Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse...

August 30, 2007 8:35 AM

T.S. Eliot reads the The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, accompanied by Portishead.
posted by monju_bosatsu (55 comments total)

If you're confused about the lack of sound, AdBlock Plus seems to block the Flash player on the linked page.

Listening to T.S. Eliot read is awesome, almost makes me like the poem. He's like a more erudite William S. Burroughs. The Portishead loop underneath it is terribly obnoxious though.
posted by Nelson at 9:00 AM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

In 1967 I first read this poem. It was illuminating at the time, the sense that everything wasn't necessarily rosy, for even the gifted, renowned, respected if not, the beloved. Somehow other literature had not yet reached me on a level of self. This poem, I could say, was the first pass that the universe at large, made at me. I highly recommend this post, and my regret is that I have already breakfasted, used the same coffee-spoon as yesterday, and spoke sharply to my college aged daughter on the way to school. I should have read this first, to soothe this day, and the days to come. His reading, like a liturgy, is in fact a liturgy for all of us that think we can live unscathed in this world, even if we front an impeccable quiet.
posted by Oyéah at 9:01 AM on August 30, 2007 [2 favorites]

I don't mind the music underneath, it keeps the left brain from railing against the finality of his intonations.
posted by Oyéah at 9:03 AM on August 30, 2007

Oh, I was expecting Beth Gibbons and friends arranged in a semi-circle behind Eliot, occasionally waving at the camera. Too bad.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:12 AM on August 30, 2007

Is it just that one sample looped for 8+ minutes - oy!
posted by forallmankind at 9:20 AM on August 30, 2007

Shame it's not Eliot reading The Waste Land. He really don't do the police in different voices, to hilarious effect.
posted by jack_mo at 9:24 AM on August 30, 2007

Here's Eliot reading Prufrock without music. Also, Eliot reading The Wasteland.
posted by Nelson at 9:25 AM on August 30, 2007 [3 favorites]

he goes very fast through "time...", doesn't he?
posted by andrew cooke at 9:48 AM on August 30, 2007

is he bored?

awesome poem, but underwhelming reading. imho. sounds much better in my head.

"afraid" is ok, though.

the music is a bloody nuisance.

and just last night i was wondering what to do with the rest of my life :o(
posted by andrew cooke at 9:53 AM on August 30, 2007

This is really the only poem that I love. I come back to it again constantly, and as I get older, it means more and more to me.
posted by empath at 9:56 AM on August 30, 2007

I feel so ignorant. I've read Prufrock five times in my life, even studied it a day or two in high school. I just sat and listened through Eliot's reading while following the text. And I just don't get it.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I feel like old people do when they listen to rap music. Huh?

When I can make myself slow down and attend, I love the rhythms and imagery of Eliot. But while I like the pretty colours and brushstrokes, I just can't see what it's a painting of.

I have this problem with most poetry. I generally think of myself as culturally literate, and I'm sure if I spent hours with some critical guidance I could really understand it. But that's a lot of work, and it feels wrong to disassemble a poem.

I converted those AU recordings of the Wasteland reading into a clean, single MP3. But the copyright prevents me from sharing it here.
posted by Nelson at 10:00 AM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

I love you monju_bosatsu.
posted by cowbellemoo at 10:02 AM on August 30, 2007

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

it's "ah, fuckit" with more words.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:05 AM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

I like both items separately, not as much combined.
posted by milovoo at 10:13 AM on August 30, 2007

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

In the most literal sense -- "I should have been a lobster."

