Status Updates From Selected Poems

- whispers of immortality (9/10)
- mr. eliot's sunday morning service (5/10), cool but wtf does any of this really mean
- sweeney among the nightingales (4/10) t.s. eliot ur incel is leaking out
- wasteland 1. burial of the dead (7/10)

- sweeney erect (7/10) --> i feel as though this poem is probably deeply misogynist but in the modern context, it rlly reworks perfectly to display the apathy of men to women's suffering
- a cooking egg (10/10) --> perfection. commodification of historical figures, removal of intimate connections, apallingly the most relevant poem i've read yet. we're fucking cooked!
- the hippopotamus (9/10) --> fuck the church

reading 'the hippopotamus' and listening to music and crass's 'so what' comes on, and specifically the part where they sing "So what if Jesus died on the cross? So what about the fucker, I don't give a toss! So what if the master walked on the water? I don't see him trying to stop the slaughter!" LMFAOOOO THE STARS ALIGN SO NATURALLY

t.s. eliot your pen game too holy, your swag too ceaseless, your drip unfathomable, your mind too fire

- gerontion (9/10), new favourite, hate how searingly relevant these poems are. christ as no longer a gentle lamb but a tiger, a predator. there is no salvation when weak minds are rife. driven mad with desire.
- burbank with a baedeker (7.5/10) had to pull out the google for this one but once i did, fire

- the love song of j.alfred prufrock (10/10, genuinely unbeatable even after reading it 50 times holy fuck)
- portrait of a lady (6.5/10)
- preludes (image of ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots has never left my mind, 8/10)
- rhapsody on a windy night (8/10 the world held in lunar synthesis, a madman unable to resuscitate a dead geranium, losing your grasp on reality and still putting the shoes at the door)

bcs reading t.s.eliot for the first time in english really did fundamentally change me and finding this at a book fair a year ago for $1 did feel like god themself embraced me. re-reading this and listening to rm's RPWP, 2 pieces of art that i feel the most understood in my life by, that mean the most to me oh modernist alienated emotionally paradoxical existential masterpieces you are so near and dear to me!

The pain of living and drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Issues from the hand of time the simple soul
Irreaolite and selfish, misshapen, lame,
Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,
Denying the importunity of the blood,
Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,
Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;
Living first in silence after viaticum.

I am tired with my own life and lives of others after
me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after
me.

Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And god said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper...