Creier de Modernism Pane

Modernism and Postmodernism – Lecturer Dr.
Eliana Ionoaia – POETRY COURSE PACK
Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden, 1899

This famous poem, written by Britain's imperial poet, was a response to the American take over of the
Phillipines after the Spanish-American War.
Modern History Sourcebook: http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/kipling.asp
Take up the White Man's burden-- The ports ye shall not enter,
Send forth the best ye breed-- The roads ye shall not tread,
Go bind your sons to exile Go mark them with your living,
To serve your captives' need; 35 And mark them with your dead.
5 To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild-- Take up the White Man's burden--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples, And reap his old reward:
Half-devil and half-child. The blame of those ye better,
40 The hate of those ye guard--
10 Take up the White Man's burden-- The cry of hosts ye humour
In patience to abide, (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
To veil the threat of terror "Why brought he us from bondage,
And check the show of pride; Our loved Egyptian night?"
By open speech and simple, 45
15 An hundred times made plain Take up the White Man's burden--
To seek another's profit, Ye dare not stoop to less--
And work another's gain. Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
Take up the White Man's burden-- 50 By all ye cry or whisper,
20 The savage wars of peace-- By all ye leave or do,
Fill full the mouth of Famine The silent, sullen peoples
And bid the sickness cease; Shall weigh your gods and you.
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought, 55 Take up the White Man's burden--
25 Watch sloth and heathen Folly Have done with childish days--
Bring all your hopes to nought. The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Take up the White Man's burden-- Comes now, to search your manhood
No tawdry rule of kings, 60 Through all the thankless years
30 But toil of serf and sweeper-- Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The tale of common things. The judgment of your peers!
Modernism and Postmodernism – Lecturer Dr. Eliana Ionoaia – POETRY COURSE PACK
Keegan, Paul, ed. The New Penguin Book of English Verse. London: Penguin Books, 2001. P. 862.
Rudyard Kipling, from Epitaphs of the War 1914-18 (1919)

A SERVANT Cities and men he smote from overhead.
We were together since the War began. His deaths delivered, he returned to play
He was my servant—and the better man. Childlike, with childish things now put away.
5 A SON 35 THE REFINED MAN

My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I I was of delicate mind. I stepped aside for my needs,
knew Disdaining the common office. I was seen from afar and
What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are killed…
few. How is this matter for mirth? Let each man be judged by his
10 40 deeds.
THE COWARD I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that I
I could not look on Death, which being known, willed.
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.
NATIVE WATER-CARRIER (M.E.F.)
15 SHOCK 45 Prometheus brought down fire to men,
My name, my speech, my self I had forgot. This brought up water.
My wife and children came—I knew them not. The Gods are jealous—now, as then,
I died. My Mother followed. At her call Giving no quarter.
And on her bosom I remembered all.
20 50 BOMBED IN LONDON
THE FAVOUR On land and sea I strove with anxious care
Death favoured me from the first, well knowing I could not To escape conscription. It was in the air!
endure
To wait on him day by day. He quitted my betters and came BATTERIES OUT OF AMMUNITION
25 Whistling over the fields, and, when he had made all sure, 55 If any mourn us in the workshop, say
“Thy line is at end,” he said, “but at least I have saved its We died because the shift kept holiday.
name.”
COMMON FORM
R.A.F. (AGED EIGHTEEN) If any question why we died,
30 Laughing through clouds, his milk-teeth still unshed, 60 Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Keegan, Paul, ed. The New Penguin Book of English Verse. London: Penguin Books, 2001. Pp. 862-863.
Rudyard Kipling, Gethsemane – 1914-1918 (1919)
The Garden called Gethsemane

In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see
5 The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass—we used to pass
Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas
Beyond Gethsemane.
10
The Garden called Gethsemane,
It held a pretty lass,
But all the time she talked to me
I prayed my cup might pass.
15 The officer sat on the chair,
The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass.
20 It didn’t pass—it didn’t pass-

It didn’t pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
Beyond Gethsemane!
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Signet Classic, 1998. (pp. 32-35)
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Waste Land (1922) (pp.32-35)
“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere,
et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω (apothanein thelo).”1
For Ezra Pound

il miglior fabbro2
1. The burial of the dead.3
25 April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing4
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
30 Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.5
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee6
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,7
35 And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.8
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
1
Epigraph: “For on one occasion I myself saw, with my own eyes, the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a cage, and
when some boys said to her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.’” This account is given by
Trimalchio, a character in the Satyricon, by Pentronius, a satirical novel written by the Roman writer Petronius in
the first century A.D.
2
Dedication: “the better craftsman” in Italian. Eliot dedicates the poem to Ezra Pound with the phrase that
registers Dante’s tribute to the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, who flourished between 1180 and 1200 in
Purgatorio Canto XXVI from the Divina Commedia.
3
The Burial of the Dead: “The Order for the Burial of the Dead” prescribes the words and actions of a burial
service within the Church of England; the text appears in the Book of Common Prayer.
4
1–2: Critics often compare this account of April with the opening to the General Prologue to The Canterbury
Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343?–1400), which adopts a more conventional and cheerful treatment of spring.
5
7 [a little life]: Perhaps an echo from “To Our Ladies of Death,” a poem by James Thomson (1834–1882):
“Our Mother feedeth thus our little life, / That we in turn may feed her with our death.” The phrase is hardly
unique since it occurs repeatedly in Christian writing opposing the “little life” of man to the vast designs of God. In
Thomson’s, “The City of Dreadful Night,” the following lines make reference to the same concept of corpses
returning to the earth and feeding it, all of us being a part of the grand cycle of nature: “This little life is all we
must endure, / The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure, / We fall asleep and never wake again; / Nothing is of us
but the mouldering flesh, / Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh / In earth, air, water, plants, and other
men.”
6
8 [Starnbergersee]: The German name for Lake Starnberger, located fifteen kilometers from Munich. Eliot
visited the city in 1911.
7
10 [Hofgarten]: “Court Garden” in German, located in the heart of Munich and standing next to a tall arcade,
the “colonnade” referred to in line 9, beyond which one could find the Arcade Café, situated within the Hofgarten.
8
12 [Bin gar keine Russin . . . echt deutsch]: “I am not a Russian, I come from Lithuania, a real German”
(German).
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,9
40 Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? 10 Son of man,11
45 You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images,12 where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, 13
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
50 (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),14
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;15
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.16
55 Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?17
9
15 [Marie]: Eliot “met” the Countess Marie Larisch (1858–1940, illegitimate daughter of Ludwig Wilhelm,
heir to the throne of Bavaria, and Henriette Mendel, a commoner) who lived with Ludwig’s sister, her aunt, who
was Empress Elizabeth of Austria, thus becoming a companion to the empress’s son and heir to the throne,
Archduke Rudolf.
10
19–20 [What the roots . . . stony rubbish]: Perhaps an echo of Job 8:16–17. “He is green before the sun, and
his branch shooteth forth in his garden. His roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones.”
11
20 [Son of man]: Eliot’s note cites Ezekiel 2:1. “And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon they feet, and I
will speak unto thee.” Thereafter “son of man” becomes the form in which God addresses the prophet Ezekiel.
12
22 [broken images]: Perhaps an echo of Ezekiel 6:4, in which God judges the people of Israel for worshiping
idols: “And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men
before your idols.”
13
23 [And the dead tree . . . no relief ]: Eliot’s note cites Ecclesiastes 12:5, describing the “evil days” that come
when men are old and declining into darkness: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears
shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail:
