What I'm Reading Today

I finished that book on technical analysis of stocks, thank god. Useful, sure, but oh so dreary. I discovered poetry sometime in my late teens after we moved to Vancouver Island and a slightly better municipal library. The poets I read then included T. S. Eliot because everyone said he was wonderful, Ezra Pound, because Eliot said he was wonderful (he dedicated The Waste Land to him) and Shakespeare because we read him in school. My first year English professor introduced me to Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke. I discovered Rainer Maria Rilke on my own.

Alas, moving to Mexico meant that most of my library had to stay behind so I haven't actually owned any Eliot for a long time now. But I just got his Collected Poems and re-reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was a deeply moving and eerie experience. I first read it fifty years ago but I haven't read it in at least twenty-five years. The lines still echo in my memory.

Let us go then, you and I,

 When the evening is spread out against the sky

 Like a patient etherised upon a table

And:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo

I am so glad I read this when I was young as it resonates so much more now when I read it many years later. It reminds me of the very odd sensation in the two-part finale to season three of Battlestar Galactica when some members of the crew begin hearing (hallucinating) strange musical fragments that elude identification. Finally, at the very end a dead crewmember is resurrected and we hear the song in its entirety: it is All Along the Watchtower written by Bob Dylan with a very famous cover by Jimi Hendrix. The moment when you realize what song it is, and if you are old enough to have heard it when it was released, is very like the sensation of re-encountering a very great poem like Prufrock.

And I have The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and Four Quartets to look forward to!

Here is the song in the context of the series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVd9EMdVj9Y

And here is the Bear McCreary arrangement on its own:

Here is the Jimi Hendrix cover:

 And finally the Bob Dylan original: