Purgatory and The Family Reunion: In Pursuit of Prosodic Description

PURGATORY AND THE FAMILY REUNION: IN PURSUIT OF PROSODIC DESCRIPTION T. S. ELIOT'S PROSODY IN The Family Reunion and his other verse dramas in modern setting has been compared with that of Yeats's Purgatory, to which Eliot recognizes a debt. Pursuit of the comparison may help to establish the nature of the line Mr. Eliot has sought to develop for his contemporary verse drama since Sweeney Agonistes, his first effort in the twenties. He has expressed a desire for a flexible, transparent verse form which could move from the prosaic to the poetic at moments of intense emotion, refining modern idiom and conversational speech rhythms into art. The rhythm of Yeats's Purgatory has, on the one hand, been called by Louis MacNeice an awkward attempt, "in the absence of formal limits," to escape from traditional metrics and gain a "tougher and starker kind of verse."l On the other hand, Ronald Gaskell has demonstrated that the play combines effectively a versatile and precise diction, tight syntax, the illusion of conversation between characters who "transcend the personal," and measured accentual verse of 4-stress lines which provides the formal limits of the metric.2 It will be seen that Eliot's verse in The Family Reunion is also describable as 4-stress. Prosody is a term designating the rhythmic structure of sound in verse or prose.s Meter may be defined as a rhythmic pattern of expectation by which one identifies particular prosodic types of verse or prose. The prosody of Mr. Eliot's verse dramas in modern setting has been the subject of conflicting descriptions which reflect either extremely varied performances or completely different modes of description, and the poet's brief mention in "Poetry and Drama" of his use of a line of three stresses and a caesura4 was not fully enough developed to clarify the problem. The verse of these plays has been called by critics prose, free verse, iambic pentameter, or loose blank verse, and 3-stress, 4-stress, or 5-stress measured accentual 1 Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London, 1941), pp. 192, 196. 2 Ronald Gaskell, "Purgatory," MD, IV (February, 1962), 400-401. 8 James Craig La Driere. "Prosody," Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley, new rev. ed. (New York, 1953), p. 322. 4 T. S. Eliot, "Poetry and Drama," On Poetry and Poets (New York. 1957), pp. 87-88. 1964 PURGATORY AND THE FAMILY REUNION 257 verse which counts the number of approximately isochronous metrical stresses in the line. Examination of metric parallels between PW'gatory and The Family Reunion helps to illuminate the prosodic structure of each. Mr. Eliot acknowledged Yeats's "astonishing" development of the line and of speech in verse in his last play, Purgatory, when he wrote in "Poetry and Drama" that "[Yeats] solved his problem of speech in verse, and laid all his successors under obligation to him/'5 The play, like Eliot's The Family Reunion, gives great importance to an old house evoking memories, a curse, and supernatural creatures.6 Giorgio Melchiori sees Purgatory as the chief source of the language and meter of The Family Reunion; however, Eliot apparently began work on his play long before March, 1938, when Yeats conceived of Purgatory. Purgatory was performed first in August, 1938. Eliot had completed his first draft by the spring of 1938, though the play was not produced until March 21, 1939.7 Analysis of rhetorical accents in performance and of the structure of the line suggests that the meter in Purgatory is 4-stress measured accentual verse, often heavily end-stopped by punctuation and syntactic grouping to preserve the line unit, with a caesura and a varying number of syllables to the line. It creates the illusion of conversation through matching speech stresses and metrical stresses in very precise language which ranges from the trivial to the formal.s Accents generally fall in rhetorically important content words and rhythmically prominent syllables at approximately isochronous intervals, in keeping with the normal speech tendency in English towards isochronism of accent.9 The frequency of the appearance of four accents per line establishes the immediately perceived pattern of expectation-a meter...