I love this
poem; it's so very
disgusting, once you
get it...
And the trees about me,
Let them be
dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with
continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!
PAINT me a
cavernous waste shore
Cast in the unstilled
Cyclades,
Paint me the bold
anfractuous rocks
Faced by the
snarled and yelping
seas.
Display me
Aeolus above
Reviewing the
insurgent gales
Which tangle
Ariadne's hair
And swell with haste the perjured
sails.
Morning stirs the feet and hands
(
Nausicaa and
Polypheme).
Gesture of orang-outang
Rises from the
sheets in
steam.
This
withered root of
knots of hair
Slitted below and
gashed with eyes,
This
oval O cropped out with
teeth:
The
sickle motion from the
thighs
Jackknifes upward at the
knees
Then
straightens out from heel to hip
Pushing the
framework of the bed
And
clawing at the
pillow slip.
Sweeney addressed
full length to shave
Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,
Knows the
female temperament
And
wipes the suds around his face.
(The lengthened
shadow of a man
Is history, said
Emerson
Who had not seen the
silhouette
Of Sweeney
straddled in the sun.)
Tests the
razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek
subsides.
The
epileptic on the bed
Curves
backward, clutching at her sides.
The ladies of the
corridor
Find themselves involved,
disgraced,
Call witness to their
principles
And
deprecate the
lack of taste
Observing that
hysteria
Might easily be
misunderstood;
Mrs. Turner intimates
It does the house
no sort of good.
But
Doris, towelled from the bath,
Enters
padding on broad feet,
Bringing
sal volatile
And a
glass of brandy neat.
By
T.S. Eliot, c. 1920