Before Prufrock

"The Love Song of St. Sebastian"

I would come in a shirt of hair
I would come with a lamp in the night
And sit at the foot of your stair;
I would flog myself until I bled,
And after hour on hour of prayer
And torture and delight
Until my blood should ring the lamp
And glisten in the light;
I should arise your neophyte
And then put out the light
To follow where you lead,
To follow where your feet are white
In the darkness toward your bed
And where your gown is white
And against your gown your braided hair.
Then you would take me in
Because I was hideous in your sight
You would take me in without shame
Because I should be dead
And when the morning came
Between your breasts should lie my head.

I would come with a towel in my hand
And bend your head beneath my knees;
Your ears curl back in a certain way
Like no one's else in all the world.
When all the world shall melt in the sun,
Melt or freeze,
I shall remember how your ears were curled.
I should for a moment linger
And follow the curve with my finger
And your head beneath my knees---
I think that at last you would understand.
There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.

I first read this early, unfinished, but terribly haunting T. S. Eliot poem  in the fall of my freshman year at college in a freshman seminar that no longer seems to exist, high up in a seminar room in Blair Tower. At the time, I read this poem wide-eyed and breathless alongside Prufrock, secretly guilty for liking it more than the masterwork. Now, almost a decade later as I am once again immersed in Eliot (this time as a teacher), I am no longer breathless when I read it. I am grateful. And I turn to this work precisely because it resists the abstraction and high referentiality that Eliot would begin to seek out in just a few more years. This poem as I read it now is not unlike the one by Borges below. It is, perhaps, the cruder, youthful version of the latter, the poet intent on expressing himself, his love, and his desire, shamelessly, impatiently, intimately, willfully, prophetically, fanatically. Earlier, when talking about Emma Bovary I thought about love as productive, but for the poet in the garb of a modern St. Sebastian there is another economy of love. (In the historical Christian narrative, of course, St Sebastian, an early martyr and divine performer, tried and sentenced to death for being a traitor to the Roman state, is healed by the human Irene).
Here, where Sebastian seems to want to murder Irene after he kills himself, or at least leave her unfit to be loved again, love, or its true extents, seem reserved or available only to those who are in some way exterior, lowered, and base. The suggestion, I would argue, amidst these images of prayer, ablution, self-flagellation, and darkness is, in fact, that to be capable of loving another, one cannot and must not love oneself, but rather hold oneself in a terrifying abhorrence. Love cannot be social, societal, or domestic, then, rather it must be pariah, covert, discovered only in death. 
What I'm trying to say here is more complex than just thinking of love as all-consuming or destructive, rather I'm suggesting that the figure of the lover/poet, clothed in the sinner's shirt of hair, knows and recognizes how "hideous" he is. It isn't necessarily love that makes him this way, but rather it is his self-repulsion that makes him able to love in the way that he does. His feminine lover, pure for the moment, must willingly embrace the "darkness" of the bed, the blood from the neophyte's attempt at conversion, and the perversion of a relationship in which she is the absorber of his sin. This is not a religious poem, per se, it was written well before Eliot's evangelical turn to Anglicism--practice and ritual function as both perverse and enabling instruments. 
The final third of the poem inverts the order of worship and the possibility of redemption. Her head is beneath his knees as she waits for him to dry her hair after her bath, after she has washed herself of his sins, and as she almost inadvertently bows to him. But love is not cleansing, or purifying after all. It is, she must "understand," the opposite of redemptive; far from promising a spiritual afterlife, it leaves her not dead, but "mangled," another pariah, another leper, unable to claim belonging or function. 
If in Emma's case, love, or the feeling of love meant an overall benefit for the society she lived in, and for Borges came to symbolize a tired persistence, then for Eliot, in between these two works, love is excruciatingly measured. In other words, the economy of love, to use this phrase, is utilitarian rather than social. Love seems to play out outside of the social. It is most importantly, not shared or between the two, that is to say, it manifests, blossoms, replicates, and then self-destructs entirely in the abyss of the person(al).