May, 2024

Dr. G. Kim Blank, The Department of English at the University of Victoria

Beginning in 1927 and running until 1931, and under the direction of Richard de la Mare, Faber & Faber of London publish thirty-eight pamphlet cards known as “The Ariel Poems.” A second series of eight poems is produced in 1954.

Faber’s catalogue advertises its line of “little booklets” of unpublished poems as “suitably decorated in colours and dressed in the gayest wrappers. It has been designed to take the place of Christmas cards and other similar tokens that one sends for remembrance sake at certain seasons of the year.” The series is commercially successful; this is assured by commissioning a wide selection original art for the cards, including work by brothers Paul and John Nash, poet-artist David Jones, and Eric Gill. Faber also uses the Ariel cards as gifted acknowledgement for clients and those within its literary circle.

T. S. Eliot’s Animula is No. 23 in the sequence of Ariel poems. Printed by the Curwen Press, Plaistow, it is published 9 October 1929, when Eliot is forty-one; it sells for 1 shilling. Two weeks later, 400 large-paper copies—numbered and signed—are published. For Animula, there are two wood-engravings (one in colour) by sculptor, illustrator, and wood-engraver Gertrude Hermes (1901-1983). Eliot will after-the-fact say that he didn’t really like the wood engraving, and, more generally, that he would prefer “not an illustration but a design” to accompany poetry, given that “the illustrator will merely impose his own particular interpretation of the poem upon the reader”; Eliot also adds that he thinks “the market for those Christmas card poems is pretty well exhausted” (letter to Emily Hale, 24 Nov. 1931; The Eliot-Hale Letters, ed. John Haffenden, The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 2022).

Eliot contributes a poem in the Ariel series for each of the six years it runs. His other poems are The Journey of the Magi (1927, no. 8 in the Ariel series), A Song for Simeon (1928, no. 16), Marina (1930, no. 29), Triumphal March (1931, no. 35), and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (1954, when the series is shortly revived in a larger format with eight poems by prominent poets). In Eliot’s collected edition of his poems (the first being Poems 1909-1925), Eliot uses the series name to nominate his grouping as the “Ariel Poems.”

Other writers who contribute to the Ariel series include Thomas Hardy (1927, no. 1); Walter de la Mare (1927-1931, nos. 4, 11, 20, 31, 33); G. K. Chesterton (1927, 1929-1930; nos. 5, 21, 25); Siegfried Sassoon (1927-1928, 1930-1931, nos. 7, 14, 27, 34 ); W. B. Yeats (1929, no. 18); Edith Sitwell (1928, 1931; nos. 15, 36); “AE” (1929, no. 19); and D. H. Lawrence (1930, no. 28); the 1954 pamphlet-cards include poems by W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. The full line up of Ariel poets is more or less a who’s-who of poets of the first half of the twentieth century.

At the time of composing Animula, American-born Eliot works for Faber & Faber (though there is only one “Faber”—Geoffrey), having been taken on with an initial five-year contract as a director/editor in the autumn of 1925, when the publisher is Faber & Gwyer. His general position is as literary advisor. Eliot did have pressures in his selection of writers: Geoffrey Faber did want to turn a profit. This isn’t a given, since Faber & Faber’s declared publishing inclinations are belle-lettristic.

In joining the publisher, Eliot leaves a position at Lloyds Bank in London, where, for eight years, and advancing quickly, he ends up in the Colonial & Foreign Department. His work ethic and polyglottal skills set him ahead. In the last phase of his employment at Lloyds, he heads its Intelligence Department; he eventually oversees a staff of seven. Despite the nagging of many friends to invest his full energies in literature, it is not easy for Eliot, at age thirty-seven, to leave the security—and the challenges—of working for Lloyds, where he deals with the complexities of international, real-world banking policy at an interesting historical moment of both financial growth and post-war debts, and where, in fact, he develops some lasting friendships.

