Essay: Isolation in Eliot and Yeats

Compare how Eliot and Yeats present Isolation in Animula and any other poem...

Isolation is a prominent them of both Eliot and Yeat's poetry, as Eliot explores the effects of it on individuals and how it corrodes society as a whole, whereas Yeats focuses more on the way an individual produces it's own isolation.

A recurrent theme in Eliot's work is the isolation of separation of people from spirituality, and how isolated one feels without an ideology to sustain you. In Animula, Eliot explores how humans erect barriers, or grow more distance from ideas of spirituality and god,as the little souls corrodes from when it was 'issue[d] from the hand of God' until 'after the viaticum'. Both 'God' and 'fairies' could represent the spirituality or the beliefs the little souls starts off with, and the capitalization of 'God' suggests that he is real and present in the little soul's life until he gets pushed out. This distancing from early beliefs is shown through the change in tone from light and happy to despairing and dark, and the change from an imperative heavy first half - 'advancing', 'running', rising - to a adjective filled second half - 'dusty', 'irresolute and selfish'. This represents the freedom and happiness of early life compared to a frightening and sad later life, where the words of the poems itself, full of plosives and sibilance, seem to oppress the little soul, hounding it and isolating it from the comforting things it once knew.

Just as Eliot presents people as isolated from God, they are isolated from other people, and likewise in Yeats he presents people as unable to truly know one another. Both 'The Mask' and 'The love song of J Alfred Prufrock' explore the inablity of people to understand one another, and find out what they are feeling or thinking. For Prufrock, his inability to understand the woman he loves is his purgatory, as he constantly frets 'Do I dare? and Do I dare?', with the repititon representing the frenzy of his thoughts and reiterating his isolation from her thoughts and feelings. Prufrock craves companionship yet does not fell he is capable of or deserves it, saying that he does 'not think [the mermaids] will sing to [him]'. The word 'mermaids' is reminiscent of sirens that used to lure men to their deaths, and perhaps Prufrock feels as though he would not worth their wooing,and this self hatred leaves his helpless and indecisive. His 'bald spot' and 'thin' 'arms and legs' are as much of a mask to his inner self as the 'mask of burning gold' is in 'The Mask'. However Yeats, unlike Eliot, seems to suggest that a 'mask' is able to provoke lust, as the word 'burning' connotes lust and passion' and 'gold' makes it seem precious, and worth keeping on. Both poets agree on the outer self being  brarrier to the inner self and true love however, as the questioner in 'The Mask' grows more dismayed as they are unable to discover whether 'love or deceit' lies behind the mask, just as Prufrock is isolated from his love's true feelings.

Eliot presents individuals isolation as a result of an oppressive society, as both the little soul in Animula and Prufrock are held back by society's expectations. The little soul becomes increasingly baffled by 'the imperatives of 'is and seems' which Eliot uses to connect societal rules to oppression. The way the little soul 'curl[s] up'likens it to a small child or animal, frightened of the world around it and turning in on itself. the fact that there are no other characters in the poem could serve to emphasise the little soul's isolation or alternatively to create a feeling of everyone else being united in their oppression of it. Similarly in Prufrock, he feels trapped by polite society's never ending rules, and has grown tired of 'the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase', trying to manipulate and keep him in line. his fear of what 'they will say' keeps him in isolation, unable to express his feelings, with the anonymous 'they' keeping him in fear, in the end he has to take his love away from polite society into 'half deserted streets' in order to try to confess his love. In both these poems Eliot seems to express the loneliness that comes from following society's rules, and how it drives people into themselves and separates them from others.

Both Eliot and Yeats portray isolation as springing from a yearning for the past. For both the little soul and Marie in 'The burial of the dead' it is the past that holds the key to their happiness, and Eliot uses nature and water imagery from Marie's past like the 'Starnbergersee', 'rain' and 'sunlight' to present her past as fertile and full of life. In fact, Marie's memories are one of the few images of fertility in 'The wasteland', reflecting the happiness she felt at that time, just as the little soul's early years are full of the light of 'sunlit pattern[s]', the 'brilliance of the christmas tree'. These images of beauty juxtapose with their present experiences, with the little soul 'fearing the warm reality' and  Marie 'read[ing] much of the night and go[ing] south in the winter'. In Yeat's 'The Lake Isle Of Innisfree' a similar feeling of being isolated from reality is explored, as the fantasy island of Innisfree seems too beautiful to be true, with Yeats sharing Eliot's technique of using nature (such as the 'purple glow' and 'beeloud glade') to insinuate joy and peace. The fact the narrator can 'hear lake water lapping' 'night and day' could connote that it is an imaginary place he has created in his mind, or that he lives in his memories of it and they absorb him. either way, Yeats seem to portray a happy past as a source of isolation in the future, as the narrator, just like Marie, seems to prefer the past to engaging with the present.

In conclusion Eliot and Yeats both explore isolation from others and the present and it's detrimental effects upon the individual, with Eliot suggesting that the original source of isolation is a lack of relationship with God.