2025: January, Version 1.1 ~ February, Version 1.2 ~ March, Version 1.3

G. Kim Blank, English Department, University of Victoria

Animula is not considered a significant text within the Eliot canon. But it can be pitched as profitably expressing central features of Eliot’s poetry and poetics, as a condensed expression of his conflicted, grasping beliefs about the meanings and purposes of a life lived, a life then looked back upon, with an intimated yet uncertain thereafter.

Generally, what significance Animula does signal is sidelined within the contexts of the other, more prominent of Eliot’s Ariel poems—The Journey of the Magi (1930)—as well as by other poetry by Eliot from the 1920s, and in particular The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), and the poems that make up Ash Wednesday (1930). The indifferent poetic status of Animula—mainly held in passing critical opinions that range from nominating it as a minor confessional poem to declaring it a vaguely dispassionate essay, or as somewhat connected to Eliot's other Ariel poems as a Christmas poem—perhaps deserves, as they say, a second look. Animula might possibly be ready for reassessment as a complex and fully Eliotic poem—syntactically, tonally, sonically, metrically, and, most importantly, thematically: the struggle for spiritual vitality. As we will also see, Animula can be usefully read through and in parallel with William Wordsworth's most canonical work; finally, and somewhat surprisingly, and in the complicating light of Eliot's early impersonal theory of poetry, it can be opened up to biographical appropriation via relatively recent evidence.

The Poem

Eliot’s thirty-seven-line poem has two stanzas: lines 1-31 and 32-37. The metrical form is loosely based around pentameter; most of the lines have asymmetrically patterned end-rhymes, many of them slant rhymes.

The poem’s title seems to have been salvaged by Eliot from a short poem attributed to second-century Roman Emperor Hadrian, where the word appears in the first line—“Animula vagula blandula” (roughly translating as "Little (or endeared) soul, wandering, pleasant." There are plenty of sources for Eliot’s encounter with Hadrian beyond Hadrian’s poem itself: the lines had been cited, used, or translated—sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely—by numerous hands, including those of Henry Vaughn, Matthew Prior, Alexander Pope, Lord Bryon, and Walter Pater.

While Eliot’s sources and literary precursors are notoriously eclectic and arcane, there’s a good argument for Dante being the foremost influence upon Eliot’s poetry and poetics; as Ezra Pound summarily writes in The Sewanee Review a year after Eliot’s death, “His was the true Dantescan voice.” It is not surprising, then, that Animula takes its lead from The Divine Comedy, the three-part narrative poem (of over 14,000 lines, written in the early 1300s) that is more or less a guided tour through the realms of the dead. In particular, Eliot directly draws from a passage in the second part: Purgatorio, Canto XVI, lines 85-96. This passage ventriloquizes some of Dante’s ideas via Marco Lombardo (that is, Marco of the Lombardy region of northern Italy), who, historically, is thought to have been a forthright and articulate medieval courtesan.

In Purgatorio, moving toward this moment through a scene of thick smoke, the two travellers, Virgil (the guide at this point) and the Pilgrim (associated with Dante himself), encounter the spirit-voice of Lombardo; they ask if they are on the right upward path. Lombardo is also queried about why the world is without virtue and full of evil. Good question, and Lombardo, though a bit testy, is up to it. His answer promotes the necessity of free will in a blinded world made unprincipled by the muddy intermingling of church and state. He points to the corrupting nature of undisciplined pursuits, and thus to our need for justice-bringing law; our faults lie in ourselves, and not in the stars.

Dante, via Lombardo, has large, over-spilling questions at the back of this. What are we to follow: A way into the world which, without guidance, offers deceiving temptations, or the pathway to God and to heaven? How can free will even exist in a world subject to God’s will only? We are, as it were, created as good souls, but what is it that, in life, comes to corrupt us? What, then, is even the point of life? Eliot, of course, likewise occupies these nagging questions, and he condenses features of them in Animula.

The passage (Canto XVI, lines 85-96) within the greater Lombardo scene draws Eliot enough that, after marking it out in his own copy of The Divine Comedy, he offers a prose translation in his 1929 essay-book, Dante:

"From the hands of Him who loves her before she is, there issues like a little child that plays, with weeping and laughter, the simple soul, that knows nothing except that, come from the hands of a glad creator, she turns willingly to everything that delights her. First she tastes the flavour of a trifling good; then is beguiled, and pursues it, if neither guide nor check withhold her. Therefore laws were needed as a curb; a ruler was needed, who should at least see afar the tower of the true City."

