Aunt Helen Poem Analysis

T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot(1888-1965), one of the most important and influential poets and critics of the Modern period, always, unlike many Romantics, and perhaps subscribing to the Arnoldian approach to poetic art, tries to feed his poetry on social soil. His poetry, in most cases, takes up burning aspects amounting to a blow upon the social fabric, and along with the depiction of those social maladies, it, quite often, prescribes certain solutions to them either. His one of the major poems, “Aunt Helen” addresses a very relevant and prevalent practice of our age that eventually earns nothing. His “Whispers of Immortality” also exposes the deterioration of men in the hands of malignant modernity.
“Aunt Helen” typically captures the void and nothingness in human life and its existence in modern settlement where more than average people engage in thinking and doing things that do not correspond to men as rational being. The character in the poem under discussion, Miss Helen Slingsby, although a female figure, represents both the sexes, and the average people of the modern society. Her living “near” a fashionable square speaks of the entire fashion-loving mass who, in the name of fashion and modernity, experiment activities at the expense of morality and established positive social norms, and these “deeds”, for quite obvious reasons, merit no permanent value as was done by the narrator’s maiden aunt. Miss. Helen Slingsby, throughout her life, cultivated a fashion of remaining unmarried until her last breath. And she advocated the fashion with self-imposed dignity and veneration. She

John Webster (1580-1634), as the above poem portrays, was preoccupied with the idea of death, and so was forced to ignore the fleshy enjoyment, for he “saw the skull beneath the skin” and “knew that thought clings round dead limbs /Tightening its lusts and luxuries”. To quote Ronald