These past two weeks have offered us challenging reading from some pillars in 20th Century American literature. Faulkner is never easy. And now we face Eliot and his allusive and elusive “The Waste Land”.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” have become touchstones in our culture today. Even my science-type friends can quote the first line from “The Waste Land”: “April is the cruellest month…” As I type, I’m listening to the band Crash Test Dummies sing their 1993 song, “Afternoons and Coffeespoons”, which makes reference to lines from “Prufrock”. The lines go: Someday I’ll have a disappearing hairline / Someday I’ll wear pyjamas in the daytime / Afternoons will be measured out Measured out, measured with Coffeespoons and T.S. Eliot. (If you’re interested, see the YouTube video embedded below.)
So a poet who works with allusion has become the subject of allusion himself.
While I find “The Wasteland” difficult, I find the longing, weariness, and fragility of Prufrock compelling. Ever since I first read the poem as an undergrad (when I wasn’t even old and world-weary!), I have carried with me the lines near the end that begin with, “I grow old…I grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled./ Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?….” I think many of us desire to lead a bolder, more daring life than we think we are able to. We take timid, small steps each day to get through life (the coffee spoons). We wish the mermaids would sing to us…but suspect they won’t. We dream of lingering “in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown…”. I know I do. You?