Poetry Thursday - The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

Today "The Zoo of the New" fell open to the middle of a poem, a page-spread uninterupted by the title of another poem ... and it turned out to be Prufrock, which takes up five pages. I don't remember this poem being so long - the husband of my youth had memorised it easily, and thanks to the way he often broke into snatches of it, I too knew many phrases and the entire first stanza:

Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go through certain half-deserted streets
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insiduous intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh do not ask "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.


Hear T S Eliot read it here - or read it yourself here or here - and note the wonderful phrases that, in my youth, we used to bandy and riposte....

the yellow fog that curled once about the house, and fell asleep

time / to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet

Time for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea

Do I dare
Distrub the universe?

the voices dying with a dying fall

the butt-end of my days and ways

a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the floors of silent seas

Should I, after tea and cake and ices
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

trousers with the bottoms rolled
  Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

........and the mermaids...

Intriguing twist in the title of a poetry collection (via) 

New Yorker cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan