PREPARING FOR LIFE [REALLY?]

WHY NO ONE LIKES TO DWELL

ON "DEAD GERANIUMS": 

i.e.,  HIS POETRY KIND OF SPEAKS FOR ITSELF...

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

BY T. S. ELIOT

Twelve o'clock. 

Along the reaches of the street 

Held in a lunar synthesis, 

Whispering lunar incantations 

Dissolve the floors of memory 

And all its clear relations, 

Its divisions and precisions, 

Every street lamp that I pass 

Beats like a fatalistic drum, 

And through the spaces of the dark 

Midnight shakes the memory 

As a madman shakes a dead geranium. 

Half-past one, 

The street lamp sputtered, 

The street lamp muttered, 

The street lamp said, "Regard that woman 

Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door 

Which opens on her like a grin. 

You see the border of her dress 

Is torn and stained with sand, 

And you see the corner of her eye 

Twists like a crooked pin." 

The memory throws up high and dry 

A crowd of twisted things; 

A twisted branch upon the beach 

Eaten smooth, and polished 

As if the world gave up 

The secret of its skeleton, 

Stiff and white. 

A broken spring in a factory yard,

Rust that clings to the form that the

strength has left ;

Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two, 

The street lamp said, 

"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, 

Slips out its tongue 

And devours a morsel of rancid butter." 

So the hand of a child, automatic, 

Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay. 

I could see nothing behind that child's eye. 

I have seen eyes in the street 

Trying to peer through lighted shutters, 

And a crab one afternoon in a pool, 

An old crab with barnacles on his back, 

Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. 

Half-past three, 

The lamp sputtered, 

The lamp muttered in the dark. 

The lamp hummed: 

"Regard the moon, 

La lune ne garde aucune rancune, 

She winks a feeble eye, 

She smiles into corners. 

She smoothes the hair of the grass. 

The moon has lost her memory. 

A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, 

Her hand twists a paper rose, 

That smells of dust and old Cologne, 

She is alone ...

With all the old nocturnal smells 

That cross and cross across her brain." 

The reminiscence comes 

Of sunless, dry geraniums 

And dust in crevices, 

Smells of chestnuts in the streets, 

And female smells in shuttered rooms, 

And cigarettes in corridors 

And cocktail smells in bars." 

The lamp said, 

"Four o'clock, 

Here is the number on the door. 

Memory! 

You have the key, 

The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair, 

Mount. 

The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, 

Put your shoes at the door, sleep:

Prepare for life." 

The [very] last twist of the knife. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-L6rEm0rnY

Happy Birthday to 2 radiologists I worked with in the past: Dr. C.S. Moss  and Dr. B. Fedeson