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En l'an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beucs ...
Pipit sate upright in her chair
Some distance from where I was sitting;
Views of the Oxford Colleges
Lay on the table, with the knitting.
Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,
Her grandfather and great great aunts,
Supported on the mantelpiece
An Invitation to the Dance.
. . . . . .
I shall not want Honour in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney
And have talk with Coriolanus
And other heroes of that kidney.
I shall not want Capital in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond:
We two shall lie together, lapt
In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.
I shall not want Society in Heaven,
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
Her anecdotes will be more amusing
Than Pipit's experience could provide.
I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me ...
. . . . . .
But where is the penny world I bought
To eat with Pipit behind the screen?
The red-eyed scavengers are creeping
From Kentish Town and Golder's Green;
Where are the eagles and the trumpets?
Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.
Over buttered scones and crumpets
Weeping, weeping multitudes
Droop in a hundred A.B.C.'s
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Read poems about / on: heaven, dance, snow, together, green, red, world, hero
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| Comments about this poem (A Cooking Egg by Thomas Stearns Eliot) |
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James Niles (2/22/2008 9:37:00 AM)
How marvellous is poetry. I find this poem neither powerful nor depressing. It is, however, full of irony, considering Eliot's first marriage, and I wonder whether there had been a recent production of Shaw's Arms and the Man. It is probably dangerous to attribute too many autobiographical musings to Eliot. For instance, only his waistcoat and spectacles could have belonged to J. Alfred Prufrock. I can see 'Pipit', a gray drab bird, saying, 'Whatever do you mean? You have the soul of an English teacher', while his American family chimes in saying, 'This poetry thing has made you make no sense at all, no sense at all.' |
quercus ... (2/22/2007 5:21:00 PM)
Wow! What a powerful stuff! I have been breaking my head for the whole afternoon in order to find out what the first two verses mean in English. Although I don't speak French, somehow I managed to get some help from Latin and international Babel interpreter. I hope I got it right - I think the beginning translates as: 'I enter my thirtieth year, ashamed by waste of opportunity...' I believe Eliot must have noticed that he had some aspirations in his life which had never been fulfilled. He strongly admits that in the title of the poem - a cooking egg is a symbol of something that could have grown and developed, but never got that chance and its growth had been stopped in its shell during the destructive cooking process...
I feel sadness in his words - Eliot seems to be regretful realizing that certain actions could have been taken in order to achieve his goals, but it never happened. Now, I wonder why. Was he too passive or somebody tried to stop him from making his dreams come true? I wonder about the 'red-eyed scavengers that are creeping from Kentish Town and Golder’s Green'...
When he speaks about heaven, he might be refereing to a place where he finally would be liberated and given new opportunities to grow... He highlights that in his reference to the historically famous people whose actions contributed to the world remarkably - these strong, persistent and somehow creative characters seem to be Eliot's desired company - he knows he would achieve a lot at their side.
Life is what we make it... Shouldn't we always chase our dreams and try very hard to make them come true? |
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