because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about in the streets.”
14
26 [Come in . . . this red rock]: Perhaps an echo of Isaiah 2:10: “Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust,
for fear of the Lord” or of a more consoling prophecy in Isaiah 32:2: “And a man shall be as a hiding place from the
wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary
land.”
15
28–29 [Your shadow . . . rising to meet you]: the title character in the play Philaster by Francis Beaumont
and John Fletcher (written around 1608–1610), a prince unfairly dispossessed of his kingdom who is in love with
Arethusa, daughter of the king, who had dispossessed him. Rumours seem to point to her betrayal and he believes
the accusations, longing to travel to “some far place / Where never womankind durst set her foot,” a place where
he will “preach to birds and beasts / What woman is and help to save them from you”—that is, from women in
general. There he will deliver a homily to the animals which will show “How that foolish man / That reads the
story of a woman’s face / And dies believing it is lost forever. / How all the good you have is but a shadow / I’th’
morning with you and at night behind you, Past and forgotten.” (III.ii.132–137) Eliot strips the amorous and
gender-bound context of the lines and applies to humans in general.
16
30 “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return”, as in the funeral service. A Handful of Dust became the
title of Evelyn Waugh’s novel from 1934.
17
31–34 [Frisch weht . . . weilest du]: As Eliot notes, his quotation is from the opera Tristan und Isolde (1865)
by Richard Wagner (1813–1883), I.i.5–8. “Fresh blows the wind / To the homeland; / My Irish child, / Where are
you tarrying?” (German). The scene opens on a ship that is transporting Isolde from Cornwall to Ireland, where
“You gave me hyacinths18 first a year ago;
60 “They called me the hyacinth girl.”
- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead,19 and I knew nothing,20
65 Looking into the heart of light, the silence.21
Od’ und leer das Meer.22
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,23
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
70 With a wicked pack of cards.24 Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,25
she is to marry King Mark. She is accompanied by Tristan, the king’s nephew. From the ship’s rigging, a sailor’s
voice resounds with a melancholy song about an Irish woman left behind, which includes the lines transcribed by
Eliot. Later in the opera, Isolde decides to kill both Tristan and herself with poison; but her companion, Brangäne,
substitutes a love potion for the poison, and the two fall hopelessly in love.
18
35 [hyacinths]: In Greek myth Hyacinth was a beloved companion of Apollo. When the two engaged in a
discus-throwing contest, Apollo’s discus inadvertently killed his friend. Where drops of Hyacinth’s blood touched
the ground, a purple flower miraculously arose, resembling a lily. Apollo inscribed his grief upon the flower,
which was said to have marks which looked like the letters AI, ancient Greek for a cry of woe. The story is told in
Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 162–219.
19
39–40 [I was neither / Living nor dead]: Perhaps an allusion to Dante, Inferno XXXIV, 25. Dante recalls his
state of mind when he first saw Satan at the very bottom of the Inferno: “Com’ io divenni allor gelato e fioco / nol
dimandar, lettor, ch’ i’ non lo scrivo, / però ch’ ogni parlar sarebbe poco. /Io non morì, e non rimasi vivo.” This can be
translated as: “How chilled and faint I turned then, / Do not ask, reader, for I cannot describe it, / For all speech
would fail it. /I did not die, and did not remain alive.”
20
40 [and I knew nothing]: Compare Job 8:9: “For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our
days upon earth are a shadow.”
21
Reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and the description provided by Marlowe for London
at the beginning of the novella. The initial epigraph for “The Waste Land”, discarded by Eliot as urged by Ezra
Pound, was from the same novella “The horror! The horror!”, the last words uttered by Kurtz.
22
42 [Öd’ und leer das Meer]: “Desolate and empty the sea” (German). From Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde,
III.i.24. Tristan is lying grievously wounded outside Kareol, his castle in Brittany, tended by his companion
Kurwenal. He will die unless Isolde can come and cure him with her magic arts. Tristan wakes from his delirium;
he is clinging to life only so that he can find Isolde and take her with him into the realm of night. For a moment he
thinks that he sees Isolde’s ship approaching; but a shepherd who is watching with him pipes a sad tune:
“Desolate and empty the sea.”
23
43 [Madame Sosostris]: The name is obviously appropriate for someone who equivocates, or whose answer
to every question is a variant of “so so.” Not surprisingly, her friend is named Mrs. Equitone, a variant on the
notion of equivocation. To learned readers the name Sosostris may also recall the Greek work for “savior,” soteros,