The soul issued by God will, after encountering delights, be deceived or charmed by them; without a guide or laws or ruler, “the tower of the true City” (the city of Heaven, presumably) will be lost sight of and not gained. Required: Tough love? Devotional stricture?

Meanwhile, back at the poem, what establishes a reading of Animula is announced in its first line, which lifts, translates, and condenses the first few lines from the passage in Purgatorio. Eliot marks his translation with single quotation marks: ‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul’.

Expansion in Animula beyond this first line (which, problematically, with the absence of any end punctuation, may or may not be grammatically connected to the subsequent line) both does and doesn’t follow Eliot’s translated passage of Dante, but it clearly uses the idea of a child occupying an uncertain, confused world, as well as picturing the isolated child pursuing very specific and trifling delights.

The poem seems to articulate an impersonal account into the path of life by an observing persona; that is, in the third person, it resists any relational positioning of the speaker with the insertion of a lyrical “I.” But that missing “I” becomes somewhat conspicuous by its absence, as a kind of purposeful disociation; pushed further, the adult speaker appears puzzlingly alienated from both the child’s imaginative and physical world—yet at the same time so very close.

Why Conspicuous?

The poem’s speaker (despite the title’s suggested attentiveness to this “simple soul”) calls upon some very particular childhood image-recollections and feelings, and it does so from the clear perspectives of a certain child or kind of child, and not, it seems, from an adult persona looking at or considering a generic child or childhood. This child, in a “flat” yet mutable world, moves “between the legs of tables and of chairs,” and is pictured “grasping at kisses and toys” (2-6). The child timidly retreats and feels insecure at subtle dangers, and is thus “Eager” for physical, bodily reassurance from those around him—“the corner of arm and knee” (7-8). According to the distanced-not-distanced speaker, this child exists in a world of shifting, synesthetic senses, in sight, sound, smell, and feeling: in “changing lights and noise, / To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm” (2-4); in the “fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree, / Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea”; in studying “the sunlit pattern on the floor” and the images of “stags around a silver tray” (9-12). This child, though confused by “the actual and the fanciful,” is “Content” retreating into his solitary imaginative engagement with playing cards, fairies, and “what the servants say” (13-15). No less than seven participles animate this sensitive, imaginative, thinking child, and, again, the terms of reference are fairly specific.

So far, so good—at least for this child. Nothing seems too far beyond the expected. This child is, at least, on the pathway into our mutable world. Noteworthy, too, is that, unlike in Purgatorio, the figure is not designated as “she,” and will not be.

At this point, about half-way through the poem’s first part, despite the more immaterial idea of “simple soul” that Dante pictures, noteworthy is how much, in Animula, the material, peopled world—of tables, chairs, kisses, toys, arms, knees, Christmas tree, wind, sunlight, sea, floor, the silver tray, playing-cards, and servants, and in those participles that present a moving world, of rising, falling, grasping, advancing, retreating, taking (and implicitly studying)—passes into the experience of this child and, circumspectly, of the speaker.

The poem hints toward a world of battling and waning agency, which is unsurprising given the long run of Eliot’s poetry. The next passage of five lines (16-20) falls into the increasing weight and confusions of growing up and into the world, where, with uncompromised complications and confusions, the forcing deceptions of “is and seems” face the “growing soul.” And if we don’t get it, in characteristic Eliotian fashion, the speaker interweaves tensioned pairings—“Perplexes and offends,” “offends and perplexes,” “desire and control”—with doubling, accumulating repetitions: “Perplexes . . . perplexes,” “offends . . . offends,” “more . . . more,” “day by day,” “Week by week,” “may and may not.” Uncertainty is steadily, palpably, more intense.

This child-subject is taken closer, perhaps, to and through adolescence—to “The pain of living and the drug of dreams.” This does not yet picture an adult, given that the subject is seen as a curled-up “small soul in the window seat / Behind the Encyclopædia Britannica” (21-23). Does this highly specific circumstance and very specific cultural reference suggest protection by canonical—yet highly commercialized—world knowledge? Is the suggested comfort spurious or possible ironic? A little obscure materialist background helps: Eliot, like many, was aware that Britannica, beginning with the 1910-1911 eleventh edition, was wildly advertised throughout the English-speaking world as the single most important cultural archive and publishing event of the era; Eliot acknowledges as much in a 1931 obituary he writes about Charles Whibley for the English Association. But whatever the context, the subject-child is pictured as inward and perhaps seeking protection.

