Tradition and the Individual Talent Assignment | Online Homework Help

Comment on any single line or short passage from any of T.S. Eliot’s poems. Simply try to explain your experience reading it and research how others have interpreted it. Be sure to quote the passage and use in-text citation for your reference to anyone else’s idea(s) (e.g. – According to …….., what Eliot means is “……….” / As you said in class……..). This is informal and your audience is me, the instructor I have uploaded our book in pdf you’ll find some of Eliot’s work which you can choose from and also some commentary you may use as a reference to someone else’s experience

Selected Poems
Tradition and the Individual Talent
American/British
Modernism
Eliot was born in St. Louis, the youngest of seven children. He attended Smith
Academy in St. Louis, and went on to study at Harvard. After finishing his bachelor’s
degree, he began his graduate studies. During this time, he focused on Symbolist poetry.
He tried to study abroad in Germany in 1914, but left the country early due to the threat
of war. Instead, he went to England, where he met Ezra Pound, who would have a
profound influence on Eliot’s work. While Eliot did occasionally return to the United
States, he settled in England and eventually became a citizen of the country. It was Pound
who helped Eliot publish “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) in Poetry. The
poem established Eliot’s reputation as an experimental, intellectual writer. Eliot
possessed an amazing versatility. By the time he was 40, he had published over 20 books,
which included volumes of poetry, criticism, and plays. His most notable work is The
Waste Land (1922), which explores the disenfranchisement and ennui felt by the post-
World War I, Lost Generation. The work is experimental in its fracture perspectives, play
with tone and language, and disrupted narrative. His criticism, most specifically works
from The Sacred Wood, such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920), constructs a
comprehensive literary theory, where the poet is not merely repeating popular ideas, but
is interacting with an entire body of literary history, starting with Homer. By the time he
won the Nobel Prize in 1948, he was considered one of the most influential writers in the
English language.
Consider while reading:
1. In The Waste Land, how does Eliot portray time in relation to war? What larger point
is he trying to make?
2. How does Eliot break with traditional forms and content? What is the significance of
these breaks?
3. How does Eliot reimagine classic stories and figures (such as Tristen and Isolde and
Tiresias) in his work? What is his purpose in this rewriting?
4. What does Eliot’s work reveal about the effects of historical events, such as World
War I, on the poet?
5. Eliot uses allusion to enhance his poetry. How do the lines from Dante’s Inferno set
the tone for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock? What do the two figures have in
common?
6. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot uses a refrain, what is he trying to
emphasis?
7. Eliot experiments with conceptions of time in both “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” and The Waste Land. How does he express time in each work? How do
these expressions of time underscore his meanings?
8. In his essay, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” Eliot’s conception of art emphasizes
the idea of art being impersonal? How does the structure of his argument both
uphold and undercut that idea?
9. Eliot discusses what a poet must sacrifice in “Tradition and Individual Talent.” What
does this sacrifice comprise? What does he suggest is the relationship between the
poet, history, and society?
Written by Laura Ng
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
License: Public Dom ain
T.S. Eliot
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
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
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?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
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,
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
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,
And time for all the works and days of hands
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,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
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!”)
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?
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,
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?
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
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
(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?
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
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
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?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
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,
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,
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,
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.”
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?—
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:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, 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 sentence, but a bit obtuse;
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.
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.
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.
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.
TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT
License: Public Dom ain
T.S. Eliot
I
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply
its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a
tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-andso
is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word
appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with
the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological
reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without
this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.
Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead
writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own
critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and
limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or
think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in
the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude
(we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we,
and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were
the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that
criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for
articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion
about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts
that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise
a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else.
In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what
is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s
difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we
endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed.
Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not
only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which
the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do
not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full
maturity.
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the
ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its
successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such
simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition.
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if
you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the
historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would
5
continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense
involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence;
the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation
in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from
Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a
simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical
sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the
timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it
is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in
time, of his contemporaneity.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance,
his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.
You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison,
among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical,
criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided;
what happens when a new work of art is created is something that
happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing
monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing
order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the
supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly,
altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the
whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English
literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the
present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware
of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by
the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be
as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the
canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are
measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not
really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work
of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in;
but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly
and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We
say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual,
and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the
past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he
form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself
wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is
an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly
10
desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current,
which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations.
He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the
material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of
Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be
much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and
that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does
not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the
Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps,
complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any
improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the
psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end
based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference
between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of
the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot
show.
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so
much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the
métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount
of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of
poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or
perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet
ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and
necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be
put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more
pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy
must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch
than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted
upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and
that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to
something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual selfsacrifice,
a continual extinction of personality.
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to
the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to
approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a
suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated
platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.
II
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the
13
poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of
popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we
seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall
seldom find it. In the last article I tried to point out the importance of the relation of the
poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living
whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal
theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that
the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any
valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to
say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied,
feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.
The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously
mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form
sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present;
nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the
platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and
unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or
exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more
perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who
suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and
transmute the passions which are its material.
The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the
transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a
work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from
any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a
combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular
words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great
poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed
out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up
of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of
any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last
quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which “came,” which
did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in
suspension in the poet’s mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add
itself to. The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up
numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles
which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see
how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any
semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For it is not the
“greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of
the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes
place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite
emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from
whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is
no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which
has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the
process of transmution of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of
Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the
scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the
emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist
himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the
combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that
which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of
elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing
particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps,
because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to
bring together.
The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the
metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that
the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is
only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences
combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which
are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which
become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the
personality.
I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh
attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:
And now methinks I could e’en chide myself
For doating on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge’s lips,
To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her? …
In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive
and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally
intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This
balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is
pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural
emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the
17
fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means
superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events
in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular
emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a
very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who
have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity
in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for
novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is
not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up
into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And
emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those
familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in
tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection,
nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new
thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences
which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all;
it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These
experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which
is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is
not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which
must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious
where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be
unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning
loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have
personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these
things.
III
δ δε νους ισως Θειοτερον τι και απαθες εστιν
This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and
confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible
person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a
laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good
and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere
emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate
technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant
emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the
poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this
impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And
he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely
the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of
what is dead, but of what is already living.
THE WASTE LAND
License: Public Dom ain
T.S. Eliot
“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.”
For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
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? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
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;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“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, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, 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.
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,
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.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth 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!
“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!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
II. A Game of Chess
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion.
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered,