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To: Conservatrix

Eliot used rhyme to knock the reader on the head to make a point. But something like 'The Wasteland' works just fine in its own unrhymed baggy way. Alexander Pope it isn't.


21 posted on 05/19/2005 1:57:57 PM PDT by Borges
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To: Borges

you mean like this one?

Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service
 
 
         Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.

The Jew of Malta.
 
 
POLYPHILOPROGENITIVE
The sapient sutlers of the Lord
Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.
 
In the beginning was the Word.         5
Superfetation of ,
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.
 
A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground         10
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
 
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set         15
The Father and the Paraclete.
    .    .    .    .    .
The sable presbyters approach
The avenue of penitence;
The young are red and pustular
Clutching piaculative pence.         20
 
Under the penitential gates
Sustained by staring Seraphim
Where the souls of the devout
Burn invisible and dim.
 
Along the garden-wall the bees         25
With hairy bellies pass between
The staminate and pistilate,
Blest office of the epicene.
 
Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
Stirring the water in his bath.         30
The masters of the subtle schools
Are controversial, polymath.


24 posted on 05/19/2005 5:26:12 PM PDT by Conservatrix ("He who stands for nothing will fall for anything.")
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