luka

Well-known member
i'm reading the cantos really slowly and just noticed

Palace in smoky light,
Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones,


and

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

It's good you're reading the cantos. Everyone must. Version will start soon.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's not the same but when I get really fucked out my head with people round the flat there comes a point where I realise they've all gone and I can't work out how long I've been by myself,as if I were with other people. having conversations or whatever. Feeling as if I was in company
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I suppose I was reading it "through" what other critics had said about it. Whereas Paradise Lost I didn't have a clue what he was on about a lot of the time but I was balls deep in the poetry itself rather than the footnotes.
 

luka

Well-known member
You should have done a massive load of acids and read it all in one go, posting your wonderful insights here as they occurred.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
 

version

Well-known member
FAEff8h-XEAE-Vp-W.jpg
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Last night I got stoned and started reading TWL for something to read on the loo and ended up reading the whole thing (most of it not on the loo, if that's relevant). There are bits I find a bit boring and skim but there's a fair chunk of it that I find compelling, compulsive and charged with some sort of juju power that slightly freaks me out. Like I started feeling my depression and anxiety from earlier in the year start hammering at the trapdoor of the cellar I've managed to trap them in.

Been reading quite a lot of Eliot lately, both the early jaundiced urban stuff ("Preludes") and the post conversion stuff ("Ash Wednesday", "Song of Simeon").

He's NOT BAD.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
“This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
 
Top