Where the beat goes on.
Section 1
Here is a very famous and beautiful poem I thought we might explore together. Every week, or so, I'll put up a brief section, and I hope we can have a good discussion. Consider reading each section aloud, as it will help reveal the beauty of the poetry.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . . 10
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . . 10
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
61 comments:
Big hit in English classes in the 60s.
It was always portrayed by our professors as a scathing denunciation of the smallness of the lives of the proles.The smallness of the lives of the proles was a favorite topic of English professors back in the day.
Might be worth revisiting to see if that's really what it's all about.
Ugh, the beginning reads like a nasty satire on Masefield's "Sea Fever". Looking over the rest of the poem, it reads like a series of allusions to other poems. Patch-work, rather than flowing and integral to itself.
I'm not sure that poetry works when the poet has contempt for his subject. It's so sing-songy in patches that it's almost doggerel, which is appropriate given, as I said, the obvious contempt for the narrator by the poet.
It could very well be called "an ode to the Last Man", reminds me somewhat in spirit if not structure of "Ballad of a Thin Man".
Obviously I'm not a huge fan of Elliot. He always struck me as a better phrase-maker than a poet, over-educated and under-socialized.
Shouting, I don't think it's addressed to proles, rather, it seems aimed at the middle class, the narrator seems like a clerk, one of the sorts that Orwell talked about when discussing how Victorian or Edwardian lower-middle-class professionals of little or no resources distinguished themselves from the more prosperous members of the working classes.
Ah! I knew I recognized this line from somewhere:
"Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me"
It's from the Rubaiyat:
There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE
There seemed---and then no more of THEE and ME.
...a better phrase-maker than a poet, over-educated and under-socialized.
Well-said, and right on the money, Mitch H. Some of the phrases he made were awfully pretty, though.
Eliot was a kind of comical reversal of the usual "buttoned-up Englishman comes to America and revels in his new freedom" story.
Eliot landed in England, threw open his arms, and joyfully embraced the snobbery and the social restrictions. He even joined the Church of England and renounced "the Devil and all his works." (He had been Unitarian.)
" In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."
It is amazing how prophetic the work of TS Eliot is in retrospect when you really think about it. How could he possibly foresee the rise of the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?"
Shall we consign poor Mr. Eliot to the dustbin of mediocrity and choose another poem?
deborah said...
Shall we consign poor Mr. Eliot to the dustbin of mediocrity and choose another poem?
No. You chose it because you liked it. You should tell us why you liked it and let things build. You're pretty good at that. I promise to chime in.
No no no, Deborah. This is the Internet. Critics will always be more motivated to criticize than admirers will be to express admiration. Do as you like. (But for God's sake, stay away from Dylan Thomas.)
I don't know that I know any Dylan Thomas. What is his most famous?
(Trooper, go stand in the corner.)
Dylan Thomas wrote about photosynthesis, didn't he?
OIC, Refual. Yes, I never got around to reading that one. The title is off-putting enough.
phx, I just read that for the first time in years. It's mostly schmaltzy, but this gets me pretty bad:
"And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Oh, screw.
Dylan Thomas was famous as a overrated poet who died after eighteen straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern.
Think Phillip Seymour Hoffman with a Welsh accent.
Instead how about a little Patrick Kavanagh or Seamus Heaney.
Give a link, Troop.
"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."
Eliot requires too much effort to discuss, he's very complex. Mediocre indeed!
Frost and Thomas are much simpler and much easier to discuss.
Maguiire was faithful to death:
He stayed with his mother till she died
At the age of ninety-one.
She stayed too long,
Wife and mother in one.
When she died
The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son's backside
And he was sixty-five.
O he loved his mother
Above all others.
O he loved his ploughs
And he loved his cows
And his happiest dream
Was to clean his arse
With perennial grass
On the bank of some summer stream;
To smoke his pipe
In a sheltered gripe
In the middle of July.
His face in a mist
And two stones in his fist
And an impotent worm on his thigh.
But his passion became a plague
For he grew feeble bringing the vague
Women of his mind to lust nearness,
Once a week at least flesh must make an appearance.