The translation of Dante in the first line of Animula now returns in line twenty-four, but with a one-word difference that shifts or expands the poem’s thematics: “Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul” (1) now becomes (with a dropped comma) “Issues from the hand of time the simple soul” (24). Likewise, that “simple soul” of the first line is recast as “the growing soul” in line 16. This shift, or substitution—from “God” to “time” and time passing—raises a question earlier hinted at with the persistent passing of days and weeks (17-18): Is “time” the real “God” of our existence? After all, the temporal is the true master our being—or not being. Once more, this idea (or problem) persists in much of Eliot’s poetry. What is the meaning of human time—its tedium, its wavering meaning, its moments of inertia—set, as it were, within the timelessness of before and after?

Line twenty-four until the first ending of the poem at line thirty-one recall a feeling and figure in Eliot’s breakthrough poem of 1915, a persona obsessed with and trapped by time and by via relentless, reduplicating moments of indecision, insecurity, fear, aging, and death: Prufrock, in his dramatic monologue The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In this passage in Animula, as in Prufrock (which also begins with an epigraph from Dante), this figure-feeling is conjured and is likewise, and utterly, caught within time—uncertain, immobilized, trapped in self-centeredness, fearful, and ineffectual in acting upon “offered” desires: “Unable to fare forward or retreat, / Fearing the warm reality, the offered good, / Denying the importunity of the blood” (26-28). Again, think of poor Prufrock in his do-I-dare hesitancy and labored suppositions, looking at but unable to act upon the warm reality that surrounds him, watching those women coming and going, and awkwardly gazing upon the perfumed women and their bare, white, braceleted arms (Prufrock 13-14, 35-36, 63-66), trapped between fear and denial—and watching himself age. Interestingly, both Prufrock and the Animula figure are further joined by having moments of being depicted as disabled or mutilated: Prufrock sees himself as a pinned, sprawling insect as well as bodiless, worn-out claws (57-58, 73-74), and the speaker in Animula captures the figure as “misshapen, lame” (25-26).

This child-soul figure in Animula, stuck in though moving through time, in this later time-frame of Animula, at once hardly exists, reduced (re-figured) to a shadow-spectre “in its own gloom” (29). Where has this figure been, and doing what?

The narrative is, to say the least, abbreviated: in the space of a line, and looking through and into this darkness and despondency, we see where it seems to have been: surrounded by “disordered papers in a dusty room” (30). [1] Dust, the material stuff of time passing, too-easily references the human state of becoming, being, and ending, primarily via the Book of Genesis and burial of dead section in The Book of Common Prayer, both of which are poetic fodder for Eliot, as is Eliot's ever-present struggle with the idea of incarnation. But stepping back from this obviousness, it is again irresistible not to superimpose this alliteratively-driven (disordered/dusty) moment upon a wearied editor-writer under the unending weight of both his work and the pressures of his personal world—to Eliot himself in the 1920s, that is.

And lest we forget, and once more abbreviated: this adult is seen “Leaving” (30) that disarranged, aging space. To what? To return to exist again after last rites—“in the silence after the viaticum” (31), offering provisions to begin some kind of passage or journey from this world into the next, as the v-word and its history suggests? Or is there simply nothingness—“silence”? Eliot, attracted to the idea of transmigration, often poetically worries about the state of spiritual betweenness, of not being able to cross over, which conjures his iconic poem of 1925, The Hollow Men, a poem with a collective voice that struggles over the efficacy and completion of prayer, a poem about waiting to get the other side. The scaffolding of this moment as dramatized by Eliot once more takes us back to Dante’s Purgatory—a place to purge sins, of cleaning, of paying debts, of salvation and repentance, before you can proceed to heaven. The means to do so (as in Purgatorio) is prayer.

Fittingly, then, six lines of post-scripted prayer-invocation take up the final section of Animula. Specifically, it is intercessory prayer—praying for others, for five varied but ultimately obscure figures: someone “avid of speed and power,” someone “blown to pieces,” someone “who made a great fortune,” someone “who went his own way,” and someone “slain” by a boarhound (not by the boar) “between the yew trees” (32-36; yew trees suggest death and rebirth). Though three of these figures are given names—Guiterriez, Boudin, Floret—and because the circumstances for death seem spread into history and the names non-English, the point might be simple: death comes everywhere and to all. For his part, Eliot maintained that these five were meant as types, not as particular individuals. [2] These five are figures of activity—not necessarily good activity or activity with promising outcomes, but activity nonetheless, whereas Eliot's assumed speakers often circle around either languishing figures or uncertain watchers and deeply reflexive thinkers, rather than on earnest performers. This is hardly news, since, in fact, much poetry revolves around forms of irresolution; but what makes Eliot's work stand out is the often-encountered spiritual intensity and the modernistly-styled probing of irresolution. And Animula is such an encounter.

