Across the room the shifting smoke
Settles around the forms that pass
Pass through or clog the brain;
Across the floors that soak
The dregs from broken glass
The walls fling back the scattered streams
Of life that seems
Visionary, and yet hard;
Immediate, and far;
But hard…
Broken and scarred
Like dirty broken finger nails
Tapping the bar.
*****
It’s very Eliot, isn’t it! A poem written in pencil in his early Notebook; dated provisionally to the years immediately before the publication of Prufrock in 1917, the Notebook is wryly headed ‘Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot’. The near 100 pages of the Notebook, with the twice as many pages of Christopher Ricks’ notes on the poems, comprise the bulk of the material in ‘T.S. Eliot – Inventions of the March Hare – Poems 1909-1917’.
Ricks’ nine comments on this poem include pointing out the similarity of the line
‘Like dirty broken finger nails’
to the passage towards the end of The Waste Land:
‘On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.’
fwiw
Photo: “Lucky Strike.” by H.Robertson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
