Thursday, April 19, 2018

Reading Notes W13: Eliot & Akhmatova, Part B

T. S. Eliot

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock"

  • Opens with an excerpt from Dante's Inferno (541)
  • "Streets that follow like a tedious argument / of Insidious intent" (541)
  • References Michelangelo (541)
  • Several mentions of yellow fog and yellow smoke. I'm actually not sure at all what this is. (541-2)
  • He seems to be pondering the days in which he'll grow old. (542)
  • "And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes / Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?" (543)
  • "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be" (544)
  • The last stanza seems to be about sirens. "Sea-girls" with "human voices wake us, and we drown" (544).
"The Waste Land"
  • The Burial of the Dead specifically refers to the burial service of the Anglican church (545)
  • April is the most cruel month (545)
  • "Winter kept us warm" (545)
  • "Summer surprised us" (545)
  • Hyacinths. (546)
  • "Unreal City" references Baudelaire (547)
  • A Game of Chess references a play by Thomas Middleton (548)
  • Demobbed means demobilized / discharged from the army (549)
  • The Fire Sermon is a reference to Buddha's Fire Sermon (550)
  • Eliot includes "The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters" (553-555)
  • Death by Water is about Phlebas the Phoenician. (555)
  • "Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you" (555)
  • Lines 367-377 refer to Hermann Hesse's Blick ins Chaos (Glimpse into Chaos) (556)
  • "Poi.... / Quando..." is a passage from Purgatorio when Arnaut Daniel asks Dante to remember his pain (558)
Anna Akhmatova

"Requiem"

  • "No, not under the vault of alien skies" is a borrowed phrase from Message to Siberia by Aleksandr Pushkin (568)
  • The Yezhov terror of 1937-1938 consisted of mass arrests being carried out by the secret police (568)
  • Black Marias were police cars for conveying those arrested (569)
  • "Quietly flows the quiet Don" refers to the flowing of the great Russian river. (570)
  • Akhmatova's first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921 (570)
  • "For seventeen months I've been cying out / Calling you home" (571)
  • "Just as the white nights / Stared at you, dear son, in prison" (571)
  • "I must kill my memory once and for all" (571)
  • "I must learn to live again--" (571)
  • "Do not weep for Me, Mother, / I am in the grave" (573)
  • In the Russian Orthodox Church, a memorial service is held on the anniversary of a death (574)


Akhmatova, Anna. "Requiem." The Norton Anthology World Literature, edited by Martin Puchner, Third Edition, vol. F, W. W. Norton 2012, pp. 565-574

Eliot, T.S.. The Norton Anthology World Literature, edited by Martin Puchner, Third Edition, vol. F, W. W. Norton 2012, pp. 537-64

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