Metaphorically, he means he'd rather have existed in a world where a meaningful life isn't something expected-- living and dying alone in the depths of the ocean.
posted by empath at 10:25 AM on August 30, 2007

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I've also never quite felt these lines. But I think his wish for an immense silence can be read, similar to what empath said, as suggesting: the words people say in this world ape significance but have no significance -- and silence would be more authentic. In other words, it puts the theme of empty meaningless chatter into a new image. And maybe in wishing to be implements like claws going about their business, he hints that intelligence and discourse mock themselves in their pretence to be about anything or to establish any real connection to the world -- and that just doing and being the way a simple animal does and is would somehow be more pure and honest. This is my best guess about what they mean. Of course I take this from the surrounding poem, not just from these lines, and there's an almost 100% chance I'm wrong about this.
posted by creasy boy at 10:41 AM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

Empath: I always thought he wanted to be a crab, not a lobster. I remember something from high school English class about how it was significant that we wanted to walk sideways. But I can't imagine how this would make a difference, now that I think about it.
posted by creasy boy at 10:43 AM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

God I love this poem. There's so much epic imagery in it, and Eliot's reading really kicks in by ~line 40, even if he starts slowly.

In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

The Portishead sounds promising, but with just a simple loop it's incredibly weak sauce/ If someone had done a proper remix job and integrated some more complex electronica over the poetry...that could be quite good.

Nelson don't feel bad, I only know anything about poetry thanks to a series of improbably skilled English teachers in highschool, without that I'd not know e.e. cummings from Shakespeare.
posted by Skorgu at 10:44 AM on August 30, 2007

Thanatos, fuck yeah. Here's Larkin on the subject:

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff—
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death—
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot at 10:52 AM on August 30, 2007 [3 favorites]

This was my favourite poem when I was 15. I haven't read it in many years. I'm 45 now, and it still hits me, but with far more bite than 30 years ago. Which is as it should be. Eliot is an easy target for ridicule, but at his best, he is sublime. (Didn't mind the musak).

Now could someone get off their ass and put together a nice FPP on Dylan Thomas?
posted by fcummins at 10:52 AM on August 30, 2007

I just can't see what it's a painting of.

That's funny because it's really vivid to me, and not particularly obscure. It's just about a man musing on his own mortality and the regrets he's had about opportunities squandered, procrastination, loves lost, etc..
posted by empath at 11:07 AM on August 30, 2007

You got Portishead in my T.S. Elliot! You got T.S. Elliot in my Portishead! Two grerat tastes that kind of undermine each other...

So when are we getting that new Portishead album anyway? At least Elliot has being dead as an excuse.
posted by Artw at 11:08 AM on August 30, 2007

Ugh, hideous. Interesting in helping sense the meter, but the music is sucking the musicality out of the poem by its plodding and mechanical repetition.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 11:14 AM on August 30, 2007

T.S. Eliot - vs - Portishead

finish him!

ELIOT. WINS.

Also, I keep expecting Eliot to bust out in a wail:
Cuz nobody ^LOVES meeee, it's true! Not. Like. You dooo...
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 11:18 AM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

I have this problem with most poetry. I generally think of myself as culturally literate, and I'm sure if I spent hours with some critical guidance I could really understand it. But that's a lot of work, and it feels wrong to disassemble a poem.

Man, can I sympathize. I couldn't understand poetry at all until a teacher explained how to read poetry.

Think of a poem as a mystery. The clues are in the mystery, but you have to find the clues to uncover the secret. Here's how to find the clues:

1. Read in compete sentences, ignore the line breaks.

2. If the the language or structure sounds awkward, it's because the words are often in unusual or wrong order, or the language is old. Rewrite the sentence with the words in proper order.

3. Read the poem out loud to get the rhyme and meter right, forget about what the poem says, how does it sound? Angry, sad, happy, wistful? Is the beat martial? My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord, or is it a slow and slightly inconsistent from one line to the next "The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,/
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
" It's a bit lazy-sounding, almost dreamlike.

4. Listen for the sound of the words - hard consonants or soft consonants, high or low pitched vowels. Consider:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

It sounds like a needle scraping the sidewalk, like fast scuttling feet. Compare to:

"There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;" All the 't' sounds are like the ticking of a clock.

5. Once you have three and four, you have the tone of the poem, the emotion of it. Now read it again (in complete sentences!).

Those are sort of my general rules as my teacher gave them to me and as I remember them. You'll notice that Prufrock in particular doesn't lend itself well to number 1, because Eliot has loaded this poem with fragments and run on sentences. Which in itself tells you something - it meanders, distracted, seemingly random, like a certain character in the poem.

But the poem itself is explained in the first three lines:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let's go, you and I together through to the end out our lives with our minds already doped asleep. The rest of that stanza describes muttering retreats and streets like tedious arguments. Things non-committal, pointless, and slightly irritating.

The poem is about a man who has idled away his life on non-committal polite society pointless bullshit. His whole life is a muttered retreat. He's not a bad guy, maybe a nice soft guy, but he's of no consequence. When he dies at the end, he drowns - slips under to the murky depths, and not even his body is left as a reminder of his life.

Poems are a bit hard, and it should take a couple of hours to take apart a fairly long poem like this one. The poet agonzies over his words to convey his meaning, you should do the same to understand him.

Personally, every time I read this poem I get more and more depressed., because every time I read it I'm a little older and little changed.
posted by Pastabagel at 12:01 PM on August 30, 2007 [30 favorites]

The Portishead Essential Mix, 1995:

Part 1

Part 2
posted by empath at 12:02 PM on August 30, 2007 [2 favorites]

Now if it used THAT as a backing track, and maybe William Shatner was the reader or something, maybe they'd be on to something.
posted by Artw at 12:26 PM on August 30, 2007

"When he dies at the end, he drowns, slips under to the murky depths, and not even his body is left as a reminder of his life"

I have to disagree with this part of your reading.


Prufrock's been living in what Kenneth Koch called a "poisoned civilization"...and now he's completely useless: unable to act, unable to love, unable to be happy.

The only time Prufrock feels any sort of happiness whatsoever is when he's asleep or daydreaming....imagining he's with mermaids. But then of course human voices (reality) wakes him up and he's "dead" again.
posted by FunGus at 12:34 PM on August 30, 2007

There is a cryptic paragraph in Latin, or Italian that begins this poem. One translation I searched for , said that it was about a love let go, a door never opened. Eliot had a friend that was a surgeon, that he shared rooms with in college. This friend, died in the trenches, during WW1, of pneumonia, out up to his chest in cold water, taking care of the wounded. This poem was supposedly written after that loss. The implication is that this friend may have been a true, and unrequited love.

I don't know why I have never listened to his readings, now I have to hear them all. This poem is my favorite piece of fine art, in any medium.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps contained in time future...
posted by Oyéah at 12:36 PM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

It's not cryptic, it's from the Divine Comedy and TS Eliot himself provides a translation in the footnotes:

"If I thought that that I was replying to someone who would ever return to the world, this flame would cease to flicker. But since no one ever returns from these depths alive, if what I've heard is true, I will answer you without fear of infamy."
posted by empath at 12:49 PM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

The only time Prufrock feels any sort of happiness whatsoever is when he's asleep or daydreaming....imagining he's with mermaids. But then of course human voices (reality) wakes him up and he's "dead" again.
posted by FunGus at 3:34 PM on August 30

I didn't think of that. It makes sens in light of the line at the beginning about the etherised patient. Hmm.
posted by Pastabagel at 1:01 PM on August 30, 2007

My favorite Eliot poem. Possibly my favorite rhyming poem.
posted by juv3nal at 1:05 PM on August 30, 2007

The only time Prufrock feels any sort of happiness whatsoever is when he's asleep or daydreaming....imagining he's with mermaids. But then of course human voices (reality) wakes him up and he's "dead" again.

Yeah I think this is right. The "drowning" is a paradoxical symbol -- he's OK with the mermaids, and then reality intrudes again and he 'really' drowns, in the inanity of his life.
posted by creasy boy at 1:06 PM on August 30, 2007

Thank you for the reading, PastaBagel. I do know theoretically how to do all that and was able to do it when required to by my high school English teachers. It just took forever and drained any enjoyment I'd get out of a poem. And now when I read classic poetry, I mostly just skip over it.

