудрости забавен –
Друг утешительный и вдохновитель мой!
Теперь он в тех садах, за огненной рекой,
Где с воробьем Катулл и с ласточкой Державин.
О, хороши сады за огненной рекой,
Где черни подлой нет, где в благодатной лени
Вкушают вечности заслуженный покой
Поэтов и зверей возлюбленные тени!
Когда ж и я туда? Ускорить не хочу
Berberova (387). There are many famous Russian poems on death that begin with «На смерть» or «Смерть». For
example: Gavriil Derzhavin’s «На смерть князя Мещерского» (“On the Death of Prince Meshcherskii”), Joseph
Brodsky’s «На смерть друга» (“On the Death of a Friend”), and Mikhail Lermontov’s «Смерть поэта» (“On the
Death of a Poet”). Malmstad and Hughes also note that their publication of the poem is from Berberova’s archive
(with a white autograph, without a date) where the poem is titled «Памяти Кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat
Murr”) (387).

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Мой срок, положенный земному лихолетью,
Но к тем, кто выловлен таинственною сетью,
Все чаще я мечтой приверженной лечу. (1-12)
In amusements he was so wise and in wisdom amusing – a comforting friend and my
inspirer! Now he is in those gardens beyond the fiery river, where Catullus with the
sparrow and Derzhavin with the swallow are.
O, the gardens are good beyond the fiery river, where there is no vulgar rabble, where in
blessed laziness the beloved shades of poets and beasts partake of the well-earned peace
of eternity!
When will I go there? I do not want to accelerate my time, prescribed for terrestrial
travails, but, more and more, I am flying to those who are caught in the mysterious net
with a faithful vision.
The way the speaker approaches this devastating loss is characteristic of an elegy.97 The
reader learns of Murr’s honorable traits which are reasons for his admittance into heaven. The
speaker longs to join him in those gardens beyond the fiery river where Catullus and Derzhavin
97 In The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry Michael Wachtel defines elegy. He summarizes Konstantin
Batiushkov’s thoughts on “legkaia poeziia” (“light poetry”): “In short, Batiushkov’s vision of ‘grand genres’
corresponds closely to the ode and its ideal of ‘beautiful disorder.’ However, what for the ode is a virtue is for light
genres a vice. In the latter, everything must be carefully balanced; it cannot afford any rough edges” (72). Wachtel
continues: “While iambs are not obligatory in an elegy, they do tend to predominate, just as they did in the ode. In
contrast to the ode, however, the stanzaic structure, rhyme scheme, and number of feet per line vary widely from
elegy to elegy…Intimate feelings had no place in the ode, but they are the essence of the elegy” (73-74).
Khodasevich’s «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”) is certainly carefully balanced and personal.
Hughes explicitly labels «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”) as an elegy. In his chapter on
Khodasevich from The Bitter Air of Exile he writes: “The Russian original of this poem, in iambic hexameter, with
constant caesuras and alternating feminine and masculine rhymes, is an exquisitely realized example of elegiac
verse” (55).

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reside with their birds. He questions when this reunion will take place. These gardens are good
because there is no vulgar rabble there and poets with their beloved animals continuously partake
of the well-earned peace of eternity.98 The speaker admits that he does not want to expedite his
time on earth but is nonetheless faithfully flying after them. The speaker’s attachment to Murr is
sincere and strong. His emotional expressiveness, as evidenced by the questions and
exclamations in the poem, is reminiscent of the speaker in «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”) who
found kinship with the Serb’s monkey and not the Serb.
The Classical and literary allusions in «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat
Murr”) affirm how highly the speaker values Murr. Murr itself is a reference to E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s satirical novel The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.
99 The poem is written in
iambic hexameter, with constant caesuras, and it has both alternating and enclosed rhymes.
Hexameter is linked to Classical Latin and Greek poetry, especially epics like Homer’s Iliad. The
rich history of this meter gives Khodasevich’s poem a sense of grandeur as does the naming of
two Classical poets Gavriil Derzhavin and Gaius Valerius Catullus. Derzhavin and Catullus,
giants of world literature, wrote famous animal poems.100 The speaker’s description of the
98 I use the word “continuously” in this sentence because I am focusing on the repetitive function of the imperfective
aspect. The verb вкушать is imperfective.
99 According to Hoffmann, the inspiration for the novel was his own cat whom he considered wise and thoughtful. It
should also be noted that the Russian words for purring are мурлыкать and мурчать.
100 Catullus wrote two poems about a sparrow who is presumably the pet of his beloved Lesbia. Some scholars read
these poems as innocent, while others as obscene. After quoting Khodasevich’s «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In
Memory of the Cat Murr”), in his chapter from The Bitter Air of Exile, Hughes comments on Derzhavin: “A dirge on
the death of a friend from the animal kingdom is a relatively rare item in Russian poetry, and it is not accidental that
Khodasevich turned to the eighteenth-century poet he knew so well to find an appropriate predecessor. Derzhavin’s
poems on birds – from his metaphoric swallow, through the bullfinch who sings at the death of Suvorov, to his
peacock, swan, nightingales, and little titmouse – are uncommon phenomena; and his whimsical four-line epitaph
for a dog who fell to his death from his mistress’ lap, on hearing the news of the death of Louis XVI, is delightful”
(55). Hughes separates Khodasevich’s poem from Derzhavin and Catullus’s: “But to return to the elegy on the death
of Murr: the allusions to Catullus and Derzhavin refer to personae of love lyrics, who voice their regret at the
passing of beauty, either a real woman or her surrogate, and thus ease their grief: while Khodasevich finds his
consolation in dreaming of joining his beloved pet in the other, better world” (56).

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gardens resembles Elysium (also known as the Elysian Fields and the Elysian Plains).
101 The fact
that only the beloved shades of poets and beasts dwell in the gardens clarifies how the narrowing
of the gap or the discourse of inclusion occurs for specific animals and humans not all animals
and humans. In addition to the explicit allusions, Vsevolod Zel’chenko identifies Khodasevich’s
implicit allusions to the language and poetics of the Russian “Golden Age,” including examples
from Anton Del’vig, Afanasy Fet, and Alexander Pushkin, in his article «‘Памяти кота Мурра’
Ходасевича: Стихи о русской поэзии» (“Khodasevich’s ‘In Memoriam Kater Murr’: Verses
About Russian Poetry”). The speaker is consciously tying himself and his pet Murr to past
traditions through these Classical and literary associations.
The elevated lexicon in «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”) enhances
the poem’s weighty feel and joins it to past traditions. In the first stanza the speaker refers to
Murr as his inspirer: «вдохновитель мой» (line 2). The noun «вдохновитель» is serious and
poetic. The speaker holds Murr in high regard. Its occurrence, alongside the adjective
«утешительный» (“comforting”), recalls the «Школа гармонической точности» (“The School
of Harmonious Precision”).
102 In this school, words in a poem are selected according to their
lexical and stylistic appropriateness. They should be pleasing to the ear and not contradict one
another. Khodasevich’s poem serves as an example of this kind of harmony and precision.
In the second stanza the elevated lexicon continues, with examples of archaic and
Biblical diction. The disparity between the poets and the animals and the rest of living things is
made clear through word choice. The second stanza reads:
101 Elysium is the final resting place of the righteous, the heroic, and those chosen by the gods in Greek mythology
and religion. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Elysium is the “supposed state or abode of the blessed
after death in Greek mythology.”
102 For detailed analysis of this literary school, which included poets such as Konstantin Batiushkov and Vasilii
Zhukovskii, see Lidiia Ginzburg’s «О лирике» (On Lyric [Poetry]).

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О, хороши сады за огненной рекой,
Где черни подлой нет, где в благодатной лени
Вкушают вечности заслуженный покой
Поэтов и зверей возлюбленные тени! (5-8)103
O, the gardens are good beyond the fiery river, where there is no vulgar rabble, where in
blessed laziness the beloved shades of poets and beasts partake of the well-earned peace
of eternity!
The noun «чернь» (“rabble”) is outdated and bookish. In «Толковый словарь русского языка»
(The Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language) Dmitrii Ushakov provides the following
definitions: «То же, что простонародье» (“The same as common people”) and
«Невежественная, некультурная среда, толпа» (“Ignorant, uncultured environment, crowd”).
Ushakov then quotes from Pushkin’s «Поэт и толпа» (“The Poet and the Crowd”): «И
толковала чернь тупая…» (“And the foolish mob interpreted…”). Similarly, Sergei Ozhegov
provides the following explanations for «чернь» in «Словарь русского языка» (Dictionary of
the Russian Language): «В дворянском обществе, в высокопарно-презрительной речи:
люди, принадлежащие к непривилегированным классам» (“In noble society, in pompous and
contemptuous speech: people belonging to unprivileged classes”) and «Люди, далёкие от
духовной жизни, высоких идеалов» (“People who are far from spiritual life and high ideals”).
The speaker’s use of the word «чернь» elevates the poem’s vocabulary. He and his cat (and
103 The poets in “The School of Harmonious Precision” frequently use the word тень (shadow, shade).

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Derzhavin and Catullus and the sparrow and the swallow) are united above the vulgar crowd.
The use of «чернь» shows how stark this contrast is. After the occurrence of the word «чернь»
comes the adjective «благодатный»: «где в благодатной лени…» (“where in blessed
laziness…”) (line 6). This adjective is archaic and has religious connotations. Ushakov defines
«благодатный» as «Полный благ, довольства, счастья; радующий» (“Full of blessings,
contentment, happiness; pleasing”). «Благодатный» is grammatically connected to the nouns
«благодать» and «благо». All three of these words share the same Old Church Slavonic root
«благ».104 Biblical verses with the adjective «благодатный» and the nouns «благодать» and
«благо» accentuate the spiritual nature of the poem. 105 The speaker, Murr, and the other poets
and animals in heaven have found favor with God. After «благодатный» in the second stanza
comes the verb «вкушать» (“to partake”): «Вкушают вечности заслуженный покой…»
(“They partake of the well-earned peace of eternity…”) (line 7). This lofty word is an elevated
way to say “to taste” hence why I have translated it as “partake.” Ozhegov notes that it also
means «Ощутить, испытать» (“To feel, to experience”). As with «благодатный», the Bible
uses «вкушать».106 These verses suggest that man’s fate is directly related to his works. The
speaker, Murr, and the others deserve the peace of eternity.
104 In Fundamentals of the Structure and History of Russian: A Usage-Based Approach, linguists David K. Hart and
Grant H. Lundberg discuss TORT, TROT/TRAT, and TOROT forms. The “T” stands for any consonant, the “O”
stands for one of the vowels “о” or “е,” the “A” stands for the vowel “а,” and the “R” stands for one of the sonorants
“р” or “л.” Typically, the sequence for roots in Russian is the TOROT form but there are occurrences of the TRAT
and TROT forms. In the poem, «благ» is an example of the TRAT form. Hart and Lundberg argue that the reason
for the appearance of TRAT and TROT forms in Russian occurs because speakers of Old Russian were influenced
by OCS (which often has the TRAT and TROT forms often). OCS did not undergo полногласие (“fully voiced”)
and that is “the source of the second form in pairs such as город and -град, холод and -хлад in Russian” (170).
105 Examples of Biblical verses with the adjective «благодатный» and the nouns «благодать» and «благо» include:
1st Peter 3:7, Genesis 6:8, Luke 1:30, and Matthew 7:11.
106 Examples of Biblical verses include: Isaiah 3:10 and Proverbs 1:31. The chant sung by the choir during Russian
Orthodox communion uses this word as well.

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«Лихолетье» (“travails”) in the third stanza of «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of
the Cat Murr”) projects the intensity of the speaker’s desire to escape the terrestrial realm. The
speaker states that he does not want to accelerate his time, prescribed for terrestrial travails.
Ushakov defines «лихолетье» as «Эпоха, пора смут, потрясений, бедствий» (“An era, a time
of unrest, upheaval, disaster”). This word highlights how being matter on this earth is difficult
for the speaker. The noun «лихолетье» shares the same root as the adjective «лихой». In
«Толковый словарь живого великорусского языка» (The Explanatory Dictionary of the
Living Great Russian Language) Vladimir Dal’ states that «лихой» has two meanings. The first
being: «молодецкий, хватский, бойкий, проворный, щегольской, удалой, ухорский, смелый
и решительный» (“dashing, clever, lively, nimble, dapper, daring, smart, brave and decisive”).
The second being: «злой, злобный, мстительный; лукавый» (“angry, spiteful, vindictive; sly”).
In the context of this poem, both meanings are applicable. The speaker attests that life in the
terrestrial realm is wild, tumultuous, angry, and unpredictable. «Лихолетье» conveys how
deeply the speaker wishes to be with Murr. The final end rhyme of the poem хочу (I want) /
лечу (I fly) also affirms the speaker’s desire to fly to heaven and leave this world behind.
Finally, the repetitions, enjambments, and verbal aspect in «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In
Memory of the Cat Murr”) reveal its intricate style. The poem itself stands as a meticulously
crafted monument to Murr, well-structured like the gardens beyond the fiery river. There are
several types of repetition in this poem. There is repetition of individual letters, sounds, words,
and phrases. There are many sonorants (м, н, л, р, й) which are continuous, resonant sounds
especially in comparison with a stop or fricative. There is mirroring in the first line: «В забавах
был так мудр и в мудрости забавен» (“In amusements he was so wise and in wisdom
amusing”). In the second line the suffix «тель» repeats in «утешительный» (“comforting”) and

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«вдохновитель» (“inspirer”). The phrase «за огненной рекой» (“beyond the fiery river”)
repeats in lines three and five. There is parallelism with the word «где» (“where”). It either
begins a line or a new phrase after a caesura in the middle of the line, as captured in line four:
«Где с воробьем Катулл и с ласточкой Державин» (“Where Catullus with the sparrow and
Derzhavin with the swallow are”) and in line six: «Где черни подлой нет, где в благодатной
лени» (“Where there is no vulgar rabble, where in blessed laziness”). These repetitions create a
sense of longevity.
The enjambments in «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”), with their
conjugated imperfective verbs, are another illustration of the poem’s form emphasizing
continuity and duration. Enjambments happen at the end of lines six, seven, and nine. In these
long spanning lines, the speaker mentions eternity and his desire not to expedite his time. There
are two conjugated imperfective verbs: «Вкушают вечности заслуженный покой» (“They
partake of the well-earned peace of eternity”) and «Ускорить не хочу / Мой срок» (“I do not
want to accelerate my time”). The verbs «вкушать» (“to partake”) and «хотеть» (“to want”) are
imperfective (and «ускорить» (“to accelerate”) is perfective).107 The imperfective aspect
expresses repeated action and a focus on the process rather than the end result. The longest
statements occur when the speaker is describing a continuous action and avoiding a brief one.
This emphasis on longevity is fitting because Murr lives on like the poem and its speaker.
Considering that Khodasevich wrote this poem in nineteen thirty-four, we know that he
was familiar with and close to death. He has lost many of his loved ones and the aftermath of war
and revolution weigh heavily on him. He dies five years later on June fourteenth, nineteen thirty107 In the third and final stanza the imperfective verb «лететь» (“to fly”) is used: «Всё чаще я мечтой
приверженной лечу» (“More and more, I am flying [to those who are caught in the mysterious net] with a faithful
vision”) (line 12). The imperfective aspect conveys how the speaker is continuously flying towards Murr. He always
has him in his sights.

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nine. Khodasevich’s «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”) is undoubtedly a
serious undertaking, no matter how comic or light the subject might seem to an outside reader.
He does not take the relationship and death of his cat Murr lightly. He finds amusement, wisdom,
and comfort in Murr and other cats.
Khodasevich’s love for cats is an important aspect of his own self-fashioning. This fact is
made apparent through his poems (such as the previously analyzed «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In
Memory of the Cat Murr”)), autobiographical writings, personal correspondence, and the
recollections and statements of his contemporaries and biographers. For example, in Kanikuly
Kaina: Poetika promezhutka v berlinskikh stikhakh V. F. Khodasevicha (Cain’s Holidays: The
Poetics of the Gap in V. F. Khodasevich’s Berlin Poems) Yaroslava Ananko cites Valerii
Shubinskii and Nadezhda Teffi. They both mention Khodasevich’s predilection for cats over
dogs (874 & 189-190).108 In Khodasevich’s autobiographical excerpts on childhood
(«Младенчество») he recounts how his first words ever spoken were «Кыс, кыс!» (“Kys,
kys!”), imitating the sound of a kitten. He spoke these words when his sister Zhenya was
promenading him like a doll in a wicker pram when a kitten entered. Khodasevich compares this
memory with the famous legend of Derzhavin where his first word spoken was «Бог»
(“God”).109 Instead of little Khodasevich’s first word being familial or needs-based, or sublime
108 Ananko’s fourth chapter «Берлинский бестиарий» (“The Berlin Bestiary”) is relevant to the topic of this
chapter. Her analysis of the canine theme in Khodasevich’s poetry is excellent.
109 In «Младенчество» (“Childhood”), the account reads as follows: «Все это события до-памятные, для меня
как бы доисторические. Сюда же относится и рассказ о первом слове, мною произнесенном. Сестра Женя,
которой было тогда двенадцать лет, катала меня, как куклу, в плетеной колясочке на деревянных колесах. В
это время вошел котенок. Увидев его, я выпучил глаза, протянул руки и явственно произнес: - Кыс, кыс!
По преданию, первое слово, сказанное Державиным, было - Бог. Это, конечно, не в пример величественней.
Мне остается утешаться лишь тем, что вообще
есть же разность
Между Державиным и мной,
а еще тем, что, в конце концов, выговаривая первое слово, я понимал, что говорю, а Державин - нет.»

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like Derzhavin’s, he acknowledges the animal in front of him, extending his hands to the kitten
just as the monkey extends his black, calloused hand to the speaker in «Обезьяна» (“The
Monkey”).110
Immediately after this recounting, Khodasevich recalls an incident from his life in Paris
decades later. One sees the discourse of inclusion in this episode:
Любовь к кошкам проходит через всю мою жизнь, и меня радует, что с их стороны
пользуюсь я взаимностью. Мне нравится заводить с ними летучие уличные
знакомства, и признаюсь, моему самолюбию льстит, когда бродячий и одичалый
кот по моему зову подходит ко мне, жмется к ногам, мурлычет и идет за мной
следом. Несколько лет тому назад, поздно вечером, познакомился я с одним таким
зверем у Pont de Passy. Немного поговорив, мы пошли вместе, сперва по
набережной, потом по авеню Боске. Он не отставал от меня и на рю Сен-Доминик,
по которой двигалось много народу, расходившегося с декоративной выставки. Как
истые парижане, мы зашли в бистро и выпили: я - рюмку коньяку, он - блюдечко
молока. Потом он проводил меня до дому и, судя по всему, был не прочь остаться
со мной, но, к несчастью, я жил в отеле.
Hughes translates this section from «Младенчество» into English in The Bitter Air of Exile as: “My sister Zhenya,
who was twelve at the time, was promenading me like a doll in a little wicker pram with wooden wheels. Just then a
kitten came it. Seeing it, and popping my eyes, I stretched out my arms and pronounced distinctly: ‘Kithy, kithy!’
According to legend the first word spoken by Derzhavin was ‘God.’ This is of course incomparably more sublime. I
can only be comforted because on the whole
there is a difference
Between Derzhavin and me,
and also because, in getting out my first word, I understood, after all, what I was saying, and Derzhavin did not”
(53).
110 Khodasevich uses the same verb to describe the gesture. In «Младенчество» (“Childhood”) he extended his
hands («протянул руки») and in «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”) she extended her hand («Мне черную, мозолистую
руку, / Еще прохладную от влаги, протянула») (lines 31-32).

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The love for cats runs through my whole life, and I am glad that they reciprocate. I like to
make casual street acquaintances with them, and I confess that it flatters my vanity when
a stray and feral cat comes up to me at my call, clings to my feet, purrs and follows me.
Several years ago, late in the evening, I met one such animal near Pont de Passy. After
talking a little, we walked together, first along the embankment, then along Bosque
Avenue. He did not lag behind me on the Rue Saint-Dominique, along which a lot of
people were moving, leaving the decorative exhibition. Like true Parisians, we went into
the bistro and drank: I had a glass of cognac, he had a saucer of milk. Then he walked me
home and, apparently, was not averse to staying with me, but, unfortunately, I lived in a
hotel.
Khodasevich admits that cats stroke his ego when they show him affection. The Russian verb
познакомиться means to meet or become acquainted with someone (predominantly human) or
to get insight into something (predominantly inanimate). In Khodasevich’s scenario, one would
expect a verb like встретить which means to see, to meet, to find, to encounter, or to come
across. Khodasevich views this cat as an equal. This cat speaks, walks, and drinks with him
across the city. As an émigré, Khodasevich was not one to feel at home in Paris so the fact that
he and this cat are able to drink in the bistro “like real Parisians” is remarkable. This animal
helps him fit in in this foreign city. This genteel cat walks him home and would have stayed to
keep him company if the hotel permitted it. He can communicate and feel with him, as the
speakers in the two poems analyzed by Khodasevich in this chapter «Обезьяна» (“The

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Monkey”) and «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”). An animal’s company is
just as valuable, if not preferable, to that of a human.
Khodasevich repeatedly writes of cats in «Младенчество» (“Childhood”). Three cats, in
particular, appear in the memoir: Nal, Murr, and Zaychunov. Robert Hughes summarizes these
moments nicely in his chapter from The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West 1922-
1972: “Khodasevich does not indulge himself in a Disneyesque anthropomorphizing when he
reviews the traits that he finds so admirable in cats” (54). Hughes quotes Khodasevich when
listing these traits. These quotations underscore the metaphysical nature of cats in Khodasevich’s
opinion. They are wise, dreamy, brave, philosophical, proud, independent, and aware of
themselves. There is no hint of obsequiousness in their friendship. They are far more than
material bodies which live without thinking.
Khodasevich’s view of animals, cats and mice in particular, impacts his romantic
relationships. Based on his reading of unpublished letters of Khodasevich to his wife Anna
Ivanovna Khodasevich, David Bethea notes that “Khodasevich affectionately called Nyura
‘Mysh’ (‘Mouse’) in his letters to her” (97). Khodasevich frames their relationship in a playful
manner – he is the cat and she is the mouse. In a similar fashion, I found a note which
Khodasevich wrote to Nina Berberova wherein, instead of signing his name at the end, he writes
«Ваша» (“Your”) and draws a cat.
111
111 I found this note in “The Nina Berberova Papers,” in her correspondence with Khodasevich, housed at the
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. In English, it reads: “Oh, Ninichek, how sweet and
cute you are! Forgive me for expressing myself so openly, but I cannot not speak out! Your [cat]”

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Image A
Khodasevich draws the backside of the cat and uses pieces of his own hair as the cat’s whiskers.
This note is an excellent illustration of Khodasevich’s affinity for cats. Khodasevich attaches his
own bodily matter to the cat in this note, solidifying their connection.
Khodasevich is not the only one to see cats in a favorable and personable way. Eliot
writes himself and his personal relationships into Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
112 Eliot
wrote these cat poems for his godchildren and children of friends – Tom Faber, Alison Tandy,
Susan Wolcott, and Susanna Morley. Numerous cats and several dogs are introduced in this
collection. The speaker describes each animal in such a way that it is easy to discern their virtues
and vices.113 Before delving into the peculiarities of their personalities, the speaker notes their
112 I comment on the gutter cat in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” in the first chapter and the feeding leopards in part
II of “Ash-Wednesday” in the next chapter. In addition to these cats, one of Eliot’s most famous is the description of
fog in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The
yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, / Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, /
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, / Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, / Slipped by
the terrace, made a sudden leap, / And seeing that it was a soft October night, / Curled once about the house, and fell
asleep” (lines 15-22). As the speaker’s mind meanders, so does the weather.
113 Macavity from “Macavity: the Mystery Cat” is a negative type – “the master criminal who can defy the Law”
(line 2), “the bafflement of Scotland Yard” (line 3), and “all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known” (line
39) are “nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time / Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of

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physical attributes, especially their coats, eyes, whiskers, tails, purrs, paws, and sounds.114 They
do not lose their feline traits. Similarly, Khodasevich’s monkey and Eliot’s hippopotamus do not
lose their animality as the gap between the human and the animal diminishes. The original title
for this collection was Mr. Eliot’s Book of Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats as Recited to Him by
the Man in White Spats and the publishing house Faber & Faber announced a nineteen thirty-six
publication date. Eliot delayed publication for several years and finally released the poems under
the title Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats on October fifth nineteen thirty-nine. John
Hayward is the inspiration for the human in the original title “The Man in the White Spats.” In
the published version John is not the reciter but he still makes an appearance in the poem
“Bustopher Jones: the Cat About Town.” Russell Murphy in his commentary on the collection
explains that “Old Possum,” in the new title, is Pound’s nickname for Eliot: “…referring to what
Pound perceived to be Eliot’s ability, possumlike, to play at being what he was not, as the
Crime!” (lines 41-42). Jennyanydots from “The Old Gumbie Cat” is a positive type – an ideal housewife. When the
family has fallen asleep, she ensures that the non-human inhabitants of the house, namely mice and cockroaches, are
behaving properly. Khodasevich also has a poem concerned with the behavior of mice titled «Разговор человека с
мышкой, которая ест его книги» (“A Conversation Between a Man and a Mouse Which Eats His Books”) (1920).
This poem, like Eliot’s collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, is humorous and the intended audience is
likely a child. Nevertheless, it has serious undertones. In this poem the speaker shames a mouse for gnawing on his
books, reflects on what one can learn from books and journals, and advises the mouse to follow his example by
eating a cookie rather than books.
114 Here are several examples. From “The Old Gumbie Cat”: “I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is
Jennyanydots; / Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots” (lines 1-2). From “Growltiger’s
Last Stand”: “His manners and appearance did not calculate to please; / His coat was torn and seedy, he was baggy
at the knees; / One ear was somewhat missing, no need to tell you why, / And he scowled upon a hostile world from
one forbidding eye” (lines 5-8). From “The Song of the Jellicles”: “Jellicle Cats are black and white, / Jellicle Cats
are rather small; / Jellicle Cats are merry and bright, / And pleasant to hear when they caterwaul” (lines 1-4). From
“Mr. Mistoffelees”: “He is quiet and small, he is black / From his ears to the tip of his tail; / He can creep through
the tiniest crack / He can walk on the narrowest rail” (lines 23-26). From “Macavity: the Mystery Cat”: “Macavity’s
a ginger cat, he’s very tall and thin; / You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in. / His brow is
deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed; / His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed. /
He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake; / And when you think he’s half asleep, he’s
always wide awake” (lines 11-16). From “Gus: the Theatre Cat”: “His coat’s very shabby, he’s thin as a rake, / And
he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake” (lines 5-6).

108
possum plays dead to thwart the plans of potential predators” (350).115 In a letter to Virginia
Woolf, Eliot writes a poem as Possum explaining his silence, his recent ailments, and his desire
to see her next week:
Image B
115 In his article “T.S. Eliot’s Autobiographical Cats” Henry Hart notes that “Eliot signed letters to Pound POS
SUM, which in Latin means ‘I am able to’” (402).

109
Similar to Khodasevich’s correspondence, animals play a significant role in Eliot’s selffashioning and personal interactions. They understand themselves in animal terms, once again
reducing the gap.116
In his article “T. S. Eliot’s Autobiographical Cats” Henry Hart discusses Eliot’s decision
to focus on cats rather than dogs in the collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and
summarizes Eliot’s bias for cats:
During the book’s slow gestation he decided to abandon his plan to focus on dogs, which
had never exerted the same appeal on his imagination as cats. The dogs that did appear
had little to recommend them. They were gullible simpletons, lower-class British louts, or
heathenish foreigners who disturbed the peace by carousing and brawling in London’s
streets. Dogs represented what he called in The Idea of a Christian Society (a collection
of lectures published several weeks after his cat poems) the “illiterate and uncritical
mob…detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass
suggestion.” They were heathens in need of enlightenment and discipline from Christian
cats. (379-380)
Hart continues to highlight the Christian nature of the cats in Eliot’s poems: “While dogs appear
to have unregenerate ‘simple soul[s]’ and undisciplined appetites that keep them bound to the
secular world, Eliot’s cats have complex souls that allow for redemption. Cats may at times act
like hellish fiends, but they aspire to virtue and in some cases attain sainthood” (382).
Thormählen notices the unfavorable representation of dogs in the Old Testament and in Eliot’s
poems: “Previous scholars have drawn attention to the Old Testament representations of dogs as
unclean, contemptible creatures, and Eliot’s dogs certainly carry such associations in varying
116 This letter is believed to be from the year nineteen forty and is located in “T. S. Eliot collection of papers” in The
New York Public Library’s Berg Collection.

110
degrees” (30). Thormählen also notes how the poor qualities of humans are found in Eliot’s dogs
and how Baudelaire is more charitable in his approach: “To the Frenchman, the ‘good dogs’ are
worthy of respect because they are like the best and worst of us humans; to Eliot, the
disagreeable qualities of human beings seem particularly repellent in that they remind him of
dogs. In short, the dog’s being a ‘friend to men’ is hardly a compliment to either species” (28-
29). 117 Not all animals and humans are created equal, as in Khodasevich’s «Памяти кота
Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”) where poets and their favorite animals are placed above
the vulgar crowd.
Hart provides personal as well as political explanations for Eliot’s negative relationship
with dogs:
His wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, from whom he had separated in 1933 after years of
painful skirmishing, had joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists on December
5,1934. During the years Eliot composed his cat poems (from about 1932 to 1938), the
histrionic Vivienne often dressed up in a fascist uniform and aggressively pursued Eliot
around London with her feisty Yorkshire terrier, Polly. (380)
Hart details one moment in particular when Vivienne confronted Eliot at a Sunday Times book
fair. Eliot did his best to stay composed, but “According to Vivienne’s biographer, Carole
Seymour-Jones, Vivienne and her dog virtually chased Eliot off the stage” (380). Hart
characterizes Eliot and Vivienne’s estranged relationship as “a dog-like, or dog-and-cat-like,
war” (381). In their romantic relationships Khodasevich and Eliot are both cats, but Khodasevich
is playfully and sweetly pursuing his beloved whereas Eliot is evading his aggressor. Throughout
the article, Hart identifies where Eliot’s persona is depicted in the collection, especially in those
117 Edward Gorey’s illustrations take on this bias well. The cats’ features are well defined whereas the dogs’ are
virtually nonexistent. They look more like amorphous blobs (in his line art style). See Appendix for visuals.