In 1922, while working for Lloyds, Eliot founds and edits one the premier literary magazines of the era: The Criterion. Eliot has had experience: through his early mentor, Ezra Pound, in 1917 he had worked as Assistant Editor (and contributor/reviewer) for The Egotist, a modernist journal which ends publication in 1919 (most noteworthy, it publishes James Joyce’s A Portrait of a Young Man, parts of Joyce’s Ulysses, and Wyndam Lewis’ Tarr). The first issue of The Criterion in October 1922 (of 600 copies) includes a seminal and darkly uncertain poem by Eliot, sculpted by experimental, modernist technique, layered by allusional complexity, and enmeshed with historical crises with personal uncertainties: The Waste Land. The poem is subsequently published in the US in The Dial, November 1922; it becomes a seminal Modernist text.

Eliot vets countless submissions while overseeing The Criterion, and he shapes its direction with his critical views: he writes over sixty editorial-commentaries, and he develops a recognizable iconoclastic tone. Because of Eliot, the journal manages to bridge conservative and traditional literary values with modernist and avant-garde work. He recruits writers like Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wyndam Lewis, Kathleen Raine, Dylan Thomas, as well sounding a clear internationalist, cosmopolitan agenda in premiering writers like Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, and Herman Hesse. Early on, Eliot records that taking on The Criterion completely exhausts him, and a history of its various funding and nominal incarnations show its ups and downs, along with Eliot’s. The Criterion ceases publication in January 1939, on the brink of World War II; buried within this last issue are Eliot’s “Final Words,” expressing, in his own terms, editorial “staleness” and personal “discontent.”

Making the period of Eliot’s affiliation with Faber even more complex and uneven, in 1925, Eliot’s wife of ten years, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, suffers with serious health issues, both physical and psychological. This is predicted a few years earlier, in 1921, when Eliot himself suffers from some kind of depression-related breakdown before re-entering his life of letters. But as Eliot moves forward in the mid-1920s, his wife’s condition fully distresses and taxes him; he has moments of what seem to him as hopeless fatigue; he expresses being overwhelmed and even paralyzed by work. Medically attending to Vivien (which Eliot prefers over “Vivienne”) becomes a personal and financial burden. Eliot will separate from Vivien in 1933; she dies in 1947, having spent the last decade of her life committed to an asylum, with some suggestion of behind-the-scene promptings by Eliot. Vivien’s anonymous contributions—as “F. M.”—to The Criterion over 1924-1925 are somewhat undervalued, though also complicated by Eliot’s overseeing all of the journal’s published work, including editing the work of “F. M.”; her shared reflections on Eliot’s poetry are minor but not unimportant.

The mid-1920s sees one part of Eliot attracted to right-wing views. In February 1924, he writes to his mother that his political and social opinions are “reactionary and ultra-conservative.” While this might sound extreme, such sentiments are certainly in the air at the moment, and often amongst the intelligentsia. But Eliot’s views are neither entirely sympathetic to communism nor rising Fascist politics, as his review of five books about Fascism (in The Criterion, December 1928) make clear; more than anything, Eliot hoped for a new, engaged form of democracy, though his leanings are tinged, as it were, with some elitist and royalist sentiments tied to older traditions.

Eliot working at Faber and Gwyer, March 1926; photo taken by his brother, Henry; Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am. 2650 (186).

In June 1927, Eliot secretly converts to Anglo-Catholicism. He is secretly baptised and then immediately confirmed (confirmation requires baptism). This is as complex and interesting as it might seem odd—maybe more so for a thirty-nine-year-old. It certainly surprises, even shocks, some of his friends who, like Virginia Woolf, worry it might dull his creativity; it didn’t. Eliot’s family religious background, formed as it was around somewhat progressive Unitarian values, did not offer guidance or questions about more decisive beliefs and practices that he seemed to crave. Thus his searching philosophical and spiritual disposition (with some attraction to mysticism) makes his conversion to rooted, disciplined, and liturgical pursuits much less surprising. Eliot felt that life held a void, and he craved some representation of order; in short, he wanted a belief system, or at least the tenets of one to grasp toward. Holding the deep, traditional values of the church, with the more absolute pronouncements—about good and evil, atonement and original sin, birth and death—also offered Eliot much to creatively engage. More personally, for Eliot, through the idea of a sacramental life and possibility of fulfilment, came habits he hoped might shape his own discipline—in, for example, in the simple, ceremonial habits of attending mass. And so, Eliot is attracted to how Anglo-Catholicism turns up questions of spiritual salvation in the context of both historical chaos and in his personal discomposure.

Later in 1927, Eliot is naturalized as a British citizen. During the year, in prose alone, Eliot averages about one piece every week.

Looking ahead, we come to a powerful and somewhat uniquely odd tension in Eliot the poet: he is powerfully attracted to the stability and traditions and trappings of belief, along with the embedded mysteries of disenchantment and indecision; and yet, formally, his verse is startlingly modernist in its form, phrasing, and testing allusions.

Eliot will be professionally associated with Faber & Faber for forty years, often acting as a crucial literary advisor. He continuously assesses submissions, and his busyness is, here and there, apparent in a few haphazard moments of proofreading. As mentioned, he manages to foster, publish, and promote many of the most important writers of the age, such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Wallace Stevens. Interestingly, he turns down the opportunity to publish George Orwell’s Animal Farm: he’s unconvinced that the “fable” of Animal Farm “is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the present time” (letter to Orwell, 13 July 1944)—to criticize Stalinism, that is.

A year after the death of Vivien in 1948, Eliot, aged sixty, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1957, and quite secretly one very early January morning, Eliot marries Valerie Fletcher. He has known her for eight years, when she is a secretary at Faber & Faber (Eliot proposes via a very polite letter); she has known all about Eliot since her early teens, when she seems to be seriously drawn to him after hearing a recording of his poetry being read—which, coincidently, happens to be the most significant of the Ariel poems, The Journey of the Magi (1927). Valerie is 30 at the time of their marriage; Eliot 68.

In 1965, less than eight very happy years with Valerie, and after long history of chain-smoking and suffering from emphysema, Eliot, passes away, aged 76. Valerie, as literary executor of Eliot-related material, will become a protective yet crucial editor of Eliot’s poetry and letters; she also makes and then generously distributes the fortune she makes via the worldwide profits of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, a musical based on Eliot’s 1939 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Valerie passes in 2012, aged 86.

Faber & Faber still manages a great deal of Eliot’s work, along with handling the rights of the Estate of T. S. Eliot. It remains an independent publisher that privileges the belle-lettristic tradition.

Animula is not considered significant text within the Eliot canon, though it profitably embodies features of Eliot’s poetry and poetics as well as offering 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, and especially The Journey of the Magi. 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—perhaps deserves, as they say, a second look. Animula might possibly be ready for reassessment as a complex and fully Eliotian poem—syntactically, tonally, sonically, metrically, and, most importantly, thematically. And as we will see, and somewhat surprisingly, the poem can be opened up to biographical appropriation via relatively recent evidence.

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.

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.” Anima in Latin means “soul,” with the la making it diminutive, hence animula—“little soul,” or “endeared little soul.” There are plenty of sources for Eliot’s encounter with Hadrian beyond Hadrian’s poem itself: the lines had been cited or translated—sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely—by numerous hands, including 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 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 particular 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:

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 trifling delights.

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

Why conspicuous?

The poem’s speaker (despite the title’s suggested attentiveness to this “simple soul”) calls upon some 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, the child exists in a world of shifting, synesthesic 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). The 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 the child and, circumspectly, of the speaker.

Young T. S. Eliot Reading (Photograph by Henry Ware Eliot, Jr.); courtesy of the T. S. Eliot Estate

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.

The 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 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 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 indecision, insecurity, fear, aging, and death: Prufrock, in his 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). Dust, the stuff of material 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. 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 (Dantesque) 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, 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 the 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 the boar itself) “between the yew trees” (32-36; yew trees, fittingly, suggest death/rebirth). Though three of these figures are given names—Guiterriez, Boudin, Floret—and because the circumstances for death are spread into history and the names non-English, the point might be simple: death comes everywhere and to all. But something more specific seems at work: these five for whom we should pray embody violent and sinful ways. Interestingly, and possibly significantly, these are figures of activity—not necessarily good activity, but activity nonetheless, whereas Eliot often seems attached to languishing figures—to disillusioned watchers rather than to earnest performers.

