T. S. Eliot wrote the poem, “Animula,” in 1929 at the age of 41, which belongs in the later part of his literary life as a poet and critic. Eliot converted to a Catholic in 1927, the year his father-in-law, Charles Haigh-Wood, died. It was in 1929 that he was thinking of divorce with his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and his mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot, died as well. Biographically, the poem “Animula” is certain to reflect his own life from infantry to death, physically and spiritually. Actually, the poem develops with three stages ranging from the period of an infant, who “Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul,” to the period between adolescence and youth, who gets “irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,” with the characters who follow as if living in limbo in the final lines: Guiterriez “avid of speed and power” and Boudin “blown to pieces.” The title of “Animula” thus alludes to the poem “Animula vagula blandula”(a pale vagrant little soul) the Roman Emperor Hadrianus left dying - the little soul, once the friend of and guest to the body, now leaving its dying body. So, the poem “Animula” is designed to convey how to live till death from infantry, especially in the childhood. The child’s soul is identified as simple, yet miserable even in the childhood without religious discipline: “Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.”

• 양병현(상지대학교) | Byung-Hyun Yang