Eliot's "The death of Saint Narcissus" and Herbert's "Affliction" (I)

Abstract

Among the many verses that T.S. Eliot originally planned to include in The Waste Land but dropped or radically revised following Ezra Pound's advice is "The death of Saint Narcissus." This poem exists in two forms: a heavily corrected draft (which I will focus on) and a further revised version prepared for publication in Poetry in 1915 but not published until 1950 in Poems Written in Early Youth.y Eliot's Narcissus is "a dancer before God" (1. 17), and his life in the desert is in some ways an imaginative triumph: the quickly metamorphosing visions that fill the central part of the poem are momentarily stunning. But because he is motivated by a sensuous indulgence in suffering, his martyrdom is one of selfishness, not devotion, and his spiritual quest is a failure, ending "With the shadow in his mouth" (I. 39). This poem has been generally neglected, but Lyndall Gordon suggests very persuasively that "It is crucial to see 7"ne Waste Land, indeed all of Eliot's subsequent work, in the context of this early story of an aspiring saint," written during a time when the "consuming issues" of his life were "his longing for metamorphosis, his vision and loss of vision, and the avidity of his religious emotions."2