Comment 21 of 22, added on September 8th, 2009 at 9:21 AM.

This poem came early in Mr. Eliot's career. In December 1917, he read it out loud at a Red Cross charity benefit -- a poetry reading chaired by the pompous Sir Edmund Gosse and attended by Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, the Sitwell's and other luminaries.

It is important to note that Eliot was never an atheist. He grew up in a Unitarian household of old New English stock, and quickly became disenchanted with the leading Transcendental Movement lights of Emerson and Matthew Arnold. These gods of western intellectuality, who are still adored, could not account for Eliot the concrete experiences of Time and History.

So you have in Eliot's Hippopotamus a clear hope for an actual Church, a place of "atonement" with a real God, juxtaposed with a nagging frustration at the pettiness of the Church's clergy and laity. Thus, the Church is built upon the Rock of faith in Jesus Christ as Son of God, but still anchored in the fallen human experience of her acolytes.

There is a difference between "material ends" and the "dividends" that accrue to the True Church. The former are the things we complain about, and rightly so. No one should have gold commodes and call himself an apostle of Jesus, the One Who had nowhere to lay His head except in the soul of a disciple. But at the same time, the real "dividends" are the "daily bread" prayed for in the Lord's Prayer, which is nothing less than the Eucharist.

"The mango on the mango-tree" is meant to suggest the nightmare of Tantalus. Greedy men and women in the Church will stretch out their grubby hands to lesser, material things, like dignities of the world and the praises of lesser powers. There is a horrible truism in Church history: that which is lower which you reach for will be pulled ever higher out of your reach (just like Tantalus) ... but if you reach for the highest, you will attain (after all, "Ask and it shall be given unto you"). Hence: "fruits of pomegranate and peach/ Refresh the Church from over sea."

The mating of hippo's must be an unattractive sight, as is every moment when Church magistrates and rulers and leaders and bureaucrats "mate with the world" by involving themselves in lesser things and lesser ethics. When the churchmen practice the art of Macchiavel and engage in realpolitik and the Jesuitical arts -- this is the "mating of hippo's" when "the hippo's voice/ Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd ..."

But at the Liturgy, at the true marriage of human nature with the Divine: "... every week we hear rejoice/ The Church, at being one with God."

The Church is always "at rest" in the Sabbath peace of God's fellowship. You may disagree with this, but this is what we know. Thus we rest and are fed in God's "mysterious way," and some of us have died -- but our Lord careful to rename "death" as "sleep."

It is as difficult, I'm sure, to believe this about the Church as it is to believe that Eliot saw "the 'potamus take wing" -- a reference, by the way, to the River (i.e., "potamus" in Greek) of Baptism. And rising from repentance and baptism, we are told, every Christian is greeted with rejoicing angels in heaven.

The Sacraments, Eliot says poetically, must take hold and be effective, sending those who want Sacraments and receive into the beginning of Heaven here and now, and into the fulfillment of it at the Last Day.

All the while, "the True Church remains below/ Wrapt in the old miasmal mist."

It is still amazing to me that Eliot, who had not yet entered the Church, could understand what the Church needed to be and her relation to the Trinity and what the Sacraments had to mean.

He must have looked around at the carnage of the Great World, and have seen the death of the old Emersonian and Arnoldian dreams of a Christianity-less world.

Jonathan from United States