19 January 2001
Last year: ...I hope you'll bear with me if I venture into fiction. I've got what might be a story rattling around in my head.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
I was thinking of this poem this morning, mostly because it's exceptionally foggy out today.
I'm not usually a big fan of poetry. Every now and then something will move me with its eloquence, or stun me with its intelligence. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock tops my short list of favored poems. If you'd like to read the whole thing, you can find it here. Another one that always sends shivers down my spine - and then makes me stand a little taller - is Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Woman.
But I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for old Prufrock.
When I first encountered it, I was in the eleventh grade, in the "accelerated" English class, getting ready to move on to AP English the next year. AP English was taught by a man I'd known for years - he'd known my parents when they were teachers, and he was my karate teacher as well. He was full of strange and interesting ideas of how an AP class should be taught.
One thing he did was bring his students into the up-and-coming class to give us a taste of what we'd be getting into. A hand-picked delegation of his students came in and read Prufrock to us, and then read their essays discussing it.
I was bored. I read the handout with the poem printed on it, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. It sounded nice, but it didn't make any sense. I'm a fairly visual person, so I had trouble following the essays being read to me. But I liked the imagery of the fog and smoke settling on the streets like a cat. That was nice.
The next time I encountered the poem, predictably enough, was the next year. That teacher was all over the place with what he had us read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Illusions, Siddhartha, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man... Scattershot. Some of it (especially Joyce) I loathed; most of it I really liked. But I was still dreading the approach of the poetry unit.
But whatever else you could say about him (and there was plenty to say), he was a fantastic teacher. He seemed to know instinctively (or maybe just from year after year of practice) what we needed explained, and what we could figure out on our own. We spent two weeks dissecting Prufrock, line by line. Indeed, we had it "...formulated, sprawling on a pin... pinned and wriggling on the wall."
We went over it line by line, and then backed up and did it again. And again. And again.
Always before, this line-by-line analysis had ruined the beauty of poetry for me. But with Prufrock, it was like every dissection opened a window onto a fantastic garden. The analogies and metaphors; the hints and evasions that spelled out Prufrock's agony and purpose so clearly; the glimpse into his agitated mind that, once understood, matched parallels with my own.
We were a classroomful of Igors, watching in half fear, half wonder as our Frankenstein dissected the lifeless words, showed us their meaning, and then brought them to life before our astonished eyes. When he was done, we couldn't understand how we had ever not appreciated this poem.
And that's what I was thinking about this morning.
Word of the Day:
Pandora's box - a prolific source of troubles
Currently Reading:
- the second book of the King's Daggers series by Dave Duncan
Current Projects:
- Kris' afghan
- a crocheted purse