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time taking the very sociable Hayward to a party or pushing him and his wheelchair through a park. This living arrangement may or may not have emboldened a young literary critic to interpret The Wasteland as having homosexual overtones, suggesting that the poet had been mourning a young man who had drowned. Eliot and his soliciters demanded destruction of the remainder of the magazines where the critical article appeared.On Jan. 10, l957, at 6:l5 in the morning and still quite dark, Eliot slipped out of the flat, met his much younger secretary--she still called him Mr. Eliot-at St. Barnabas Church in Addison Rd. Kensington (ages 30, 68 respectively) and married her. He had not previously discussed this plan with his roommate of 11 years who was in a wheelchair. He had not told his close friends, Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyn. The new Mr. and Mrs. Eliot were inseparable for the next 8 years. Eliot's health was failing and he succombed to cardio-respiratory problems and stroke.
-Dorian Borsella
Eliot brought the word "Prufrock" into the English language, meaning a sniveling, equivocating sod, underwhelmed by his sense of importance:
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 life 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.
….
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
….
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 shall I presume?
….
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.
….
Do I dare to eat a peach?
(From
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
Preludes conveys a sense of despair and pessimism that is quite appropriate for these pages. It makes your bones feel chilly to imagine those gusty late Fall early evening London showers pounding on the chimney-pots and blowing leaves about:
THE
WINTER evening settles down
With
smell of steaks in passageways.
Six
o’clock.
The
burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And
now a gusty shower wraps
The
grimy scraps
Of
withered leaves about your feet
And
newspapers from vacant lots;
The
showers beat
On
broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And
at the corner of the street
A
lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And
then the lighting of the lamps.
The
morning comes to consciousness
Of
faint stale smells of beer
From
the sawdust-trampled street
With
all its muddy feet that press
To
early coffee-stands.
With
the other masquerades
That
time resumes,
One
thinks of all the hands
That
are raising dingy shades
In
a thousand furnished rooms.
You
tossed a blanket from the bed,
You
lay upon your back, and waited;
You
dozed, and watched the night revealing
The
thousand sordid images
Of
which your soul was constituted;
They
flickered against the ceiling.
And
when all the world came back
And
the light crept up between the shutters
And
you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You
had such a vision of the street
As
the street hardly understands;
Sitting
along the bed’s edge, where
You
curled the papers from your hair,
Or
clasped the yellow soles of feet
In
the palms of both soiled hands.
His
soul stretched tight across the skies
That
fade behind a city block,
Or
trampled by insistent feet
At
four and five and six o’clock;
And
short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And
evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured
of certain certainties,
The
conscience of a blackened street
Impatient
to assume the world.
I
am moved by fancies that are curled
Around
these images, and cling:
The
notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely
suffering thing.
Wipe
your hand across your mouth,
And laugh;
The
worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering
fuel in vacant lots.
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