hhhh
Marina, a poem by T.S. Eliot
Posted on September 7, 2012 by Morgan Mussell
One of best educational experiences I ever had was a class called “Yeats and Eliot” that I took as a college sophomore. I’ve been reading and rereading his work ever since. The name of this blog, “The first gate(s)” comes from the opening of Eliot’s long poem, “The Four Quartets,” which matches the scope and depth of the work of any poet who ventures into ineffable realms.
T.S. Eliot by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1934. Public Domain
Eliot must have been quite a character. He scandalized the early 20th century literary establishment with images like this, from the opening of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:”
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;”
At the same time he offended the avant garde because he worked in a bank and joined the Catholic church. Aware of such contradictions, he was never afraid to parody himself:
“How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.”
By all accounts, he was also a joker, who served whoopee cushions and exploding cigars to dinner guests. He and Groucho Marx were mutual fans.
***
“Marina” was one of the first Eliot poems I came to love, but I hadn’t read it for quite a while. Ironically, it was the political conventions that brought these lines from the poem to mind:
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Marina was #29 in Eliot’s series of ”Ariel Poems,” first published in September, 1930. It was based on the Jacobean play, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Shakespeare is credited with the last acts of the play, the story of Pericles’ separation from, and reunion with, his daughter, Marina (most scholars believe the opening was
Posted on September 7, 2012 by Morgan Mussell
One of best educational experiences I ever had was a class called “Yeats and Eliot” that I took as a college sophomore. I’ve been reading and rereading his work ever since. The name of this blog, “The first gate(s)” comes from the opening of Eliot’s long poem, “The Four Quartets,” which matches the scope and depth of the work of any poet who ventures into ineffable realms.
T.S. Eliot by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1934. Public Domain
Eliot must have been quite a character. He scandalized the early 20th century literary establishment with images like this, from the opening of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:”
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;”
At the same time he offended the avant garde because he worked in a bank and joined the Catholic church. Aware of such contradictions, he was never afraid to parody himself:
“How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.”
By all accounts, he was also a joker, who served whoopee cushions and exploding cigars to dinner guests. He and Groucho Marx were mutual fans.
***
“Marina” was one of the first Eliot poems I came to love, but I hadn’t read it for quite a while. Ironically, it was the political conventions that brought these lines from the poem to mind:
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Marina was #29 in Eliot’s series of ”Ariel Poems,” first published in September, 1930. It was based on the Jacobean play, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Shakespeare is credited with the last acts of the play, the story of Pericles’ separation from, and reunion with, his daughter, Marina (most scholars believe the opening was