Where with six you get eggroll
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet–and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while, 90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say, "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.
25 comments:
And here we are again, meandering aimlessly through the anxieties of poor, hapless J. Alfred. Even Death, the eternal footman, can't help but laugh at our hero and his ill-formed conceits. It's not so much death, as the laughter that unmans him. And the polite uncomprehending dismissal of his conversational gambits by the women not quite in his life...
Disregard the snickers, Thomas Stearns, as you fail to navigate Obamacare.
"It's easy peasy," said the witch named Valerie J.
You must learn to be a vicious cur, Thomas Stearns, full of guile.
Then and only then will all be laid bare.
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
Weird image.
Made me think of Kafka's bug-guy.
Lydia, it's especially strange because until the last word, the reader's operating in the expectation of a cockroach metaphor, and then snap! we're in a crustacean metaphor instead. The poem is full of allusional whiplash, but this one is particularly unsettling and abrupt.
But there is the whole "roach of the sea" thing re lobsters, etc. Maybe Eliot was going with that?
Due to new reading patterns over the last 10 years, my brain skews toward shorter fare:
The Crab
The crab looks forward,
But scuttles sideways.
Should I?
© Nick Strong 2014
Poor Elliot. He was ahead of the times, dying in '65 before the thrill of video was perfected; consigned to the tedious process of stringing words together when the bits he needed to pull the whole thing together weren't yet available.
Had he known what powers lurk beneath the surface, the ragged claws could have been traded for a much more useful set of deadly punching arms powerful enough to break 1/4 inch glass and crab shells!
Plus, he'd have found there was something else that possessed hexnocular vision, two eyes with three focal points each.
Poor Elliot. Oops. One el over the line.
Mitch:
"And here we are again, meandering aimlessly through the anxieties of poor, hapless J. Alfred. Even Death, the eternal footman, can't help but laugh at our hero and his ill-formed conceits. It's not so much death, as the laughter that unmans him. And the polite uncomprehending dismissal of his conversational gambits by the women not quite in his life..."
I think you're awfully hard on J. Alfred. He's in the throes of existential angst with a healthy dose of self-consciousness. One of the unfortunates trapped in the state of living their lives trapped in the imagined perceptions of others. And also a prideful coward. Better to not take a chance, rather than risk rejection. Because all of the rejection is speculated, I think. It seems he never 'asked.'
You have given me new insight, but I think there's room for more pity and less derision.
This is why I like to discuss poetry :)
ricpic:
"Disregard the snickers, Thomas Stearns, as you fail to navigate Obamacare.
"It's easy peasy," said the witch named Valerie J.
You must learn to be a vicious cur, Thomas Stearns, full of guile.
Then and only then will all be laid bare."
Is this an homage to Lem's cut and paste method :)
Lydia:
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
Weird image."
A great phrase, I think, but needs to be paired with the preceding stanza where he is wondering what he can possibly say to the woman he's dining with:
"And how should I begin?
. . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?
. . .
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
It seems he has nothing to say to the woman with "arms that are braceleted and white and bare."
"ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas"
Is he berating himself because he wants nothing more than to grasp the woman for sex, but has no emotional or intellectual connection with her?
"silent seas"
Apart from civilization, its noise and demands.
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?
Again, here's another case of metaphor whiplash, where the reader is expecting a straight-forward image of urban streetscape - with smoke rising up over narrow streets from feeble chimneys no more substantial than "pipes" and - it's the other kind of pipe, lonely men leaning out of windows smoking tobacco.
J. Alfred's imagery is highly peculiar, bordering on autistic, what we used to call Asperger's. His visualizations are decidedly non-standard, bordering on alien. He is very much a "type" in my anti-social milieu - and no, they never get the girl. I believe the term of art is "love-shy".
I suppose I'm so hard on J. Alfred because he's such a commonplace in my world - weird, bookish, introverted, probably the meatless beanpole type of otaku, rather than the fat sweaty type.
"Again, here's another case of metaphor whiplash, where the reader is expecting a straight-forward image of urban streetscape - with smoke rising up over narrow streets from feeble chimneys no more substantial than "pipes" and - it's the other kind of pipe, lonely men leaning out of windows smoking tobacco."
We could not disagree more. This is the second time you've mentioned expecting one thing
(cockroach, pipes) and finding J. Alfred zigging where you expected him to zag.
I find lovely phrasing unexpectedly unrhymed, in a curiously flat rhythm, with a stark, broken-off ending. How can he convey to his dinner partner how he feels about what he sees, knowing she would not understand or care.
We will have to agree to disagree on this poem.
How can he convey to his dinner partner how he feels about what he sees, knowing she would not understand or care.
How does he arrive at this knowing, this surety that his dinner partner would not understand or care?
Does she continue to offer her opinions as fact, presuming to have a discussion, without truly engaging with him or listening to what he says? If so, that might be clue. If only she'd invite!
The childhood history on Eliot is enlightening.
Youngest of 6, tail-ender, parents 44 years old at his birth with 8-19 years separating him from his living siblings, and a sister who died in infancy three years prior to his arrival. (Mothers who've not fully grieved the loss of one child before another is born can have difficulty bonding with the next child or offering them the whole-hearted love and attention the child needs to thrive. It's possible this could have been his experience, given the age of his mother and the number of children already raised and past childhood)
I regard this type of background as a set-up for a hole in the heart experience that can leave one searching for answers, connections and meanings for the rest of their lives.
