Whispers of Immortality

by T. S. Eliot
First published in| Little Review 5.5
Language| English
Lines| 32

"Whispers of Immortality" is a poem by T. S. Eliot. Written sometime between 1915 and 1918, the poem was published originally in the September issue of the Little Review and first collected in June 1919 in a volume entitled Poems published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. It is one of the quatrain poems, a mode that Eliot had adapted from the mid-19th-century French poet Theophile Gautier.[1] The title is a fainter parody of William Wordsworth's title of the poem, Intimations of Immortality.

## Analysis[edit]

The poem was developed in two sections; each contains four stanzas and each stanza contains four lines. The first section where Eliot paid homage to his great Jacobean masters in whom he found the unified sensibility is a kind of "versified critique"[2] of Jacobean writers, Webster and Donne in particular. Both Webster and Donne are praised by the narrator, the former for seeing the “skull beneath the skin”(l.2), the latter for not seeking any “substitute for sense/ To seize and clutch and penetrate;/Expert beyond experience,..”(l.10-12). The apparent oxymoron of a "sense" that transcends beyond "experience" is followed by references to "the anguish of the marrow"(l.13) and the uncontrollable “fever of the bone” (l.16) that are too corporeal for mundane experience. The second section begins with a description of a modern Russian woman Grishkin whose “friendly bust/ Gives promise of pneumatic bliss”(l.19-20). In the following two stanzas, Grishkin is compared to the “Brazilian jaguar” which “does not in its arboreal gloom/ distil so rank a feline smell/ As Grishkin in a drawing room.”(l.26-28) In the concluding stanza, the narrator said that even her charm is the subject of philosophy. Nevertheless “our lot crawls between dry ribs/ To keep our metaphysics warm.”(l.31-32).

## References[edit]

1. ^ Murphy, Russell Elliott (2007). Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot: a Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Infobase Publishing. p. 488\. ISBN 978-0-8160-6183-9.
2. ^ Wood and Davies (2003). The Waste Land. India: Viva Books Private Limited. p. 5\. ISBN 81-7649-433-X.

## External links[edit]

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Whispers of Immortality

* An omnibus collection of T. S. Eliot's poetry at Standard Ebooks
* Whispers of Immortality public domain audiobook at LibriVox

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T. S. Eliot

Bibliography

Early poems|

* "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
* "Portrait of a Lady"
* "Preludes"
* "Whispers of Immortality"
* "Gerontion"
* The Waste Land
* The Hollow Men
* Ash Wednesday
* Ariel Poems
* "Journey of the Magi"
* "A Song for Simeon"

Later poems|

* Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
* "The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles"
* "Gus: The Theatre Cat"
* "Growltiger's Last Stand"
* "The Naming of Cats"
* Burnt Norton
* East Coker
* The Dry Salvages
* Little Gidding
* Four Quartets

Plays|

* Sweeney Agonistes
* The Rock
* Murder in the Cathedral
* The Family Reunion
* The Cocktail Party
* The Confidential Clerk
* The Elder Statesman

Prose|

* Selected Essays, 1917–1932
* "Hamlet and His Problems"
* "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
* The Sacred Wood
* A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941)
* "The Frontiers of Criticism"

Adaptations|

* Murder in the Cathedral (film)
* Assassinio nella cattedrale (opera)
* Murder in the Cathedral (TV play)
* Canticle IV: The Journey of the Magi
* Cats
* 1981 musical
* 1998 film
* 2019 film

Publishing|

* The Criterion
* Faber and Faber
* T. S. Eliot Prize
* T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University)

Related|

* Portrait of T. S. Eliot
* Tom & Viv (1984 play, 1994 film)

People|

* Eliot family
* Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (first wife)
* Valerie Eliot (second wife)
* Henry Ware Eliot (father)
* Charlotte Champe Stearns (mother)
* William Greenleaf Eliot (grandfather)
* E. Martin Browne
* Emily Hale
* John Davy Hayward
* Ezra Pound
* Jean Jules Verdenal
* William Butler Yeats

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