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 […]
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 […]
The Year of the Dragon: An Homage to Southern Gothic and Flannery O’Connor
It was during the 2011 release of their fourth full-length studio album, The Reckoning, when I discovered the music of NEEDTOBREATHE. They had just finished a two-year tour promoting their 2009 album, The Outsiders, and were coming into their own as an Americana-style rock ‘n’ roll band. At the expense of being weirdly personal, I […]
Words Make Us What We Are in the World
Ultimately through our own use of words, we come to be what we are in the world, for good or bad… Through the concert of heart and mind tuned by true words, we may move beyond our individual, separate aspirations and become aware that we hold humanity in common; so then we have a common—that […]
Skills Pay the Bills
It is not uncommon to hear someone condemn liberal education as being a financial bust, an exercise in futility toward the goal of gainful employment. After all, skills pay the bills—literature and poetry don’t. Cartoonist, Steve Breen, epitomizes this modern cynicism toward the liberal arts and humanities in a 2012 frame for San Diego’s Union […]
Another Primer on Christian Humanism
One of the failures of thought among some of the modern Reformed is the tendency of that some to absolutize the biblical vision for God’s glory. That is, this school of thought asserts the drama of world redemption was played out for God’s glory alone. Understood rightly, this is absolutely true. However, the redemption of […]
The Sound of Sputum
The voices have reached a fever pitch. They’re no longer just faint static or the hum of a radio left playing in the background; they’ve grown from that to indistinguishable murmurings fading in an out of earshot to the constant dull roar which now occupies the foreground of every facet of life. Whispered and shouted—and […]