Page 16 - summer 22
P. 16
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.
All very enigmatic in meaning and Modernist in its free form, but also very readable
and musical in its scattered rhymes and rhythms. There are encounters with women
…
In the rooms the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
… and the ever-present urban cityscape:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes.
Eliot is a master of the memorable one-liner, which he scatters throughout his
poems, such as …
There will be time, there will be time,
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
But what is “the overwhelming question”? Perhaps it’s just…
Do I dare disturb the universe?
In Preludes (1911) there is more grim and dingy London city-scape stuff, such as …
The burnt-out tends of smoky days
Newspapers from vacant lots
Faint stale smells of beer
… which makes him think…
of all the hands
that are raising dingy shades
in a thousand furnished rooms.
As with many Modernists, the image of the masses on the march figures large: in The
Wasteland Eliot compares it to a flowing river:
