Christian Romanticism: T. S. Eliot's Response to Percy Shelley By ...

Upon returning from a journey, the speaker notes that the trees are still in leaf, and that no cobwebs have been dislodged by “the gentle fingers of the breeze.” In the second stanza, however, a sense of transience becomes increasingly prominent. Whilst the flowers still bloom in the hedgerow, the once wild roses that adorned the woman’s wreath “were faded, and the leaves were brown.” As in Shelley’s lines, we become aware of the inescapable passing of time and its effect on human emotions—captured via images of transience in the natural world. In the reference to the faded roses of the wreath, we may find a sense of mortality, an image that echoes Shelley’s “Rose leaves, […] heaped for the beloved’s bed”. In form and imagery, ‘Song’ wears its Shelleyan credentials boldly, moving as Gregory Jay argues “technically in Shelley’s direction”, and showing that the young Eliot has followed the Romantic passion for nature and “internalized the difference between nature and human desire.” (Jay 86)

The third stage of Eliot’s development of taste marks the return of order to what has, hitherto, been a very disordered process of inspiration and influence:

This is the point at which one has acquired ‘Taste’. Youthful infatuation has been subdued. Our critical faculties remain “awake”, and on guard against the threat of the possessive ‘other’ that can overthrow us if we are not conscious of its threat. ‘Pleasure’ is here a more cerebral effect, founded on the appreciation of subtlety and nuances of style as opposed to the total assimilation of a whole oeuvre and the desire to produce poetry out of imitation. Eliot’s theory of ‘poetic assent’ is important here too because it marks our ability to remain sufficiently detached from the poetry we read to acknowledge the thought it contains without necessarily believing in it. Thus, the first flush of infatuation and possession should, if Eliot’s model is followed correctly, give way to a more detached, and by definition ‘mature’, appreciation.