Prufrock and Other Observations | Page 5

me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one
about to reach her journey’s end.
I shall sit here, serving tea to friends...."
I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends
For what she has
said to me?
You will see me any morning in the park
Reading the

comics and the sporting page.
Particularly I remark
An English
countess goes upon the stage.
A Greek was murdered at a Polish
dance,
Another bank defaulter has confessed.
I keep my
countenance,
I remain self-possessed
Except when a street piano,
mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song
With
the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other
people have desired.
Are these ideas right or wrong?
III
The October night comes down; returning as before
Except for a
slight sensation of being ill at ease
I mount the stairs and turn the
handle of the door
And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and
knees.
"And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?
But that’s a
useless question.
You hardly know when you are coming back,
You
will find so much to learn."
My smile falls heavily among the
bric-a-brac.
"Perhaps you can write to me."
My self-possession flares up for a
second;
This is as I had reckoned.
"I have been wondering
frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why
we have not developed into friends."
I feel like one who smiles, and
turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
My
self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.
"For everybody said so, all our friends,
They all were sure our
feelings would relate
So closely! I myself can hardly understand.

We must leave it now to fate.
You will write, at any rate.
Perhaps it
is not too late
shall sit here, serving tea to friends."
And I must borrow every changing
find expression ... dance, dance

Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us
take the air, in a tobacco trance--

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
Afternoon grey and
smoky, evening yellow and rose;
Should die and leave me sitting pen
in hand
With the smoke coming down above the housetops;

Doubtful, for quite a while
Not knowing what to feel or if I
understand
Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon ...
Would
she not have the advantage, after all?
This music is successful with a
"dying fall"
Now that we talk of dying--
And should I have the right
to smile?
Preludes
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty
shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken
blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely
cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer

>From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press

To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time
resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and
waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand
sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered
against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light
crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the

gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly
understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the
papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the
palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,

Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock

And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers,
and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a
blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by
fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion
of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand
across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient
women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar
synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of the
memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,

Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And
through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a
madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,

The street lamp said,
"Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward
you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see
the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,

And you see
the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A
twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the
world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A

broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the
strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street lamp