'April Is the Cruelest Month'

“Measured out my life with coffee spoons”
“Lonely men in shirt sleeves”
“Bitten off with a smile”
“Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.”
“Do I dare/ to eat a peach?” 

First time I heard this was as spoken by Jack Dalton, Diane's ex from the s4 Cheers episode:

Not to be confused with Jack Dalton from Macgyver. Or Jack Colton from Romancing the Stone, or Jack Dawson from Titanic.  Or anything by the Allman Brothers.

“Lingered in the chambers of the sea.”
- Selections from “Love Song of J Prufrock”

“Smoke and fog of a December afternoon.”
“And so the conversation slips”
“Now that lilacs are in bloom/ she has a bowl of lilacs in her room”
“Tobacco trance”
“A cowardly amends”
- Portrait of a Lady

“Burnt-out ends of smoky days.”
“The conscience of a blackened street / impatient to assume the world.”
- Preludes

“Midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium.” 
- Rhapsody on a Windy Night

“Her laughter was submarine and profound.”
“Worried bodies of drowned men.”
- La Figla che Pairge

“A dull head among windy spaces.”
“Neither fear nor courage.”
“Whirled beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear.”
-   Geronation

“A heap of broken images.”
“April is the cruelest month.”
“Lilacs out of the dead land.”
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” 

Close, Sandman, very close.

“Drowned the sense in odors.”
“Withered stumps of time.”
“I think we are in rats alley / where the dead men lost their bones.”
“Thunder of spring over distant mountains.”
“Dry stale thunder without rain.”
“Doors of mudcracked houses.”
“Ringed by the flat horizon.”
“Bats with baby faces in the violet light.”
- The Waste Land

“Eyes I dare not meet in dreams.”
“Sunlight on a broken column.”
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.”
- The Hollow Men

“The indigestible portions which the leopards reject.”
“For only the wind will listen.”
“The garden where all loves end.”
“The years that walk between.”
“Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew/ and this our exile.”
“Eighty years and no tomorrow.”
- A Song for Simeon

“Content with playing cards and kings and queens”
“The pain of living and the drug of dreams”
“Spectre in its own gloom.”
- Animula

“Woodthrush calling through the fog.”
- Marina

(Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Queen of the Night 1815)

Four Quartets

“Neither ascent nor decline.”
“Distracted from distraction by distraction.”
- Burnt Norton

“Where the field mouse trots”
“In a warm haze the sultry light is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.”
“Dawn points, and another day prepares for heat and silence.”
“Hollyhocks that are too high.”
“The intolerable wrestle with words and meaning.”
“Only the knowledge of dead secrets / useless in the darkness into which they peered / or from which they turned their eyes.”
“And cold the scene and lost the motive.”
“Old men ought to be explorers.”
- East Corker

“The sea is all about us.”
“Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception.”
“People change, and smile, but the agony abides.”
“Like the river with its cargo of dead.”
- The Dry Salvages

“Ash on an old man’s sleeve/ is all the ash the burnt roses leave.”
“Dust in the air suspended/ marks the place where a story ended.”
“Of sanctuary and choir, this is the death of water and fire.”
“Compliant to the common wind.”
- Little Giddon

~

About this Post: I recently downloaded the Complete Poems of TS Eliot and thought I'd jot down a few lines and phrases that struck me. I'm earmarking some of these as potential titles for stories not-yet-written. Hemingway, when stuck for a title, plucked his from the Book of Ecclesiastes. Same sort of rationale here. I'd like to write a story for each of the fragments above. 

I occasionally do Scenic Route/ mash-up posts. Not to everyone's taste, of course, but I enjoy the process. I just threw in some pictures I had lying about. I like the effect such incongruities have on my brainwaves.   

Incidentally, I had to read 'Four Quartets' for a 'Zen and the Literary Experience' class I took at Rhode Island College. Loved it at the time but struggled to connect with it this time out.

Still, a worthwhile reading experience. I downloaded a Complete Poems of WB Yeats to do the same with that one, but - to my surprise - I didn't connect with much of anything in there. After three hundred pages (!) I realized I wasn't really collecting any meaningful fragments. Yeats is, apparently, over my head.

Nothing beats "The Second Coming," though, which remains the most metal thing ever written. My middle child recently had to read a poem to her kindergarten class over their remote set-up. I lobbied unsuccessfully for "The Second Coming." ('What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" Indeed.) She chose one about the seven continents instead. So it goes.

Originally, I thought I'd change the original line to 'April was the cruelest month,' past tense, to reflect the cruelty just ended. But it felt like tempting fate. Don't want to ever give the gods of cruelty and plague-whimsy any excuse to Hold-My-Beer the situation.