I'm the same way about opera. I think I just enjoy some types of art (movies, novels) more than other. It makes me sad though that it's so hard for me to enjoy the best of poetry.
posted by Nelson at 1:34 PM on August 30, 2007

So, I coach speech forensics.

A couple years ago, one of my exceptional students decided she loved this poem and wanted to compete with it. She, I and the other speech coach completely immersed ourselves in the poem and T.S. Eliot in an effort to fully understand the piece so she could interpret it more effectively.

We listened to the recording of Mr. Eliot reading it and felt that his monotone was a clue to the poem - it spoke to how Prufrock felt nothing. However, we made some different choices in our attempts at making the poem work as a spoken piece.

Anyhow, spending all this time with the poem was actually thrilling in a pedantic sort of way - and that it was initiated by a student and not by me was positively inspiring. I never would have looked so closely at "Prufrock" if not for her.

In competition? The judges either loved her or hated her. She would split the first and last place votes every single round. The first place ranking judges tended to write comments like "brilliant interpretation of a challenging piece" while the last place ranking judges tended to write comments like "this piece is too hard for a high school student - you should try something easier."

She was pretty consistently beat by kids doing sections from "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

None the less, and I am showing my overly academic stripes when I write this, I think she was the winner in the long run. She fully understands and appreciates one of the great poems of the 20th centuries and got her old teacher to love that poem, too.
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:49 PM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm intrigued. What were your different choices?
posted by empath at 1:55 PM on August 30, 2007

"this piece is too hard for a high school student - you should try something easier."

They should be drawn, quartered, shot, pilloried, tarred, feathered, mocked and fired. What losers.

(Ambrosia had lots of experiences like that in high school.)
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 1:57 PM on August 30, 2007 [2 favorites]

One of my favourite memories from high school was the time our (openly alcoholic, about to retire) teacher spent the whole class dissecting this poem line by line. "Do I dare to eat a peach" in particular stuck with me - it refers of course to the dentures which come with age.

I can't hear the recording at work, but anyways, a great poem.
posted by stinkycheese at 2:35 PM on August 30, 2007

The dentures coming out when you bit into a peach I mean.
posted by stinkycheese at 2:35 PM on August 30, 2007

Picking specific meanings and claiming to have "solved the mystery" ruins poetry for me. Not to pick on you, stinkycheese, since you didn't say you thought the peach line meant only that, but I think the line "feels" like a reference to the overwhelming stimulus of eating that passionate, sexy fruit, as the kind of prurient, immodest, dangerous, heat-attack inducing drupe one must avoid in numb, cautious old age. Much more than the practical dentures explanation.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 2:47 PM on August 30, 2007

empath:
I'm intrigued. What were your different choices?

She felt Eliot's monotone didn't capture that sense of yearning for something more that Prufrock experiences when he dreams. She tried to capture that sense of quiet desperation in her delivery. In my opinion, it made the ending almost heartbreaking.

Heh. Sympathy for a Prufrock.
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:48 PM on August 30, 2007

I agree with what you're saying, and I think the beauty of poetry is very often in its ability to convey more than one strict meaning - but the "do I dare" kind of tips the meaning towards that interpretation for me.

Or maybe I just like the image of an old man pulling his dentures out on a peach. And either way of course a peach is ripe with youthful sexual connotations, yes.
posted by stinkycheese at 2:51 PM on August 30, 2007

I've never heard the Eliot reading. The Portishead loop was nice for the first stanza or so and then I just wanted it to change.

Then thinking about it some more figured it was pretty good accompaniment for a poem about completely listless emptiness, a sleepwalker through life, a limp-wristed lament of things that can't be changed.

Great post.
posted by C.Batt at 2:58 PM on August 30, 2007

I like the poem a good deal, but Eliot's reading voice never does much for me. The monotone isn't necessarily him trying to evoke the feeling in the poem (I reckon) so much as just the way he reads. The recordings of The Waste Land and Four Quartets are similar.

