We all have lines of poetry buried in our heads. Who hasn't intoned "Nevermore" in a sepulchrous voice when circumstances called for it? Who hasn't had "miles to go before I sleep?" Those outtakes are so ubiquitous they can be heard from lips that know nothing of the lost Lenore or snowy woods.
I have this relationship with poems I have read, poems which I cannot claim to have ever fully understood, but bits and pieces of which surface now and then in the most prosaic of circumstances.
One of those is T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
This one pops up now and then when leaving the house with a companion:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
The last bit can startle my friends, so sometimes I confine the verbal outtake to the first line, with the following lines echoing in my head and a Mona Lisa smile on my lips.
This one pops up at parties. Sometimes it's a "did I say that out loud?" moment.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
I don't actually have this one memorized in words, but I do have an embedded image of a cat curled up somewhere about the house:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And this one, of course, has resurfaced of late. It comes into my mind with a sigh in the mornings as I creak my way out of bed.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled
Frustrated by a failure to communicate? Try this:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
When I try to imagine what Eliot meant by those lines, I imagine he was talking directly to me.
.