T.S., Eliot

T.S., ELIOT

 

The spaniel howls on the night moor,

and the partridge shrieks in the wainscoting,

and it is time to shake the field mice out of the arras,

and to upbraid the bishop with a silent motto.

 

That was a way of putting it, not very satisfactory,

a periphrastic exercise in a worn-out poetical idiom,

and I’m not veddy sure what a wainscoting is,

but it sounds teddibly Bditish

if you pronounce it as I do,

in what I suppose to be the older and more English fashion,

with preternatural stress upon the antepenult

so that the last line appears to have two accents;

 

in my arsis is my thesis.

 

My freshman English section man was a nice Jewish boy,

blistered in Brooklyn, patched and peeled in Cambridge,

uncomfortably aware that Eliot was anti-Semitic,

like 500 other field mice in Fifties Cambridge,

Trying to write Gerontion half a century later.

 

Salivary amylase

works on the substrate of the Lord.

Hoc est enim corpus meum,

in the beginning was the Word.

 

Hoc est calix sanguinis mei,

alcohol dehydrogenase,

acetyl coenzyme A,

are my ways then not your ways?

 

The partridge howls on the night moor,

and the spaniel shrieks in the wainscoting,

and it is time to shake the bishop out of the arras,

and to upbraid the field mice with a silent motto.

 

Data. More data. More data.

Chianti. Chianti. Chianti.