Current mood:

happy

More on Poetry
Okay, first: Go White Sox!

Second: Despite Geni's encouragement that I copy her seriously awesome series on the ABCs of Art History and do one on Poetry after seeing my entry on WCW, I ultimately decided not to. Couple of reasons--first, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and people's heads might explode from all the learning and culture. Second, I'm lazy. Third, I don't want to committ myself to finding a poet whose name starts with Q. Fourth, I don't have the coding skills needed to format stuff and upload nifty pictures and so forth. I'm a great believer in the idea that if you can't do anything right, you shouldn't bother to do it at all.

It is a great idea, certainly, and I have no objection to anyone stealing it if they want to devote the time to it. I only ask, if you thieve my idea, that you do it properly and not half-assed.

Meanwhile, I was rereading "The Wasteland" yesterday morning (because I know how to live it up on a Sunday, people--reading extremely long and windy poems), and thought about some lesser-known stuff of Eliot's, and so I give you one of his Landscapes poems, his ode to New Hampshire:

Children's voices in the orchard
Between the blossom-and the fruit-time:
Golden head, crimson head,
Between the green tip and the root,
Black wing, brown wing, hover over;
Twenty years and the spring is over;
To-day grieves, to-morrow grieves,
Cover me over, light-in-leaves;
Golden head, black wing,
Cling, swing,
Spring, sing
Swing up into the apple tree.

Typical Eliot, if not one of his more successful pieces; it's a bit earlier than his better known "Wasteland" or even the "Sweeney" poems, but you can see the Eliot hallmarks even in something this basic: the repetition of words to draw emphasis on tone, the sing-songy rhymes to establish a physical rhythm**--those ending bits lend the motion to the idea of a child's swing in an orchard because the words echo nonsensical children's rhymes coupled with the rhythm of a simple swing swaying up and down.

And yet there's a sense of menace lying underneath this--the insistance that "twenty years and the spring is over" and the repetition of the word "grieves", followed by a burial image in "cover me over." Innocence is soon lost.

**Most of Eliot's stuff is entirely too long to post here, but there are oodles of good websites with complete poems. But the best short example I can think of that captures the idea of motion by marrying word tone with rhythm is a tiny bit from "The Wasteland": "O O O O That Shakespearian Rag---/It's so elegant/so intelligent". You can here the Charlestony 20's music running through that. And yet he throws you backwards in time with the Rag (i.e. ragtime music) being "Skakespearian". Genius.

And that's your brief poetry lesson for today folks...