by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
O Little Soul of Bethlehem
“The heavy burden of the growing soul / Perplexes and offends more, day by day …”
Come Christmas, down comes the T.S. Eliot Selected for the “Ariel Poems.” So I suggested in a sketch posted the other morning. In truth, the Selected comes down for two of the Ariel poems: “Journey of the Magi” and “A Song of Simeon,” which I’ve read many years running.
So this year I read “Animula” instead. The term of the title is Latin for “little soul,” and in the poem – a tight thirty-odd lines, after the convention of Faber’s Ariel chapbook series – Eliot follows the progress of a modern growing soul. Like much of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic poetry, it strikes a note of starchy superiority, proposing that the soul innocent of the ministrations of the church remains unjoined to God — remains a very, very small soul.
And then near the end “Animula” flows over into frankly penitential poetry — poetry which might have been written yesterday, not eighty-five years ago:
Pray for Guiterriez, avid of speed and power,
For Boudin, blown to pieces,
For this one who made a great fortune,
And that one who went his own way.
Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.
Animula — it turns out — is the first word of a famous set of five verses in which the Roman emperor Hadrian, dying in body, bid goodbye to his soul. The verses became a whetstone for parsonical folk sharpening their Latin translation skills. The poet Devin Coldewey’s site has forty-three different translations from five centuries. This especially deft one is by the nineteenth-century Rev. R. Malone:
Pretty spirit, tiny fleeting flame,
Guest and partner of my earthly frame,
Whither passest thou away?
Pale one, stark, unclothed—never more
Sparkling now with joy as heretofore.
Reading these poems, I am struck by how strange the word soul sounds on the tongue and in the inner ear. The idea of the soul, it seems to me, is an idea that has undergone drastic change in our time without anybody really noticing. We don’t think of Eliot’s poetry as soulful, do we? We don’t think of poetry as soulful, do we? We don’t think of the soul as soulful, do we?
