A Patient Etherised Upon a Table – a Poetic Dissection

Everyone has one identity and one body through which to experience the world. There can be no changing of perception or flesh. The limbs, the torso, the mind one is saddled with from birth will be a vessel until death, bearing the marks of time. How then can one understand, assume, or control an identity? In the fluid world of thought, one must struggle to make physical or concrete embodiments of abstract and shapeless ideas. In this struggle, the objects that fill the physical world are sometimes the only clues to the workings of personality. In exploring identity, poets turn to these external markings, the trappings of a life. Specifically, Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot have investigated the way in which the things surrounding a person illuminate and influence their identity. In the three following poems, the writers have tried to examine this relationship between identity and the external world.

In the poem “Walking Around,” Pablo Neruda presents a man tired of his identity. He is awash in a sea of things that limit and define his position in the world. The first person voice gives the poem a confessional tone, with Neruda himself speaking directly through the language. He says in the second stanza, “All I ask is a little vacation from things: from boulders and / woolens / from gardens, institutional projects, merchandise, / eyeglasses, elevators-I’d rather not look at them.” In this early part of the poem, Neruda sets up objects from the outside world as extensions of his perception of life. He cannot stand to look at the mundane things that surround and confront him in everyday life. The list varies dramatically, from gardens to institutional projects. In this manner, his feelings of personal dissatisfaction manifest themselves in a dissatisfaction with the world around him. Neruda also discusses specific “things” associated with being a man, such as the tailor or the barbershop. These places shape and define his role as man in the world. They are extensions of the societal expectations that a man will be well groomed and wear a nice suit.

Neruda moves from this concept of how things shape his identity and perception of the world and begins to explore the background of his despondence. He ranges from wanting to lash out, as seen in the fourth stanza, to a sinking numbness in the fifth stanza. He writes that he will not go on in the same way, “wide-open and wondering, teeth chattering sleepily.” Indeed, the whole form of the poem is wide open and wandering. It moves in a loose form with little rhyme, and casual meter. He gives the words open range on the page to do what they will. His numbness does not call for a carefully structured poem. Rather, it wants the language to take the shape it needs and issue forth. Neruda is tired of his world of things, of “absorbing things, taking things in” and constantly processing this outside information in relation to himself.

In the final movements of the poem, Neruda concentrates more closely on the things themselves. He reverses his earlier observations of how things define him, and begins to wonder how he affects things. He delves into the question of how things reflect their human uses. If objects can define individuals and shape their conception of the world, then how do these individuals affect the things they come into contact with? This question is explored specifically in the last three stanzas of the poem, beginning with an opposition between the vague idea of “something” and the tragedy of specific things. He writes that, “Something shoves me toward certain damp houses,” as if even his motivation were controlled by a thing. He cannot tell what this “something” is. It exists as a vague notion of some sort of force compelling him in his frustrated life. This “something” brings him into contact with his perceived tragedy of specific objects, “hospitals, with bones flying out of the windows,” or “streets frightful as fissures laid open.” In the second to last stanza, he comes to the most reflective objects of all, mirrors. Unexpectedly, Neruda does not meditate upon his own reflection and the information contained therein. Instead, he concentrates on the mirrors themselves. He grants them awareness and wonders about what they can see. Finally, he creates them as collaborators in his grief, companions in his misery. He says they “must surely have wept with the nightmare and shame / of it all.” This statement gives an identity to an object, and allows it to absorb the world in the same manner as the man himself. With their powers of perception, Neruda feels that these mirrors will surely agree with his view of the world. He wonders, with all the tragedy they have seen, how can the mirrors not weep along with a lonely man?

Neruda continues the logic behind this question with the last image of the poem. He concentrates on the objects of domesticity, things that trap and entwine one identity to another. In marriage, two individuals become enmeshed, and the objects surrounding them reflect this status. The laundry hanging on the wire is a mix of “blouses and towels and the drawers newly washed.” Here one sees the reality of marriage embodied in coexistence of the feminine blouses and the masculine drawers. Neruda reflects upon this image and applies the same idea he realizes with the mirrors. The laundry cries along with the man, “slowly dribbling a slovenly tear.” Thus, it not only represents the objects that trap and define him, but becomes an extension of himself. Through the animating force of his imagination, Neruda’s identity rubs on the objects he comes into contact with, and these objects use this power of awareness to pass judgment on the world.

W. H. Auden explores this relationship between identity and the external objects of the world in his poem “Miss Gee.” Unlike in “Walking Around,” the reader does not see the world through the main character’s eyes, but rather sees Miss Gee from the outside. Auden gives many details as to Miss Gee’s appearance, where she lives, and what she does. In this way, he explores the same concepts set up in Neruda’s poem, how Miss Gee’s life and identity are shaped by the things that surround her. In her identity as a woman, Miss Gee must wear certain things and do certain things. She conforms to her society’s mode of dress and ideas of propriety, wearing “her clothes buttoned up to her neck.” Unlike Neruda and his revolt against barbershops and the similar trappings of manhood, Miss Gee seems to merely conform to her world. Auden carefully describes her clothes, which are manifestations of her prim and proper personality. She has “a velvet hat with trimmings, / And a dark-grey serge costume,” and is prepared for the weather with her raincoat and umbrella.