which survives in the English word soteriological, of or having to do with the doctrine of salvation in Christian
theology. For many years scholars also thought that her name was suggested to Eliot by a character in Aldous
Huxley’s novel Chrome Yellow (1921), in which Mr. Scogan disguises himself as a gipsy fortune-teller named
Sesostris and, at the village fête, reads the fortune of a simple young girl whom he means to seduce. In a letter,
dated 10 March 1952, Eliot had said it was “almost certain” that he had borrowed the name from Chrome Yellow.
24
46 [pack of cards]: The tarot deck consists of twenty-two cards, one unnumbered and the rest numbered
through twenty-one, which are added to a pack (British usage) or deck of fifty-six cards arranged in four suits
(cups, wands, swords, and pentacles or pentangles). Jessie Weston suggested that these suits were repositories of
primeval symbols of fertility corresponding to the four Grail talismans, grail-cup, lance, sword, and dish (From
Ritual to Romance, 77–79). Scholars have expended vast amounts of ink on establishing precise connections
between the tarot cards and Eliot’s use of them, even though Eliot, in his notes to the poem, admitted that he had
little familiarity with the tarot and had “departed” from it “to suit [his] own convenience.”
25
47 [the drowned Phoenician Sailor]: There is no such card in the tarot deck, but this passage is thought to
anticipate part IV of The Waste Land.
(Those are pearls that were his eyes.26 Look!)
Here is Belladonna,27 the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
75 Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant,28 and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
80 I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,29
85 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.30
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,31
26
48 [Those are pearls . . . Look!]: From Shakespeare, The Tempest I.ii.399. The play begins with a storm scene
and a shipwreck: young Prince Ferdinand and others from the court of Naples come to shore on an unnamed
island inhabited by Prospero, the former ruler of Naples whose throne has been usurped by his brother Antonio,
acting in concert with Ferdinand’s father, Alonso. At Prospero’s behest the storm has been created by Ariel, a
magical spirit of the island who serves him. When Ferdinand laments his father’s supposed death —he is
mistaken, for his father is still alive—Ariel tries to comfort him with a song (396–405): “Full fathom five thy father
lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade / But
doth suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange. / Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell: / Burden. Ding-
dong. / Hark! Now I hear them—ding-dong bell.”
27
49 [Here is Belladonna . . . Rocks]: Belladonna is Italian for “beautiful woman.” There is no such card in the
tarot pack. Commentators have often urged that the phrase, “the Lady of the Rocks,” has overtones of a passage in
the essay by Walter Pater (1839–1894) on “Leonardo da Vinci” in The Renaissance (1873). Pater discusses da
Vinci’s painting La Gioconda, popularly known as the Mona Lisa: “She is older than the rocks among which she
sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secret of the grave; and had been a diver in
deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.” But
Eliot disliked Pater’s prose style.
28
51–52 [Here is the man . . . the one-eyed merchant]: The first two cards, the man with three staves and the
wheel, are genuine tarot cards, but the one-eyed merchant is Eliot’s invention.
29
60 [Unreal City]: The City is the name for the financial district in London, located just beyond the north end
of London Bridge. The area is home to the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, and the head offices or
headquarters of Britain’s major commercial banks, including Lloyds Bank in Lombard Street, where Eliot worked
from 1917 to 1925. The London Bridge that Eliot knew was built between 1825 and 1831 to a design by John
Rennie (1761–1821); it was dismantled in 1967 and replaced with the current structure. Eliot’s note at this point
invokes a poem by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), “Les sept viellards” (1859), which recounts a ghostly
encounter in the street that sets the pattern for the incident which follows in this portion of The Waste Land:
“Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, / Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant! / Les mystères partout
coulent comme des sèves / Dans les canaux étroits du colosse puissant.” John Goudge (1921– ) translated “The Seven
Old Men” in Carol Clark and Robert Sykes, eds., Baudelaire in English (London: Penguin, 1997): “City swarming
with people! City crowded with dreams! / Through the narrow back streets of this mighty colossus, / Like the sap
in a tree, a dark mystery streams, / And ghosts clutch a man’s sleeve, in broad day, as he passes.”
30
