Prelude Poem Quotes

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.

[On Chopin's Preludes:] "His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. ... The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power.

He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait, and he will not come. It is for that that I love him. Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my life. And I shall pass, incredible as it seems, into other lives; this is only an escapade perhaps, a prelude only.

The minds of others I know well; But who I am I cannot tell

Imagination! lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my Song Like and unfather'd vapour; here that Power In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through, And now recovering to my Soul I say I recognize they glory; in such strength Of usurpation, in such visitings Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode There harbours whether we be young or old. Our destiny, our nature, and our home Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be.

I can write no stately proem As a prelude to my lay; From a poet to a poem I would dare to say. For if of these fallen petals One to you seem fair, Love will waft it till it settles On your hair. And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.

you appear without prelude midway between my eyes and the nearest trees, your colours bright, your outline flattened suspended in the air with no more reason for occurring exactly here than this billboard, this highway or that cloud.

There are in our existence spots of time Which with distinct preeminence retain A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed By trivial occupations and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds - Especially the imaginative power - Are nourished and invisibly repaired. - The Two-Part Prelude: First Part

How Nature by extrinsic passion first / Peopled my mind with beauteous forms or grand' (Book I.)

But that night When on my bed I lay, I was most mov'd And felt most deeply in what world I was; With unextinguish'd taper I kept watch, Reading at intervals

When an animal dies, another of the same species may cling to the body, eat the body, or look bored. Bees expel dead bodies from the hive or, if that is impossible, embalm them in honey. Elephants "say" a ritualistic good-bye, and touch their dead before slowly walking away. Corvids often accept the death of a companion without much fuss, but they at times have “funerals,” where scores of birds lament over the corpse of a deceased crow. But it is a bit odd that people should investigate whether animals “comprehend death,” as if human beings understood what it means to die. Is death a prelude to reincarnation? A portal to Heaven or Hell? Complete extinction? Union with all life? Or something else? All of these views can at times be comforting, yet people usually fear death, quite regardless of what they claim to believe. In the natural world, killing seems a casual affair. Human beings, of course, kill on a massive scale, but most of us can only kill, if at all, by softening the impact of the deed through rituals such as drink or prayer. The strike of a spider, a heron, or a cat is swift and, seemingly, without inhibition or remorse. They pounce with a confidence that could indicate ignorance, indifference, or else profound knowledge. Could this be, perhaps, because animals cannot conceive of killing, since they are not aware of death? Could it be because they understand death well, far better than do human beings? If animals envision the world not in terms of abstract concepts but sensuous images, the soul might appear as a unique scent, a rhythmic motion, or a tone of voice. Death would be the absence of these, though without that absolute finality that we find so severe. Perhaps the heron that snaps a fish thinks his meal lives on, as he one day will, in the form of currents in the pond.

It is we, the thinking-sensing ones, who really and continually make something that is not yet there: the whole perpetually growing world of valuations, colours, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. This poem that we have invented is constantly internalized, drilled, translated into flesh and reality, indeed, into the commonplace, by the so-called practical human beings (our actors).

TO SLEEP A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by,   One after one; the sound of rain, and bees   Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,   Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky;   I’ve thought of all by turns; and still I lie   Sleepless; and soon the small birds’ melodies   Must hear, first utter’d from my orchard trees;   And the first Cuckoo’s melancholy cry.   Even thus last night, and two nights more, I lay,   And could not win thee, Sleep! by any stealth:   So do not let me wear to night away:   Without Thee what is all the morning’s wealth?   Come, blessed barrier betwixt day and day,   Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!

Eliot's own reflections on the primitive mind as a model for nondualistic thinking and on the nature and consequences of different modes of consciousness were informed by an excellent education in the social sciences and philosophy. As a prelude to our guided tour of the text of The Waste Land, we now turn to a brief survey of some of his intellectual preoccupations in the decade before he wrote it, preoccupations which in our view are enormously helpful in understanding the form of the poem. Eliot entered Harvard as a freshman in 1906 and finished his doctoral dissertation in 1916, with one of the academic years spent at the Sorbonne and one at Oxford. At Harvard and Oxford, he had as teachers some of modern philosophy's most distinguished individuals, including George Santayana, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim; and while at the Sorbonne, he attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, a philosophic star in Paris in 1910-11. Under the supervision of Royce, Eliot wrote his dissertation on the epistemology of F. H. Bradley, a major voice in the late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century crisis in philosophy. Eliot extended this period of concentration on philosophical problems by devoting much of his time between 1915 and the early twenties to book reviewing. His education and early book reviewing occurred during the period of epistemological disorientation described in our first chapter, the period of "betweenness" described by Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset, the period of the revolt against dualism described by Lovejoy. 2 Eliot's personal awareness of the contemporary epistemological crisis was intensified by the fact that while he was writing his dissertation on Bradley he and his new wife were actually living with Bertrand Russell. Russell as the representative of neorealism and Bradley as the representative of neoidealism were perhaps the leading expositors of opposite responses to the crisis discussed in our first chapter. Eliot's situation was extraordinary. He was a close student of both Bradley and Russell; he had studied with Bradley's friend and disciple Harold Joachim and with Russell himself. And in 1915-16, while writing a dissertation explaining and in general defending Bradley against Russell, Eliot found himself face to face with Russell across the breakfast table. Moreover, as the husband of a fragile wife to whom both men (each in his own way) were devoted, Eliot must have found life to be a kaleidoscope of brilliant and fluctuating patterns.

