T.S.Eliot

Therefore the man with heavy eyes

Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears

Outside the window, leaning in,

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud;

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,

Susceptible to nervous shock

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud;

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,

Susceptible to nervous shock;

I have not made this show purposelessly

And it is not by any concitation

Of the backward devils.

I would meet you upon this honestly.

I that was near your heart was removed therefrom

To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it

Since what is kept must be adulterated?

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:

How should I use it for your closer contact?

The smoky candle end of time

Declines. On the Rialto once.

The rats are underneath the piles.

The jew is underneath the lot.

Money in furs. The boatman smiles,

Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Donne, I suppose, was such another

Who found no substitute for sense;

To seize and clutch and penetrate,

Expert beyond experience,

He knew the anguish of the marrow

The ague of the skeleton;

No contact possible to flesh

Allayed the fever of the bone.

John Davidson (1857-igo8), and especially his poem "Thirty Bob a Week," with its stark presentation of a city clerk. He had "found inspiration in the content of the poem," Eliot later recalled, "and in the complete fitness of content and idiom: for I also had a good many dingy urban images to reveal."' More important, however, was his discovery of Arthur Symons, whose study of The Symbolist Movement in Literature he purchased in December 19o8.

In Laforgue's poetry Eliot found much that he could adapt to his own use: the couplets turned by neat rhymes, the counterpoint achieved by interweaving stanzas with different imaginative weight and line length, and a tone that was questioning, quizzical, ironical, inconclusive.