delanceyplace.com 08/25/06 - t.s. eliot

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In today's excerpt - T. S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland', the poem that many consider the most important of the twentieth century. The year is 1922, and the backdrop is the unprecedented horror of the just-ended Great War, which with twenty-three million casualties has profoundly touched virtually everyone in Europe. Eliot is thirty-three and trapped in a failed marriage, a job he wants to leave, and deteriorating health. In the brief excerpt below, the poem's narrator Tiresias describes the evening's activities of a young man:

The time is now propitious as he guesses;
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defense;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias, have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I, who have sat by Thebes below the wall,
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit ...

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

Complete Text of The Wasteland