The Journey Of The Magi

We spent our second week on T S Eliot at this evening's class. The more one studies the poet the more impressed you have to be. Prufrock and the other poems in that first collection of iconoclastic brilliance still have the power to overwhelm the senses, particularly when taken together; as the whole they seem to be:

Lines two and three of Prufrock are famously, When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table.

The second of the Preludes begins ... The morning comes to consciousness / Of faint stale smells of beer.

Different poems. Same world. The poems connect not just in content and subject matter and voice but in the way the lines and images relate to one another.

Fiona Morrison (our tutor) ended the class with a reading and discussion of The Journey Of The Magi. Andrew Calder's critical essay cites the poem as an indication that Eliot had begun his descent. Fiona suggested it marks the high-water mark of a mature poet, on his game so to speak. I'm inclined to agree with her, which means my opinion of the poem has changed.

Fiona asked us to speculate on what made the Magi particularly appealing to her. We tried to guess but none of us hit the answer. It was this section, she said:

...................................... but set down
This set down
This:...

I see her point. It is confident. We are persuaded by / of the poetic voice. We suspend disbelief. We're sitting with an old, wise man; a real man rather than some religious icon or signifier. He's telling us his story. He wants us to be sure we write down the crucial, epoch-turning truth he recalls from an earlier time. He is insistent that we get his point; that we get the point. It is, I agree, mightily impressive craftmanship.

I looked for images, settling on this one. It has a realism about it that contrasts strongly with other 'Adoration' paintings of the time. Worth a look.

Jacopo Bassano

(b Bassano del Grappa, c. 1510; d Bassano del Grappa, 13 Feb 1592).

Son of Francesco Bassano il vecchio. He was apprenticed to his father, with whom he collaborated on the Nativity (1528; Valstagna, Vicenza, parish church). In the first half of the 1530s Jacopo trained in Venice with Bonifazio de’ Pitati, whose influence, with echoes of Titian, is evident in the Flight into Egypt (1534; Bassano del Grappa, Mus. Civ.). He continued to work in the family shop until his father’s death in 1539. His paintings from those years were mainly altarpieces for local churches; many show signs of collaboration. He also worked on public commissions, such as the three canvases on biblical subjects (1535–6; Bassano del Grappa, Mus. Civ.) for the Palazzo Communale, Bassano del Grappa, in which the narrative schemes learnt from Bonifazio are combined with a new naturalism. From 1535 he concentrated on fresco painting, executing, for example, the interior and exterior decoration (1536–7) of S Lucia di Tezze, Vicenza, which demonstrates the maturity of his technique.