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poems where cats are elusive tricksters. Hart also quotes Eliot’s contemporaries who describe
Eliot in catlike terms, focusing on his luminous eyes which could spring out any moment and his
fiery core of impatience (402). Vivienne and her feisty Yorkshire terrier Polly, as noted by Hart,
appear in the poem “Of the Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles” in Old Possum’s Book
of Practical Cats. Hart identifies other figures from Eliot’s personal life, besides John Hayward
and Vivienne and Polly, in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. For example, he sees a
connection between the practical cat in the poem “The Old Gumbie Cat” and Eliot’s nurse-maid
Annie Dunne who was like a mother to Eliot in St. Louis (400).
Rather than fixating on who is who in each poem of Old Possum’s Book of Practical
Cats, I explore the metaphysical essence of the uniquely individual cats in the collection. In the
previous chapter material objects dominate but Khodasevich’s lyrical personae have a more
coherent and stable identity and presence than Eliot’s. The poems in Old Possum’s Book of
Practical Cats, unlike those in chapter one, describe cats with specific and singular personalities,
albeit some are more respectable than others. In Russell Murphy’s commentary on Old Possum’s
Book of Practical Cats he stresses the independent nature of cats: “Cats do as they please, and
their self-possessed swagger is no laughing matter” (349). Old Possum’s practical cats are selfsufficient, lively, and cunning.
Although these cats are primarily described through another’s perspective, in the manner
of an adult speaking familiarly and playfully to a child, they maintain their individuality and, in
some cases, they speak for themselves. Cats are quoted or are the lyrical speaker in two poems
from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats: “Gus: the Theatre Cat” and “Cat Morgan Introduces
Himself.”118 Morgan and Gus verbalize their opinions and experiences. In the first stanza of
118 In the poem “Skimbleshanks: the Railway Cat” the speaker explains how Skimble establishes order on the train.
Although Skimble does not speak directly, the poem ends with the speaker giving voice to Skimble’s tail: “When

112
“Gus: the Theatre Cat” Old Possum describes Morgan using the third person. A shift occurs in
the second stanza when Gus chronicles his past acting achievements using the first person.
119 In
his prime, he could do it all and his greatest creation is “Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.” In
the third and final stanza of the poem Gus claims that the theatre is certainly not what it was
before and that nothing will equal his “Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.”120 “Cat Morgan
Introduces Himself” is the last poem in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The idiosyncrasies
of his voice (unusual pronunciation and compressing of words) drive the poem.121 Morgan, using
the first person, explains things like what he used to do for work, what he does now, what he is
partial to, and how he looks and behaves. He even signs his name, in capital letters, at the end of
the poem: “MORGAN.” Morgan and Gus are thinking beings who can communicate well in
rhymed lines no less.
you get to Gallowgate there you do not have to wait – / For Skimbleshanks will help you to get out! / He gives you a
wave of his long brown tail / Which says: ‘I’ll see you again! / You’ll meet without fail on the Midnight Mail / The
Cat of the Railway Train.’”
119 The second stanza reads: “‘I have played,’ so he says, ‘every possible part, / And I used to know seventy
speeches by heart. / I’d extemporize back-chat, I knew how to gag, / And I knew how to let the cat out of the bag. / I
knew how to act with my back and my tail; / With an hour of rehearsal, I never could fail. / I’d a voice that would
soften the hardest of hearts, / Whether I took the lead, or in character parts. / I have sat by the bedside of poor Little
Nell; / When the Curfew was rung, then I swung on the bell. / In the Pantomime season I never fell flat, / And I once
understudied Dick Whittington’s Cat. / But my grandest creation, as history will tell, / Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend
of the Fell.’”
120 The final lines of the poem read as follows: “And he says: ‘Now, these kittens, they do not get trained / As we did
in the days when Victoria reigned. / They never get drilled in a regular troupe, / And they think they are smart, just
to jump through a hoop.’ / And he’ll say, as he scratches himself with his claws, / ‘Well, the Theatre’s certainly not
what it was. / These modern productions are all very well, / But there’s nothing to equal, from what I hear tell, / That
moment of mystery / When I made history / As Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.’”
121 The poem’s twenty lines (five quatrains) read as follows: “I once was a Pirate what sailed the ’igh seas – / But
now I’ve retired as a com-mission-aire: / And that’s how you find me a-takin’ my ease / And keepin’ the door in a
Bloomsbury Square. / I’m partial to partridges, likewise to grouse, / And I favour that Devonshire cream in a bowl; /
But I’m allus content with a drink on the ’ouse / And a bit o’ cold find when I done me patrol. / I ain’t got much
polish, me manners is gruff, / But I’ve got a good coat, and I keep meself smart; / And everyone says, and I guess
that’s enough; / ‘You can’t but like Morgan, ’e’s got a good ’art.’ / I got knocked about on the Barbary Coast, / And
me voice it ain’t no sich melliferous horgan; / But yet I can state, and I’m not one to boast, / That some of the gals is
dead keen on old Morgan. / So if you ’ave business with Faber – or Faber – / I’ll give you this tip, and it’s worth a
lot more: / You’ll save yourself time, and you’ll spare yourself labour / If jist you make friends with the Cat at the
door.” One can sense Eliot’s own voice in the final quatrain of the poem with the reference to Faber & Faber.

113
The proper way to name and address a cat is a serious matter in Old Possum’s Book of
Practical Cats, especially in the poems “The Naming of Cats” and “The Ad-dressing of Cats.”122
In these poems it is indisputable that cats are unique, deserving of respect, and contemplative.
Although their characters are varied, like humans, parts of them remain inaccessible. At the
beginning of “The Ad-dressing of Cats” the speaker reminds the reader of the various types of
Cats included in the collection:
You’ve read of several kinds of Cat,
And my opinion now is that
You should need no interpreter
To understand their character.
You now have learned enough to see
That Cats are much like you and me
And other people whom we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better, some are worse –
But all may be described in verse. (1-12)123
122 The poem “Cat Morgan Introduces Himself” was added at the end of the nineteen fifty-two edition.
123 This idea that humans and animals can be described in verse is reminiscent of a minor poem by Eliot, wherein the
speaker states that humans and animals share the same fate. In “Five-Finger Exercises,” Part II “Lines to a Yorkshire
Terrier,” the speaker states: “Pollicle dogs and cats all must / Jellicle cats and dogs all must / Like undertakers, come
to dust” (lines 20-22).

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After this reminder, the speaker spends twenty lines asserting that cats are not dogs. Then the
speaker explains how they bow and take off their hat before addressing a cat and advises the
reader to do the same. Finally, the speaker urges the reader to bring some offering, usually a type
of food, to earn the cat’s friendship:
But we’ve not got so far as names.
Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem
Is needed, like a dish of cream;
And you might now and then supply
Some caviare, or Strassburg Pie,
Some potted grouse, or salmon paste –
He’s sure to have his personal taste…
A Cat’s entitled to expect
These evidences of respect.
And so in time you reach your aim,
And finally call him by his NAME. (51-59 & 64-67)
“The Naming of Cats,” the first poem of the collection, discusses the multiple names of cats. The
poem reads as follows:
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,

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It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey –
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter –
But all of them, sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum –
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover –
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

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The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name. (1-31)124
The final lines of this poem substantiate the gap between the human and the animal.125 The cat
alone knows his last and final name. No human inquiry can discover it. One’s name is the
cornerstone of identity. These cats can safeguard their sense of self by not confessing their name.
The form of “The Naming of Cats” articulates a cat’s meditative demeanor and the
gravity regarding its name. As the speaker clarifies the different types of names that a cat has,
and in what occasions they should be used, the capitalization emphasizes the seriousness and
formality of the process and draws the reader’s attention to what is most important.126 For
example, the title of the poem, “The Naming of Cats,” with its capitalized letters, repeats in the
first line of the poem: “The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter.” In the concluding line of the
poem “name” is capitalized once again: “Deep and inscrutable singular Name.” In the fourth line
124 Possum’s cats are arguably the most anthropomorphized beings in this dissertation, but this poem testifies that
not all aspects of cats are comparable or knowable to humans. This distinction is paramount. Generally speaking, I
agree with Bennett’s take on anthropomorphism: “In a vital materialism, an anthropomorphic element in perception
can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances – sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than
would be possible were the universe to have a hierarchical structure…it [anthropomorphizing], oddly enough, works
against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a
nonhuman ‘environment’” (99, 120).
125 Gorey’s illustrations perform the same function. He frequently draws cats (in motion or in repose) above humans
or facing the reader while the humans or other animals face away. See Appendix for visuals.
126 In line sixty-seven of “The Ad-dressing of Cats” “name” is in all capital letters.

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entire words are capitalized: “a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.” More capitalized
words appear in line twenty-four when the speaker discusses the last name that a cat has, the one
that no human research can discover: “But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never
confess.” These capitalizations are emphatic and express that, ultimately, only the cat
comprehends its true and complete name.
The internal and end rhymes of the poem reiterate the originality of a cat’s name, their
mental capacity, and the playful yet serious tone of the poem and the collection overall. “The
Naming of Cats” has an alternating rhyme scheme. The end rhyme quorum / Jellylorum captures
the overall tone of the poem nicely. The word “quorum” denotes something formal, dealing with
a governmental, legal, religious, or political body, but Eliot’s neologism “Jellylorum” is comic
and ridiculous. The second end rhyme of the poem, games / NAMES, initially suggests that a
cat’s name is something silly, but this is not the speaker’s intention.127 His opinion is direct and
transparent – it is a difficult matter, not one of your holiday games. The internal and end rhymes
found in lines thirteen through sixteen emphasize the necessity of a cat’s individual name. The
lines read:
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride? (13-16)
127 In “The Ad-dressing of Cats” the end rhyme games / names is used again but “names” is not capitalized.
However, “The Ad-dressing of Cats” has coupled not alternating rhymes.

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A cat’s perpendicular and lively tail is one of its essential body parts. Through the rhymes in
these lines, the speaker suggests that a cat cannot exist without its particular and peculiar name.
It is as vital as its perpendicular tail, without it they would have no dignity nor pride. A cat’s
name carries weight and differentiates them from others. The weight of a name is conveyed
formally because subsequent end rhymes also stress “ame.” These words, which stress “ame,”
include: games, NAMES, James, names, dames, names, same, name, Name (lines 2, 4, 6, 8, 10,
12, 26, 28, 31). The other end rhymes are distinct and do not repeat themselves (matter / hatter,
daily / Bailey, sweeter / Demeter, particular / perpendicular, dignified / pride, quorum /
Jellylorum, Coricopat / cat, over / discover, guess / confess, meditation / contemplation, effable,
Effanineffable).
The diction, repetitions, and enjambments at the end of the “The Naming of Cats”
accentuate a cat’s metaphysical side. The poem concludes with the speaker’s remarks on a cat’s
final name. The end rhyme meditation / contemplation succinctly expresses a cat’s ability to
ruminate and ponder. The structure of lines twenty-seven through thirty-one in particular, with
their enjambments and repetitions, emphasize how a cat can get lost in deep contemplation. They
can think of their name for extended lengths of time, over and over again, exactly like the drawnout and repetitious sentence in the poem. The Oxford English Dictionary lists “ineffable” as both
an adjective and a noun.
128 When used as an adjective, as in Eliot’s poem, it has several
meanings. Firstly: “That cannot be expressed or described in language; too great for words;
transcending expression; unspeakable, unutterable, inexpressible.” This definition has religious
connotations. “Ineffable” emerges when speaking of the grandeur and mercy of God. His power
128 The two definitions given by the Oxford English Dictionary for “ineffable” as a noun are colloquial and slang.
The first is plural: “Trousers. (A humorous euphemism: cf. inexpressibles, unmentionables).” The second is: “One
not to be mentioned or named; an anonymous journalist, etc.; an ‘unutterable’ swell.”

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is so immense that it cannot be adequately expressed in words. For example, in William
Tyndale’s translation of Second Corinthians chapter nine verse fifteen it reads: “Thankes be unto
God for his ineffable gyfte.”129 The second definition of “ineffable” (as an adjective) is: “That
must not be uttered; not to be disclosed or made known.” Thirdly: “That cannot be uttered or
pronounced; unpronounceable.” Its fourth definition is obsolete and mathematical: “That cannot
be expressed in terms of rational quantities; irrational, absurd.” The speaker’s use of the word
“inscrutable” in the last line also highlights the deep nature of a cat and its unique name. Humans
cannot understand it. The Oxford English Dictionary lists “effable” as an adjective whose
meanings are obsolete. The first definition is: “Of sounds, letters, etc.: That can be pronounced.”
The second: “That can be, or may lawfully be, expressed or described in words. Now only
archaic in antithesis to ineffable.” The placement of “ineffable” followed by “effable,” and then
the neologism “effanineffable,” in “The Naming of Cats,” speaks to my notion of metaphysical
materiality. That which is too transcendent for words is metaphysical and that which can be
expressed in words is material. In Eliot’s view, cats are metaphysical and material, even down to
their names.
In Khodasevich and Eliot’s so-called “comic,” “childish,” “satirical,” “ironic,” and
“light” poems «Обезьяна» (“The Monkey”), «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat
Murr”), “The Hippopotamus,” and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats animals are taken
seriously. Both poets reflect on sources of knowledge and tradition and life after death in these
poems. The animals analyzed in this chapter extend comfort, amusement, redemption, and
understanding especially in hard times. They have a monumental impact on the speakers.
Animals play a key role in Eliot and Khodasevich’s own self-fashioning – they appear in their
129 In the King James Version this verse reads: “Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift.”

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personal as well as professional writings. Considering the poems from chapter one, wherein
Khodasevich and Eliot’s speakers felt isolated from the rest of the world and powerless before
animate and forceful objects, the fact that the speakers in these poems connect more with animals
than humans is only logical. Nevertheless, Khodasevich and Eliot never conflate humans and
animals.

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Chapter 3: Metaphysical and Macabre Remains in Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot’s
Poems
Human bodies, in all conditions, are fruitful ground for Khodasevich and Eliot. In
countless poems by them one finds hung, stuffed, severed, disabled, diseased, and barraged
bodies as well as skeletons, skulls, and empty eye sockets. There is a particular fixation on the
head and its various parts.130 The realities of life in the Modernist era, not a push for diversity or
representation, motivate Khodasevich and Eliot’s inclusion of these types of bodies in their
poetry. The First World War and the Russian Revolution brought Khodasevich and Eliot into
contact with “incomplete” or “partial” bodies. In the introduction to her book Reconstructing the
Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World Ana Carden-Coyne writes:
The First World War destroyed human bodies on an unprecedented scale. Modern
technologies mangled faces, blew away limbs, and ruined nerves. Ten million dead,
twenty million severe casualties, and eight million people with permanent disabilities,
modern war obliterated with unsparing, mechanical efficiency. (1)
These bodies became visible in the period. Eliot dedicates his first collection, Prufrock and
Other Observations (1917), to his friend from Paris, Jean Verdenal, who died in the war on the
130 In “Morning at the Window” (from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)) and «Берлинское» (“Berlin
View”) (1922) (from «Европейская ночь» (European Night) (1927)), for example, both speakers see severed heads
in a window’s reflection. The severed, lifeless, night-stricken image of his own head sickens Khodasevich’s speaker:
«И проникая в жизнь чужую, / Вдруг с отвращеньем узнаю / Отрубленную, неживую, / Ночную голову мою»
(“And while I’m gazing at this alien / life, I jolt, to find instead / I’m sickened by the severed, lifeless / nightstricken image of my head”) (lines 17-20). The English translation is Peter Daniels’ (131). The hovering, aimless
smile and the twisted faces from passers-by on the street sicken Eliot’s speaker: “The brown waves of fog toss up to
me / Twisted faces from the bottom of the street, / And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts / An aimless smile
that hovers in the air / And vanishes along the level of the roofs” (lines 5-9).

