A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Although Auden and cummings would give either of them a run for their money.

Poetry deathmatch!

maggie and millie and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

[memfault]

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

Someone should make a Pound for Pound joke here.

Not me though.

Can we not leave aside the meaning? Because I still don't get it. I think I basically get the other two poems, though.

I know very little of Eliot, but after reading through Burnt Norton I think perhaps the phrase has something to do with identity within time? The meaning I take from the poem is that we partly define ourselves by organising time into past, present and future. There are states beyond time, "still point[s]", but they are beyond humanity. Our memories and other temporal identity markers are the wire in our blood, keeping us whole, keeping us defined.

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

I don't know. I just read through the poem again and found an abundance of lines that contradict my theory. God, I love poetry. Tricksy torturous preciouses.

Jim, that's one of my favorite passages.

Jim, that's one of my favorite passages.

Mine too. Gives me chills every time.

My broad hit from reading the section that contains that phrase is that the trilling wire in the blood is the spark of life in us that connects to the world, to the past, to time, but only lives on in those external things once we are past.

I love both Yeats and Eliot, but I think Eliot just a little more. I had to write a paper on Buddhist influences in the Waste Land and found a really fascinating myth/story that seemed to relate to the "dog that's friend to men."

The story, short version, is that Buddha visited a rich man. The rich man laid out a feast, but his people were starving. A demon in the shape of a dog or wolf dug up the bones of the poor people he was supposed to be governing and howled, to inform the Buddha of the evil the rich man did.

I can't stand Yeats for some reason, I've just never "got" him despite having to teach him loads of times. Eliot is good but I like Wallace Stevens better than any of that lot. (I seem to prefer American poets for some reason. I'm not sure why; I certainly don't prefer American novelists. Anyway, Eliot gets marks for being born there.)

Angus! Come stand over here next to me with the rest of the Yeats haters! (We did him for A-Level and I loved his stuff at first, but all that calculating self-mythologising really got to me after a bit).

ee cummings is my hero