I think it's just a reflection of the style of reading at the time, since a lot of contemporaneous recordings by other poets have the same rather stentorian tone. I can't get enough of Wallace Stevens on the page, but he kills it when he reads it aloud. About the only poet whose voice I like from that generation is Frost, who sounds a lot like William Burroughs.
posted by whir at 4:34 PM on August 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

Oh, and fcummins, there have been two posts on Dylan Thomas in the past (not that there shouldn't be more).
posted by whir at 4:37 PM on August 30, 2007

Nelson, my advice would be don't try too hard to figure out every line and concentrate on the flow and beauty of the language and the imagery. I keep going back to difficult poems and find that my enjoyment and understanding increases over time.

There are millions of songs I love where the lyrics don't completely register with me - yet I still love the songs and the sound of the words strung together. Poetry, like music, is very sensual.

That being said, one of the things I miss most about college is discussing poetry or literature - so this thread is very nice - I just don't get much of that in the sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells that I frequent.
posted by madamjujujive at 4:59 PM on August 30, 2007

What I received from his work, was the act of being in time. Many of his phrases are with me to describe time I spend alone, or are remarkable to me, in their intuitive beauty. He was a singularity, at the still point of his turning world, and by describing such a concept, I realized I could have my own point of reference. How many times I have watched the wind wrinkle and slide across some body of water, or looked at roses, and laughed at the concept of those roses had the look of roses that are looked at.

I later thought the mermaids were the young and interesting people of the society of his day, and he had grown older and was married to a woman who became ill and not in society.

When he talks of silent seas, and lingering in the chambers of the sea, I hear that silence, and imagine him in his bath, underwater, escaping the reality of his household, or just escaping even the sound of his children, in moments under the summer sea.

Sorry, just the musings of a TS Eliot geek.
posted by Oyéah at 5:21 PM on August 30, 2007

Regarding his monotone delivery, consider that the preferred style of Eliot's era was one of oratory. Only late in his life did radio transform spoken oratory into vocal performance. (Compare recordings of Frost from a similar timeframe - also quite monotone.) I'm sure there are exceptions (I'd love to find some) but much of the recorded poetry of the era was delivered this way. Narration and storytelling were for childrens' entertainment. Heck, even Tolkein has long stretches of this style in his recordings I've heard of The Hobbit.

Am I the only one to whom this poem speaks so perfectly of the frustration of wanting everying but being willing to risk nothing to get it that it feels like I'm wandering through my own head? The fear of being 'pinned, wriggling on a wall' is a perfect impression of what it means to make my motivations clear and become, ultimately, mortal with want.

It's a love song! (Never throw away the title of a poem - even his name conflates "proof", "frock", "rock", and the comfort-classness of a J. Alfred).

The lines from the Divine Comedy are spoken to Dante by a soul who mistakes him for a spirit who cannot return to earth. Eliot pioneered a kind of subscript-poetry -- the endnotes added to The Wasteland (apocryphally the filler required to flesh it out for publication), give a sly rebuke to the modern pathos of cite as proof of even the most inane details ("Co co rico"). Based on that, I'd say the epigraph belongs in the poem (rather than, as is somewhat traditional, as its inspiration).

Given that, the speaker (I'll assume it's Prufrock) intones his love song to someone he treats as his Dante (the reader). He is fully aware of that irony as he talks hiimself out of taking a leap, broaching a subject, as he draws his confessor through the moments of decision he demured. One reason this speaks to me is that this is not one particular decision. Not one "I love you" or "We're through" but a lifetime of such opportunities never seized.

Anticipating our judgement he admits and accepts all the failings, confiding the imperfections which convince him his risk is not worth taking. It's a lifetime in fear of hope inviting the heartbreak of "not what I meant/at all."

He "should have been a pair of scutting claws" concludes a section of self-awareness. He sees the men in shirt-sleeves - I read that as lonely men like him, the fear of which is a motivation he doesn't want to admit. The scuttling claws belong to the crab as it moves sideways, never forward (into the unknown) as he is unwilling to do.

"I do not think that they will sing to me." always breaks my heart. He knows, understands himself too well, his situation too perfectly. It's that understanding which immobilizes him, and even his perfect seascape won't seduce him in his own daydream.

I do wonder who "We" is when "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea". Not him and his mermaids, the grammar doesn't work out. He and the object of his affection never made it this far. The only person left is the reader, and that makes me pretty self-conscious.

(/Totally TSELiotist. I lurve the uptight bastard.)
posted by abulafa at 6:32 PM on August 30, 2007

This is my favorite poem on earth. I'd never heard Eliot read it, so that was an extra treat. Great link!
posted by SisterHavana at 7:19 PM on August 30, 2007

empath,

thank you for the P'head mixes. reminds me of seeing them at the 9:30. excellent show. love for Beth Gibbons kindled that night.
posted by the sobsister at 6:15 AM on August 31, 2007

I adore The Waste Land (and this post and comments) and I'm not terribly fond of Ezra Pound.

Nevertheless Pound's editing of The Waste Land is one of the most magical makeovers in the history of Eng. Lit. It removed the bloat from the text, cunningly intensified its sly obscurity and brought out its brilliance.

If memory serves, Pound very, very carefully chucked away almost half of the original manuscript!

(I remember laughing at Pound's occasional irritation with his friend Eliot. Pound would slave over tons of tiny - but crucial - edits and wait for Eliot to exclaim "by George, you've got it!!" - or similar. In fact, Eliot would simply say "yeah, fine. Great. Looks better. Whatever. Thanks" and Pound would simmer. Still, it's one of THE great double acts - after Max Perkins and Fitzgerald).

Val Eliot authorized an edition showing Pound's full edits. One of the few liberties she allowed re her late husband's precious estate.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 7:15 AM on August 31, 2007

And because I've not mentioned Iain Banks for 30 seconds...

Iain M. Banks and The Wasteland
posted by Artw at 8:21 AM on August 31, 2007

Thanks abulafa, that essay on the Waste Land's notes is outstanding.
posted by whir at 10:34 AM on August 31, 2007

One of my all-time favorite poems. Some years ago, I was given a copy of Poetry Speaks and can recommend it for people who enjoy hearing the author of a poem do the reading.

abulafa: "I do not think that they will sing to me." always breaks my heart. He knows, understands himself too well, his situation too perfectly. It's that understanding which immobilizes him, and even his perfect seascape won't seduce him in his own daydream.

That's the line that always gets to me as well, and for the same reasons...nice post, thanks.
posted by faineant at 8:18 PM on August 31, 2007

If memory serves, Pound very, very carefully chucked away almost half of the original manuscript!

Looking at the drafts, it feels like even more than that - Pound's 'maieutic skill' (as Valerie Eliot put it, beautifully) includes crossing out entire pages with a single stroke! Some of the comments are wonderfully blunt, too: Pound calls lines 'wobbly' or 'too tum-pum' or 'not interesting' or just plain old 'OK'.

Val Eliot authorized an edition showing Pound's full edits.

She actually prepared and edited The Waste Land - A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including The Annotations of Ezra Pound from the lost manuscripts that turned up in John Quinn's papers herself, adding lots of notes and cross-references, and writing a really good introduction.

The facsimile and transcript edition is a truly fascinating thing, anyway, and totally essential for anyone with more than a passing interest in Eliot, though it does kind of fuck with your subsequent readings of the poem as published. (I coveted a copy for years, after being mislead by the show-off teacher at school who loaned me his copy into thinking it was spectacularly rare and valuable, and stupidly never bothered to check the price for ages. Turns out a first edition in tip top condition goes for all of thirty quid.)
posted by jack_mo at 11:17 AM on September 1, 2007