To return to these figures: Do some, like these five, require more deliverance, more help, than others—in order, that is, to be born again? Prayer is, after all, a living, formal attempt to speak to God’s presence—a pleaful, surrendering discourse that intimates reciprocity with something unknowable beyond. Crucially, prayer is necessarily about waiting, which is also central to Eliot more than ten years later, and perhaps most strongly articulated in East Coker (1940), which becomes the second part of Four Quartets (1943), where the speaker (who sees life as a kind of failed space) likewise speaks to his “soul”: “there is yet faith / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting” (section III). That this is openly the speaker’s “soul” caught in the process of waiting does turn us back to the non-declared speaker in Animula, and to how close, how proximate, this speaker might be to the poem’s human subject.

The final line of Animula makes the implicit explicit: we are suddenly included—“Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth” (37). Why “suddenly”? Because the poem’s first section of thirty-one lines has a conspicuous grammatical absence: no personal pronouns. Now there are two—“us” and “our.” And, once more, why pray? For rebirth? Salvation? The paying of debts? With the line, Eliot openly invokes the most famous of prayers, the Hail Mary: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” [3] Eliot, though, massages, or even counters, the final part of the Hail Mary prayer in Animula by substituting "birth" for "death," thus turning our focus upon a life to be lived, rather than upon the hoped-for coming of some kind of afterlife.

That last line in Animula—“Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth”—besides turning us to the significance of the Hail Mary prayer, in fact takes us to its use as the last line of a poem that becomes the first part of Ash Wednesday, entitled “Perch'’io non spero…,” published in the French journal Commerce in Spring 1928. That poem is, unlike Animula, not a recollection of specific experience, but a meditation upon the meaning of our moment in the here and now. But the compositional proximity of the two poems, along with Journey of the Magi (first published in August 1927), suggests a noteworthy alignment with Eliot’s poetic interests during this period, as Eliot's first post-conversion poetic expressions of his spiritual struggle to hold on to the sustaining powers of faith.

With all of this, does Animula offers more than just a small slice (1/46th to be exact) of Faber & Faber’s Ariel Christmas-card publishing history. Does it represent anything more than a diverting footnote within Eliot’s poetical canon?

Before we get there, a lurking question has already crept in, one that, in general, in fact challenges the job of criticism, and here, specifically, in what we are to make of Animula: Does the poem both avoid yet provide possible poetical snapshots of Eliot’s childhood personality and feelings—that of a the solitary, timid, uncertain child?

This possible sideways approach to Animula is complicated, and even more so given that the poem may or may not be propped up by Eliot’s famous 1919 manifesto-essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, which forcefully argues that the job of the poet is to not draw upon the poet’s lived life as the subject for poetry: “experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry.” The essay is obviously the critical posturing of a younger poet—a young modernist poet—attempting to carve out some anti-Romantic space for himself. Moments of bravado (rhetorical and otherwise) are hard to miss in, for example, Eliot’s declarations that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” or in “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Years later, in the 1964 Preface to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Eliot gives a slight nod to such critical posturing, referring to Tradition and the Individual Talent as “perhaps [his] most juvenile" essay to "appear in print." It remains, nevertheless, highly canonical.

Going Through Wordsworth: The Corpse Finding its Way to the Surface

Eliot has a specific Romantic fish to fry in Tradition and the Individual Talent, and a big one at that: the dominant presence in 19th-century poetry, William Wordsworth—the non-mentioned but oh-so-present straw-poet in Tradition, whose first-person lyrical “I,” which often openly draws directly from the speaker’s personality and experience, is (to riff off John Keats’s phrasing that famously captures Wordsworth’s poetical character) both egotistical and sublime.

Eliot in the 1920s returns to question the poetic worth of Wordsworth’s recollections of early childhood. In a 1927 review of Edmund Blunden’s study of Henry Vaughn’s poetry in the September issue of Dial (pages 259-63), Eliot, in one of his perfectly pitched passive-aggressive critical phrases, describes Wordsworth’s Ode as a “superb piece of verbiage.” Eliot then proceeds to condemn the “love of one’s own childhood” as indulgent and weak—“it is something to be buried and done with, though the corpse will from time to time find its way to the surface.” In the end, Eliot goes on say that Blunden—a fellow Ariel Poems contributor for 1928—“like some persons of vague thinking and mild feeling, yearns toward a swooning ecstasy of pantheistic confusion.” Persons like Wordsworth, that is.

This, perhaps, angles Animula as a moment when Eliot’s childhood corpse finds “its way to the surface.”