62–63 [so many . . . so many]: Eliot’s note cites Dante, Inferno III, 55–57: “such a long stream / of people,
that I would not have thought / that death had undone so many.” As soon as Dante passes through the gates of
Hell, he hears first “sighs, lamentations, and loud wailings” (III, 22), then “strange tongues, horrible languages,
words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse” (III, 25–27). In the gloom he discerns “a long stream of
people.” He asks Virgil, his guide in the underworld, why these people are here, and
Virgil explains that in life these did neither good nor evil, thinking only of themselves; like the Sibyl in the
epigraph to The Waste Land, they “have no hope of death, and so abject is their blind life that they are envious of
every other lot” (III, 46–48).
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
90 Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,32
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth33 kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!34
95 “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!35
100 “You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!”36
31
64 [Sighs . . . ]: Eliot’s note cites Dante, Inferno IV, 25–27: “Here, as far I could tell by listening, / Was no
lamentation more than sighs, / Which kept the air forever trembling.” Dante has entered the first circle of Hell, or
Limbo, and describes the sound that emanates from those who died without being baptized, and who therefore
must live forever with the torment of desiring to see God, yet knowing that they never will.
32
66 [King William Street]: The thoroughfare (see Fig. 5) which runs from the north end of London Bridge
directly into the City, or financial district, of London.
33
67 [St. Mary Woolnoth]: The church, a neoclassical work designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736),
who was a prominent architect in the early eighteenth century, was erected from 1716 to 1724 (see Figs. 6, 7). It
is located at the intersection of King William Street and Lombard Street; Eliot worked in the Lombard Street head
office of Lloyds Bank (see Fig. 9), and to reach work had to pass St. Mary Woolnoth every morning. By his time the
church had already become a relic, isolated and dwarfed by the larger office blocks of the City’s banks, since
people no longer resided within the City and the church had lost its parishioners.
34
70 [Mylae]: A city on the northern coast of Sicily, now called Milazzo, off the coast of which there occurred a
naval battle between the Romans and the Carthaginians in 260 b.c., the first engagement in the first of the Punic
Wars. The Romans won, destroying some fifty ships, an early step in their battle for commercial domination of the
Mediterranean.
35
74–75 [Oh keep the Dog . . . again!]: Eliot’s note directs the reader to The White Devil (1612), a play by John
Webster (c. 1580–c. 1635). It dramatizes numerous acts of political and sexual betrayal, among which Flamineo
murders his own brother Marcello. Their mother, in act V, scene iv, sings a demented dirge over Marcello’s body
(her song is given in italics, her spoken words in roman): “Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren, / Since o’er
shady groves they hover, / And with leaves and flowers do cover / The friendless bodies of unburied men. / Call unto
his funeral dole / The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole / To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm, / And
(when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm. / But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, / For with his nails
he’ll dig them up again. / They would not bury him ’cause he died in a quarrel, / But I have an answer for them: /
Let holy church receive him duly / Since hee paid the church tithes truly. / His wealth is summed, and this is all his
store: / This poor men get; and great men get no more. / Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop. / Bless
you all, good people.”
36
76 [hypocrite lecteur! . . . mon frère]: Eliot’s note cites “Au Lecteur” (“To theReader”) (1855), the first poem
in Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of evil, 1857), by Charles Baudelaire: “C’est l’Ennui!—l’oeil chargé d’un pleur
involontaire, / Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka. / Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,/ —Hypocrite
lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
The South African poet Roy Campbell (1901–1957) offered this translation of “To the Reader” in his Poems of
Baudelaire: A Translation of Les Fleurs du mal (New York: Pantheon, 1952): “Boredom! He smokes his hookah,
while he dreams / Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother. / You know this dainty monster, too, it seems /
Hypocrite reader!—You!—My twin!—My brother!”
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Signet Classic, 1998. (p. 5-11)
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock (1917)
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
5 Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.37
Let us go then, you and I,

