Week 9: Eliot's quatrain poetry: "Sweeney"

"I consider my Sweeney poems as serious as anything I have ever written, in fact much more serious and more mature than the early poems but I do not know anyone who agrees with me on this point except William Butler Yeats and Vivienne who have both said much the same thing about them" (Eliot, Letters 608).

Here's a great article on Eliot's early poems.

On my first reading of the "Sweeney" poems, and after reading "Prufrock", I was struck by the disparity between them - Sweeney, on one hand, is an animal-man, a brute, but Prufrock is the repressed intellectual. I'm unsure whether Eliot meant to play one against the other - it's likely, I suppose, but it's a great opposition.
Sweeney lacks self-reflection, but Prufrock lacks anything much beyond self-reflection... It would make a great dissertation topic, I'm sure, but I'm somewhat unwilling to start with something that seems so.. broad.


...
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

As we discussed in class - the liquid siftings of the nightingales are clear enough, but I want to chase down Agamemnon, and get a better idea of who he was, why Eliot used him, etc...

So, armed with facts from pantheon.org:

Agamemnon was the son of Atreus and the brother of Menelaus. He was the king of either Mycenae (in Homer) or of Argos (in some later accounts), and was the leader of the Greek forces during the Trojan War. He married Clytemnestra and had several children by her, including Orestes, Electra, and Iphigenia.

When the Greeks sailed for Troy, their fleet was trapped by unfavorable winds at Aulis. The seer Calchas revealed that their misfortune was due to Agamemnon, who had boasted that he equalled Artemis in hunting; the winds would only change if Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia was sacrificed. Agamemnon reluctantly agreed to the sacrifice, but Artemis herself whisked Iphigenia away from the altar and substituted a deer in her place.
During the seige of Troy, Agamemnon offended the greatest of the Greek warriors, Achilles, when he took the girl Briseis from him. Achilles' anger with Agamemnon furnished the mainspring of the plot in the Iliad. After the sack of Troy, Agamemnon acquired Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam, as his concubine, and took her home with him to Greece.

Well, that's fine, but it was his homecoming that was featured in Greek tragedy....



Upon arriving, Agamemnon found that Aegisthus, who had killed his father Atreus, had become the lover of Clytemnestra, and the two together murdered Agamemnon and Cassandra shortly after their arrival. Aegisthus and Clytemnestra then ruled Agamemnon's kingdom, but were eventually killed by Agamemnon's son, Orestes (or by Orestes and Electra in some accounts).



So the importance of Agamemnon in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" would begin with the sacrifice of the child (Iphigenia), and look toward the murder of Agamemnon by Aegisthus.. And the dishonoured shroud - presumably the marriage shroud of Agamemnon and Clymenestra, dishonoured by her betrayal of Agamemnon with Aegisthus.

Update: Pindar, the ancient Greek lyrical poet, wrote that Agamemnon was slain by his wife Clytemnestra while he was bathing, and that she threw a cloth or net over his head to prevent him from either noticing her or resisting. So it's less of a marriage-dishonoured-by-adultery shroud, and more a murder-of-a-spouse kind of dishonour, the stains, somewhat predictably being his blood.
Which, of course, makes the indignity of the nightingales emptying their bowels on his death-shroud all the more apparent.