Animula, then, recalls and complicates Wordsworth’s famous first-person and personalized moments in the monumental Intimations Ode (1807; properly titled Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood). The Ode pictures how, over time, “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy” (67-68), with “Years” that “bring the inevitable yoke” and, importantly (given Animula's terms), a “Soul” weighed down by “earthly freight” (127-129). Likewise, like the child’s increasing difficulties set into Animula ("day by day; / Week by week"), Wordsworth presents a very similar narrative of the increasing confusions and uncertainties of childhood—“vanishings,” “obstinate questionings” over outward appearances, uncertain “shadowy recollections” (Ode, 132-170). There’s even parallel scenes of their respective children receiving “kisses” (Ode 88; Animula 5).

That Wordsworth’s Ode signals the notion of pre-existence—that the "Soul," issued from God, precedes existence (64-66, 161-167)—is yet another striking convergence. Wordsworth, however, manages to thank and praise childhood as strength-giving and foundational, generalizing it as the “master light of all our seeing” (155)—what sees us through the confusions of “human suffering” to establish “the faith that looks through death” (187-188). The speaker of Animula, too, wants the latter—the transcendence-making that faith enables—but cannot muster any sense that childhood (or specific childhood experience) is foundational in the strength- and meaning-making of our being. That is, Animula cannot see through such perplexity and "The pain of living" (21). Both poems recall the sensuous "pleasures" of childhood (Animula 8-10, Ode 178-79), and both poems note that such pleasures pass as the confining, darkening weight of life approaches. The difference: Eliot’s imagery leaves us with darkness, dust, silence, and death; Wordsworth’s imagery works itself through "darkness" (118) and then finds light. In Animula, rather than being foundational, childhood is, at best, mysteriously, darkly diversionary. Wordsworth gives us the story of how loss is turned into gain, in finding "strength in what remains behind" (181); Eliot's poem gives the story of loss that, at best, leaves us with the uncertain practice of prayer—in praying for others, but also for "us," both at our birth and "now" (37).

The narrative that strongly connects Animula and the Intimations Ode can be put fairly simply. The child is seen as a soul issued "From God" into the world, but as the "Boy" grows into a "Man," this connection dies away (Ode 58-77) into confining darkness, and is compromised by a life of "earthly freight, / And custom" (Ode 127-28). Both poems variously but similarly worry over our "Souls" losing sight of that "immortal sea / Which brought us hither" (Ode 164).

Put beside another of Wordsworth’s iconic poems, Tintern Abbey (1798), Animula again seems stark in being unable to muster connection, continuity, and restoration. For Wordsworth, however, meditatively looking back through the first-person to particular moments—to experience, that is—fortifies his “spirit” against the “darkness” and “fever of the world” (53-55). Wordsworth resolves to summon and to perceive “a motion and a spirit that [. . .] rolls through all things” (102-4), which falls far from the selfish irresolution (25) and crippling fear of any “offered good” in Animula, of any “warm reality” (27-28). Whereas in Tintern Abbey the sweetness of sensations that are “Felt in the blood” and in “the motion our human blood” move us to “become a living soul” so that we “see into the life of things” (29, 45-50), in Animula “the simple soul” (24) is found “Denying the importunity of the blood” (28). Both poems recognize the weariness, weight, and mystery of “this unintelligible world” (Tintern Abbey 36-41 ), but for Wordsworth, for his “spirit” (57-59, 116), there is movement toward light, joy, healing, and affirmation; for Eliot, the soul within the world is no more than a “spectre in its own gloom” (29)—confused, pained, uncertain, inward. Finally, both poems end in prayer (Tintern Abbey 124); but while Wordsworth’s moves toward “cheerful faith,” “blessings,” and love (136-37, 157-58), Eliot’s ends by imploring prayer for five apparently unsaved souls, and then for us.

Both poems image the pressures of the world in exactly the same terms: in Animula, the “heavy burden of the growing soul / Perplexes” (16-17), and in Tintern Abbey a “blessed mood” is conjured that lightens the “burthen of the mystery,” “the heavy and weary weight” of the world (38-42).

Why bother to bring Wordsworth into the discussion, besides acting as a stark, strongly comparative backdrop to Eliot's poem, though this, in itself, could be an end?

First, Eliot is the obvious successor to Wordsworth: Wordsworth is to English poetry of 19th century as Eliot is to the 20th. Second, any sustained poetic consideration of childhood in the English poetic canon necessarily conjures and has to go through Wordsworth, who explores how memories and experience springing from childhood can, with the meditative mind, be restorative and forward-looking, and in fact see us through time. Third, and related, is the more crucial note that even a passing comparison of Eliot’s seemingly minor poem with Wordsworth’s major poetry alerts us to Eliot’s attraction to the deepest, most persistent questions—questions about the soul growing into the world, questions that evolve into shifting consideration of meaning, doubt, and faith. Fourth, via Wordsworth, we might become more critically attuned to that apparent distancing marked by Eliot’s critical theory of the impersonal: Eliot's non-use of the lyric “I” in Animula, when in fact the poem clearly conjures snapshots and the clear specifics of a personal memory, what in the Wordsworth canon via his remarkable Prelude are famously known as childhood’s “spots of time”—though, again, Wordsworth, unlike Eliot, sees these memories and scattered moments as renovating, reparative, uplifting, and nourishing (1850 Prelude, Bk, XII, 208-25).

But then again, maybe not so unlike Wordsworth after all?

And so, in March 1933, just a few years after Animula, Eliot delivers the “Conclusion” of his Norton Lectures at Harvard, and unlike what he says in the 1927 Blunden review above, Eliot now fully points to the importance an author’s “sensitive life since early childhood,” and he does so very much in Wordsworthian terms—the idea of recurring but random “certain images”—as well in the same style that Wordsworth uses to describe the importance and nature of childhood’s “spots of time.” Eliot questions,

“Why, for all us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junctions where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depth of feeling into which we cannot peer. We might as well ask why, when we try to recall visually some period in the past, we find in our memory just the few meagre arbitrarily chosen set of snapshots that we do find there, the faded poor souvenirs of passionate moments.” [reprinted in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism]

Here, like Wordsworth in The Prelude as he attempts to articulate the meaning of those “scattered” moments “From our first childhood” (Book XII, 222-25), Eliot considers these “arbitrarily chosen set of snapshots” from past memory “charged” with both emotional and, possibly, “symbolic value”—mysterious in that they “represent the depth of feeling into which we cannot peer.” Even Eliot’s phrase, “early childhood” directly recalls the full title of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode: “Ode | Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood.” So in a way we have two Eliots at work: one who demerits, resists, or is at best mystified by the value and meaning of certain recurring images from the past, and in particular childhood; and the other who calls them “passionate moments” linked to “depth of feeling.” Again, all of this once more complicates and expands our reading of Animula.

Does this mark merely an artful and dispositional difference between the two poets, inasmuch as Animula struggles to displace anything meaningful from the speaker’s im/personal, recollected perspective? Or does it suggest something (at least on a critical level) more compelling? Part of Eliot’s struggle might be, in Wordsworth’s terms, how to poetically place or give meaning to his own “spots of time.” In the end, both poets are joined inasmuch as both seek revelatory moments: for Eliot, and particularly in the first part of his life as a poet (say, pre-1930), revelation as a kind of moment is held out as static, delayed, and uncertain; for early Wordsworth (say, pre-1807), his revelatory moments assure a future via moments "too deep for tears," where fear and joy can coexist (Ode 201-3).

How Should We Speak of It?

So, with all of this, what perspectives should be brought to bear upon Animula? How should we speak of it?

Perhaps, to begin, as a kind of story. Animula seems to harbour brooding, unsettled feelings—negative sentimentality, it might be called. The narrative path of this sensitive child issued into the “flat” (2) yet mutable world does not alter the fact that the child is seen to experience pleasure, play, and curiosity, along with childhood apprehensions and feelings of isolation. The speaker is set to look back through and to this child (one is tempted to say “to himself”), set into human, material time, with the vexing weight of an unsatisfactory world closing in. Vague assurance and experience falls into self-centered, frozen, and distorted confusions. It’s a story where the speaker points to how fear and denial of “warm reality, the offered good” moves the figure to become a despondent “shadow” or “spectre” of itself. This brief narrative of a life and impermanence seems to move toward tragedy, to a fall and to failure, but the speaker petitions a further journey: “Leaving” this world, then “Living” into another. This, of course, is vintage Eliot: departure as an equivocal form of both appeal and questioning, with wavering positions of hope and fear. Reduced to the most basic narrative reading, Animula is the story of the movement from innocence to experience.

Outside of such narrative and themative positioning, Eliot in April 1945 expresses this plainly to his longest-running confidante and confessor, Emily Hale: “I think of this life as yielding no permanent satisfaction”; the details of life’s plot plague Eliot in his desire for, at best, some kind of patterned meaning. [4]

Animula is intriguing in that a significant part of it images the mysterious strains between the speaker and (his treatment of) the subject-child. Stylistically, these seem to be distancing tensions that poetically perform an end-run around the personal, but they nonetheless break into the poem, bottle it up, and then silently make an exit by shifting beyond the figure whose life begins and passes by in thirty-one lines, only to fall into prayer for souls who otherwise might be hopeless.