Auden’s concept of Miss Gee in her conforming, proper manner stretches even to the form of the poem itself. It has a closely controlled meter and constant rhyme between the second and last lines of each stanza. The effect of this strict meter and rhyme is a simple, sing-song form that creates a poem seemingly silly and playful on the surface. As Auden says in the opening lines, this is a “little story.” Yet, while this form hides the tragedy of the poem at first, it also works in ironic opposition in the end and strengthens the cruel images and outcome. Miss Gee is a lonely woman ignored by the world. Even the “days and nights went by her,” and she asks the stars if anyone cares about her. It is not until she experiences cancer, the thing with the most impact on her existence, that she finally draws the attention of others. This “funny thing” kills her, and she is noticed by others only upon her death. However, their attention is not directed to her as a person, as an individual, but rather as an object to study and dissect. The poem does not precisely state her death until suddenly she appears on a table while “students begin to laugh” as she is cut open. The harshness of these images paired with the same singsong quality of the tone lends an eerie and gruesome feel to this ending. Auden also heightens the horror by continuing to address her as Miss Gee, enforcing her identity and personality. He does not create the image of a cadaver or dead body. Thus, the students react to an object while the reader reacts to a person. In the course of the poem, Miss Gee moves from being surrounded by things that define her to the outside world, then is killed by a “funny thing” and finally, in the end, becomes merely a thing, something to be laughed at, cut in half, dissected, and discarded.

The objectification of Miss Gee is exactly what T.S. Eliot both embraces and fears in his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Like Neruda, Eliot creates a lonely, explorative poem that meditates upon the things surrounding a man. J. Alfred Prufrock has come to the same point as Neruda, a world weary summing up of life, and wonders upon the worth of all his actions and times. He examines the exteriors of his world, from his own physical appearance, to the objects and people that surround him. He begins the exploration of his identity by examining what he wears, a “necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin.” Like Miss Gee, he wears his collar “mounting firmly to the chin.” The clothes and the way he wears them communicates his identity to others. This also shows the way in which objects control a person’s free will, becoming tools of conformity to societal values and expectations. Prufrock wears his clothes in this manner not to express his originality or creativity, but to appear like everyone else. He goes so far as to be slightly obsessed with the correct way in which to conform with his dress. He thinks, “I grow oldâÂ?¦I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” In this way, his reaction to time and aging is exhibited by a response in his physical appearance. He is fascinated by things, by the objects that surround him and he relates everything to objects.

Although Eliot grants some objects a life of their own, such as the fog with its feline character, he does not grant them the ability to react to human actions, like Neruda does in the last lines of his poem. Instead, Eliot has Prufrock compare human actions to objects and objectify everything he sees. Prufrock cannot even see the whole of people or things, he speaks of everything in fragments, a pair of claws, arms, eyes, etc. In this way, even human identity becomes a set of broken objects. He cannot see the people around him but as a collection of things, prepared faces, white arms, and formulating eyes. He turns this objectification upon himself, stating that these eyes, “fix you in a formulated phrase.” He thus becomes merely a phrase “sprawling on a pin.” He has, like Miss Gee, become only a thing. Even time becomes a question of objects and can be measured out by coffee spoons. When Prufrock questions the validity of the ways in which he has spent his life, he wonders if it was worth all the objects he has experienced, “the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled / streets, / After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that / trail along the floor.” He wonders, after this life filled with pleasant things, if it would have been worth risking it all to ask the “overwhelming question.”

Prufrock’s speculation on past actions or missed opportunities epitomizes the feelings of restlessness and weariness in all three poems. In the start of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot compares the sky to a “patient etherised upon a table.” Neruda’s chattering numbness is akin to this etherised image; he has been lulled into oblivion by the drone of everyday life. The ultimate passivity expressed in this image exemplifies the frustration of the poets, and their poems as well. Just as Miss Gee becomes literally a body on a table, dissected by indifferent students, so do the poems themselves become objects of dissection themselves. Eliot, Auden, and Neruda have created objects to be understood much in the same way they are trying to dissect the worlds they live in and sort out the meaning of the objects that surround them. All three poets speak of discontented lives, of souls wanting or wondering if there is something more. This stagnation is expressed by Doctor Thomas when he speaks of cancer as a “hidden assassin” that grows inside the body, feeding upon dissatisfaction and regret. He says, “Childless women get it, / And men when they retire; / It’s as if there had to be some outlet / For their foiled creative fire.”