So Maguire got tired
Of the no-target gun fired
And returned to his headland of carrots and cabbage
To the fields once again
Where eunuchs can be men
And life is more lousy than savage.
The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanaugh.
The Otter by Seamus Heaney although I don't think he was really talking about an Otter.
Frost and Thomas are much simpler and much easier to discuss.
My "Frost Bites" series sort of lacked enthusiasm. Maybe poetry is too personal.
The perfect description of life in Barack Obama's America:
"Where eunuchs can be men
And life is more lousy than savage"
I do not think 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.
Damn, Troop, that's quite a poem. Care to comment on it?
Chick, your Frost series brought me to a greater appreciation of him.
This is a sublime poem.
First you need Prufrock's epigram:
"If I thought my reply were to one who could ever return to the world, this flame would shake no more; but since, if what I hear is true, none ever did return alive from this depth, I answer you without fear of infamy." — Dante, Inferno
Prufrock leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Brilliant it may be but it clearly is a piece of nihilism. Perhaps Eliot earned his nihilism and surely it saturated the post WW I artistic scene. For obvious reasons. But the kids who have been exposed, in their millions, to Prufrock as the standard of what poetry should be (Eliot was practically the dictator of what was "in" and what was "out" poetically for the next two generations) those kids hadn't earned their nihilism, it became a pose, and a most destructive pose at that. We still live with the lie that only an arch, ironic stance toward EVERYTHING, only that stance is legitimate. Worse, only a putdown of all past belief is ALLOWED by the winners of the kulturkampf. It is pure poison and has just about killed high culture in the West.
Well said, ricpic.
deborah said...
Shall we consign poor Mr. Eliot to the dustbin of mediocrity and choose another poem?
No. You chose it because you liked it. You should tell us why you liked it and let things build.
Which brings up the question of why this particular poem was chosen and presented.
How did it enter your awareness and what does it mean to you, deborah? Did you, as chickenlittle presumes, like it?
If so, why?
I have to admit that I liked the Frost poems I put up. One of them was new to me. But it's hard sometimes to say why you liked a particular one, unless it's self-evident.
@MamaM: You once asked my why I posted that "Kiss Precise" poem on my blog a while ago. Truth is, I had read about the author and liked his other work in other fields and just thought it was cool when I discovered the poem.
And the last thing I want to do is to discourage deborah from posting poems.
You once asked my why I posted that "Kiss Precise" poem on my blog a while ago
That was a fun and informative exchange. Cool post, drawing and poem, but not nearly so without the question asked and answer given which opened the door to more connection and awareness.
Chick, why would I think you were discouraging me?
M, I love the Love Song. Yes, through years of wear it can be seen as sophomoric, but it is lovely.
Trooper, that Kavanaugh is exquisite. Thank you for introducing me to him.
ricpic said...Prufrock leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Brilliant it may be but it clearly is a piece of nihilism.
I agree. I prefer his "Ash Wednesday" and "Four Quartets", the poems written after his conversion to high-church Anglicanism. They still have some of the desolate feel of modernity/nihilism, but they're really very different from his earlier work because there's hope through salvation in Christ.
You're welcome Deborah.
Here's is how you read that poet. Get and Irish Cable knit sweater and a bottle of Jamesons and a cigar. Then find an old tree that you can sit against in the son and read his poems while sipping on the Irish.
A great activity to do on Paddy's Day where you have the added bonus of watching the fair colleens puking while their boyfriends hold their hair back. Young love. It's wonderful.
"Prufrock leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Brilliant it may be but it clearly is a piece of nihilism. Perhaps Eliot earned his nihilism and surely it saturated the post WW I artistic scene. For obvious reasons. But the kids who have been exposed, in their millions, to Prufrock as the standard of what poetry should be (Eliot was practically the dictator of what was "in" and what was "out" poetically for the next two generations) those kids hadn't earned their nihilism, it became a pose, and a most destructive pose at that. We still live with the lie that only an arch, ironic stance toward EVERYTHING, only that stance is legitimate. Worse, only a putdown of all past belief is ALLOWED by the winners of the kulturkampf. It is pure poison and has just about killed high culture in the West."