But is there more—more, that is, to profitably complicate the poem, particularly in those ostensible distancing tensions?

Indeed. This is, again, a circling back to Eliot’s seeing-un-seeing of himself. Extra-textual biographical and personal material exists to perhaps even underpin Animula, and it comes via another letter to Hale. Less than two years after the publication of Animula, and in expressing how he feels his life has been “discontinuous” and that he understands the “handicaps” of being an “only child,” he reveals much about his childhood—and he ends by referencing his 1929 Christmas-card poem:

"...I was somewhat like an only child in a large household. In a way I was spoilt […] I was allowed to indulge my tastes for solitary dreaming and reading all sorts of odd books in a library corner, unnoticed. I never talked, for who was there to talk to? And I had no playmates. We continued to live in an old quarter of the town, which had originally belonged to my grandfather; […] So that we lived practically in a slum: it harmed me only in starting me with a rather drab image of the world, and in isolating me from the other children of my own class. I never met any girls at all, except at the dancing classes, of which I was terrified; and I very much envied the other little boys who apparently played more or less with the same girls — or at least saw them frequently on other occasions than dancing class — and who to my perpetual amazement seemed as much at ease with the girls as with each other. I became both conceited and timid; independent and helpless … But how I run on about my childhood, quite too garrulous. I tried to put some of this into a little poem called ‘Animula.’" [5]

Eliot confesses a little more to Hale, pointing to his youthful “struggle against difficulties and defects of temperament.” But it is clear enough: Eliot directly translates significant childhood feelings and personal characteristics into Animula—the awkwardness, timidity, and uncertainty; a sense of isolation and imaginative escape; and even that recollection of a “library corner” in the letter points to the reference in Animula to that buffering set of Britannica; then there’s the “flat world” of Animula and the “drab image of the world” in the letter. Of course none of this alters the poem as a poem, inside or outside of history—though it does provide an insight into Eliot’s creative method, the styled tensions in his distancing-not-distancing, in the poetics of the impersonal. Both the poem and the letter somewhat remarkably avoid any sense of nostalgia, except, slightly, in the inward turn: once more, negative sentimentality.

What, then, is Animula? Literary in subscribing to poetic discourse—in allusion, imagery, form, sound, convention, and tradition—and in being Eliotic? Spiritual in acting out life’s uneven, darkening journey, life’s sufferings, and, through the place of faith and sin and Christian tradition, moving toward some possible after-world—in short, his constant struggle with belief and acceptance of death? Historical in situating a life within the material qualities of a certain class, with the picturing of certain social anxiety and tensions, continuously compromised by uncertainty as well as social commitment—not to mention being a modernist text and an interwar poem? Philosophical in probing the meaning of fundamental knowledge and experience, in pointing to the tensions between the ideal and the real, between skepticism and belief, destiny and the will—and behind this, Eliot's varying assertion that history—even a singular moment in history—is paradoxically timeless? Psychological in testing and transcribing memory, childhood development and perception, fears and desires, and in forming an individual consciousness? Autobiographical in specifically picturing while distancing Eliot’s own childhood and particular personality, with a figure growing into and through the directing complexities of religious meaning in the face of some shadowy, immobilizing reality—and then, as a writer/editor, leaving all those papers behind in a dusty room? And then bio-critical, in enacting Eliot’s early impersonal theory of poetry, before, as in the Four Quartets, he comes to fear less the full presence of a thinking, feeling “I,” but always picturing a persona who negotiates the paradoxical place of his flickering soul, caught between time past and time future, between material purposes and spiritual intimations, with hoped-for release from unprofitable action toward eternal, stilled silence.

Animula, of course, is all this and more—that is, besides being a Christmas card.

Notes

[1] Many years later, on 30 November 1947, this line (30) from Animula returns to Eliot, verbatim, as a self-reference. He does so in a highly contemplative, soul-searching letter to Emily Hale, in which he probes his profound “strains” and “torments of mind” over the last months; with confused, multi-faceted regret, Eliot believes that she, Emily, is the only one with whom he had even the vaguest chance of happiness. As for the rest of his life: “I have a probably superstitious, and possibly self-pityingly, lachrymose, feeling that I have not many years, that there is something important I ought to do with them, and that I probably shall have postponed doing it ‘leaving disordered papers in a dusty room’ […].” (From The Eliot-Hale Letters, ed. John Haffenden, The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 2022.)

