![]() ![]() Eliot’s sense of humor, whether savage, lugubrious, or droll, never lay far below the surface, and, as we honor the centenary of his most celebrated work, it’s worth bearing in mind his responses to a questionnaire that was sent out to a batch of poets, in July, 1922. Cumberbatch, keyed up by the piano and the other instruments arrayed behind him, took the lines at quite a tilt, slipping between accents like a quick-change artist donning pants and hats, and thus reminded us how funny this bitter poem can be. The occasion was a rare one, because the recitation was entwined with music: a score composed in the nineteen-seventies by the novelist Anthony Burgess, no less, to accompany the poem. ![]() Eliot’s “ The Waste Land,” which will shortly celebrate its hundredth birthday. “White bodies naked on the low damp ground / And bones cast in a little low dry garret.” And this: “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit.” And again: “In this decayed hole among the mountains / In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves.” What had we done, in the sun-warmed paradise of Charleston, to deserve all these mountains, bones, and teeth? So much death, on a day that promised such life!Ĭumberbatch was, needless to say, reading T. ![]() April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |