T S Eliot: from Rhapsody on a Windy Night
| The memory throws up high and dry | |
| A crowd of twisted things; | |
| A twisted branch upon the beach | 25 |
| Eaten smooth, and polished | |
| As if the world gave up | |
| The secret of its skeleton, | |
| Stiff and white. | |
| A broken spring in a factory yard, | 30 |
| Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left | |
| Hard and curled and ready to snap. | |
| Half-past two, | |
| The street-lamp said, | |
| “Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, | 35 |
| Slips out its tongue | |
| And devours a morsel of rancid butter.” | |
| So the hand of the child, automatic, | |
| Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay. | |
| I could see nothing behind that child’s eye. | 40 |
| I have seen eyes in the street | |
| Trying to peer through lighted shutters, | |
| And a crab one afternoon in a pool, | |
| An old crab with barnacles on his back, | |
| Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. | 45 |
| Half-past three, | |
| The lamp sputtered, | |
| The lamp muttered in the dark. | |
| The lamp hummed: | |
| “Regard the moon, | 50 |
| La lune ne garde aucune rancune, | |
| She winks a feeble eye, | |
| She smiles into corners. | |
| She smooths the hair of the grass. | |
| The moon has lost her memory. | 55 |
| A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, | |
| Her hand twists a paper rose, | |
| That smells of dust and eau de Cologne, | |
| She is alone | |
| With all the old nocturnal smells | 60 |
| That cross and cross across her brain.” | |
| The reminiscence comes | |
| Of sunless dry geraniums | |
| And dust in crevices, | |
| Smells of chestnuts in the streets, | 65 |
| And female smells in shuttered rooms, | |
| And cigarettes in corridors | |
| And cocktail smells in bars. | |
| The lamp said, | |
| “Four o’clock, | 70 |
| Here is the number on the door. | |
| Memory! | |
| You have the key, | |
| The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair. | |
| Mount. | 75 |
| The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, | |
| Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.” | |
| The last twist of the knife. | |
T S Eliot’s poem explores some ‘flaneur’ wandering like an insomniac refugee about the ‘reaches’ of some unnamed city, where even a prostitute hesitates to ply her trade in the poet’s direction…just as in The Love song of J Alfred Prufrock, the poet seems isolated, sexually unfulfilled and possessed of an hallucinatory imagination bordering on the surreally febrile!
The brilliance of the poem seems to shine out from the unreliable lighting of the talking street lamps whose presence gives the poet a structure to his ostensible progression. Perception is thus connected to these pools of light and shade, with moral implications and existential questions lurking at the borders and hinterland of the poem .
Memory has become grotesque and disfigures all the shapes of the past. Things return to taunt us with their loss of symmetry. We have killed our hope?
Time erodes and returns the past to the wandering poet so damaged that the present becomes infected by cynicism and distrust. The perceptual bewilderment of Eliot’s poet makes the final return of the poet to his solitary room with solitary toothbrush, a relief, even if the isolation of the verb ‘mount’ communicates teh bleakness of sexual unfulfillment and despondency. ( Anticipating Mr Bleaney by Larkin) The house has a ‘real’ number and appears welcomingly itself in the midst of the somnabulistic, nocturnal hauntings of a man very much on the verge of some mental collapse.
I admire the unsettling subversion of the phrase: ‘ prepare for life.’ How can we prepare for our own inevitable death when we are spectators or bystanders on our own lives? Reading this poem today I could detect Larkin’s shared sensibility too. Ennui as a refuge, style and linguistic choice. The resigned affection of the ‘little lamp’ after their chattering malignancies…
Posted in Reading for Life!