10 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
15 And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
20 Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.
25 The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
30 Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time

35 For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
40 And time for all the works and days38 of hands
37
From Dante’s Inferno, XXVII, 61-66. Guido da Montefeltro speaks, after Dante questions him: “If I thought that
my reply were to be to someone who would ever return to the world, this flame would be still, without further
motion. But since no one has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear
of shame.” In the poem, Prufrock speaks, similarly, an inner truth to an unnamed “you”.
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
45 Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.
50 And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
55 My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
60 In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
65 I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
70 And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
75 To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
80 (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?
85 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
38
The Greek poet Hesiod (eighth century B.C.) wrote Works and Days, a georgic poem.
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
90
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

95 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?
100 But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,39
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,
105 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,
110 Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,40
115 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.”
120 And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
125 It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
130 “That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
No! I am not Prince Hamlet41, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do
39
The head of John the Baptist was delivered on a platter to Salome (Matthew 14:1-11).
40
Lazarus was raised from the dead by Jesus (John 11:1-44).
41
i.e. Prufrock will be, not like Hamlet the hero, but rather like Polonius, a fussy court advisor.
135 To swell a progress42, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence43, but a bit obtuse;
140 At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
145
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.
150 I do not think that 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.
155 We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
42
Royal procession.
43
Sententiousness.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Hollow Men44 (1925) (p. 60-65)
Mistah Kurtz-he dead45

A penny for the Old Guy46
We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
5 Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
10 Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
15
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
20 As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
25
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
30 Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
44
Cf. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar IV.ii., “But hollow men, like horses hot at hand / Make gallant show and promise
of their mettle.”
45
“Mistah Kurtz…” (first epigraph), cf. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, Conrad’s hero, grows corrupt and
insane deep in the African jungle.
46
“A penny…” (second epigraph), English children’s saying. Guy Fawkes’ conspiracy to blow up the House of
Commons (1605) was thwarted and Fawkes executed. The day of execution, November 5, is celebrated with
children making effigies of the “guy” and begging pennies.
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
35 Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
40 Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-
45
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
50 III
This is the dead land

This is cactus land
Here the stone images
55 Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
60 In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
65 Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
70 The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
75
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
80
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose47
85 Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
90 V
Here we go round the prickly pear48

Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
95 At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea

And the reality
Between the motion
100 And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception

105 And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
110
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
115 Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
120 For Thine49 is

Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends

125 This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
47
Dante’s vision of Paradise in his Paradiso. Souls saved in Heaven arrange themselves around God, like petals
falling back from a rose.
48
Eliot’s version of the children’s game “Here we go round the mulberry bush.”
49
“For Thine…” from the Lord’s Prayer.
Author Notes
1. Mistah Kurtz: a character in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

2. A...Old Guy: a cry of English children on the streets on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, when they carry straw
effigies of Guy Fawkes and beg for money for fireworks to celebrate the day. Fawkes was a traitor who
attempted with conspirators to blow up both houses of Parliament in 1605; the "gunpowder plot" failed.
3. Those...Kingdom: Those who have represented something positive and direct are blessed in Paradise. The
reference is to Dante's "Paradiso".
4. Eyes: eyes of those in eternity who had faith and confidence and were a force that acted and were not
paralyzed.
5. crossed stave: refers to scarecrows
6. tumid river: swollen river. The River Acheron in Hell in Dante's "Inferno". The damned must cross this river
to get to the land of the dead.
7. Multifoliate rose: in dante's "Divine Comedy" paradise is described as a rose of many leaves.
8. prickly pear: cactus
9. Between...act: a reference to "Julius Caesar" "Between the acting of a dreadful thing/And the first motion,
all the interim is/Like a phantasma or a hideous dream."
10. For...Kingdom: the beginning of the closing words of the Lord's Prayer.
Keegan, Paul, ed. The New Penguin Book of English Verse. London: Penguin Books, 2001.
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Sailing to Byzantium (1928) (p. 892-893)
That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
5 Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
10 An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
15 Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire

20 As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
25 It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,
30 But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
35 Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Keegan, Paul, ed. The New Penguin Book of English Verse. London: Penguin Books, 2001. P.
885
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) - Leda and the Swan (1923)
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
5 By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
10 And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
15 And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
The Second Coming (1919) – online source: http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html
Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
5 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
10
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
15 Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
20
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
25 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Keegan, Paul, ed. The New Penguin Book of English Verse. London: Penguin Books, 2001. Pp. 897-898.
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) – Innocent England (1929)
Oh what a pity, Oh! Don’t you agree

that figs aren’t found in the land of the free!
5
Fig trees don’t grow in my native land;
there’s never a fig-tree near at hand
when you want one; so I did without;