Link?
deb, I'm not sure what you are asking for as a link, but here is a famous statement Eliot made after he had achieved renown and with it great influence as the "official voice" of poetry:
The difficulty of poetry (and modern poetry is SUPPOSED to be difficult) may be due to one of several reasons. First, there may be personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure way; while this may be regrettable, we should be glad, I think, that the man has been able to express himself at all.
I added emphasis to supposed. Read the statement carefully. It is BS. And it was taken as gospel for a very long time. Compare to Frost, whose poetry is not "difficult" and yet is quite complex/many layered and expresses many revealing things about Frost that Frost had the GUTS to reveal. Eliot used difficulty to hide. Hide, lecture us and tell us to be grateful for the little the great man has revealed, obscurely. Quite revolting the more I think about it.
Dylan Thomas celebrating his childhood in the beautiful
Fern Hill
Six stanzas. Pure music.
Final stanza
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Ricpic, asking for a link was me yanking your chain.
"But the kids who have been exposed, in their millions, to Prufrock as the standard of what poetry should be (Eliot was practically the dictator of what was "in" and what was "out" poetically for the next two generations) those kids hadn't earned their nihilism, it became a pose, and a most destructive pose at that."
Fashions come and go. Eliot had WW I, we had the Bomb, and 'gather ye rosebuds while ye may' is never coming back.
Just because Frost rhymes doesn't mean he doesn't engage in symbolism.
Eliot requires too much effort to discuss, he's very complex. Mediocre indeed!
That's kind of why I dislike Eliot and all that followed in his train: the notion that complexity and effort are wards against mediocrity. I love Benet and Fitzgerald *because* they're simple, they're direct, they're sincere. Simple, direct and sincere is the *hardest* thing to get right. Puzzle-boxes of erudition can impress scholars, but they're not great art. Frost could be ostentatiously plain and sere - reminds me of Hemingway, even though they're completely different generations - but he was sincere, and that earns a lot in my book.
How about Edna St. Vincent Millay? I've only read the one book of hers, but it was impressive:
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
"That's kind of why I dislike Eliot and all that followed in his train: the notion that complexity and effort are wards against mediocrity. I love Benet and Fitzgerald *because* they're simple, they're direct, they're sincere."
IMO, authors can be great and complex and great and simple. Genius writes its own rule book. I agree that too much mediocre overpraised literature (and art/music) hides behind "Sophisticated" "Complex" "Modern".
But I don't Eliot was mediocre or trying to hide his mediocrity.
I have a friend who a big "sophisticated" art collector (as big as he can be with his money -LOL).
I love to yank his chain by telling him I get more pleasure from viewing a Rockwell or a "Gibson Girl" illustration then any Jackson Pollock and Chagall painting.
Valentine, thank you for the epigram. I guess I'm a dilettante as I always thought it superfluous.
Lemondog, thanks for the stanza. I'll try and take a look at the entire poem. I like this imagery:
'Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft...'
Ricpic, Lydia, I never considered Prufrock to be nihilistic, rather a dirge of despair at disappointed love and professional aspirations. It's actually the opposite of nihilism to me, as he obviously cares very much.
Lydia, I haven't tried very hard, but the only Quartet I can get into, adore actually, is Little Gidding.
Mitch, thanks for the Millay. Here is the one I'm familiar with:
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag, or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.
And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,
—mothers and fathers don't die.
And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always be kissing a person?"
Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window with your thimble!"
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother."
To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.
Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake
them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.
Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.
Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
I think rc nails it when he says "IMO, authors can be great and complex and great and simple. Genius writes its own rule book."
Shout:
"It was always portrayed by our professors as a scathing denunciation of the smallness of the lives of the proles.The smallness of the lives of the proles was a favorite topic of English professors back in the day."
Thanks. The poem to me is the opposite of a scathing denunciation, it's a sympathetic insight. Or are Prufrock's ruminations to be viewed as self-pitying tripe?
Millay. Brief, direct, commentary on the Lost Generation.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
Ah, yes, Lemondog. But sometimes my memory fails me, and I would have said that was Dickinson!
