Yulia Vitvitska
Kamianets-Podilsky Ivan Ohienko National University
Scientific Supervisor: Matkovska M.V.
The semantic peculiarities of the concept “Time” in Tomas Eliot’s poetry
The paper explores semantic peculiarities of the concept “Time” in Tomas Eliot’s poetry, the most influential poems and pieces of criticism of the twentieth century, but the notion is nevertheless applied both to theory and practice. This paper sheds light on Eliot’s works and its conceptual integration of the concept “Time”. Closely related to Eliot’s perception of tradition, it also supports his use of techniques of metaphors and presentation of sources, archetype and images.
Keywords: semantics, concept, cognition, category, time.
Toward the end of the 20th century, there is both dissatisfaction with existing formal semantic theories and a wish to preserve insights from other semantic traditions. Cognitive semantics, the latest of the major trends which have dominated the last decades, attempts to do this by focusing on meaning as a cognitive phenomenon.
Cognitive semantics is investigated by such scientists as Leonard Talmy, George Lakoff, Dirk Geeraerts and Bruce Wayne Hawkins. As part of the field of cognitive linguistics, the cognitive semantics approach rejects the formal traditions modularization of linguistics into phonology, syntax, pragmatics.
As is often the case with labels for theories, the term cognitive semantics might be objected to as being rather uninformative: in this instance because in many semantic approaches it is assumed that language is a mental faculty and that linguistic abilities are supported by special forms of knowledge [3, p. 155].
Hence, for many linguists semantics is necessarily a part of the inquiry into cognition. Cognitive semantics sees linguistic meaning as a manifestation of conceptual structure: the nature and organization of mental representation in all its richness and diversity, and this is what makes it a distinctive approach to linguistic meaning. Leonard Talmy, one of the original pioneers of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, describes cognitive semantics as follows: ‘Research on cognitive semantics is research on conceptual content and its organization in language’[3, p. 160].
In the cognitive semantics literature meaning is based on conventionalized conceptual structures. Thus semantic structure, along with other cognitive domains, reflects the mental categories which people have formed from their experience of growing up and acting in the world. A number of conceptual structures and processes are identified in this literature such as metaphor, metonymy, generalization and specialization.
Eliot’s narrative simplicity is that powerful instrument with the help of which he shows the reality and non-reality. The author mastered this technique over the years. The language of his works is simple, though he uses complex metaphors, allegories and other categories.
Time is the principal phenomenon of his poetry. Eliot’s primary theme—time and the timeless—consistent with the temporal qualities of music is presented in the Four Quartets’ opening lines:
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past . . .
all time is eternally present” [2, p. 42].
Time more than anything defines the contrasting dimensions of relative existence: an apparent snare with no escape, a continuum of change ever wearing away the fabric of existence, a flow and beauty in constant renewal, a series of exquisite moments that bind life together. Time defines the human condition—the constant reminder that our days are numbered, that our “too, too solid flesh” will too soon melt [1, p. 141].
The Four Quartets’ opening four lines demonstrate Eliot’s grasp of time, its spiritual significance, and its philosophically exasperating nature which the poet contemplates in the line: “time is eternally present,” an assertion that lends to time both relative and absolute properties while conflating its various, fluctuating forms—the past forever disappearing, the future forever being born, and the present forever being renewed into a single moment [1, p. 185].
Sandwiching past, present, and future together, he creates the eternal moment, the natural condition of time according to physics. With a touch of glib humor, Eliot states that the past contains the future, a truism if time is conceived as sequential flow, that is, the future flowing into the present and the present flowing into the past, but an absurdity from the perspective of pure philosophy which holds that the future is always in a state of becoming and the past is always already gone [2, p. 205]. Eliot next suggests that the present and past will “perhaps” be found in the future. True, what will become the present and the past must first be found in the future, but because what is already the past and what is currently the present precede the future, is Eliot’s assertion logical? Moreover, Eliot adds the qualification perhaps they will be found because the future, unlike the past and present, is yet to be formed and remains forever uncertain.
We see that Eliot understands time in a different way. The author expresses his own attitude to the category “time” in the following lines:
“Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present” [2, p. 46].
Eliot’s reflection on the cyclical nature of time continues in East Coker, a poem about dissolution and renewal. The realization that “In my beginning is my end” has a sharp-edged, biting quality that only a Christian thinker can keep from turning into morbidity and nihilism.
East Coker offers the reader images of fleeting time. Taking a cosmic look at man and lived-time, the poet offers the reader a vision of the futility of overt concern with earthly existence. In one of the most striking passages of the poem, Eliot doubts whether mere poetry, or any of man’s modes of expression, can fully grasp the cyclical nature of time: permanence. He tells us that the beginning contains the seeds of the end. However, time racing away from us, the reader is assured, does not really matter. The reality of human existence goes deeper than any mortal can ever suspect
“That was a way of putting it-not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter [2, p. 50].
The Dry Salvages reflects on time as a lived, existential reality that man embodies. The poem begins by considering the importance of rivers, what Eliot calls conveyors of commerce. “The brown gods” as he refers to rivers, are only of immediate concern to us so long as they remain a problem to tackle. After a river has proven useful, the “worshippers of the machine” ignore it [2, p. 54]. The river, a metaphor for subjectively lived-time—we are told—informs human existence. This rendition of time is quickly contrasted with chronological time, which is nature’s time.
The Dry Salvages attempts to reconcile the tension between these two forms of time. Realizing that there can be no end to the passage of time, the narrator recognizes that man’s embrace of time is essential to our development as incarnate souls. The narrator alerts us that man cannot help but internalize the objective world in forming part of our existence:
“While emotion takes to itself the emotionless/Years” [2, p. 154].
Eliot confronts time not as an abstraction but as the reservoir of historical and personal experience. With increasing age, we come to regard the past as a closed-ended reality that contains the wisdom of the ages. For Eliot, the passage of time ought to teach us much about permanence: many people merely pass through experiences and miss their meaning. He ties this idea to the deceptive notion that momentary happiness is more important than well-being.
The Longman Dictionary gives the following definition of “time”: 1) the thing that is measured in minutes, hours, days, years etc using clocks; 2) a period of time during which something happens or someone does something [4, p. 1513].
In Tomas Eliot’s poetry time more than anything defines the contrasting dimensions of relative existence: an apparent snare with no escape, a continuum of change ever wearing away the fabric of existence, a flow and beauty in constant renewal, a series of exquisite moments that bind life together. Time defines the human condition—the constant reminder that our days are numbered, that our “too, too solid flesh” will too soon melt.
So we may make the conclusion that Tomas Eliot’s understanding of the concept “time” makes the reader think over it.
The main lesson that cyclical time leaves us with is not that time is ultimately cyclical, but that memory fails us. This is why the end is a beginning and the beginning an end.
Time is like a moving platform that man rides on. The problem, as Eliot sees it, is that we forget the sights, colors, people, and places that we encounter along the way.
References
- Gish, N. K. Time in the poetry of T.S. Eliot / N.K. Gish. – Totowa, New York : Barnes and Noble, 1981. – 156 p.
- Eliot T. Selected Poetry. Poems, lyrics, dramatics poetry / T. Eliot. – St. Petersburg : “SEVERO-ZAPAD” 1994. – 446 p.
- Evans V., Green M. Cognitive Linguistics / V. Evans, M. Green. – Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2006. – 848 p.
- Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. — London : Longman, 2001. — 1667 p.