Cummings Study Guide

Type of Work and Year of Publication

......."T. S. Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" is a modernist lyric poem that first appeared in a 1919 Eliot collection entitled Poems. The collection was published in England by Hogarth Press, operated by writers Leonard and Virginia Woolf. As a modernist work, the poem presents its characters as mundane and vulgar rather than as romantic or heroic, like the characters in many poems of the nineteenth century. Its attitude toward twentieth-century man is pessimistic rather than optimistic, cynical rather than idealistic. Like many other modernist poems, its language is difficult and richly allusive.

Setting

.......The poem is set in a dining room of a restaurant or a brothel in an unidentified locale—perhaps Montevideo or another city along the southern coast of Uruguay, as suggested by lines 5 and 6: The circles of the stormy moon / Slide westward toward the River Plate. River Plate is the English name for Río de la Plata (River of Silver), between Uruguay and Argentina. The westward movement of the moon indicates that the observer is in Uruguay, since that country is northeast of the river. Additional hints at the location include the following:

The Epigraph

.......Interpreting “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” requires an understanding of the epigraph (quotation after the title) from Agamemnon, a tragedy by the Athenian playwright Aeschylus (525-456 BC). T. S. Eliot placed the epigraph in its original Greek wording:
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In modern English, the quotation says, “Alas, I am struck deep with a mortal blow.” In the play of Aeschylus, a Greek king named Agamemnon speaks the words a moment before he dies. Agamemnon was the commander-in-chief of the Greek armies during the Trojan War. Following are the events leading up to his death, as recounted in the legends and myths of ancient Greece and in the play of Aeschylus.
.......Before going off to the Trojan War, Agamemnon offends the goddess Artemis by killing a stag sacred to her. In retaliation, the gods withhold the winds necessary to propel Agamemnon's ships to Troy. To appease the deities, he sacrifices his own daughter, Iphigenia, gagging her to prevent her from cursing him at the moment of her death. The gods then loose the winds, and the Greek fleet sails to Troy. Agamemnon's brutal act has enraged his wife, Clytemnestra, envenoming her with a desire for vengeance.
.......During the war, Agamemnon takes two Trojan women as his playthings—first, one named Chryseis, then another named Briseis. When the Greeks conquer Troy, Agamemnon captures another Trojan woman, Cassandra, and takes her with him as his mistress when he returns to Greece. Meanwhile, Clytemnestra has taken a lover of her own and, with him, plots the murder of Agamemnon.
.......After Agamemnon arrives with Cassandra, his wife greets him as a conquering hero, rolling out a carpet of purple for him to walk on as he enters his home. Then, while he is bathing, she murders him. She and her lover also kill Cassandra. Clytemnestra tells citizens that she killed Agamemnon to avenge the death of Iphigenia and to vent her anger at his unfaithfulness. (In another play of Aeschylus, the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra avenge the death of their father by killing their mother, but that story has no bearing on the subject at hand.)
.......Agamemnon's murder was in part a result of a curse on his father, Atreus, and all his descendants. Atreus's brother, Thyestes, had pronounced the curse after Atreus murdered Thyestes' sons in a long-standing family quarrel.
.......So it was that the son of Atreus, Agamemnon, inherited the sin and guilt of his father, just as Christians of later times inherited the sin and guilt of Adam and Eve. The curse eventually catches up with Agamemnon.

Sweeney's Link to Agamemnon

.......Let us now turn to Sweeney and his link to Agamemnon.
.......The narrator, or speaker, of "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" describes the title character as a brute, comparing him to an ape, a zebra, and a giraffe. He then suggests that the two women in the poem are conspiring against this brute, implying that Sweeney has mistreated them. In this respect—the abuse of women—he is like Agamemnon.
.......In the second and third stanzas, the narrator also suggests that an ominous cloud, or curse, hangs over Sweeney—like the inherited curse on Agamemnon. Furthermore, he draws a parallel—or seems to—between the carpet on which Agamemnon walked and the grapes and wistaria (wisteria) mentioned in the poem. The carpet was purple; grapes and wisteria are usually purple.
.......Since ancient times, purple has been the color of royalty –of kings' capes, of emperors' robes, and of other trappings surrounding a monarch, including carpets. Now then, notice this development: After the waiter brings in fruit, Ms. Rabinovitz “Tears at the grapes with murderous paws.” Is she another Clytemnestra, ready to strike out at the royal purple that is the symbol of kingly power? At this point in the poem, Sweeney leaves his chair (or shall we call it a throne?) and goes outside. There, he looks in through a window, his face framed by wisteria.
.......Nightingales begin singing at a convent. What do nightingales have to do with this tale? Another name for a nightingale is philomel, a term derived from the name Philomela. In Greek mythology. Philomela was a princess of Athens. Her sister, Procne, was married to King Tereus of Thrace. Not satisfied with only one of the sisters, Tereus lusted after Philomela and one day raped her. To prevent her from revealing his crime, he cut out her tongue. However, Philomel embroidered a tapestry depicting his brutality and showed it to her sister. The two women then plotted against Tereus (like the two women in the poem who appear to be conspiring against Sweeney) and ended up serving him his son, Itys, in a stew. When Tereus discovered what they did, he chased them with an axe. The gods then turned Philomela into a nightingale and Procne into a swallow. In later literature, the song of the nightingale became associated with tattling on promiscuous behavior, as in line 463 of Shakespeare's King Edward III: "The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong."
.......The nightingales singing at the convent of the Sacred Heart appear to represent all the Philomelas whom “King Sweeney” has wronged. The poem ends before the reader learns what happens to Sweeney.

.......The poem uses the brutish Sweeney to convey the idea that modern man is little more than a crude version of Agamemnon—just as corrupt, just as reprehensible, and equally deserving of an ignominious fate. That Eliot updated Agamemnon as an apparently rough-hewn, uncultured boor may derive from his modernist view that everyday life is not a journey through the airy climes of romance and heroism. In fact, "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" may have been a parody of a specific poem that depicted life that way: "Bianca Among the Nightingales," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Here is the third stanza of that poem:

.......The rhyme scheme of "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" is abcb—that is, the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme.
.......The meter varies. The predominant format is iambic tetrameter. In this format, a line contains four feet (four pairs of syllables), with the stress falling on the first syllable in each pair. Here is an example:

.......The speaker, or narrator, presents the poem in third-person point of view. He is objective—merely reporting what he sees—except in the seventh stanza. Its first two lines say, "She and the lady in the cape / Are suspect, thought to be in league." Here, the speaker seems to know that someone in the room, probably Sweeney, thinks that the two women are conspiring.

Tense

.......The first nine stanzas of the poem are in present tense. The last stanza is in past tense.

Eliot and Anti-Semitism

.......The unflattering depiction of Rachel in the sixth stanza (as well depictions of Jews in other poems, such as "Gerontion" and "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar") has led some critics to accuse T. S. Eliot of anti-Semitism. One such critic is Anthony Julius, author of T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. The second edition of this book is now available. Click here.

Figures of Speech

.......Following are examples of figures of speech in the poem:

Study Questions and Writing Topics

• In a short essay, compare and contrast the point of view of "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" with the point of view in Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
• Do you believe Eliot goes too far with his difficult language and obscure allusions? Explain your answer.
• "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" has been interpreted in ways other than the interpretation presented here. Read several other interpretations. Then, in an essay, defend the interpretation that you believe to be the most valid.
• What is the meaning of gambit in line 28?
• With whom is the host conversing in the ninth stanza?