10 and that is what this row’s all about.
Virginal, pure policemen came

and hid their faces for very shame,
15 while they carried the shameless things away

to gaol, to be hid from the light of day.
And Mr. Mead, that old, old lily

Said: ‘Gross! coarse! hideous!’ – and I, like a silly
20
thought he meant the faces of the police-court officials,
and how right he was, and I signed my initials,
to confirm what he said: but alas, he meant

25 my pictures, and on the proceedings went.
The upshot was, my pictures must burn

that English artists might finally learn
30 when they painted a nude, to put a cache sexe on,

a cache sexe, a cache sexe, or else begone!
A fig-leaf; or, if you cannot find it

a wreath of mist, with nothing behind it.
35
A wreath of mist is the usual thing
In the north, to hide where the turtles sing.
Though they never sing, they never sing,

40 Don’t you dare to suggest such a thing
or Mr. Mead will be after you

- But what a pity I never knew
45 A wreath of English mist would do

As a cache sexe! I’d have put a whole fog.
But once and forever barks the old dog,

so my pictures are in prison, instead of in the Zoo.
50
Keegan, Paul, ed. The New Penguin Book of English Verse. London: Penguin Books, 2001. Pp. 857-858
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) – Anthem1 for Doomed Youth (1918)
What passing-bells2 for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
5 Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out3 their hasty orisons.4
No mockeries5 now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented6 choirs of wailing shells;
10 And bugles7 calling for them from sad shires.8
What candles9 may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor10 of girls' brows shall be their pall;
15 Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk11 a drawing-down of blinds.12
1 Anthem - perhaps best known in the expression "The National Anthem;" also, an important religious song (often
expressing joy); here, perhaps, a solemn song of celebration
2 passing-bells - a bell tolled after someone's death to announce the death to the world
3 patter out - rapidly speak
4 orisons - prayers, here funeral prayers
5 mockeries - ceremonies which are insults. Here Owen seems to be suggesting that the Christian religion, with its
loving God, can have nothing to do with the deaths of so many thousands of men
6 demented - raving mad
7 bugles - a bugle is played at military funerals (sounding the last post)
8 shires - English counties and countryside from which so many of the soldiers came
9 candles - church candles, or the candles lit in the room where a body lies in a coffin
10 pallor - paleness
11 dusk has a symbolic significance here
12 drawing-down of blinds - normally a preparation for night, but also, here, the tradition of drawing the blinds in a
room where a dead person lies, as a sign to the world and as a mark of respect. The coming of night is like the drawing
down of blinds.
Notes from Out in the Dark - Poetry of the First World War in Context edited by David Roberts. Copyright © David
Roberts 1998. Free use by individual students for personal use only.
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) - Dulce et Decorum Est1 (1917)
Source: http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

5 Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares2 we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest3 began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
10 Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots4
Of tired, outstripped5 Five-Nines6 that dropped behind.
Gas!7 Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets8 just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
15 And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime9 . . .
Dim, through the misty panes10 and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,11 choking, drowning.
20 If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
25 Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud12
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest13
To children ardent14 for some desperate glory,
30 The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.15
Notes on Dulce et Decorum Est

1. DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely
understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great
honour to fight and die for your country.
2. Flares - rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the
front lines
3. Distant rest - a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer
4. Hoots - the noise made by the shells rushing through the air
5. Outstripped - outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they
struggle away from the scene of battle
6. Five-Nines - 5.9 calibre explosive shells
7. Gas! - poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had
the same effects as when a person drowned
8. Helmets - the early name for gas masks
9. Lime - a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue
10. Panes - the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks
11. Guttering - Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the
sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling
12. Cud - normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew usually green and bubbling. Here a similar looking material was issuing
from the soldier's mouth
13. High zest - idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea
14. ardent - keen
15. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - see note 1 above.
W. H. Auden (1907-1973) - Musée des Beaux Arts (1938)
About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood
5 Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
10 On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
15 Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
20 But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus (1558)
Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

Source: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/bruegel/icarus.jpg.html
Keegan, Paul, ed. The New Penguin Book of English Verse. London: Penguin Books, 2001. P. 997-998.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
Here (1964)
Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows

5 And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
10 And the widening river s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,
Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
15 And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires—
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers—
20
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
25 Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands

