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Maclin Horton's avatar

I had not read this poem for many years and had forgotten how much I like it, though "infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing" has stayed with me. Thanks for bringing the whole poem to my attention again.

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Melanie Bettinelli's avatar

I think the final line of the first section "and then the lighting of the lamps" is a momentary spot of beauty in the grimness. At least it's always felt like that to me: a magic moment when suddenly the ugly urban landscape takes on a softer glow. It feels like it chimes with the "infinitely gentle, / Infinitely suffering thing."

And maybe it's just my romantic heart and my tenderness for Eliot, but I've always felt like the light creeping in between the shutters and the sparrows in the gutters are glimpses of something that could be lovely could be hopeful, that the poet in taking his inventory of the urban landscape notes. To me the poem has a rhythm that goes back and forth between the ugly and sordid and the little spots of something fairer that give the mind little islands of rest. Like Wordsworth's spots of time have diminished and grown dim, become mere freckles or ghosts flickering in the periphery of your vision, but aren't completely absent.

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Michelle Ma's avatar

I love your taste in poetry, this is a landscape, a scene scape. Not very psychology driven.

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Frank Dent's avatar

The similarity of images in this poem and “Prufrock” suggests a linkage.

“burnt-out ends of smoky days” (“butt-ends of my days and ways”)

“sawdust-trampled street” (“sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells”)

“all the hands” (“all the works and days of hands”)

“fingers stuffing pipes” (“smoke that rises from the pipes”)

Possibly by giving up tobacco and insisting on sanitation we’ve lost access to a lot of the sensory world.

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Michelle Ma's avatar

I like your comparison.

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Sally Thomas's avatar

I think it's very much the same world as Prufrock, with a similar but less self-disclosing speaker.

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Sally Thomas's avatar

Losing coal smoke as a ubiquitous presence in the air is also a huge sensory shift, now that you prompt me to think of it.

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Frank Dent's avatar

Yeah, it’s a world we can almost smell: steaks, stale beer, sawdust, coal smoke, cigarette butts, pipe tobacco.

It’s also not too far from the world of noir fiction (minus the bootleg booze), where a degraded urban environment is often associated with corruption. Hammett in Red Harvest (1927):

“[T]he smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters’ stacks.”

There’s Prufrock’s “yellow smoke.”

I wonder if it can be said that modern poetry tends more to the “photographic” (or even cinematic) in its description and metaphor, whereas older poems often attempted to evoke the sound and smell of a world, the sensations of physical movement and touch.

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Sally Thomas's avatar

These are all fascinating observations --- and now I want to go down a rabbit hole looking for sensory imagery in contemporary poems, to see whether in fact you're right that the trend is toward the visual. In some ways we'd have Imagism to thank for that, at least as much as the clinical regulation of so much of our physical environment, at least indoors (though also, as you note, sanitation/air-quality regulations in our more public and outdoor environments), that means our olfactory experience is maybe less vivid or varied that it would have been a hundred years ago.

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XYZ's avatar

Eliot is said to have adapted Jules Laforgue to English. There is probably something to that: satire that goes beyond satire to spiritual investigation. It also seems like an application of verse to Zola-style naturalism. Yes, the ugly, the marginal, the wasted, are real. Let's see how verse can bring out the deeper meaning of this reality.

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Sally Thomas's avatar

This is a really illuminating comment --- thanks especially for the idea of satire reaching beyond itself to spiritual investigation.

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