Nietzsche's response to this situation is not to seek narcotics in a return to the past or a flight to the supersensible, but instead to assert, and in a deeper form to accept, even to accelerate, the approach of nihilism on a European, if not global, scale. A rejuvenation of the human spirit is possible only through a complete destruction of the decadent present. Like very few before him, Nietzsche sees the necessary link between radical creativity, on the one hand, and war, courage, and brutality, on the other. The great creators abominate everything that interferes with the full expression of their will to power; they are not egalitarians, democrats, or refined and tolerant appreciators of the poems of their competitors. The bestiality of the blonde beast may be understood not simply as an expression of the need to destroy in order to create but as a consequence of Nietzsche's fundamental identification of Being and history History is the dissolution of Being into chaos, as reorganized by the shifting perspectives of man, the highest incarnation of the will to power. As we have seen, a reliance upon courage led Nietzsche to invoke the unleashing of the blonde beasts and wars of universal destruction as the negative prelude to the advent of positive nihilism.

The title Voices of the Night originally was used by Mr. Longfellow for the poem Footsteps of Angels; then he gave it to the first collected volume of his poetry with special application to the group of eight poems following Prelude. Here it is confined to this group.

With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,   Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;   Some lying fast at anchor in the road,   Some veering up and down, one knew not why.   A goodly Vessel did I then espy   Come like a Giant from a haven broad;   And lustily along the Bay she strode,   Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.   This Ship was nought to me, nor I to her,   Yet I pursued her with a Lover’s look;   This Ship to all the rest did I prefer:   When will she turn, and whither? She will brook   No tarrying; where she comes the winds must stir:   On went She, and due north her journey took.

Earth has not any thing to shew more fair:   Dull would he be of soul who could pass by   A sight so touching in it’s majesty:   This City now doth like a garment wear   The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,   Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie   Open unto the fields, and to the sky;   All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.   Never did sun more beautifully steep   In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill;   Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!   The river glideth at his own sweet will:   Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;   And all that mighty heart is lying still!

No one can say exactly when the process of combining the different historical, legendary, and mythic elements into a Volsung cycle began, but it was probably at an early date. By the ninth century the legends of the Gothic Jormunrek and those of the destruction of the Burgundians had already been linked in Scandinavia, where the ninth-century “Lay of Ragnar” by the poet Bragi the Old treats both subjects. Bragi’s poem describes a shield on which a picture of the maiming of Jormunrek was either painted or carved and refers to the brothers Hamdir and Sorli from the Gothic section of the saga as “kinsmen of Gjuki,” the Burgundian father of King Gunnar. The “Lay of Ragnar” has other connections with the Volsung legend. The thirteenth-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson identifies the central figure of the lay, whose gift inspired the poem in his honor, with Ragnar Hairy Breeches, a supposed ancestor of the Ynglings, Norway’s royal family. Ragnar’s son-in-law relationship to Sigurd through his marriage to Sigurd’s daughter Aslaug (mentioned earlier in connection with stave church carvings) is reflected in the sequence of texts in the vellum manuscript: The Saga of the Volsungs immediately precedes The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok. Ragnar’s saga, in turn, is followed by Krákumál (Lay of the Raven), Ragnar’s death poem, in which Ragnar, thrown into the snakepit by the Anglo-Saxon King Ella, boasts that he will die laughing. The Volsung and Ragnar stories are further linked by internal textual references. It is likely that the The Saga of the Volsungs was purposely set first in the manuscript to serve as a prelude to the Ragnar material. The opening section of Ragnar’s saga may originally have been the ending of The Saga of the Volsungs. Just where the division between these two sagas occurs in the manuscript is unclear. Together these narratives chronicle the ancestry of the Ynglings—the legendary line (through Sigurd and Ragnar) and the divine one (through Odin). Such links to Odin, or Wotan, were common among northern dynasties; by tracing their ancestry through Sigurd, later Norwegian kings availed themselves of one of the greatest heroes in northern lore. In so doing, they probably helped to preserve the story for us.” (Jesse Byock)

A poem is among reading's slowest roads....What is it to have read a poem well? To have caught an allusion, admired a formal twist, heard a music in the silent tumble of letters on the page? How long does it take to read a poem, anyway? Such reading does not proceed in continuous, countable units of hours and days. It is a minute, minutes, here and there, intense and distracted, questing, between trips to the dictionary, and it consists in endless, endless repetition. There is a great deal less reading than reading where poems are concerned. A poem once read is the first note of a symphony, a toe dipped in the water, the first mouthful after a fast--necessary experiences all, with joys of their own, but still preludes. A poem comes into being by means of our repeated encounters with it, and each of these encounters must stay slow. It is hard to stay slow enough to keep pace with a poem.

And yet “I celebrate myself” has to be seen as more than a conventional prelude to a lyrical aesthetic event: it is a proclamation of poetic independence and uniqueness. “And what I assume you shall assume” is a confrontation, really a challenge, a dare: what is being implied here is that the ordinary relationship between reader and poet, lyrical speaker, lyrical “I,” will not be in effect. Something else is happening, something which, on the face of it, is presumptuous. An impertinence which is absurdly reinforced by the notification of a communion unlike any other in poetry: you are not merely listening to me, overhearing me—you are to be taken into my poem with me in a way no other poem has done.

Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration: — feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As may have had no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.