A deepened hunger for seriousness : 'Mr Eliot's Sunday morning service'

Abstract

For nearly a century the quatrain poems of T. S. Eliot, collected in Poems (1920), have occupied a comparatively peripheral space within the enterprise of Eliot studies. Despite the frequency with which some of them have been anthologized, these poems have elicited far fewer critical responses than most of Eliot’s other work. The primary reason for this neglect is that the quatrain poems are largely regarded as satirical or comical meanderings that do not conform to the more ‘serious’ agenda of Eliot’s oeuvre. ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ is a case in point, since it has the appearance of a learned and almost unintelligible joke. However, it is the aim of this article to demonstrate that Eliot’s growing indignation with perverted spiritual practices is couched within the satire of the poem. It is further argued that the poem shows Eliot’s hunger for seriousness to have grown since ‘The Hippopotamus’, a poem written two years prior which also deals the corruption of established religion. In this poem, Eliot’s vituperation is sustained and is ultimately indicative the poet’s distaste for spiritual apathy, a theme which will reach its zenith some three years later in The Waste Land.