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March 30, 2007
"Winter Kept Us Warm": Poetry Friday
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
-The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot (Here’s the rest of it. I warn you: it is loooooong, although not as long as The Waste Land and not as dull as Wordsworth's The Prelude.)
T.S. Eliot didn’t know he was picking the future date of National Poetry Month back when he wrote The Waste Land, and I’m sure he didn’t know how amusing I’d find quoting, “I grow old… I grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” when he wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Life, as they say, is full of surprises. Anyway, National Poetry Month starts Sunday, so I’m giving our man Eliot a shoutout. A lot of people find him indecipherable and/or boring , but I find that when I ignore his allusions, I enjoy all those ridiculous rhymes. He’s writing something that professors have assured me is highly intellectual in a rhyme scheme and meter that sounds like nothing quite so much as The Cat in the Hat. Sorry, but I gotta love it.
Posted by adrienne at March 30, 2007 11:35 AM
Comments
Ah, good ol' Alfred.
Once used it for a reader's theatre presentation, it's practically a one act play. It was fun to represent the fog. I like pretending to be a kitty.
Adrienne, maybe you should do a program with the kids doing reader's theatre. You can convert one of your favorite books into a script. The kids would totally dig it and there's no pressure to remember your lines, you just have to read.
Lucas seems like he'd excel at this sort of thing. He could even direct.
Posted by: Sally at March 30, 2007 01:02 PM
Thanks for this. I'm truly chuckling -- it's such a grounded assessment of Eliot that you've made it VERY appealing indeed. (But maybe that's just 'cause I'm getting old, old, all my trousers now are rolled....)
Posted by: Liz Garton Scanlon at March 30, 2007 02:19 PM
:)
And, Sally, you are so right that Lucas would enjoy bossing everyone around. I should really get video of him doing one of his dramatic picture book readings. He really gets into them.
Posted by: adrienne at March 30, 2007 05:57 PM
I have always loved this poem, but I have never-not-ever realized how Seussian it is. It totally could've been written by the Green Eggs and Ham dude, before his conversion to the wonders of green food.
Posted by: eisha at March 31, 2007 09:49 AM
You're so right! The GE&H guy was totally suffering from ennui before Sam-I-Am got to him. He *could* be Prufrock.
Now I'm having a dim recollection of a spoof my friend Craig wrote of Prufrock years ago. Now I'm going to have to try to find it....
Posted by: adrienne at March 31, 2007 09:57 AM