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second of May nineteen fifteen in the Dardanelles.
131 In a letter to his close friend and literary
critic Mikhail Gershenzon in November of nineteen twenty-two Khodasevich compares his
experience in exile to the sensation of a phantom limb:
У меня бывает такое чувство, что я сидел-сидел на мягком диване, очень удобно,
— а ноги-то отекли, надо встать — не могу…Я здесь [в эмиграции] не равен себе, а
я здесь минус что-то, оставленное в России, при том болящее и зудящее, как
отрезанная нога, которую чувствую нестерпимо отчетливо, а возместить не могу
ничем.
I sometimes have the feeling that I have been sitting around on a soft sofa, very
comfortably – but my legs are swollen, I need to get up – I cannot…I am not equal to
myself here [in emigration], but here I am minus something left behind in Russia, at the
same time it hurts and itches, like a severed leg, which I feel unbearably clearly, but I
cannot compensate for with anything.132
Khodasevich and Eliot’s personal circumstances during the first half of the twentieth century,
and those of Europeans more generally, explain why bodies are not “whole” in their poems.
Their desire for “whole,” “complete,” or “healthy” bodies are examples of the normative, social
constructs surrounding the human body that scholars like Ana Carden-Coyne,
Maren Linett, and Stacy Alaimo combat in their works.
133
131 Some scholars, including John Peter and James E. Miller, interpret The Waste Land as an elegy to Jean Verdenal,
identifying the Frenchman as Phlebas the Phoenician. For more information on Verdenal, see George Watson’s
seminal article “Quest for a Frenchman.”
132 Pavel Uspenskii quotes this letter as part of his argumentation in his article «Эмиграция как парад уродов:
Почему в поздних стихах Ходасевича все увечные» (“Emigration as a Parade of Freaks: Why Everyone is
Crippled in Khodasevich’s Late Poems”).
133 See Linett’s Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature and Alaimo’s
Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self.

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As Khodasevich and Eliot reflect on the crushing effects of war, revolution, and
emigration, their poems, «В Петровском парке» (“In Petrovsky Park”), «Золото» (“Gold”), The
Waste Land, “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash-Wednesday” in particular, are teeming with bodies in
various states of decay. These are the poems I focus on in this chapter. I track a progression in
these poems, a movement from despair to hope. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men”
reach out for the metaphysical through their form and speakers’ statements but the bodies in
these poems are not lively. All three – the form, content, and bodies in “Ash-Wednesday” – are
lively as they speak with God. In Khodasevich’s «В Петровском парке» (“In Petrovsky Park”)
and «Золото» (“Gold”) the form, content, and bodies are animate even in the face of death.
Although humans are finite, the speakers in these macabre poems by Khodasevich and Eliot
believe that sometimes something else remains. All five poems in this chapter have highly
religious undertones. Eliot’s speakers directly invoke a divine presence. Khodasevich’s speakers
do not but the imagery and formal techniques of «В Петровском парке» (“In Petrovsky Park”)
and «Золото» (“Gold”) rely on to the Resurrection myth. New Materialists would not approve of
naïve hope. Bennett declares: “A vital materialism is more thoroughly nontheistic in
presentation: the out-side has no messianic promise” (16-17). They do not apply the labels
“whole,” “healthy,” or “complete,” when analyzing bodies.
The long and storied history of Eliot’s colossal poem The Waste Land (1922) regarding
its composition, publication, interpretation, and reception is vast. Recounting this history lies
outside the scope of this dissertation.134 Instead, I focus on its depiction of wasting bodies and its
yearning for something metaphysical. The specific types of bodies include: the dehumanized and
fragmented bodies of city workers, dead bodies and bones, and sexually mistreated bodies. These
134 See Bibliography, especially Lawrence Rainey’s “Introduction” to The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s
Contemporary Prose, Yale University Press, 2005.

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bodies come from parts I-IV of The Waste Land. After they have been amassed, I elucidate the
redemptive power of part V.
The final stanza of part I “The Burial of the Dead” is set in urban London. The speaker
describes men on their way to work in a dehumanized manner:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. (60-68)
In these lines the men lose their individuality and agency. They are a crowd that flows, not
individuals moving as single bodies. Death has undone them. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the primary meaning of the verb “to undo” is “to unfasten and open a door, gate, or
window.” The secondary meaning of the verb “to undo” is “to annul, cancel, rescind, (something
done, effected, or decided on); to reduce the condition of not having been done, effected,
decided, etc.” When considering these standard definitions of the verb, the men are more like
inanimate objects or actions taken by humans, not human beings themselves. Eliot’s use of
“undo” in the poem is striking. The metaphysical side of the men is absent. Although they sigh,

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which shows they are human, their sighs are short and infrequent, accentuating how they are
wasting away. Importantly, there is no possessive pronoun in the line: “Sighs, short and
infrequent, were exhaled” (line 64). The sixth line of the stanza, not the first, announces their
gender: “And each man fixed his eyes before his feet” (line 65). This posture makes them more
like automatons. These men have nothing to look up to or forward to. They get lost in the crowd
and in the routine. Death, and the dead sound that comes from the final stroke of nine initiating
the start of a workday, are clearly in control. The descriptions of these bodies recall Eliot’s
earlier poems from the first chapter of this dissertation. In “Preludes,” for example, body parts
perform actions, like the hands raising dingy shades and the trampling, insistent feet.
This section of The Waste Land takes place in the financial district of London where Eliot
used to work for Lloyds Bank. In his notes Eliot remarks that he often noticed this phenomenon,
i.e. the crowd flowing over London Bridge and up and down King William Street with Saint
Mary Woolnoth (an Anglican Church) keeping time. Part I occurs at the start of the workday,
while part III occurs at the end of the workday. Individuals at work are again described in a
detached and mechanical way, there is nothing metaphysical about them: “At the violet hour,
when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits / Like a taxi
throbbing waiting” (lines 215-217). Instead of stating that the workers look up at the violet hour,
the speaker uses synecdoche. Their selves are reduced to their eyes and backs. Their bodies are
likened unto the engine of a taxi throbbing and waiting. In this Modern world, they are not fully
alive. The motorcycle and two automobiles in Khodasevich’s «Соррентинские фотографии»
(“Sorrento Photographs”) and «Автомобиль» (“The Automobile”), from the first chapter of this
dissertation, have more agency than these workers. They are in motion, unlike these
bodies/engines that are throbbing and waiting.

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In addition to the crowd of undone men in part I and the human engines throbbing at their
desks in part III, there is a buried corpse in the final stanza of part I “The Burial of the Dead.”
The speaker questions if the buried corpse has begun to sprout, showing signs of rebirth, but the
section concludes pessimistically:
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!’ (69-76)
The reference to Mylae is unexpected given the previous lines in part I depict men on their way
to work in the financial district of polluted London. One would expect a reference to a World
War I naval battle, not one from the First Punic War.135 Nevertheless, Eliot’s point is that war
and the urban Modern world always produce corpses, bodies that are unable to grow or rest in
peace. The speaker calls out to Stetson asking about the corpse he planted in his garden last year.
He questions whether it has begun to sprout or if it will bloom this year. Instead of a response
from Stetson, the reader is left with another question from the speaker – “Or has the sudden frost
135 The Battle of Mylae took place in 260 BC. It was a key Roman victory and the first battle where the Roman ship
the corvus was used. Key naval battles of World War I include Heligoland Bight (1914 & 1917), Dogger Bank
(1915), and Jutland (1916).

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disturbed its bed?” This one-sided conversation, so typical of The Waste Land, continues with
the speaker advising the dog be kept away from the body because it might try to dig it up again.
In this passage Eliot plays with the well-known cliché that a dog is a man’s best friend. The
dog’s loyalty would drive him to dig up the corpse. Their connection is similar to the speaker and
Murr’s in Khodasevich’s «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”).
An animal is a faithful companion even after death.
Thormählen mentions certain scholars who have interpreted the dog in this passage of
The Waste Land as an allusion to the Dog Star Sirius or something more literary and elusive
(24).136 Many of these scholars base their exegeses on the capitalization of “Dog” in line
seventy-four of The Waste Land. Although capitalizations are telling, especially in Eliot’s
poems, “Cat” and “Dog” are capitalized throughout Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, thus
making this instance in The Waste Land not so unique. Thormählen concludes that the wording
in these lines makes this interpretation unlikely: “Line 75 with its concrete digging image
suggests a definite agent, and stars are hardly noted for excavatory exploits…The stars cannot be
stopped in their courses (‘keep far hence’)” (24). I agree that the phrasing suggests a physical
dog despite it not being present at the London Bridge with Stetson or the speaker. In
Thormählen’s view, the buried body has presumably been killed by Stetson, “in the kind of
suburban garden you would expect an office clerk to possess” (29). Thus the speaker’s
seemingly harmless questions about the condition of the corpse become audacious: “And now
someone he once knew not only shows him, out loud, that he is aware of the terrible, secret, but
inquires about it in exactly the terms one uses when asking a keen gardener how his pet project is
coming on (‘Will it bloom…Has the frost disturbed it?’) (29). The dog, according to
136 Other explanations for what the dog represents include the dog that helped Isis gather the limbs of Osiris,
humanitarianism, faithfulness, conscience, and God (25).

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Thormählen, is “unwelcome because he might uncover something.” Something the speaker and
the reader are already aware of, i.e. the “sordid” nature of human experience with its “crimes,
failures, and disappointments” (30). That is why Eliot “hurls Baudelaire’s ‘hypocrite lecteur! –
mon semblable, – mon frère!’ at his own reader, including himself and his audience in his picture
of the timeless debasement of mankind” (30).137 This dog is similar to the animals in the first
chapter because it would follow its natural instincts and dig, like the cat eating the food and the
crab grabbing the stick in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” Nevertheless, this dog has the potential
to reveal something to humans, like Khodasevich’s monkey in the second chapter who revives
the sweetest legends of deep antiquity in the speaker’s heart.
In addition to this corpse that haunts the speaker and the dog, bones rattle and recur
throughout The Waste Land. Various speakers mention bones, but they do not bring comfort or
trace of something else. In part II, after the speaker admits their nerves are bad tonight and asks
for another to think and speak, bones are referenced: “I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the
dead men lost their bones” (lines 115-116). These lines remind the reader of Bennett’s first
example of thing-power in Vibrant Matter quoted in the first chapter of this dissertation. She too
has observed a rat in gutter (in addition to other debris – a glove, pollen, a cap, and a stick).
Thormählen comments on the element of desecration this line carries: “The traditional notion of
the sanctity of the bones of the dead invests the ‘Game of Chess’ sentence with ominous
undertones” (128-129). In part III the rattle of the bones drowns out the speaker: “Sweet Thames,
run softly, for I speak not loud or long. / But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the
bones” (lines 184-186). Repeating the connection between rats and bones, in the next stanza the
137 In English, the line reads: “Hypocritical reader, my mirror-image, my brother!” This line comes from
Baudelaire’s poem “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”) from his collection Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil).
This line is the final one in Baudelaire’s poem and the final one of part I in The Waste Land.

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speaker notes that only rats rattle bones in this city: “And bones cast in a little low dry garret, /
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year” (lines 194-195). Thormählen continues her earlier
thought:
In “The Fire Sermon,” the rest of the bones is not only disturbed – it is violated by the
particularly obnoxious animals, which makes the breach of the grave’s peace even more
distasteful…those whose bones are rattled by the rat’s foot are surely not only dead but
damned, out“casts” condemned to utter ruin. (129)
Like the corpse which Stetson buried, and which the dog would try to dig up or the sudden frost
would disturb its bed, these bones cannot lie peacefully. They are scattered near the Thames and
in dark alleys. Lost by men and moved only by rats. The gap between the human and the animal
narrows but their, the rat and the bones’, connection is strictly physical, not emotional or
dignified. They meet when the human bodies are decomposed. These rats do not elicit comfort,
amusement, or wisdom. They signify death.
In part IV “Death by Water” another body, Phlebas the Phoenician, cannot rest peacefully
and nothing metaphysical or hopeful lingers. Ezra Pound’s notorious and extensive cuts are the
reason why this section of the poem is only ten lines long.138 In the middle of these lines, the
speaker reports the state of Phlebas’s body:
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool. (315-318)
138 Pound joked that The Waste Land’s birth was a caesarean and that he performed the operation, yet another
reference to a scarred body.

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Just as the rat’s foot rattled the bones, and the dog who would dig up the planted corpse with its
nails, Phlebas’s body, his bones in particular, are touched by something non-human. The current
picking at his bones suggests that barely anything remains. And the fact that the current does so
in whispers under the sea implies that no one will hear or know of his presence down below. All
traces of his spiritual side are absent, lost in the depths of the whirlpool never to be discovered.
In addition to the workers’ bodies, the dead corpse, the rattling bones, and Phlebas’s
drowned body, there are also bodies suffering from sexually related acts in The Waste Land. This
is particularly evident in parts II and III. In the final stanza of part II “A Game of Chess” two
women are discussing what Lil should do upon the return of her husband Albert from war. Lil’s
interlocutor tells her to get some new teeth before he arrives. To look smart for him so that he
will not look elsewhere:
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said –
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you
And no more can’t I, I said… (139-147)

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The speaker’s advice is harsh. They admit so themselves “I didn’t mince my words.” The
capitalized phrase “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,” which gets repeated throughout the entire
stanza, is demanding.139 Lil’s identity and value have been reduced to the quality of her teeth,
similar to the synecdoche of parts I and III with the worker’s eyes, sighs, feet, and backs as well
as the feet and hands of “Preludes.”
In the following lines the speaker makes matters worse when explaining to Lil that others
will have sex with Albert if she refuses, implying that her body is only useful when pleasing
Albert: “…and think of poor Albert, / He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time, /
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said” (lines 147-149). The speaker views
Albert as a victim, “poor Albert,” not Lil. Lil pushes back, making it known that she is aware of
her interlocutor’s ulterior motives: “Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said. / Then I’ll
know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look. / HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”
(lines 150-152). Despite Lil’s push back, the speaker continues to berate her:
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (153-156)
Before and in between Lil’s response, key pieces of personal information are inserted inside
parentheses:
139 The Waste Land, and this repeated line “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,” is another cruel reminder in Eliot’s
poetry that time dictates man’s life.

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(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same. (157-161)
These parenthetical statements are matter of fact, but in comparison with Lil’s interlocutor, they
are much more forgiving. Ironically, this telling information about Lil’s body is placed inside
parentheses which are usually used to signal secondary and nonessential information. After
giving birth to five children by thirty-one, nearly dying from one of the births, and taking pills to
have an abortion, Lil’s body is understandably suffering. Nevertheless, the speaker continues to
ignore these essential facts. She tells Lil she is a fool and that her body’s sole purpose is to have
sex with her husband and give birth, patronizing her for getting married and expecting anything
else: “You are a proper fool, I said. / Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said, /
What you get married for if you don’t want children?” (lines 162-164). As with the capitalized
letters in “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,” the italicized “are” only adds insult to injury. This
stanza concludes with the speaker coming over that Sunday for dinner, with Albert home, to help
them heat up their sexual appetites: “Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot
gammon, / And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot” (lines 166-167). The
following sexual encounter between husband and wife is neither pleasant nor healthy. The dash
could be interpreted as a violent cutoff as well as the repetition of “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS
TIME.” This stanza and part II conclude with an allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia’s
final words before her suicide: “Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight Mary. Goonight. / Ta ta.