[2] “Boudin”—“blown to pieces” (33)—is particularly contra-Prufrockian, inasmuch as the figure indeed dares to disturb the world. The name, perhaps coincidently, irresistibly signals the French anarchist Martial Bourdin: armed with a bomb, Bourdin famously (and accidently) blows himself up February 1894, in what seems like an attempted attack on London’s Greenwich Observatory, an obvious symbol of civilized order. Eliot spells the name only slightly differently in Animula. (Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, is formulated around the Greenwich incident.) But, in a letter to Dudley Fitts, 6 June 1940, Eliot writes that, although the three names in Animula were not meant to suggest anyone, he nonetheless did “have a particular person in mind: a writer I used to know” who was “blown to pieces”: Eliot does not mention a name, but the reference points to T. E. Hulme, the essayist, critic, and minor poet who, in September 1917 in the Belgium trenches during World War I, aged thirty-four, was shelled. Eliot thought highly of Hulme’s conservative, anti-Romantic critical tenets—what might be called his classicism. Eliot writes to Morris Gilbert, 10 September 1942, about how the three names in Animula were not intended to be identifiable.

[3] That Animula is rounded by prayer is not surprising: many of Eliot’s significant poems—Ash Wednesday (1930), Four Quartets (1943), and, as mentioned, The Hollow Men (1925)—invoke prayer and its meaning at various moments; and even Prufrock, as he fearfully intimates his own death, pictures himself praying (81-86). Eliot returns to probe the meaning of prayer in Little Gidding (1942), which becomes the fourth and final poem of Four Quartets: in the struggle for belief, genuine prayer goes far beyond ritual, consciousness, or “instruction,” to the attempted invocation of a timeless space “beyond the language of the living.”

[4] 3 April 1945: from The Eliot-Hale Letters, ed. John Haffenden, The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 2022. Eliot, interestingly, in this letter argues that his poetry after 1926 ceases to express "futility."

[5] 7 Sept. 1931: from The Eliot-Hale Letters, ed. John Haffenden, The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 2022.

Animula Contents: Selected Sources & Works Cited

Atkins, G. Douglas. T. S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Reading-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Blunden, Edmund. “The Ariel Poems.” The Times Literary Supplement, 24 November 1927, p. 873.

Budziak, Anna. T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: Making Sense of the Times. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Egotist, vol. 6, 1919. [The essay is published over two issues of The Egotist, where Eliot is (as named in the masthead) “assistant editor”: part 1 of the essay is published in the September issue (no. 4, pp. 54-55), and parts 2-3 in the December issue (no. 5, pp. 72-73).]

Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd: 1920. [New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1021.]

Eliot, T. S. “The Hollow Men,” in Poems 1909-1925. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1925.

Eliot, T. S. “The Silurist.” Dial. September 1927, pp. 259-63. [Review of Edmund Blunden’s On the Poems of Henry Vaughan.]

Eliot, T. S. “Perch'’io non spero…,” Commerce, no. 15 (Spring 1928), pp. 6-11.

Eliot, T. S. Dante. London: Faber & Faber, 1929.

Eliot, T. S. Charles Whibley: A Memoir. The English Association. Pamphlet No. 80, December 1931.

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1935. London: Faber & Faber, 1936.

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1940.

Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1943. [The Faber & Faber edition is published in 1944.]

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.

Eliot, T. S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism | Studies in the Relationship of Criticism to Poetry in England. London: Faber & Faber, 1964. [First edition: London: Faber & Faber, 1933.]

Haffenden, John, editor. The Eliot-Hale Letters. The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 2022. [<https://tseliot.com/the-eliot-hale-letters> / <tseliot.com>]

Gelzer-Govatos, Asher. “’A Sensuous Embodiment’. Sacramental Poetics in T. S. Eliot's Ariel Poems.” Religion & Literature, vol. 52, no. 2 (Summer 2020), pp. 25-44.

Gordon, Lyndall. The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse. London: Virago Press, 2022.

Lehmann, John. “T. S. Eliot Talks About Himself and the Drive to Create.” New York Times (Book Reviews), 29 November 1953, p. 5 and cont’d p. 44.

Pound, Ezra. “For T. S. E.” The Sewanee Review, vol 74, no. 1 (January-March) 1966, p. 109.

Ricks, Christopher and Jim McCue, editors. The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Roberts, Michael, editor. The Faber Book of Modern Verse, London, Faber & Faber, 1936.

Schneider, E. “The Ariel Poems and Coriolan,” in T. S. Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet. Oakland: University of California Press, 1975, pp. 129-48.

Timmerman, John H. T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1994.