VII

A month ago I bought a book of poems by T.S. Eliot. However, it wasn’t until last week that I picked it up in earnest, and I am currently obsessed with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—and I have yet to finish the entire poem! I spent last week hacking my way through the first half, but it wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that I felt the poem crack. I won’t say I’ve unlocked it just yet (I need to get to the end first), but I feel like I’ve caught Eliot’s wave.

“In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo”

——————

At the expense of being sacrilegious, I am going to divorce a bible verse from its sacred context and apply it to something else, something much more fitting—for regardless of my love for Christian scripture, it is not the word of God, I believe, but poetry that is,

"… living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, even penetrating as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

I’ve never encountered language more powerfully, in any art or medium, than I have in poetry. Poetry more so than music because poetry successfully uses pathos without the help of instruments, which by themselves affect emotion tremendously. Poetry relies only on the written word and yet creates work much more lasting—and dynamic, in that regard—works that last centuries, as I’m demonstrating right now. Eliot published this poem in 1915, and here I am in 2024, mulling every line and blogging about it. Even during the early days last week, when the poem was still veiled, I knew there was something there . . . a humdrum of electricity below the surface, and I could hear it crackling. The poem was affecting my emotion before my mind could process why. This is poetry.