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/ Goonight. Goonight. / Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night”
(lines 170-172). This reference to Ophelia implies that Lil and her body will only continue to
suffer and waste away, ending tragically.
Poor sexual relations continue in part III of The Waste Land “The Fire Sermon.” Tiresias,
the blind prophet in Greek mythology whose punishment from Hera was transformation into a
woman (yet another body in this poem under duress), witnesses the sexual dominance, verging
on assault, over the typist by the young man carbuncular.140 After introducing the typist and
describing her home, including her divan, Tiresias declares: “I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled
dugs / Perceived the scene, and foretold the reset – / I too awaited the expected guest” (lines 228-
230). Following this announcement, the young man carbuncular arrives and the speaker
comments on his character and profession: “A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, /
One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire” (lines 232-234).
This young man, with his assurance and bold stare, proceeds to engage sexually with the typist.
Her indifference does not deter him, his vanity welcomes it:
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
140 This act of sexual violence, being witnessed by Tiresias (someone whose body has undergone a significant
transformation), reminds the reader of the earlier reference to Philomela in part II of The Waste Land: “The change
of Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable
voice / And still she cried, and still the world pursues, / ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears” (lines 99-103). In Greek mythology,
Tereus, rapes his sister-in-law Philomela. Afterwards, she transforms into a nightingale.

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Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference. (235-242)
Before this vague form of sexual assault finishes, there is a parenthetical statement from Tiresias
(structurally recalling the previous scene with Lil and her interlocutor and the parenthetical
statements in between):
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.) (243-246)
Tiresias has suffered through that which the typist has undergone. Then the young man finally
leaves: “Bestows one final patronising kiss, / And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit…”
(lines 247-248). The ellipsis at the end of the stanza expresses the weight of this encounter.
The next stanza details the typist’s response. This description is another example of a
half-alive and half-dead body in The Waste Land:
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’

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When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone. (249-256)
At the beginning of the stanza, she is able to create a half-formed thought, which is more than the
other bodies have been able to do thus far. Nevertheless, this thought is fleeting, just like her
momentary look into the glass. She detaches – pacing about the room, smoothing her hair with
automatic hand, and putting a record on the gramophone. Her automatic hand is now the focus,
as was the young man carbuncular’s exploring, groping hands and the eyes, sighs, feet, and
backs of the workers. Her automatic hand brings to mind the automatic hand of the child in
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” who grabbed a toy from the quay. They both complete actions
thoughtlessly. In this and the previous stanza of The Waste Land certain end rhymes emphasize
the typist’s listless nature. These pairs in particular – tired / undesired, no defence / indifference,
bed / dead, lover / over, and alone / gramophone – show her exhaustion, indifference, isolation,
and finality.
Dying and broken bodies have clearly accrued in The Waste Land.
141 It is as the speaker
pronounces at the beginning of part V “What the Thunder Said”: “He who was living is now
dead / We who were living are now dying” (lines 328-329). The land is in dire need of water:
“Here is no water but only rock” (line 331) and “But dry sterile thunder without rain” (line 342).
Nevertheless, in this final section of The Waste Land, there is the possibility of something
141 In her article “The Poetics of Waste: Inoperative Bodies in The Waste Land” Claire Colebrook also notes the
many “corporeal horrors” of Eliot’s poem (95). According to Colebrook, the body’s desire and reproduction,
attached to the time of the city, “become disposable, mechanized, and alienated” (95).

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metaphysical, spiritual, or redemptive. At the beginning of the fourth stanza there is a Biblical
reference to Luke chapter 24 where Christ appears to two disciplines on the road to Emmaus:
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?” (line 360). This reference to resurrected Jesus
hints that someone will come to redeem this sterile waste land and its bodies. At the end of the
seventh stanza the long-awaited rain finally comes: “In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust /
Bringing rain” (lines 394-395). In reference to the Upanishads, a collection of Hindu scriptures,
the thunder speaks “DA” three times in The Waste Land (lines 401, 411, and 418). After each
utterance of “DA” there are three italicized words, of which “DA” is the root. “Datta” (line 402)
meaning “give,” “Dayadhvam” meaning “sympathize” (line 412), and “Damyata” meaning
“control” (line 419). These words repeat in the penultimate line of the poem. The last line of the
poem reads: “Shantih shantih shantih” (line 434). “Shantih,” meaning “peace” in Sanskrit, is the
same word used at the end of one of the Upanishads. These moments of eastern and western
religious thought, as well as mention of rain and peace, signal cleansing, healing, and
redemption. This metaphysical power is not found in the bodies of The Waste Land but arrives
nonetheless.
Critics and Eliot himself consider “The Hollow Men” (1925) to be one of his bleakest
and most desperate poems due in part to its oft-quoted final quatrain.142 Wasting and wanting
bodies fill its dead land which represents post-war Europe. These bodies are stuck in between,
not reaching death’s dream kingdom. Nevertheless, there is both a cry and a possibility for
something metaphysical, spiritual, and redemptive in the poem, especially at the end of part IV
142 See Jewel Brooker’s sixth chapter “Poetry and Despair: The Hollow Men and the End of Philosophy” from her
book T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination. The epigraph to Brooker’s chapter is taken from one of Eliot’s letters to
his brother Henry in 1936: “I have written only one blasphemous poem, The Hollow Men: [it] is blasphemy because
it is despair” (90). As Brooker points out, many critics cite Eliot’s failing marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood as
reason for his despair. The final quatrain reads: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends /
This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper” (lines 95-98).

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and part V. In this regard, it reflects The Waste Land. While it might not be as definitive or
thundering as in The Waste Land, it is still there whimpering, embedded into the poem’s form.
The first instances of tortured and dead bodies in “The Hollow Men” occur in the two
epigraphs. The first epigraph comes from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899):
“Mistah Kurtz – he dead.” By the end of Conrad’s novella, Kurtz, an ivory trader sent to Africa
by a Belgian company, is fully corrupted. He persuades the natives to worship him and behaves
like a tyrant, exemplified by the heads on sticks. When the protagonist of the novella, Charles
Marlow, finally meets him, Kurtz is already sick with jungle fever and on the verge of death.
Marlow attempts to take Kurtz with him back down the river, but Kurtz dies on the boat, his
finals words being: “The horror! The horror!”143 Eliot’s reference to Conrad’s novella certainly
sets an ominous tone. The second epigraph refers to Guy Fawkes, a key conspirator in the
Gunpowder Plot of 1605 (an attempted regicide of King James I and parliament by English
Catholics seeking reform after suffering religious persecution): “A penny for the Old Guy.”
Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. His neck broke when he was hanged
and died as a result. His effigy is burned, as are fireworks, on the fifth of November in the United
Kingdom for the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day. Although this celebration brings a sense of fun
and play, the fact remains – Fawkes’s body was and continues to be harmed.
In part I of “The Hollow Men” emphasis is placed on the people’s ostensibly full bodies.
These bodies are seemingly full, yet in essence empty, which speaks to the broader issue of this
chapter. Many bodies in Eliot’s poems have literal or figurative hollow heads and eyes. They are
material without the metaphysical. “The Hollow Men” begins with their lament:
143 Eliot originally intended for these words to be the epigraph to The Waste Land.

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We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! (1-4)
Although they are stuffed leaning together, and their headpieces are filled with straw, they are
hollow men. The following lines note the effectiveness of their voices:
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar (5-10)144
Although they whisper together, their effect is quiet and meaningless. The punctuation in these
lines suggests that they cannot utter anything complete or coherent. In lines five through ten
there is neither a period nor an exclamation point as in the first four lines of the poem. A
complete sentence is not possible. This is particularly compelling given line ten marks the end of
144 Because the rats’ feet touch broken glass, this makes the line in The Waste Land about bones being rattled by
only the rat’s foot all the more bleak. Man’s bones are reduced to broken glass. Thormählen clarifies how, as
opposed to The Waste Land and “Burbank” rats, “the rats’ feet in The Hollow Men are a mere element in a simile”
(130). The other animals analyzed in this dissertation are not similes. They are physical entities, albeit some more
powerful than others. Despite these rats being a mere element in a simile, Thormählen argues that they still create a
real sense of emptiness and ruin: “The rat, which has up to now implied a condition of extreme and irredeemable
destruction, hence retains these qualities in The Hollow Men. Its implied appearance is only to be expected in the
introduction where negation is a basic feature. The despair of the stuffed men is defined in terms of what they lack:
substance, purpose, commitment and communication, form, colour, force, motion – and hope” (130-131).

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the stanza. The following stanza, which is an unrhymed couplet, stresses the deficient nature of
the people’s bodies: “Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture
without motion;” (lines 11-12). Repeated negation (without, without, without) asserts the weight
of their emptiness. Part I concludes with the voices stating that they should be remembered as the
hollow men, the stuffed men, not as lost violent souls.145
The first-person plural of part I switches to the first-person singular in part II of “The
Hollow Men” but their shallowness still defines them. The first stanza begins with the speaker
wishing not to meet the eyes of someone he has presumably wronged: “Eyes I dare not meet in
dreams” (line 19). They continue, describing what resides “there” in “death’s dream kingdom”
(lines 20-28).146 The speaker has not reached this other kingdom, but when they do arrive, they
want to remain as they are:
Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer –
145 The final stanza reads: “Those who have crossed / With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom / Remember us – if
at all – not as lost / Violent souls, but only / As the hollow men / The stuffed men” (13-18).
146 Lines 20-28 read: “In death’s dream kingdom / These do not appear: / There, the eyes are / Sunlight on a broken
column / There, is a tree swinging / And voices are / In the wind’s singing / More distant and more solemn / Than a
fading star.”

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Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom (29-38)
Echoing part I, with the incongruity between outer and inner, the speaker of part II wants to
remain in disguise. To literally and figuratively hide what is or is not beneath, even in death.
Furthermore, these disguises are deliberate. The speaker wants to keep their distance, especially
from those they have wronged, staving off that “final meeting” of judgment. The repeated
negation (no nearer, no nearer, not that) stresses how strong this desire to remain distant is. The
pause in between the line and stanza break “No nearer – / Not that final meeting” emphasizes
this as well. The animal nature of these disguises is significant. A rat and crow are traditionally
bad omens. Thormählen writes: “In order to avoid their scrutiny, he wants his straw-stuffed self
to stand in a field, like a scarecrow, blown into various directions by the wind. Adorned with the
hides and feathers of rats and crows, dusky animals associated with decay and death, he might
contrive to escape attention” (172). The speaker wants to become like an animal, not because he
values them or sees them as equals, but because he wants to avoid confrontation with other
humans. Animals are interesting when they serve him.
Parts III and IV see the return of the first-person plural and underscore the contrast
between “here” and “there.” “Here” is a dead land, a cactus land, dry and stony, with a dead
man’s hand, and a fading star.147 “Here” there are no eyes. “Here” is a hollow valley of dying
147 Lines 39-44 read: “This is the dead land / This is cactus land / Here the stone images / Are raised, here they
receive / The supplication of a dead man’s hand / Under the twinkle of a fading star.”

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stars, a broken jaw of lost kingdoms.148 “Here” men grope together, avoiding speech, sightless.149
“Here” it is material, with broken and missing body parts. The speakers question whether it will
be like it is “here” “there”: “Is it like this / In death’s other kingdom” (lines 45-46). There is no
direct answer to this question, nevertheless, the end of the poem offers up the possibility of
redemption however faint.
After the speakers have noted their groping together, avoidance of speech, and
sightlessness while “here,” the word “unless” (used after “sightless” in line sixty-one, creating a
slant rhyme) ushers in the more positive ending. The last stanza of part IV reads as follows:
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men. (61-67)
The repetition of eyes, death’s twilight kingdom, emptiness, and stars in these lines makes this
final stanza of part IV thematically connected to the rest of the poem. It is not discordant. As
previously established, there are no eyes “here” while those “there” can see directly. “Here”
148 Lines 52-56 read: “The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here / In this valley of dying stars / In this hollow
valley / This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.”
149 Lines 57-61 read: “In this last of meeting places / We grope together / And avoid speech / Gathered on this beach
of the tumid river / Sightless.”

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vision is lost, and the people do not wish to connect. Nevertheless, in this stanza there is
possibility for eyes to reappear “here” which is the only hope of empty men. The mention of the
perpetual star (as opposed to the fading star of part II) implies the potential of eternity. The
mention of the multifoliate rose, which Dante sees in Paradiso (the third and final part of the
Divine Comedy), connotes heaven, divine love, and redemption.150
Critics have argued that the end of “The Hollow Men,” part V in particular, is a
breakdown of language and reveals a lack of spirituality.151 Although part V is certainly
fragmented and interrupted, it still holds promise. The first stanza of part V is a reference to the
nursery rhyme “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”:
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning. (68-71)
The prickly pear, a genus of flowering plants in the cactus family Cactaceae, replaces the
mulberry bush. This image of a cactus refers back to earlier lines in the poem that mention the
dry voices and land. Part III begins with a cactus: “This is the dead land / This is cactus land”
(lines 39-40).152 In between this italicized stanza and the next italicized phrase falls the second
stanza, which illustrates the liminal and obscure space between ideas and reality:
150 Dante’s multifoliate rose is a symbol of divine love. The petals are the souls of the faithful, including Beatrice.
151 In his article “The Spiritual Status of T. S. Eliot’s Hollow Men” Everett Gillis describes the end of “The Hollow
Men” as “distortion,” “mordant parody,” “ironic benediction,” and “perverse doxology” (474-475).
152 The descriptor “dead land” appears in The Waste Land as well: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs
out of the dead land…” (lines 1-2).

