| Chapter 1: | Eliot and Shelley: Influence, Renunciation, and Accommodation |
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The instances cited above combine to relate Eliot’s intense engagement with Shelley as seen from his more mature position, in the past tense, with poetic debts couched within the form of a critical essay. The poem ‘Song’, published in 1907, shows the extent of Shelley’s influence on the young Eliot at closer quarters. In its tone and imagery, it resembles Shelley’s ‘Music, when soft voices die’, a poem that Eliot praises in his 1920 essay on Swinburne on account of “a beauty of music and a beauty of content.” (SE 325) Shelley’s poem runs as follows:
Vibrates in the memory. –
Odours, when sweet voices sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken. –
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed –
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on….12
In Eliot’s poem, reprinted in Poems Written in Early Youth and later in The Complete Poems and Plays (1969), we find the two-stanza format reprised. The opening lines speak of a natural world in which stability is predominant.