that connects to poetics: it was written primarily for political rather than aesthetic purposes. Form follows function, and Eliot wanted to write in the more "universal" form of poetry in order to emphasize the connectedness between political events in the twelfth century and in the 1930s. The play was specifically commissioned by the Bishop of Chichester to comment on the Night of the Long Knives, a shocking event in 1934 in which Hitler murdered (or "purged") hundreds of his perceived enemies, including former good friends. Eliot wanted to use a serious and high-minded verse style to point to the parallels between the way Henry II turned on his close friend Becket for political reasons and Hitler's cynical betrayal of his own close friends. Eliot hoped people would see these parallels and that the gravity of his poetic forms would emphasize the gravity of the situation in Europe and the need for action.

T.S. Eliot was first and foremost a poet, and in this 1935 play, commissioned by George Bell, the bishop of Chichester, to critique Nazi abuses of power, Eliot writes primarily in verse. In fact, the only two parts of the play not written as poetic verse are Thomas's Christmas day sermon and the apologies the knights make for their crimes.

Eliot has both the play's chorus and its actors use poetic devices to evoke a mood of darkness, chill, expectation and foreboding. These devices include alliteration, repetition, and use of imagery.

We find alliteration, or using the same consonant at the beginning of more than one word in a line, when the chorus repeats "w" words in "... a waste of water and mud,/The New Year waits, breathes, waits, whispers ... "

Repetition occurs as both the chorus and the First Priest repeat the words "seven years:"

Seven years and the summer is over/Seven years since the archbishop left us.

Eliot uses poetic imagery throughout the play, for example, when he has Thomas say:

For a little time the hungry hawk/Will soar and hover, circling lower,/Waiting excuse, pretence, opportunity.

Here we can see the hawk in our mind's eyes, a predatory animal, circling and waiting for the kill, a metaphor for Henry II awaiting an opportunity to destroy Thomas, but also a timeless metaphor that can be applied to the Nazi quest for power.

Likewise, the chorus's images of how "golden October declined into sombre November" sets a tone of foreboding, both in terms of events that will unfold in medieval England with the murder of Thomas and the chilling events unfolding in 1930s Germany. 

Eliot's play is not primarily a realistic reenactment of the Archbishop of Canterbury's murder, though that was a real event in history, but a poetic meditation on the politics of evil across the ages. 

Eliot wrote this play at the behest of George Bell, the bishop of Chichester, who wanted him to speak out against what was going on in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Bell was especially troubled after what was called the Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler murdered many of his former friends and associates to purge his Party and consolidate his power.

The play is set in the twelfth century, during the reign of Henry II, who, like Hitler, had a friend killed for opposing his policies. This friend was the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The verse, much of which concerns the turning of the seasons and the rotating of the wheel of life, evokes the idea of repetition. This works well because it reinforces the idea that tyranny is a repeating and universal problem. Eliot is trying to make a universal statement that all people in all times have an obligation to stand up against tyranny, which will keep popping up, over and over.

The verse form is effective not only because it reinforces the sense of the eternal, but also because it creates rhyming lines that lend themselves to repetition and are easy to remember. One effective couplet, because of both its rhyme and the message it conveys, is the following:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason

T.S. Eliot used verse for “Murder in the Cathedral” for several reasons.

First, dramas were written in verse long before they appeared in prose. Classical, medieval, Elizabethan, and Jacobean drama were all in verse.

Eliot felt that prose was ideally a purely intellectual and reflective medium and that verse synthesized the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic components of language. He considered that the growth of prose, especially as manifested in the scientific prose of the Royal Society and what he saw as the anti-intellectualism of Romantic verse, caused our intellectual and emotional sensibilities to split (the “disassociation of the sensibility”). By writing the drama in verse, set in the past, he was trying to recover an approach to religion which balanced emotional, spiritual, and intellectual.