Poetry Placement

What are we to make of literary quotes in a film or other work of fiction? Does the context change their meaning or vice versa?

Last weekend I saw Oppenheimer. And no, I didn’t follow it up with Barbie – too many shades of pink for my taste. Ever since, I have been puzzling over its self-conscious references to three works of poetry.

Sculpture of John Donne whose poetry inspired Oppenheimer (Photo by Bill Eccles on Unsplash)

First, when Oppenheimer is at Cambridge we are shown, on his desk, a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Second, when he is having sex with Jean Tatlock, she (improbably) demands that he read Sanskrit. He obliges with this passion killer from the Bhagavadgita: ‘I am become Death, destroyer of worlds’. Third, on surveying the site where the bomb will be built, he quotes John Donne’s sonnet, ‘Batter my heart three person’d God’ and chooses the code name Trinity for the secret location.

Unlike the unsubtle effect of product placement, such poetry placement begs a host of questions, including whether this trinity of quotations offers us a new slant on the protagonist or his actions. There is a factual basis for at least two references: the name Trinity was indeed inspired by Donne’s poetry, and Oppenheimer learnt Sanskrit and was known to use the quotation from the Gita. He attended Cambridge shortly after publication of The Wasteland whose bleak title seems to anticipate the results of his work.

Cambridge University (Photo by Divyansh Jain on Unsplash)

The three poems are linked by metaphysical angst and crisis of faith. The oldest, the Bhagavadgita, is described as ‘a metrical interpretation of the instructions of the Upanishads in their bearing on social life’ (S.N. Das Gupta). The Upanishads are ‘philosophical hymns’, or spiritual instructions, originating between eight and four centuries BCE. Famously, it comprises a dialogue between the reluctant warrior, Arjuna, and the god, Kṛṣṇa, who persuades him that it is his destiny to fight his cousins. When Arjuna asks the god to manifest himself Kṛṣṇa undergoes a series of terrifying and beautiful transformations saying – in my translation (by Vrinda Nabar and Shanta Tumkur) – ‘I am Death, destroyer of all . . .’ (10: 34) and ‘I am Time, the destroyer of worlds . . .’ (11:32).

Eliot too quotes an Upanishad, (and many other texts) at the end of The Wasteland : V ‘What the Thunder Said’. Here God delivers a message in a thunderclap, Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata, ‘give, sympathise, [self-] control’. Eliot follows this with the invocation ‘Shantih, shantih, shantih’ meaning peace, which he equates with the biblical phrase, ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’.

In this section too Eliot alludes to an essay by Herman Hesse, from Blick ins Chaos (Glimpse of Chaos) envisioning half of Europe heading for the abyss. Later, in the same essay, on Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Hesse writes:  

Every man has visions, every man has fantasies, every man has dreams. And every vision every dream, every idea and thought of a man, on the road from the unconscious to the conscious, can have a thousand different meanings, of which every one can be right. But the appearances and visions of the seer and the prophet are not his own. The nightmare of visions which oppresses him does not warn him of a personal illness, of a personal death, but of the illness, the death of that corpus whose sensory organ he is[.], This corpus can be a family, a clan, a people, or it can be all mankind. (Trans. Sydney Schiff)

This image of the holy fool or seer could be said to anticipate the character of Einstein in the movie. Here he is presented as a superannuated, but respected, old man who spends his days feeding ducks. His prophetic dialogue with Oppenheimer is both the pivot on which the plot of Strauss’s petty jealousy turns and a vision of the future which we have lived.

In 1922, the year of The Wasteland’s publication, Hesse published Siddhartha, his version of Buddha’s life story. Eliot also cites Buddha in The Wasteland : III ‘The Fire Sermon’, in which Buddha says ‘everything is burning’: ‘I declare that it is burning with the fire of birth, decay, death, grief, lamentation, pain, sorrow, and despair.’ (Trans. Ledi Sayadaw). Grim as this sounds he is preaching liberation from this accumulation of suffering caused by human delusion.

Everything is burning (Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash)

Donne invokes the same violence when asking God to save him, in ‘Divine Meditations 14’:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Eliot’s praise for Donne and his peers revived interest in their ‘metaphysical’ poetry. Reviewing an anthology of their work, edited by Herbert Grierson in 1921, he wrote:

A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.  . . . in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

This statement might apply equally to The Wasteland. The poem is almost a collage, combining disparate fragments of other writers’ works, from Chaucer and Dante to Verlaine and Wagner, to construct a ‘new whole’. Yet this new whole enacts the loss of spiritual and aesthetic coherence in the aftermath of World War I.

In the movie Oppenheimer we are given glimpses of the physicist’s vision, a psychedelic shower of atoms spinning, parting and recombining. In the era of the Upanishads, the Vaiseshika school of Indian philosophy described the universe in just those terms. Time was defined by cosmic cycles, when one cycle ended the atoms would rebalance and a new cycle begin.

The Wasteland of our time (Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash)

Is it possible that the subtext expressed by these poetic references in Oppenheimer points to an apocalyptic vision for our times? Today, we are concerned with the destruction of our planet by global warming. The development and use of the atomic bomb resulted in a new world order, not a better one. So the end perhaps of one cosmic cycle. For all the religious imagery of salvation by war and fire conjured in the poems so prominently placed here, the warning is clear: humanity creates its own monsters and is then controlled by them.

There is talk in the movie of a further reaction from the explosion that could destroy the entire planet. Now, once again, we’re heading for that abyss. Whether we believe in Brahma, Buddha or God, or any other spiritual entity is immaterial. Maybe we should heed the prophets of our own era and recall the message in the thunderclap, Da Da Da, self-control, giving and empathy.

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Have you come across any striking use of literary quotes in another medium? If so, what was their effect for better or worse?