Gifts of insight and expression often accompany experiences of suffering, abandonment, loss, brokenness and disconnect, and Eliot definitely had a gift. On one level he "knew", and some of what he expresses through his poetry resonates in profound ways with others. On another level, his experiences with disconnect and isolation appear to cloud his work.
Reading Eliot, is for me, a both/and kind of experience; one which invites both/and awareness.
According to Harold Bloom, his mother was anything but distant; rather she was a "hovering presence" in his life.
I think the double hernia he was born with that forced him to wear a truss for most of his life may have been what predisposed him to a rather bleak view overall.
Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
I still find Eliot's post-conversion poetry more interesting. He had more interesting concerns afterwards, than his younger, cynical, callow self. I know the wreckage of foolish love-shy youth all too well - it's the wisdom of the aged survivor which I feel the need to hear.
"Eliot’s spirituality...is not precisely dry and not precisely dark; it is instead something like an exotic hothouse plant forced to a small, unlikely bloom -- over-cultivated, over-nursed, and over-watched."
That's in an interesting article at First Things on Eliot's faith and his poetry after his conversion. That "over-cultivated, over-nursed, and over-watched" pretty much captures how I see his poetry as well.
And this is something to ponder: "Part of the problem with Eliot’s late use of Christian spirituality to fill the void of modern times is that in his early and middle poems he made the void so large."
We sail o' nights to England
And join our smiling Boards —
Our wives go in with Viscounts
And our daughters dance with Lords,
But behind our princely doings,
And behind each coup we make,
We feel there's Something Waiting,
And — we meet It when we wake.
Ah, God! One sniff of England —
To greet our flesh and blood —
To hear the traffic slurring
Once more through London mud!
Our towns of wasted honour —
Our streets of lost delight!
How stands the old Lord Warden?
Are Dover's cliffs still white?
Kipling's "The Broken Men", which I came across reading on Eliot's "the Hollow Men", which supposedly was somehow inspired by this bit of Anglo-Indian doggerel. I don't know, I've never read any of Eliot's criticism, was he one of those who discarded Kipling as nothing worthy of notice?
Thank you, Lydia. That kind of link is what I like about the blog format; it expands the library of information available and provides access to something I wouldn't otherwise have found or known.
The controlling, "hovering presence" information, along with the "sensitive...exceptional" and set-apart awareness adds another element to the story. It appears as if the situation was closer to engulfment than abandonment, with pluses and minuses going on within that way of relating too.
Sitting on the porch this afternoon, thinking about the Eliot, I picked up a book of poetry (Leading from Within) that had been sitting on the stand over the winter. It contained the
"...Do I dare? and Do I dare?...Do I dare Disturb the universe?" excerpt, along with this, three pages over from Stafford:
Listening
My father could hear a little animal step
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.
More spoke to him from the soft wild night
than came to our porch for us on the wind;
we would watch him look up and his face go keen
till the walls of the world flared, widened.
My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.
I can hear the invitation in Stafford's poetry easier and clearer than I can in Eliot's.
Mitch, is your quote at 7:14 from the Four Quartets? It strikes me as a tired imitation of Little Gidding. Too much repetition trying to sound ethereal.
I haven't checked out the other three yet, but Little Gidding is quite tightly put together, with few dispensable sections.
Interesting quotes, Lydia, thanks. Poets can't always hit home runs. For example Mitch's above Kipling can be overlooked in light of his "If" or "Gunga Din" or "The Ladies."
deborah, that's from "Ash Wednesday", his conversion-poem, which I'm still wrestling with, to figure if I like it or not.
Lydia, from that criticism, I pull this line:
This is not faith’s difficult search for understanding, but understanding’s impossible search for faith.
Which strikes me as both insufferably arrogant, and purblind. Eliot's purpose in "Ash Wednesday" and the Four Quartets is the neo-Orthodox rejuvenation of faith, and to make mock of his attempt to find a connection with faith as somehow lesser to the celebration of faith attained is, in my opinion, obnxious if not actually damnable. In the modern context, attaining faith is the far more difficult step - with faith, all things are possible. Without, all is fruitless and godless by definition. To snivel at honest attempts to pave a path between modernity and faith, is to insist on an insipid obscurantism, a mystical make-believe that only the infantile could make use of, to find their way to God.
I was led to Little Gidding on the last page of A.N. Wilson's biography of C.S. Lewis, an eye-opening account. He acknowledges that Lewis was an imperfect man, but points out that the last thing Lewis would have wanted was to be set up as a plaster idol. Although and atheist or agnostic, he pays respect to Christian belief with this quote from Little Gidding:
"You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
Coincidentally, Eliot and Lewis were friends, but had had a falling out. At the end when Eliot was failing, Lewis went to visit him. It was a stilted, uncomfortable visit, but I imagine it accomplished its mission of reconciliation.
Also, according to the book Lewis was jealous of Eliot's excellence at poetry and tried very, very hard at his own poetry, but he was not good at all :)
Eliot's poem, "Ash-Wednesday" was previously linked in the comment section of the March 30 WLEM post on Prufrock.
Ash-Wednesday was the poem that inspired and encouraged Karen Armstrong, author of "The History of God", in her writing of "The Spiral Staircase-My Journey out of Darkness", a memoir that describes her spiritual journey after leaving convent life.
"Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness--diagnosed only years later as epilepsy--marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her failure seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun."
That Eliot's words would speak to her at a time when she needed to hear them constitutes a Home Run and Beyond for her, even though that particular poem does not speak to me the way it did Armstrong.
As for the jealous, imperfect Lewis, he was enough of a storyteller to capture my imagination and in the long run that is another homer!
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