T. S. Eliot has been my favorite poet since I read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" my sophomore year of high school. He has such a gift of conveying emotions well even if the words themselves don't make immediate sense, but he closes his thoughts with one solid sentence that drive the point home. In "The Love Song," he talks about the fleeting nature of life and how pointless it all feels. You feel lost and helpless at first, but you're sort of left wondering what exactly he's trying to say until one of his final stanzas, when he says "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." The same phenomenon happened in "The Waste Land" for me. I felt what he was feeling for the first few pages, all of the longing and heartache, but I wasn't sure what the true concept was until he said, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." The emptiness, the desolation, and the death Eliot describes here is so tangible despite the fact that I have never experienced it, and I think that's part of what makes this poem so wonderful. The excerpt from the bar in particular is such a moving and real depiction of a late night conversation between two people with vacant hearts. I adore this poem in its entirety.
I also really enjoyed the short segment where he's looking at his Tarot cards. "I do not find / The Hanged Man. Fear death by water" really jumped off the page at me. I did a little research and I found out that the Hanged Man is a card that can either represent metamorphosis or egotism depending on how it's drawn. The foreshadowing in this segment of both the death of Phlebas in Part IV and the yearning for water and the internal regeneration that takes place in Part V is really, really clever. This is writing at its finest.
I could go on and on about how much I enjoyed this reading and all the thoughts I had, but we would be here forever, so I'll stop here. Eliot is the most perfect poet, in my opinion. I can never re-read his work enough. If you enjoyed reading this poem for the first time, I highly encourage you to read it again. And again. And again. And never stop re-reading it because it will always, always rock your world. And if it doesn't, find a new Eliot work to read. And then re-read that one. You will not regret it. I promise.
caroline & hailey
I also really enjoyed the short segment where he's looking at his Tarot cards. "I do not find / The Hanged Man. Fear death by water" really jumped off the page at me. I did a little research and I found out that the Hanged Man is a card that can either represent metamorphosis or egotism depending on how it's drawn. The foreshadowing in this segment of both the death of Phlebas in Part IV and the yearning for water and the internal regeneration that takes place in Part V is really, really clever. This is writing at its finest.
I could go on and on about how much I enjoyed this reading and all the thoughts I had, but we would be here forever, so I'll stop here. Eliot is the most perfect poet, in my opinion. I can never re-read his work enough. If you enjoyed reading this poem for the first time, I highly encourage you to read it again. And again. And again. And never stop re-reading it because it will always, always rock your world. And if it doesn't, find a new Eliot work to read. And then re-read that one. You will not regret it. I promise.
caroline & hailey
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