Poems

It's been a long, long day, but not an unpleasant one. It's tailing off now, nearly 5.30 which in summer would see it just coming into its prime but at this time of year is the folding up and gently shutting down until the new dawn starts another one. The sun has shone all day and, lucky me, my bedroom faces south. I've dozed and slept, felt terrible and not too bad, done the crossword apart from one word which I had to look up - who could have known that a merganser was a kind of duck? - completed two killer sudokus, listened listlessly to the radio, and made the great trek down to the kitchen for refreshments. I haven't been able to concentrate on my novels, but a review of a book on TS Eliot in the paper made me dig out my old book of his poetry, and what do you know? It has really struck home today. My copy was annotated by me at university, and I've read with interest and astonishment my notes alongside The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land. Did I really know all that stuff? I remember marvelling at the concept of Modernism, and the amazing coincidence of Ulysses and The Waste Land both being published in 1922, the two seminal works being created simultaneously, though arguably Virginia Woolf had beaten them both to it. I've loved both Eliot poems today more than ever before, and feel that I too have measured out - if not my life then certainly my recent days - in coffee spoons. His imagery is startling and beautiful. I would now like to find the recording of Fiona Shaw reading The Waste Land. And then I'm going to read Heart of Darkness again, which I had already planned to do before I encountered the quote "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" in front of The Hollow Men. Life is full of these coincidences.