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, and perhaps most strongly articulated in East Coker (1940), the second part of Four Quartets, 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 have a conspicuous grammatical absence: no pronouns. Now there are two—“us” and “our.” And, once more, why pray? For rebirth? Salvation? The paying of debts? Invoked here is the most famous of prayers, the Hail Mary, with poem’s “us” and “our” placed within the exact syntax as the prayer: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

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 at various moments; and even Prufrock, as he fearfully intimates his own death, pictures himself praying (81-86).

Animula offers, then, more than just a small slice (1/46th to be exact) of Faber & Faber’s Christmas card publishing history.

There’s a lurking question: Does the poem both avoid yet provide possible poetical snapshots of Eliot’s childhood personality and feelings—the solitary, timid, uncertain child?

This is complicated, given that Animula may or may not be propped up by Eliot’s early critical dictum that poetry must “escape” personality and emotion, articulated in his 1919 manifesto-like essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent. This point in Eliot’s essay—his impersonal theory of poetry, “a continual extinction of personality”—is explicitly contra-Wordsworthian. Yet Animula recalls Wordsworth’s famous moments in Intimations Ode that picture how “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy” (67-68), on “Years” that “bring the inevitable yoke,” and, importantly, a “Soul” weighed down by “earthly freight” (127-129). Likewise, like the child’s difficulties set into Animula, Wordsworth presents very similar confusions and uncertainties of childhood—“vanishings,” “obstinate questionings” over outward appearances, uncertain “shadowy recollections” (132-170). There’s even parallel scenes of their respective children receiving “kisses” (Intimations Ode 88; Animula 5).

That Wordsworth’s poem 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, the “master light of all our seeing” (155)—what sees us through “human suffering” to establish “the faith that looks through death” (187-188). Eliot, too, wants the latter—the transcendence-making that faith enables—but attempts to resist the former, that childhood is foundational in the strength- and meaning-making of our being. Eliot’s imagery ends in darkness; Wordsworth’s in light. For Eliot, rather than being foundational, childhood is, at best, mysteriously, darkly diversionary.

Why bother to bring Wordsworth into the discussion?

First, Eliot is the obvious successor to Wordsworth: that is, 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 finds that memories springing from childhood as restorative. 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 about the soul growing into the world, questions that evolve into shifting consideration of meaning, doubt, and faith. There remains, though, that apparent distancing marked by Eliot’s critical theory of the impersonal: Eliot non-use of the lyric “I” in Animula, when in fact the poem appears to rake through snapshots and the 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 as renovating, reparative, and nourishing. Is this both (merely?) an artful and dispositional difference between the two poets, inasmuch Animula struggles to displace anything meaningful from the speaker’s im/personal, recollected perspective? Part of Eliot’s struggle might be, in Wordsworth’s terms, how to poetically place or give meaning to his own “spots of time.”

Animula, then, seems to harbour brooding though 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 the 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 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 matched tensions of hope and fear.

Outside of such poetic positioning, Eliot expresses this plainly to his longest-running confidante and confessor, Emily Hale, among the 1,131 newly released letters to her: “I think of this life as yielding no permanent satisfaction” (3 April 1945; The Eliot-Hale Letters, ed. John Haffenden, The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 2022); the details life’s plot plague Eliot in his desire for, at best, some kind of patterned meaning.

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. Extra-textual biographical and personal material exits to perhaps even underpin Animula, and it comes via another letter to Hale. Less than two years after the publication of Animula, and in the context of 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 Christmas-card poem:

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. 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? 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? Philosophical in probing the meanings fundamental knowledge and experience, in pointing to the tensions between the ideal and the real, between skepticism and belief, destiny and the will? Psychological in testing and transcribing memory, childhood development, fears and desires, and in forming an individual consciousness? Biographical 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, leaving all those papers behind in a dusty room?

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

Read the 1929 version of Animula at the University of Victoria Libraries