Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats The lines “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,” indicates the narrator has moved from prompting his companion to go with him, to guiding his companion to a certain end. There seems to be echoes of Dante’s Virgil who let him through the nine concentric […]
Books & Literature
A Melancholy Meditation: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Let us go then you and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky. Like a patient etherized upon a table; In case you’re new to our merry band, and have only recently subscribed, I’m writing a short series of posts on T. S. Eliot’s, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in […]
An Impotent Messenger from the Underworld: The Epigraph of J. Alfred Prufrock
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. If I believed my reply were to one that was ever to return to the world, this flame, […]
What’s With This Title: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
In a previous post, I introduced T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and promised to try and pry a basement window open and provide some low-level access to the poem’s meaning. In this post, we’ll simply investigate the poem’s title. There are two primary aspects worthy of consideration in this initial […]
Basement Window Access into T. S. Eliot’s Poetry: An Analysis of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an abandoned house in possession of notoriety for being haunted, must be in want of young boys seeking adventure. So, in kind, is the poetry of T. S. Eliot. It continues to attract curious intruders more than a century later. Many literary adventurers are brave enough to scale […]
Don Quixote and His Agreeable Delusions for Chivalry
Like many books that already I should have read, Don Quixote had been neglected for far too long—Tsundoku and everything. I am now reading Cervante’s hilarious novel for the first time and am immediately tickled by the Jared and Jerusha Hess comedic style (Nacho Libre and Napoleon Dynamite definitely come to mind). Lines such as […]
Reader Looke, not on his Picture, but his Booke
In Jeanett DeCelles-Zwerneman’s instructive treatise, A Lively Kind of Learning: Mastering the Seminar Method, she makes an important claim about learning to read a work on its own merits, rather than with the prejudices that frequently arise out of one’s intimate knowledge of the author. She writes, Ray Carver was an alcoholic and Rousseau abandoned […]
We Are Humans; We Are Not Gods
I have been reading through Jorge Louis Borges’ Selected Poems. One of the poems to which I keep returning is one of life’s refrains. The poem is called Límites. It reminds me there is something human about boundaries because boundaries—be they natural or artificial (that is, political)—remind us of our own limits, especially the fact […]
Don’t Read My Blog Every Day!
…if you don’t want to. As a matter of fact, you may have only signed up for my Saturday Substack Newsletter, Rumbling Toward Heaven, and are now wondering why you’re getting something from me in your inbox on a Monday. Well, this is a courtesy email to let you know that I will be publishing […]
C. S. Lewis’s Confession to T. S. Eliot
In the open stanza of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the narrator says, Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap […]