HELLO AGAIN. While I am bewildered by many things and while I have, up to now, lived in a perpetual state of bewilderment, some things are eventually becoming a bit clearer to me.
For example, I now understand why T.S. Eliot wrote these lines at the beginning of his poem The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock:
"Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is spread out against the sky
like a patient etherised upon a table...."
The first two lines seem to promise a typical romantic poem, a couple setting out for an evening stroll and perhaps a bit of billing and cooing, but suddenly the carpet is pulled from under your expectations by the third line.
Edwardian critics choke on their olives.The evening is compared to a patient etherised on a table? Egad Sir, this is definitely not cricket!
The third line introduces a sense of unease. And why wouldn't it? It was written in 1911, just in time for two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Holocaust and all kinds of other disasters and upheavals.
Poets have a kind of built-in barometer, even if they live in polite society.
No comments:
Post a Comment