30 Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
35 Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
This Be the Verse (1974)
5 They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
10 But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
15 Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Ian Hamilton (1938-2001)
Newscast (1970)
The Vietnam war drags on

In one corner of our living-room.
The conversation turns
5 To take it in.
Our smoking heads
Drift back to us
From the grey fires of South-east Asia.
Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
from Crow – A Childish Prank (1970)
”Man’s and woman’s bodies lay without souls

Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert
On the flowers of Eden.
God pondered.
5
The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.
Crow laughed.
He bit the Worm, God’s only son,
10 Into two writhing halves.
He stuffed into man the tail half

With the wounded end hanging out.
15 He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman

And it crept in deeper and up
To peer out through her eyes
Calling it’s tail-half to join up quickly, quickly

20 Because O it was painful.
Man awoke being dragged across the grass.

Woman awoke to see him coming.
Neither knew what had happened.
25
God went on sleeping.
Crow went on laughing.”
Douglas Dunn (1942-)
Modern Love (1972)
It is summer, and we are in a house

That is not ours, sitting at a table
5 Enjoying minutes of a rented silence,
The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull
To sleep the under-tens and invalids,
The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass,
The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect.
10 Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better
Happiness than this, not much to show for love
Than how we are, or how this evening is,
Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive
In a domestic love, seemingly alone,
15 All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight,
Looking forward to a visit from the cat.
Craig Raine (1944-)
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979)
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings

and some are treasured for their markings –
5
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but

10 sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight

and rests its soft machine on ground:
15 then the world is dim and bookish

like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.

It has the property of making colours darker.
20
Model T is a room with the lock inside –
a key is turned to free the world
for movement, so quick there is a film

25 to watch for anything missed.
But time is tied to the wrist

or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
30 In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,

that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it

to their lips and soothe it to sleep
35
with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer

40 openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.

They lock the door and suffer the noises
45 alone. No one is exempt

and everyone’s pain has a different smell.
At night, when all the colours die,

they hide in pairs
50
and read about themselves –
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
Christopher Reid (1949-)
Stones and Bones (1994)
SECOND GENESIS
“inde genes durum sumus”

Ovid: Metamorphoses, Book I
Two survived the flood.

5 We are not of their blood,
springing instead from the bones
of the Great Mother – stones,
what have you, rocks, boulders –
hurled over their shoulders
10 by that pious pair
and becoming people, where
and as they hit the ground.
Since when, we have always found
something hard, ungracious,
15 obdurate in our natures,
a strain of the very earth
that gave us our abrupt birth;
but a pang, too, at the back
of the mind: a loss… a lack…

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Modernism and Postmodernism – Lecturer Dr.

Eliana Ionoaia – POETRY COURSE PACK

Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden, 1899

Rudyard Kipling, from Epitaphs of the War 1914-18 (1919)

5 A SON 35 THE REFINED MAN

Rudyard Kipling, Gethsemane – 1914-1918 (1919)

The Garden called Gethsemane

20 It didn’t pass—it didn’t pass-

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

The Waste Land (1922) (pp.32-35)

For Ezra Pound

1. The burial of the dead.3

25 April is the cruellest month, breeding

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock (1917)

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

Let us go then, you and I,

In the room the women come and go

And indeed there will be time

In the room the women come and go

50 And indeed there will be time

For I have known them all already, known them all:

70 And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

And would it have been worth it, after all,

120 And would it have been worth it, after all,

No! I am not Prince Hamlet41, nor was meant to be;

I grow old ... I grow old ...

150 I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

The Hollow Men44 (1925) (p. 60-65)

Mistah Kurtz-he dead45

We are the hollow men

Shape without form, shade without colour,

This is the dead land

70 The eyes are not here

Here we go round the prickly pear48

Between the idea

Between the conception

120 For Thine49 is

This is the way the world ends

1. Mistah Kurtz: a character in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

Sailing to Byzantium (1928) (p. 892-893)

That is no country for old men. The young

10 An aged man is but a paltry thing,

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

Once out of nature I shall never take

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) - Leda and the Swan (1923)

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

How can those terrified vague fingers push

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The Second Coming (1919) – online source: http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) – Innocent England (1929)