Your welcome Deborah. The epigram is important in that it alone signals the poem's intent. Here's some of what I wrote yesterday and did not post:
Well, I can't disagree more re this being a nihilistic poem. It seems rather humble to me, an ironic celebration of the middle-class everyman.
So we're both dilettantes then. Here's more taking a close reading of the first 3 lines, i.e., a reading of the language and imagery without context:
"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;"
An invitation to paired intimacy, the highly personal imperative mood makes the invite hopeful almost seductive. We go now at evening, a settled time of day when the mundane is put to rest and the time is all our own. And yes, the possibilities are limitless, we think, spread out across the sky. Only no, the poet reveals his ambivalence, the intrusion of the abrupt turn to a despairing voice.
I stopped at this point because I thought, my God what pretentious twaddle. I then went and read the first 4 Cantos from Dante and discovered many similarities in form and content:
From Canto IV:
"And now let us go, for a long road awaits us"
and the opening line from Canto II:
"The light was departing. The brown air drew down all the earth's creatures calling them to rest from their day-roving, as I, one man alone prepared to face the double war of the journey and the pity, which memory shall here set down, not hesitate, not err."
So, my close reading was pretty good! Anyway don't throw in the towel maybe we can rustle up a little culture among these barbarians.
re: Dickinson, pithy like much of Miss Emily's work, but I suspect her candle didn't burn at both ends.
Thanks for posting this thread.
There are also lines in Canto II that shed light on the turn in Line 3, "Like a patient etherized upon a table;":
"As one who unwills what he wills, will stay
strong purposes with feeble second thoughts
until he spells all his first zeal away—
so I hung back and balked on that dim coast
til thinking had worn out my enterprise,
so stout at starting and so early lost."
How ambivalent, how human. So, in a mere 3 lines Eliot establishes the paradigm he uses as a template for his own journey inward.
The bit about etherization is the polar opposite of sympathetic or celebratory. It suggests, as I've said before, a chilly and arrogant attitude of satire, of analysis - of antiseptic, scalpels and the surgeon's very own god complex.
In short, that Elliot proposes to put his little clerk - with his sad little hesitations about peaches and small, carnal dreams without the animal courage to grasp them - on the table for vivisection.
I'll put up a brief section, and I hope we can have a good discussion.
Looks like the power of poetry extends beyond the box in which it was presented, as a good discussion (or at least semi-discussion) appears to have been had after all.
Excerpts from Benet's John Brown's Body, about poor little Shippy, the doomed spy, the polar opposite of his fictional opposite in Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge":
His soul
Shivered with fear like a thin dog in the cold,
Raging in vain at the terrible thing called Life.
--There must be a corner somewhere where you could creep,
Curl up soft and be warm--but he'd never found it.
The big boys always stole his lunch at the school
And rubbed his nose in the dirt--and when he grew up
It was just the same.
There was something under his face,
Something that said, "Come, bully me--I won't bite."
He couldn't see it himself, but it must be there.
He was always going places and thinking, "This time,
They won't find out." But they always did find out
After a while.
Valentine, thanks for the connection to the cantos. I did not know that.
Mitch, as you mentioned the similarity to the line from the Rubaiyat, I found one last night while looking for a 'love' quote. The words dying fall, which occur later in the Prufrock, occur in this Twelfth Night passage:
"If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall"
Lemondog, I'm glad you like it :)
Yeah, thanks, Deborah. Fun thread.
Mitch:
"The bit about etherization is the polar opposite of sympathetic or celebratory. It suggests, as I've said before, a chilly and arrogant attitude of satire, of analysis - of antiseptic, scalpels and the surgeon's very own god complex.
In short, that Elliot proposes to put his little clerk - with his sad little hesitations about peaches and small, carnal dreams without the animal courage to grasp them - on the table for vivisection."
Mitch, well said, the vivisection imagery sounds very logical as you interpret it. I remember when I first came to know the poem how jarring that line was.
I will throw in that the next passage is about the pervading, heavy fog which could also translate into patient etherized, though that would not rule out your view.
Also the 'Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .'
We are not to ask what the question is, but just to 'go and make our visit.'
So, all, let's keep in mind what the question may be.
y/w Mumps, I'm very happy about it :)
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