September 20, 2020

For some reason I am revisiting and relearning to appreciate the poetry of T. S. Elliot. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, A Portrait of a Lady, The Hollow Men, and The Waste Land. I recall my feelings when reading in my college years these poems having the existential dread, the search for meaning, the picturing through poetry and the words and allusions bringing up issues of time, gloom, death, human striving, the aftermath of the first World War, and the difficulty in human connection and discourse. I shall revisit these poems again for their artistic merit and ability to describe our human condition. How to read them is a delight now rather than a chore as it was during my college years. We have the computer to read the poem and then to look up the words and to  translate the languages. The references in the poems to other literature and myths is accessed in the same manner so finally the interpretations of others and these tools allows me to think I am appreciating the poems. 

In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the poem starts out with a quotation from Dante's Inferno 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

"S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma penciocche gammai di questo fondo

Non torno viva alcun, s'i'odo il vero,

Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo"

"This excerpt is from Dante's Inferno. Translated from Italian, it means, "If I thought that my reply were given to anyone who might return to the world, this flame would stand forever still; but since never from this deep place has anyone returned alive, if what I hear is true, without fear of infamy I answer thee." Prufrock's constant state of self-doubt and overanalyzation constitutes a form of hell for him. He can never truly escape his mind; he spends so much time debating himself he has not time to participate in reality. Prufrock even metaphorically dies at the end of the poem, corresponding to the idea of not returning alive from The Inferno; Prufrock's elaborate, day-dreamed world dies when someone interrupts him at the end of the poem and he drowns. https://sites.google.com/site/jalfredprufrock104b/poemtext/s-io-credesse-che-mia-1"

There are many parts of this poem worth comtemplating I give you a part that stands out for me 

"I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

In the Hollow Men Elliot is more morbid and hopeless,

"Here we go round the prickly pear

    Prickly pear prickly pear
    Here we go round the prickly pear
    At five o'clock in the morning.
   
    Between the idea
    And the reality
    Between the motion
    And the act
    Falls the Shadow
                                   For Thine is the Kingdom
   
    Between the conception
    And the creation
    Between the emotion
    And the response
    Falls the Shadow
                                   Life is very long
   
    Between the desire
    And the spasm
    Between the potency
    And the existence
    Between the essence
    And the descent
    Falls the Shadow
                                   For Thine is the Kingdom
   
    For Thine is
    Life is
    For Thine is the
   
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper."

https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men

In a Portrait of a Lady the youthful and the older women are talking to each other 

"Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands";

(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,

And youth is cruel, and has no remorse

And smiles at situations which it cannot see."

I smile, of course,

And go on drinking tea.

"Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall

My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,

I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world

To be wonderful and youthful, after all."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44213/portrait-of-a-lady-56d22338932de

The Wasteland may be his most famous poem. A game of chess, 

Old Tiresius, Tristan and Isolde, Tarot Cards, Hindu mythology, 

etc. adds to the richness and dark moods. 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land

Wikipedia describes  

In 1936, E. M. Forster wrote about The Waste Land:^[31]

Let me go straight to the heart of the matter, fling my poor little hand on the table, and say what I think The Waste Land is about. It is about the fertilizing waters that arrived too late. It is a poem of horror. The earth is barren, the sea salt, the fertilizing thunderstorm broke too late. And the horror is so intense that the poet has an inhibition and is unable to state it openly.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish ? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images.

He cannot say 'Avaunt!' to the horror, or he would crumble into dust. Consequently, there are outworks and blind alleys all over the poem—obstacles which are due to the nature of the central emotion, and are not to be charged to the reader. The Waste Land is Mr. Eliot's greatest achievement. It intensifies the drawing-room premonitions of the earlier poems, and it is the key to what is puzzling in the prose. But, if I have its hang, it has nothing to do with the English tradition in literature, or law or order, nor, except incidentally, has the rest of his work anything to do with them either. It is just a personal comment on the universe, as individual and as isolated as Shelley's Prometheus.

... Gerard Manly Hopkins is a case in point—a poet as difficult as Mr. Eliot, and far more specialized ecclesiastically, yet however twisted his diction and pietistic his emotion, there is always a hint to the layman to come in if he can, and participate. Mr. Eliot does not want us in. He feels we shall increase the barrenness. To say he is wrong would be rash, and to pity him would be the height of impertinence, but it does seem proper to emphasize the real as opposed to the apparent difficulty of his work. He is difficult because he has seen something terrible, and (underestimating, I think, the general decency of his audience) has declined to say so plainly.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land

Rebecca has this favorite poem which is a winner.

 https://laterbloomer.com/jenny-joseph/

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple 
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. 
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves 
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter. 
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired 
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells 
And run my stick along the public railings 
And make up for the sobriety of my youth. 
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain 
And pick flowers in other people's gardens 
And learn to spit. 

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat 
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go 
Or only bread and pickle for a week 
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes. 

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry 
And pay our rent and not swear in the street 
And set a good example for the children. 
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers. 

But maybe I ought to practice a little now? 
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised 
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Gerard Manly Hopkins is my last entry of the day.

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
     
   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

And

Peace

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

For those who choose to comment give me your picks!

Leonard