Il miglior fabbro

In 1922, T S Eliot published The Waste Land, the poem of the twentieth century.  After the epigraph, came the dedication: "For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro". This is a reference to the astonishing act of editing Pound undertook on Eliot's draft, brutally hacking and tightening it into - more or less - its current form.  It was an act of great poeticism, and of tremendous but rather terrible friendship.  To read the original, with Pound's annotations, is to read a different poem.

For example, on the first page of the first section, The Burial of the Dead, Pound's editing, which you can see below, left not a word of the original! Click it larger to have a look. How Eliot felt when he first saw this, one can only imagine.

And why am I talking about this today?  Because the working title of the great poem was an adaptation from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens: He Do The Police in Different Voices, my inspiration for yesterday's post title.

And to end, a few lines of the final version (which I once memorised whole, and recited to the mountains of Scotland when alone (and sometimes when not alone!)).  This is the second major part of Burial of the Dead, and is as near to a one paragraph encapsulation of the whole great poem as you will ever get:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind

Der heimat zu

Mein Irisch kind

Wo weilest du?

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;"

"They called me the hyacinth girl."

--Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed' und leer das Meer.      

And if you're tempted to ask what it means, remember Eliot's own response to the student who asked, "Mr Eliot, what does "Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree" mean?"  He replied, after some thought, that "It means, I suppose, "Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree""!

Comments

[Harriet]

Easy to say this after the event but Eliot did pop into my head. But I am not at all familiar with his poetry which I hate to say doesn't do much for me --apart from 4 Quartets which I do like.

[Peter the flautist]

Dark Puss is suitably impressed and not surprised he failed your recent challenge so comprehensively. He hopes he may still be allowed to sit quietly in a corner of your website and observe.