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Poet: T.S. Eliot (T.S. Eliot Art)
Poem: 12.
Sweeney among the Nightingales
Volume: Poems
Year: Published/Written in 1920
Comment 6 of 6, added on October 11th, 2009 at 6:56 PM.
I'm particularly fascinated by the mysterious geometry of the poem. "Silent man in mocha brown sprawls at the window sill & gapes"; "...Leaves the room and reappears outside the window looking in"; "The host with someone indistinct converses at the door apart"...All this sort of non-Euclidean geometry makes me think of Dali's "The Persistence of Memory"--the same sort of feeling, that is.
Michael Chester
Comment 5 of 6, added on September 19th, 2009 at 6:21 AM.
Temur,
How about this:
Rachel has a new appelation - Rabinovich - is a modern jew. The jews of old are changed to the decadent jews of today by the death of Christ. It is these new jews of the roman occupation who killed Christ - Christ who claimed to be the last and globally sufficient sacrifice. The last dionysis. There would be no further annual sacrifice. We are now disassociated from the old revivication of life in the seasons. We are permanently validated. Our decadence is now our own. It is not the glorious preamble of our remaking. Decadance is no longer redeemed as the propitiation of a god. Just as Agememnon's death is not the glorious death of a king in Troy. Or a sacrifice, but the sordid death of an adulterer, a murderer of his own daughter, a man killed in his bath ignominiously by the person whose trust he had despoiled, his wife. Agememnon is a false King sacrifice. He was not supposed to die then - that is one of the operating ironies of the Orestia. This rupture in moral precedence is the opening crisis of the play. Its resolution is not ritual but extraordinary. Athena herself must make a remarkable and singular judgement.
PS I think ( as have others ) that TS may have been an anti-Semite.
klauposius from Australia
Comment 4 of 6, added on September 21st, 2007 at 4:52 PM.
Eliot's wife,I believe,cheated on him, and I think the Sweeney poems are a reflection of the hurt he experienced because of the infidelity. He equated her behavior with that of whores in a brothel. And, for all his life, I think, he could not write himself out of that pain.
Robert Schwab from United States
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Comments
I'm particularly fascinated by the mysterious geometry of the poem. "Silent man in mocha brown sprawls at the window sill & gapes"; "...Leaves the room and reappears outside the window looking in"; "The host with someone indistinct converses at the door apart"...All this sort of non-Euclidean geometry makes me think of Dali's "The Persistence of Memory"--the same sort of feeling, that is.
Michael Chester