Refreshing Sunday

Derek, although Canadian

Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure. But he read till he had to rush -- .. 

One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land, it is called; & Mary Hutch[inson], who has heard it more quietly, interprets it to be Tom's autobiography - a melancholy one.

Last Sunday - not so long ago - I dined with Eliot at the beach, as I had on Friday and Saturday. When alone, I very commonly will dine with a book. I have never been less alone at dinner in my life; and for this reason, I have no regret at deferring the occasion for so long. But this is not, strictly speaking, true, because of an element he translated into his poem, from his Harvard doctoral thesis, crediting the insularity of human experience. As vividly as Eliot was present, the experience was viscerally solitary. 

I cite this element as vital, not merely to the poem's point of view, but to mine toward the pretensions of the broadcasts of last Sunday, which have been doing with that date for 10 years what they've been doing with Jesus of Nazareth for the last 2100 - forging a hammer of compulsory definition of experience. No more than 2 horrors are involved in Sunday's unhappy abuse of the mind: that our young have been taught that those facts were unprecedented, and that they licensed the debauch of their birthright: that they should cherish ignorance and foulest self-interest, that fear might reign. The hostess of the dinner recalled above, meanwhile, was well advised by their mutual friend on an affect of Eliot's poem; but as her diary entry unfolded, her Hogarth Press would share in the transatlantic publishing crescendo which launched it with the 'force and symmetry' it happens still to convey. Its date is 1922; that makes it newer than last Sunday. 

.. The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

These fragments I have 

shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you ..

Shantih  shantih  shantih

Virginia Woolf

The Diary of Virginia Woolf

Harcourt Brace, 1978©

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land

    V What the Thunder Said

i       ll 418 - 422

ii      ll 366 - 376

iii     ll 430 - end [fragment]

op. cit.