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Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow (72-76)
These lines capture Modern man’s condition – with pre-existing ideas and theories debunked,
they do not know where to look or turn. Stuck in between, unable to act, because the idea is
holding them back.153 These lines also recall the couplet in part I: “Shape without form, shade
without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion” (lines 11-12). After this “between”
section comes the next italicized phrase, a line from the “Lord’s Prayer”: “For Thine is the
Kingdom” (line 77).154 This religious allusion after the nursery rhyme is typical of Eliot’s poetic
style where he incorporates both high and low material. Additionally, this italicized reference to
the “Lord’s Prayer” is a literal cry for something metaphysical and redemptive in the poem. The
speakers pray for the Second Coming of Christ when his kingdom will be established on earth.
This line is set to the right of the page, causing it to stand out.
153 This idea of Modern man is perhaps best represented in Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with
its overwhelming questions (Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe? So how should I presume? And how should I
begin? Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?) and hundred indecisions, visions, and revisions. The
thoughts of the titular character overwhelm and immobilize him, he cannot act defiantly or definitively.
154 Matthew chapter six verses nine through thirteen includes a version of the “Lord’s Prayer”: “Our Father which art
in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day
our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us
from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” (KJV)

144
The rest of part V includes another “between” section, another italicized line, the last
“between” section, the repeated italicized line from the “Lord’s Prayer,” a change of that same
line not in italics, and the final quatrain in italics:
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is

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Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. (78-98)
Critics tend to focus on the distortion of the Lord’s prayer in the penultimate stanza, but if the
reader remembers that the “Lord’s Prayer” is a cry for the Second Coming this distortion can be
seen as more of a transformation or transfiguration.155 The words are no longer in italics and
have been extended into three lines instead of one. In Christianity, the earth and its inhabitants
will change when Christ returns. There must be an ending or death before a new beginning or
life. Thus, the ending of the world in the final quatrain might be more hopeful than doubtful. The
gaps created in between the lines “For Thine is / Life is / For Thine is the” give the reader
opportunity to pause and reflect on what is divine and what is the purpose of life.156 The reader
can fill in the blanks themselves. A liminal space can allow for growth. While shadows are dark
and difficult to see through, in Christian theology, the unknowable and unseeable is often divine
and inspired. Therefore, the Shadow that falls in the final line of each “between section,” does
not have to be interpreted negatively.157 Although the word order is subject to change, the
155 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “transfiguration” as: “The change in the appearance of Jesus Christ on the
mountain.” The gospels of Matthew and Mark record this event.
156 Pauses, interruptions, and cutoffs are also a crucial aspect of Eliot’s poetic style.
157 In their article “Hope for T. S. Eliot’s “Empty Men” Friedrich Strothmann and Lawrence Ryan also argue for a
more hopeful ending. They write: “‘The hope only / Of empty men’ ought to be taken in a sense that makes

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plethora of repetitions (of words, phrases, and stanzaic structures) in this part and the poem
overall, convey a sense of interconnectedness. Something metaphysical lingers in the gaps and in
the margins.
Eliot’s poem “Ash-Wednesday” was written in nineteen twenty-seven during his
conversion to Anglicanism and published in nineteen thirty. In many Christian denominations
Ash Wednesday is a holy day of prayer and fasting and marks the start of Lent.158 During Lent,
worshipers give up some luxury or pleasure in accordance with the Biblical event in the gospels
of Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus prays and fasts for forty days in the desert. Lent ends
with the celebration of Easter. Although some scholars see Eliot’s conversion and religious shift
in his poetry as a drastic turning point from his earlier works, I argue that “Ash-Wednesday” is
still connected to them. The portrayal of the human body, in part II in particular, speaks to the
previously discussed passages of The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men.” 159 “Ash-Wednesday”
is the most religious of the three Eliot poems analyzed in this chapter. The metaphysical remains
not only in the content and form of the poem but in the bones themselves. The bones shine bright
and speak.
Part II of “Ash-Wednesday” begins with the speaker addressing a lady and describing in
what manner the three leopards have been feeding on his body:
emptiness a condition of hope. Such an interpretation makes the multifoliate rose, the corpus Christi mysticum, a
symbol of maximum fulfillment, accessible only to those who are no longer hollow, no longer ‘filled with straw,’
but empty in some laudable, positive sense of the term. Emptiness, then, becomes something desirable – within the
framework of the poem, something to be prayed for” (426). They support their interpretation by looking at the
writings of the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross.
158 Many believers receive ash on their foreheads. The command “Repent, and believe in the Gospel” or “Remember
that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” often accompanies the marking of the ashes.
159 Part II was originally published as “Salutation” in 1927 in Saturday Review of Literature and in 1928 in Eliot’s
Criterion.

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Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. (43-46)160
These lines are certainly macabre and horrific. The vicious leopards are far from the cats in Old
Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Instead of eating rancid butter off the street like the cat in
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” these large cats devour humans. The animal and the human meet
in the animals’ stomachs. The speaker describes in detail the various body parts the leopards
have been consuming, specifying the legs, heart, liver, and that which had been contained in the
hollow round of his skull. Compressing the brain, which houses his consciousness, to the word
“that” accentuates the material nature of the speaker’s body. Thormählen sees this as well,
focusing on the impersonal aspect of the bones:
The parts of the body which harboured its physical strength, emotions, sensuality and
sense perceptions have been devoured by the leopards…The bones are not only the
customary ultimate remains of a carcase devoured by predators, they are also the most
160 There are two main allusions in these opening lines. The first is First Kings chapter nineteen verses one through
eight where Jezebel threatens Elijah with death. Elijah goes into the wilderness underneath a juniper tree and prays
that God will take his life. God sends him food instead. The second is the folktale “The Juniper Tree” which the
Grimm brothers included in their first collection. In his article “Significance of the Juniper-Tree Story for Eliot’s
Ash Wednesday, Section II” James Bratcher discusses both but gives precedence to the folktale. Bratcher defines the
plot and identifies the inheritance motive: “It is the story – a fairy tale – of a small stepson who is killed by his cruel
stepmother, then butchered and his body parts cooked as a meal of black puddings and served to the unwitting
father…In the fairy tale we are told that the housewife who kills the boy had married a widower. The boy is his
child, not hers. She resorts to murder so that her young daughter, her own child by the husband, will someday inherit
at the time of the husband’s death. The blameless and feeling little daughter, half-sister of the murdered boy,
charitably gathers his bone fragments in a silk handkerchief and places them under a juniper tree where his real
mother, the one who bore him, lies buried” (110-111). Eliot wrote that the leopards in “Ash-Wednesday” represent
“the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.” Although the world, the flesh, and the devil are real temptations that try to
feed on and destroy mankind, for this chapter, I prefer to focus on the literal and physical image of leopards feeding
on the body.

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anonymous parts of the body; to those of us who possess no expert knowledge of forensic
medicine, bones can be anybody’s, and are thus suitable emblems of a surrendered
personality. (52)
“Fed to satiety” implies that the leopards have been eating as much as possible and potentially
for a long period of time. The metaphysical cannot be found.
Nevertheless, the following lines challenge this fact because the bones show traces of
life. God appears and questions twice whether the speaker’s bones will live: “And God said /
Shall these bones live? shall these / Bones live?” (lines 46-48). This moment ties in to the end of
part I in The Waste Land when the speaker calls out to Stetson, questioning whether the corpse
he planted in his garden last year has begun to sprout or if it will bloom this year. The speaker’s
bones (or that which had been contained in them) respond.161 Given that the bones in The Waste
Land are lost, have no trace of life, and are rattled only by the rat’s foot, this moment in “AshWednesday” is quite miraculous. The bones express the reason why they shine:
And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in mediation,
We shine with brightness. (48-53)
161 The bones continue to chirp and sing in part II of “Ash-Wednesday.” For example, lines 65-66: “And the bones
sang chirping / With the burden of the grasshopper, saying” and line 90: “Under a juniper-tree the bones sang,
scattered and shining.”

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The grotesque tone of the opening lines of part II has become lighter. That which had been
contained in the bones does not only live but also chirps like a bird and speaks with God. The
goodness and love of the lady the speaker addresses, and her devotion to the Virgin, are why his
metaphysical side shines. The speaker goes on to say that he gives up his deeds and his love:
“And I who am here dissembled / Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love / To the posterity of
the desert and the fruit of the gourd” (lines 53-55).162 When considering the broader context of
the poem, Ash Wednesday, this act of sacrifice is befitting. One must participate in Lent before
the celebration of Easter. One must offer themselves to God before they can receive salvation.
The speaker confirms this in the same detailed, macabre, and material fashion as the beginning
of part II: “It is this which recovers / My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
/ Which the leopards reject” (lines 56-58).
In his dissertation «Творчество В. Ф. Ходасевича и русская литературная традиция
(1900-е гг. – 1917 г.)» (The Work of V. F. Khodasevich and the Russian Literary Tradition
(1900s – 1917)) Pavel Uspenskii quotes one of Khodasevich’s letters to Boris Sadovskoy163
wherein Khodasevich writes that he has written “five macabre poems” (160).164 The five poems
are: «Слезы Рахили» (“Rachel’s Tears”), «Сны» (“Dreams”), «Утро» (“Morning”), «Висел он,
не качаясь…» (“He hung, without swinging…”) (later titled «В Петровском парке» (“In
Petrovsky Park”), and «Смоленский рынок» (“Smolensky Market”). Uspenskii argues that
additional poems by Khodasevich could be added to this list of five, including «Золото»
162 The word “dissembled” (separated, dispersed, disassembled) is mimetic here because enjambments fill this entire
section of “Ash-Wednesday.” The enjambments break up the complete sentences and divide them into multiple
lines, disrupting the rhythm of the poem.
163 Boris Sadovskoy (1881-1952) was a Russian poet, prosaist, and literary critic. He is a well-regarded critic of the
Silver Age, like Khodasevich.
164 «О себе писать прямо не могу: нелюбопытно. Занят, занят, занят – а тольку не вижу…написал пяток
макаберных стихов» (26 января 1917).

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(“Gold”) and «Дома» (“At Home”) (160-161). This chapter concludes with close readings of
two of the poems considered macabre by Khodasevich or Uspenskii, namely «В Петровском
парке» (“In Petrovsky Park”) and «Золото» (“Gold”). Although these poems are macabre, I
contend that Khodasevich suggests the possibility of something metaphysical remaining after
death. As with Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday,” the metaphysical can be found not only in the poems’
form and content but also in the bodies themselves.
In the spring of nineteen fourteen, at dawn, Khodasevich, saw a suicide victim on his way
home from a restaurant in Petrovsky Park with his wife Anna Ivanovna and fellow Russian poet,
director, and playwright Igor’ Terent’ev. The poem «В Петровском парке» (“In Petrovsky
Park”) (1916) describes this encounter, focusing on the dead body and how it looks against the
sun and the crowd of people below. The brief poem reads as follows:
Висел он, не качаясь,
На узком ремешке.
Свалившаяся шляпа
Чернела на песке.
В ладонь впивались ногти
На стиснутой руке.
А солнце восходило,
Стремя к полудню бег,
И, перед этим солнцем
Не опуская век,

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Был высоко приподнят
На воздух человек.
И зорко, зорко, зорко
Смотрел он на восток.
Внизу столпились люди
В притихнувший кружок.
И был почти невидим
Тот узкий ремешок. (1-18)
He hung, but was not swinging,
upon a slender band.
His fallen hat, a spot of black,
was lying on the sand.
His nails had dug into the palms
Of each clenched hand.
The sun continued rising,
striving to reach its noon:
and with unblinking eyelids
under that shining sun,
there rose above Petrovsky Park
this elevated man.

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And staring, he outstared the east,
so sharp a stare had he;
the people clustered round below
in taciturnity;
the slender band that held him
was very hard to see.165
Keeping with Uspenskii and Khodasevich’s labelling of this poem as macabre, Bethea
writes that “the details of suicide seem etched in unemotional black and white” (149).166 He
argues that traditional spring symbolism (i.e. Easter, sun, rebirth, warmth, renewal, etc.) is
cruelly reversed in the poem and the irony of the dead man’s gaze, juxtaposed with the
dumbstruck crowd, is grotesque and unavoidable (150-151). «В Петровском парке» (“In
Petrovsky Park”) is indeed macabre and grotesque, nevertheless, the poem’s form implies that
something metaphysical and hopeful remains.
The second stanza expresses the movement of the sun and the placement of the body; the
poetic devices in these lines support my optimistic reading. The sun was rising, urging its run
toward noon: «А солнце восходило, / Стремя к полудню бег» (lines 7-8). Before this sun, not
lowering his eyelids, the man was raised into the air: «И, перед этим солнцем / Не опуская
век, / Был высоко приподнят / На воздух человек» (lines 9-12). The body does not lower its
eyelids, making it seem as if the man did not have any. This portrayal harkens back to the lidless
165 Peter Daniels’ English translation from vladislav khodasevich: selected poems (49).
166 From Khodasevich: His Life and Art, Princeton University Press, 1983.

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eyes of part II in The Waste Land: “And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing lidless eyes
and waiting for a knock upon the door” (lines 137-138). The third stanza describes the dead
man’s gaze. Sharply, sharply, sharply he looked toward the east: «И зорко, зорко, зорко /
Смотрел он на восток» (lines 13-14). Down below people crowded in a hushed circle: «Внизу
столпились люди / В притихнувший кружок» (lines 15-16). His elevated body is on par with
the sun, unlike those of the hushed crowd below. The end rhymes бег (run) / век (eyelids) /
человек (human) suggest that the man can still move and see. Pairing the verb смотреть (to
look) with the adverb зорко (sharply) is positive, especially when repeated three times. If
someone can see sharply, they have keen vision. They can look carefully, attentively, and
vigilantly. They can distinguish distant and small objects well. Furthermore, the man is looking
towards the east – a good omen. The sun rises in the east. The line where зорко repeats has full
realization of stress. Khodasevich is hammering home, through repetition and rhythm, that the
man still has vision or that death has brought him new insight. He can see something that the
crowd cannot, reminiscent of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” where those who have crossed into
death’s other kingdom have done so with “direct eyes.”
Structurally, threes are crucial to «В Петровском парке» (“In Petrovsky Park”) and
imbue the poem with a feeling of hope. Three six-line stanzas written in iambic trimeter make up
the poem. In each stanza, three lines share the same end rhyme.167 In the third and final stanza of
the poem the word зорко (sharply) repeats three times in one line (13). Additionally, the
conjunction и (and) stands at the beginning of three lines (9, 13, and 17).168 This recurrence of
167 Lines two, four, and six in the first stanza (ремешке / песке / руке). Lines eight, ten, and twelve in the second
stanza (бег / век / человек). Lines fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen in the third stanza (восток / кружок / ремешок).
168 This repetition of и (and) conveys continuity. The poem uses the conjunction а (and or but depending on the
context) as well. Note that the conjunction used to express stark contrast in Russian, но (but), is absent. A is in
between и and но.

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threes gives the poem a sense of completeness.169 Remembering the setting of the poem – a
sunrise in spring – this recurrence of threes also alludes to Easter and the Resurrection.
Christians believe Jesus arose three days after the Crucifixion. This emphasis on threes in «В
Петровском парке» (“In Petrovsky Park”) as well as the allusion to Christ and the Resurrection
remind the reader of the Easter setting in “Ash-Wednesday,” the Biblical reference to Luke
chapter 24 in The Waste Land where Christ, no longer dead and raised above a dumb struck
crowd on the cross, appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, the repetition of “DA” three
times by the thunder, the development of three words with the root “DA” and their repetition,
and the repetition of “shantih” three times in the final line of the poem.170 The concluding lines
of the poem emphasize that the man’s thin cord was almost invisible: «И был почти невидим /
Тот узкий ремешок» (lines 17-18). While the “macabre” details surrounding the death are
included in «В Петровском парке» (“In Petrovsky Park”), the poem’s form stresses the dead
man’s ability to rise above and look toward the east. We start to forget about or not see the cord
holding him.
«Золото» (“Gold”) (1917) operates as another macabre yet life-affirming poem, but, this
time, the speaker reflects on their own death. The speaker expresses their desire to be buried, not
burned, and believes that the gold coin placed in their mouth when they die will shine like a
small sun, like a trace of their soul. This funeral rite and the poem’s epigraph come from the
drama Irydion (1836) written by the Polish writer Zygmunt Krasiński.171 The epigraph is
169 The appearance of тот узкий ремешок (that thin cord) in the final line of the poem connects back to the second
line of the poem на узком ремешке (on a thin cord), adding to the poem’s sense of completeness. The end rhyme
восток (east) / кружок (circle) also conveys cyclicality and rebirth.
170 The first line of The Waste Land is a famous commentary on spring: “April is the cruellest month, breeding /
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain” (lines 1-4).
171 Krasiński, along with Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, is considered one of Poland’s Three Bards.
During the Partitions of Poland, these three Romantic poets influenced national consciousness. Irydion takes place

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Khodasevich’s Russian translation of Irydion: «Иди, вот уже золото кладем в / уста твои, уже
мак и мед кладем / тебе в руки. Salve aeternum» (“Go, we are already placing gold in your
mouth, we are already placing poppy and honey in your hands. Salve aeternum (Hello
forever)”).172 The poem reads as follows:
В рот – золото, а в руки – мак и мед;
Последние дары твоих земных забот.
Но пусть не буду я, как римлянин, сожжен:
Хочу в земле вкусить утробный сон,
Хочу весенним злаком прорасти,
Кружась по древнему, по звездному пути.
В могильном сумраке истлеют мак и мед,
Провалится монета в мертвый рот…
Но через много, много темных лет
Пришлец неведомый отроет мой скелет,
during the decline of the Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius Antonius, also known as Elagabalus or
Heliogabalus. In the context of the drama, the rebellion of the Greek Irydion against the Romans alludes to the
Polish November Uprising (1830-1831).
172 The term “Charon’s obol” can apply to the gold coin placed in the deceased’s mouth before burial. Charon is the
ferryman of the Greek underworld. The “obol” or coin is considered as payment or bribe to Charon.

