An Appreciation of the Poem - Sweeney Among the Nightingales

Q. Write an estimate of the poem, precisely and illustratively. Or, Attempt an appreciation, precise and illustrative, of T.S. Eliot's poem Sweeney among the Nightingales.

An Appreciation of the Poem

= T. S. Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" is no conventional lyrical poem but a modernist lyric poem. It first appeared in 1919 in Eliot's collection entitled 'Poems. As a modernist work, the poem presents modern characters as mundane and vulgar rather than as romantic or heroic. It bears an attitude toward twentieth-century man as pessimistic, cynical rather than optimistic, idealistic. As in a good many modernist poems, the poet's language is complex, rather allusive. The poem is set in a common pub or cafe in an unidentified town or city in the southern coast of Uruguay. 

"The circles of the stormy moon Slide westward toward the River Plate."

           The English name of Rio de la Plata (River of Silver), is between Uruguay and Argentina. The westward movement of the moon indicates that the place is in Uruguay. The title of the poem may, perhaps, have followed a specific poem of the Victorian poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning under the title Blance among the Nightingales Eliot's poem, however, is but a parody of Barrett that is shaken with youthful earnest love, as in the lines below "We paled with love, we shook with love We kissed so close we could not vow.

Eliot's poem treats altogether a different matter. His chief character is nothing less than a sexy ape whose life is given to wine and women (of course, prostitutes). He seems to be involved in a plot of betrayal and murder. Two prostitutes are employed to seduce him and thereby to make the way of his murder easier. Fortunately, Sweeney gets suspicious and alarmed, leaves the room and escapes the disaster, planned for him. But the whole theme of the plot against him, thoroughly amoral and dehumanised, seems hardly probable. Actually no calamity takes place. The tale of the plot remains nothing but a tale ultimately and the poem ends in a mock-heroic note. Eliot's present poem has a little thematic significance, except the vacuity of modern life. Yet the poet is to be praised for evoking a specific atmosphere of gloomy foreboding. In its felicity of expression and chastity of diction, the poem deserves unstinted praises. It is, too, a short poem in ten quatrains (rhymed four lines stanzas).