Monday Poem: T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot | "Preludes"

I

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 chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

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 times resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

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.

IV

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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Comments (4)

One of my favorites. Will you be in NYC for PhotoPlus this week?

John-

Please for the love of god stop posting these poems. It is bad enough that Soth does it but please no more.

Ah, but didn't you know that DwaDM is poetry central?! Next I'm going to start holding court for a bunch of fawning fans - but don't we all want to be like Soth? (I'm imagining a video montage in the style of the early 90's "Be Like Mike" ad campaigns).

A quick check of the archive shows that the last time that I posted a Monday poem was more than 5 weeks ago. I like poetry; deal with it. This blog is for me after all.

i think a good compromise might be reader-submitted photo poems.

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