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И в черном черепе, что заступом разбит,
Тяжелая монета загремит, –
И золото сверкнет среди костей,
Как солнце малое, как след души моей. (1-14)173
A gold coin in the mouth; hands full of poppy and honey:
these are the final gifts of your earthly business.
And don’t let them incinerate me like a Roman:
I want to taste my sleep in the womb of the earth.
I want to rise again as the spring corn,
circle the ancient track that the stars follow.
In the darkening grave, poppy and honey will rot,
the dead man’s mouth will swallow the gold coin…
173 The use of the perfective verb вкусить (to taste or to partake of) in line 4 of this poem recalls Khodasevich’s
poem «Памяти кота Мурра» (“In Memory of the Cat Murr”), from the second chapter of this dissertation, with its
imperfective counterpart вкушать (to taste or to partake of): «О, хороши сады за огненной рекой, / Где черни
подлой нет, где в благодатной лени / Вкушают вечности заслуженный покой / Поэтов и зверей
возлюбленные тени!» (“O, the gardens are good beyond the fiery river, where there is no vulgar rabble, where in
blessed laziness the beloved shades of poets and beasts partake of the well-earned peace of eternity!”) (lines 5-8).
The use of the passive participle сожжен (burned), formed from the perfective verb сжечь (to burn), in line 3 of this
poem recalls Khodasevich’s poem «Пробочка» (“The Cork”), from the first chapter of this dissertation, with the
imperfective verb жечь (to burn): «Пробочка над крепким йодом! / Как ты скоро перетлела! / Так вот и душа
незримо / Жжет и разъедает тело» (“Cork stropper from a bottle of strong iodine! How quickly you have
putrefied! Just as the soul invisibly burns and corrodes the flesh”) (lines 1-4).

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But after many many years of darkness
a stranger will come and dig my skeleton up,
and inside the blackening skull that his spade
smashes, the heavy coin will clang –
and the gold will flash in the midst of bones,
a tiny sun, the imprint of my soul.174
Bennett’s ideas from her chapter “A Life of Metal” pertain to the gold coin in
Khodasevich’s poem. Bennett finds life in the microstructure of metals, focusing on their
irregularly shaped crystals and spreading cracks (58-59). Khodasevich is not empirical like
Bennett, but the gold coin in his poem still has life. The gold coin will rattle and sparkle in the
speaker’s bones years after his burial. He believes a bit of his soul will survive there. After
Bennett identifies the independent vitality of metal she transitions to its dependent vitality:
I have so far been speaking of metal as if it existed independently of other materials. But
metal is always metallurgical, always an alloy of the endeavors of many bodies, always
something worked on by geological, biological, and often human agencies. And human
metalworkers are themselves emergent effects of the vital materiality they work. (60).
Khodasevich’s poem depicts this kind of interrelated vital materiality. Humans have fashioned
the gold into a coin and placed it in the speaker’s mouth but, in the end, the speaker’s soul can
only emerge because of the metal. It has found a new body.
174 Peter Daniels’ English translation from vladislav khodasevich: selected poems (59).

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The form illustrates the speaker’s belief that some piece of their soul will remain and
shine for another. «Золото» (“Gold”) consists of seven rhyming couplets (alternating between
iambic pentameter and iambic hexameter). Each line ends with a masculine rhyme (stress falling
on the final syllable) and four out of the seven end rhyme pairings stress the vowels о, ё, or е.
175
These vowels occur and are stressed throughout the poem, not just in end rhymes.176 In addition
to rhyming couplets, masculine end rhymes, and repetition of the individual sounds о, ё, and е,
there is repetition of individual words, constructions, and conjunctions.177 The overall
soundscape of the poem, including these various forms of repetition, reiterate a sense of
continuity and cyclicality. While reading the poem, the reader is constantly referring to the words
and sounds of previous lines, everything aligns.178 Knowing that Khodasevich wrote this poem
impromptu, in a few minutes, makes its cohesiveness all the more impressive. This sense of
continuity and cyclicality affirms the speaker’s conclusion that they will be eternal. The one line
in the poem with full realization of stress is line nine: «Но через много, много темных лет»
(“But after many, many dark years”). In this line Khodasevich underscores the speaker’s (his)
perpetuity.
Certain words in «Золото» (“Gold”) suggest what will befall the speaker after death; his
fate is not hopeless. The end rhyme мед (honey) / забот (of (earthly) cares) hints that, after
175 Lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, and 10.
176 For example: lines 1, 4, and 8, and 10 have three, line 9 has five.
177 For example: the word золото (gold) repeats four times, the conjunction но (but) starts lines 3 and 9, the
conjunction и (and) starts lines 11 and 13, хочу (I want) starts lines 4 and 5 (an instance of anaphora but not in the
same couplet), and the construction of a simile как римлянин (like a Roman), как солнце малое (like a small sun),
and как след души моей (like a trace of my soul) in lines 3 and 14.
178 Malmstad and Hughes include Khodasevich’s comments in their notes: «7 янв., днем, минут в 10-15. Никогда
ни до этого, ни после, не писал так легко. Это в сущности “экспромт”» (“January 7th, in the afternoon, 10-15
minutes. Never before or after have I written so easily. This is essentially ‘impromptu’”) (311).

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death, the speaker’s earthly worries will be changed, becoming sweet like honey. The end rhyme
прорасти (to sprout) / пути ((along the) path) hints that movement and growth are possible.
Death is not finite, the speaker will grow. Lines four through six are particularly representative
of the entire collection «Путём зерна» (The Way of the Seed). They read: «Хочу в земле
вкусить утробный сон, / Хочу весенним злаком прорасти, / Кружась по древнему, по
звездному пути» (“I want to partake of the sleep of the womb in the earth, / I want to sprout like
spring grain, Circling along the ancient, starry path”). Many consider the title poem of the
collection «Путём зерна» (“The Way of the Seed”) as Khodasevich’s most famous poem. The
speaker states the path their soul will take is like the way of the grain; having descended into
darkness, their soul will die and live again: «Так и душа моя идёт путём зерна: / Сойдя во
мрак, умрёт — и оживёт она» (lines 7-8). 179 This image of one’s body returning to the earth to
arise relates to Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday” and the command often spoken after the ashes are
placed on the believer’s forehead: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The speaker’s desire for his body to sprout like spring grain also relates to the moment in The
Waste Land where the speaker calls out to Stetson asking: “‘That corpse you planted last year in
your garden, / ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (lines 71-72). Notably, an
unknown stranger (пришлец неведомый) will break open the speaker’s skeleton with a spade
and discover the trace of his soul depicted in the rattling and sparkling gold coin in his black
skull. Someone unfamiliar to him in life can find him and touch him after his death, unlike the
bones in The Waste Land that are rattled by rats only. The image of a black skull recalls part II of
“Ash-Wednesday” where the leopards feed on that which had been contained in the hollow
round of the speaker’s skull. The gold’s, i.e. the speaker’s soul’s, ability to shine like a small sun
179 As with «Золото» (“Gold”), «Путём зерна» (“The Way of the Seed”) has rhyming couplets with alternating
lines of iambic pentameter and iambic hexameter.

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after years buried underground relates to the dead man’s body in «В Петровском парке» (“In
Petrovsky Park”), which hangs in front of the sun. It also speaks to “Ash-Wednesday” where that
which had been contained in the bones of the speaker, i.e. his soul, shines with brightness.
Remembering the final words of the epigraph, Salve aeternum (Hello forever), the speaker’s soul
in Khodasevich’s «Золото» (“Gold”) will be able to greet any or all that come to him.
Khodasevich and Eliot dig into the human body to reflect on the purpose of life and
death, especially in the Modern world, in their poems «В Петровском парке» (“In Petrovsky
Park”), «Золото» (“Gold”), “The Hollow Men,” “Ash-Wednesday,” and The Waste Land. They
penetrate to ruminate. These poems are pointed and grotesque, but not in vain. A liveliness
flashes and rattles in the poems and the bodies themselves, something which future readers and
poets can discover. In his poem “Whispers of Immortality” Eliot writes of the metaphysical poet
John Donne and the Jacobean dramatist John Webster:
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

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Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense,
To seize and clutch and penetrate;
Expert beyond experience,
He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone. (lines 1-16)
Eliot’s observations about Webster and Donne mirror my own observations about Eliot and
Khodasevich. Their questioning does not substitute or eliminate their sensing. In actuality, their
sensing aids their questioning. Khodasevich and Eliot are certainly no strangers to anguish of the
marrow, ague of the skeleton, or fever to the bone. They experience bodily suffering themselves
and witness it in others. They go beneath the skin in their death-possessed poems because the
metaphysical clings round the material.

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Conclusion
Placing my personal preferences for Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot’s poetry to the
side, I prioritized an intellectual rationale when defining the subject of this dissertation. I argued
that Khodasevich and Eliot’s speakers encountered and interacted with the material world in an
analogous way. I have defined this parallel as metaphysical materiality and have delineated
various examples of it throughout this dissertation. In a desire not to conflate their distinct poetic
voices, I have noted their nuances as well. In my analyses, I applied the ideas and terminology of
the New Materialists, especially those of Jane Bennett. Their approach to the material world
aided my discussion of what occurs in Eliot and Khodasevich’s poems.
While it is unlikely that Khodasevich and Eliot met in their lifetimes, it can be argued
that they, alongside the New Materialists, come together figuratively in the works of Ol’ga
Sedakova.180 She consciously and enthusiastically searches for the metaphysical in the material.
180 In her dissertation Forbidden Attraction: Russian Poets Read T. S. Eliot During the Cold War Nataliya
Karageorgos discusses Eliot’s influence on Sedakova. She summarizes the aims of her last chapter as follows: “The
fourth chapter, ‘The Resurrection of Metaphysics: T. S. Eliot and Olga Sedakova,’ addresses the side of Eliot that
starts irritating the mature Brodsky, but becomes a breath of fresh air for Olga Sedakova, a poet who creates the
tradition of Russian Christian poetry in the second half of the twentieth-century. For her, Eliot serves as an example
of how a poet can combine the aesthetics of high modernism and religious belief, which she pursues in her own
texts. I demonstrate how Sedakova works around Brodsky’s rejection of Eliot’s later religious poetry, making a case
for liturgical poetry in an attempt to overcome the sensibility of the desert and ruins characteristic of both the early
Eliot and Brodsky” (13). Karageorgos considers Eliot vital to the emerging postmodern and posthuman trend in the
second half of the twentieth century but does not incorporate the New Materialists as I do in this dissertation:
“Attention to Eliot’s works, occurring in the poetry of the Soviet underground, was a search for alternative poetics,
fueled by his hindered availability in the USSR and enormous fame in the West. Gravitating toward Eliotic poetic
theory, that was built on premises radically different from the Russian literary tradition nourished on humanism,
Russian lyric poetry in the second half of the twentieth century absorbed the peculiar features of Western modernism
and emerging postmodernism, stepping into the terrain of posthumanism” (v). Karageorgos mentions Khodasevich
in her dissertation as well. In her third chapter, “Exploring the Limits of Depersonalization: Dragomoshchenko,
Eliot, Deconstruction,” she describes Iurii Kolker’s view on Khodasevich. Kolker’s “orientation towards the
tradition and classical forms” echoes Khodasevich’s (189). Dragomoshchenko disagrees with Kolker but
Karageorgos is sure to point out: “Dragomoshchenko’s comments testify that the binary simplicity of the dichotomy
‘archaism/innovation’ is particularly bothersome for him. Eliot’s approach is far from binary: the present is
determined by tradition, while tradition is changed by the way the present uses and interprets it” (191).
Karageorgos’s understanding of Eliot’s stance towards tradition reflects my own.

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Born on December 26, 1949, Sedakova is a distinguished Russian poet and translator.181 A
prominent figure of Leningrad’s вторая культура (second culture), a sub-culture that existed in
opposition to official Soviet discourses and doctrines, especially Socialist Realism. Sedakova’s
“esoteric,” “religious,” and “bookish” works of poetry and prose were not published in the Soviet
Union before nineteen eighty-nine.182 Prior to that, they were distributed unofficially via
samizdat and tamizdat.183 Sedakova is well versed in the Slavic poetic tradition and reveres
Khodasevich’s beloved Pushkin and Derzhavin. She has translated some of the leading figures of
world literature, many of whom are influential for Khodasevich and Eliot, including Quintus
Horatius Flaccus, Dante Alighieri, Francis Petrarch, John Donne, Stéphane Mallarmé, Émile
Verhaeren, and Ezra Pound.184 Her mental library, so to speak, stores similar material to those of
Khodasevich and Eliot.
181 Sedakova is also known for her humanist and ecumenist leanings. While ecumenism prioritizes Christian
religions, her stance is still accepting because she does not solely support the Russian Orthodox Church. Sedakova is
a humanist in that she believes in “human rationality and capacity for free thought and moral action” (OED) but, as I
argue in this conclusion, she does not give predominance to the human. She actively creates space for the nonhuman in her works and shows their animism. Humans, in Sedakova’s opinion, should think ethically about
themselves and others.
182 From the section «Об авторе» on Sedakova’s website: «С того момента, как её поэтический мир приобрел
определённые очертания (формальные, тематические, мировоззренческие), стало очевидно, что этот путь
радикально расходится с официальной словесностью, как пути других авторов этого «послебродского»
поколения Москвы, Ленинграда и других городов…Не только стихи, но и критика, филологические работы
Ольги Седаковой практически не публиковались в СССР до 1989 года и оценивались как «заумные»,
«религиозные», «книжные». У отверженной «второй культуры» тем не менее был свой читатель, и
достаточно широкий. Тексты Ольги Седаковой распространялись в машинописных копиях, публиковались в
зарубежной и эмигрантской периодике» (“From the moment that her poetic world took on more definite contours
(in terms of form, thematics and world view), it became clear that its path would radically diverge from statesanctioned writing, as had the paths of many other ‘post-Brodsky’ authors in Moscow, Leningrad and other
cities…Almost none of Sedakova’s poetry or even scholarly work was published in the USSR before 1989; they
were viewed as ‘esoteric,’ ‘religious,’ ‘bookish.’ Nevertheless, the ‘second culture’ had a readership, quite a broad
one, at that. Sedakova’s texts were distributed as handwritten copies, and some of them were published in foreign
and émigré journals”). The English translation is also taken from the “About the Author” section on Sedakova’s
website. https://www.olgasedakova.com/about_the_author
183 Sedakova has publications in the Leningrad samizdat journals 37 and Часы (The Clock). Her first book came out
with the Paris-based YMCA-Press.
184 For examples of these translations see Sedakova’s website. https://www.olgasedakova.com/translations

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Additionally, Sedakova shares Khodasevich and Eliot’s love for cats. Her book «Моим
котам» (To My Cats) is proof of this. In the description of the book on her website Sedakova
writes: «В книгу вошли рисунки Кати Андреевой и рассказы и ласкалки Ольги Седаковой.
Ласкалки – это стихи не про котов, а для котов. Произносить их нужно, равномерно
поглаживая при этом кота по спине» (“The book includes drawings by Katia Andreeva and
stories and caresses by Ol’ga Sedakova. Caresses are poems not about cats but for cats. They
need to be read aloud while evenly stroking a cat’s back”).185 This statement favors cats over
humans. The poems, affectionally labeled caresses, should be read aloud while caressing a cat.
One of Sedakova’s cats is even called Murr, recalling Khodasevich’s in the second chapter of
this dissertation. Sedakova’s Murr is just as wise, amusing, clever, intelligent, and friendly as
Khodasevich’s. An online Russian bookseller describes «Моим котам» (To My Cats) as follows:
Ольга Седакова написала весёлую книжку для детей. Впрочем, родители тоже с
удовольствием прочтут смешные и трогательные истории про котов – потому что
кто же их не любит! И все согласятся с автором, что Кот – почётное звание, и
писать это слово надо с большой буквы.
Ol’ga Sedakova wrote a fun little book for children. However, parents will also read with
pleasure [these] funny and touching stories about cats – because who doesn’t love them!
And everyone will agree with the author that Cat is an honorary title, and this word must
be written with a capital letter.186
This advertisement could easily be applied to Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as
well.
185 https://www.olgasedakova.com/books/2369
186 https://www.labirint.ru/books/813126/

165
Not only does Sedakova love cats and read and translate familiar poets to Khodasevich
and Eliot, but she also uses Khodasevich and Eliot to craft her own ideas about poetry, life, and
faith.
187 On the Russian version of Sedakova’s personal website she has divided her essays into
four distinct categories: “Poetica,” “Moralia,” “Ars,” and “Ecclesia.” References to Khodasevich
and Eliot can be found in all four categories, the bulk of which are found in “Poetica” and
“Moralia.”188 She also incorporates Khodasevich and Eliot in numerous interviews.189
Remarkably, Sedakova mentions both Khodasevich and Eliot in the same interview three
different times.
190
Sedakova’s statements about Khodasevich are varied. She focuses first and foremost on
his work as a scholar and disciple of Pushkin. She also refers to his concept русская легенда
(Russian legend), meaning a world created by Russian poets, prosaists, and artists, throughout
her essays. Sedakova believes Khodasevich’s complex relationship with Russia can be traced
back to Nikolai Nekrasov.
191 She quotes from Khodasevich’s poem «Горгона» (“The Gorgon”)
the most in her interviews and essays, especially its concluding lines: «Но кто хоть раз был
смешан с прахом, / Не сложит песни золотой» (“But whoever has been mixed with ashes, will
187 Eliot appears more frequently than Khodasevich in Sedakova’s works. If one searches for Eliot in the Russian
version of her personal website, references occur in over sixty pieces. Ten references occur for Khodasevich.
188 Sedakova refers to Eliot in twenty-six poetica essays and Khodasevich in five. She uses Eliot in fourteen moralia
essays and Khodasevich in two. She also uses Eliot in two ecclesia essays and one ars essay.
189 Sedakova discusses Eliot in sixteen interviews and Khodasevich in three. In addition to these interviews and
essays, Sedakova references Eliot in two prose pieces, three articles on translation, and in a footnote to one of her
poems («Памяти поэта» (“In Memory of the Poet”).
190 These three interviews are with Valentina Polukhina, Anton Nesterov, and Ksenia Golubovich and can be found
on her website. https://www.olgasedakova.com/interview
191 Sedakova argues that this kind of love-hate relationship is exemplified in Khodasevich’s poem «Не матерью, но
тульскою крестьянкой…» (“Not by my mother, but by a Tula peasant woman…”). See her essay «Наследство
Некрасова в русской поэзии» (“Nekrasov’s Legacy in Russian Poetry”).
https://www.olgasedakova.com/Poetica/221

166
not compose a golden song”) (lines 15-16). Sedakova alludes to this poem when speaking of
Auschwitz and the Gulag, emphasizing that the history of mankind has always been full of
cruelty, massacres, and senseless destruction.192 Finally, Sedakova incorporates Khodasevich
when analyzing the lyrical hero. In her interview with Valentina Polukhina, «Чтобы речь была
твоей речью» (“So that speech is your speech”), Sedakova spotlights Khodasevich’s aggressive
and misanthropic gestures in his disavowal of the lyrical hero, an approach she notices in other
poets as well, including Innokentii Annenskii, Joseph Brodsky, Dmitrii Prigov, and the Oberiu:
Большинство побегов от геройного «я», совершенных в нашем веке и известных
мне, ведут вниз. Это, например, дезавуация лирического героя, изображение
нетрадиционных для мифа Поэта – полубога, вестника небесной правды –
психических изгибов: опыт некрасивой опустошенности и неуверенности, как у
Ин.Анненского, агрессивные и мизантропические жесты, как у Ходасевича.
Ироническое изображение «себя» у Бродского, почти брезгливое, – оборотная
сторона традиционного лирического самолюбования и саможаления.
Персонажные, пародийные по существу «я» у обериутов и у Пригова.193
The majority of escapes from the heroic “I” that have been committed in our century and
known to me lead downward. This, for example, is the disavowal of the lyrical hero, the
depiction of mental bends that are nontraditional for the myth of the Poet – a demigod, a
messenger of heavenly truth: the experience of ugly emptiness and uncertainty, like
Innokentii Annenskii, aggressive and misanthropic gestures, like Khodasevich. Brodsky’s
192 Sedakova is referring to Theodor Adorno’s statement that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz or to write a
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. For an example where Sedakova quotes these lines from Khodasevich’s poem,
see her interview with Anton Nesterov on Paul Celan. https://www.olgasedakova.com/interview/1058
193 This interview can be found on Sedakova’s website. https://www.olgasedakova.com/interview/177

167
ironic, almost disgusting depiction of “himself” is the flip side of traditional lyrical
narcissism and self-pity. The characteristic, essentially parodic “I” of the Oberiuty and of
Prigov.
Sedakova’s commentary is fitting.194 In the previous chapters of this dissertation, especially the
first chapter, Khodasevich’s speakers struggle to connect with other human beings and
experience mental turmoil. Although his speakers are more autobiographical than Eliot’s, his “I”
is still flattened and dehumanized.
Eliot as the erudite, neoclassical, High Modernist is the characterization that dominates
Sedakova’s discussions of him in her essays and interviews. She considers him a new Dante,
especially with his religious themes and proclivity towards polyphony.195 Sedakova consistently
refers to his concept of impersonal art as expressed most famously in “Tradition and the
Individual Talent.” In her interview with Valentina Polukhina (the same interview from the
previous paragraph) Sedakova describes Eliot’s “I” as “plural,” “choral,” “representative of the
man of his time,” more “we” than “I,” which aligns with my close readings of Eliot’s poems in
the previous chapters of this dissertation. When not addressing “Tradition and the Individual
Talent,” the works by Eliot that Sedakova mentions the most in her interviews and essays
include: The Waste Land, Four Quartets, “Ash-Wednesday,” “The Hollow Men,” and Murder in
the Cathedral. Eliot’s notions of time and “historical sense,” particularly those in Four Quartets
and “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” engross Sedakova. Eliot’s formative influence on
Sedakova is also evidenced by her decision to translate his poetry into Russian. On her website
194 Sedakova’s response in this interview reminds me of the opening line of Khodasevich’s poem «Перед
зеркалом» (“In Front of the Mirror”): «Я, я, я. Что за дикое слово!» (“Me, me, me. What a savage word!”). In this
poem the speaker despises and loses himself, yet at the end of the poem he demonstrates some level of self-pity. He
laments that Virgil is not behind his shoulders; there is only loneliness in the frame of the truth-telling glass: «И
Виргилия нет за плечами, – / Только есть одиночество – в раме / Говорящего правду стекла» (lines 23-25).
195 See her interview with Anton Nesterov on Paul Celan. https://www.olgasedakova.com/interview/1058

168
one can find her translations of “Journey of the Magi,” “A Song for Simeon,” “Animula,”
“Marina,” “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” “Ash-Wednesday,” and part I of “Coriolan”
“Triumphal March.”196
Sedakova’s seminal essay «Заметки и воспоминания о разных стихотворениях, а
также похвала поэзии» (“Notes and Recollections of Various Poems as Well as In Praise of
Poetry”), typically referred to as «Похвала поэзии» (“In Praise of Poetry”), is a revealing
example of her metaphysical materiality and her New Materialist perspective. In Stephanie
Sandler’s introduction to her, Caroline Clark, and Ksenia Golubovich’s book In Praise of Poetry
Sandler outlines the context, contents, and style of the essay.197 Sandler writes that the essay is
about Sedakova’s “growth as poet” and instead of “speaking in a gesture of command” it “itself
seems to respond to a command” because the “essay opens as if spoken to a knowing friend,
Vladimir Saitanov, who asked that she write down the origins for her early work.” Sandler notes
Sedakova’s “conversational and easy tone, even when complex matters are broached [like her
attempted suicide]. She refers to poems, historical events, or cultural landmarks without pausing
for explanation.” I would add one comment to Sandler’s description of Sedakova’s style, namely
that Sedakova has a habit of digressing throughout the essay, which she mentions herself in
various metaliterary moments. Sandler also notes that “Sedakova later explained that this essay
allowed her to combine two genres: the tale of childhood, for her epitomized by Tolstoy’s
Childhood, and that of ars poetica.”
Sandler’s commentary on «Похвала поэзии» (“In Praise of Poetry”) is extremely
thorough. Nevertheless, I expand her thoughts by explaining how this essay works as an example
196 https://www.olgasedakova.com/124
197 The quotations from the introduction that follow do not have page numbers listed after them because I purchased
the kindle version of this book which does not have page numbers.

169
of a future meeting between Eliot, Khodasevich, and the New Materialists. After the descriptions
of the significant places in her life and poetry, Sedakova declares that each thing, as she sees it,
has been made for more attention than it is usually given, but, having endured, will not ask
another for more – yet how it will smile if someone suddenly breaks the natural order, to fall
silent and listen: «Ведь каждая вещь, как я вижу, рассчитана на большее внимание, чем ей
здесь уделено, и хотя, притерпевшись, уже другого не просит – но, как улыбнётся, если
вдруг кто-нибудь нарушит обычный порядок, помолчит и послушает». Her belief that each
thing deserves our attention confirms how humans are not at the center of her worldview. Each
thing is vital and has something to say, if we will only listen.
According to Sedakova, writers and poets are this someone who suddenly breaks the
natural order and listens to all things. She expresses this idea later in the essay when she explains
under what circumstances poetry surprises us the most – when it refers to the smallest, most
ordinary, and insignificant things that have been overshadowed by objects of the first
importance: «Где поэзия больше всего нас удивляет? Там, где она относится к самому
мелкому, к самому обыкновенному и несущественному, затертому предметами первой
важности». Sedakova quotes Horace when stating that traditionally revered things in poetry,
such as a butterfly, a stream, a grasshopper, a dreary road, old clutter, and a dried flower, share
the same lowly origins: «И множество традиционно почтенных в лирике вещей по
происхождению своему именно такие, ex humili potens: бабочка, ручей, кузнечик, скучная
дорога, старая рухлядь, сухой цветок...». This list of revered objects is not unlike the content
of Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, wherein one finds dead rats, plastic gloves, bottle caps, puddles,
wood, metal, minerals, and so on. Or the content of Khodasevich and Eliot’s poems, wherein one
finds automobiles, motorcycles, radios, streetlamps, electric saws, dead geraniums, dresses,

170
crooked pins, twisted branches, broken springs, cats, rats, monkeys, crabs, hippopotamuses,
butter, toys, lighted shutters, crabs, dust, cigarettes, keys, beds, shoes, colognes, knives, toothbrushes, bodies, bones, corpses, skeletons, skulls, empty eye sockets, teeth, pills, corks, straw,
broken glass, dry cellars, nails, slender hands, fallen hats, gold coins, spring grains, and so on.
Everything in the world of lyrics, according to Sedakova, is permeated with the energy of
meaning, nothing is superfluous or indifferent, like in the world of dreams: «В мире лирики,
как в мире сновидения, нет лишнего и безразличного, все пронизано энергией смысла».
Poetry gives speech or a voice to that which is silent: «дать речь тому, что молчит». Poetry
forces us to change our perspective, to recognize that everything has life and meaning and
therefore to pay more attention and listen to those things around us both human and non-human
alike.
At their best, writers and poets are like Bennett’s vital materialists. The poems that
Sedakova praises, and composes herself, bring our attention to and require us to listen to the
traditionally or typically invisible, silent, or silenced things of this world. Her poetic voice allows
for and actively creates the space for other voices to speak and be heard. Examples include:
«Земля» (“Earth”), «Кузнечик и сверчок» (“The Grasshopper and the Cricket”), «Луг, югозападный ветер» (“Meadow, Southwest Wind”), «Элегия осенней воды» (“Autumn Water’s
Elegy”), «Элегия липе» (“Elegy to a Linden”), «Деревья, сильный ветер» (“Trees, Strong
Wind”), «Азаровка: Сюита пейзажей» (“Azarovka: A Suite of Landscapes”), «Проклятый
поэт» (“The Cursed Poet”), «Деревня в детстве» (“A Village in Childhood”), and «Горная
ода» (“Mountain Ode”).
Sedakova concludes her essay by analyzing the heroic nature of lyric poetry. Sedakova
states the kind of personality she has in mind when considering lyric poetry is connected

171
negatively with character: the courage not to have character: «Личность же, которую я имею в
виду, говоря о лирике, связана с характером отрицательной связью: отвагой не иметь
характера». The voice that forgets and looks beyond itself creates the lyric poet. That is why,
according to Sedakova, responsiveness (отзывчивость) is the condition of poetry (состояние
поэзии). Instead of trying to dominate, the poet ought to be attentive and outward looking,
similar to Bennett’s definition of vital materiality as a “rubric that tends to horizontalize the
relations between humans, biota, and abiota” (112). The human and non-human are not in
opposition in Sedakova’s poems. They befriend, touch, speak, and live with one another. They
are intimately connected. Sedakova’s concerted effort to listen, know, and speak of the vitality of
the material world is an ethos worthy of the New Materialists. The human “I” is minimized in
Khodasevich and Eliot’s poetry, while the non-human “I” is augmented, but their project is not
political. Khodasevich and Eliot do not strive for a complete de-stabilizing of the human.
Sedakova pushes their work forward, creating a new metaphysical materiality. I firmly believe
that if we, like Sedakova, give every thing its designated amount of attention, then our
relationship with our surroundings and each other will become more respectful and profound. I
hope this dissertation inspires others to find and create more examples of metaphysical
materiality wherever and whatever they might be.

172
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Appendix: Some of Edward Gorey’s Illustrations of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
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Creator Matthews, Sarah (author)

Core Title The metaphysical materiality of Vladislav Khodasevich and T.S. Eliot's poetry

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Slavic Languages and Literatures

Degree Conferral Date 2024-08

Publication Date 07/31/2024

Defense Date 07/18/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Animals,Bodies,Comparative Literature,emigre,English Literature,formalism,material,metaphysical,modernism,new materialism,OAI-PMH Harvest,objects,Olga Sedakova,Poetry,Russian literature,T.S. Eliot,Vladislav Khodasevich

Format theses (aat)

Language English

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