“I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone,” the fourth track off the Mountain Goats’ 1995 album Sweden, opens with a recording of T. S. Eliot reading from The Waste Land:
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
His voice echoes eerie and rasped. His accent spliced between the downhome St. Louis of his youth and posh, stodgy London, for which he strived and eventually renounced his U.S. citizenship.
These lines—my first encounter with the man who would ruin all other poets for me for good—invoke Tiresias, blind clairvoyant prophet of Apollo, whose mythology, though ambiguous, consistently incorporates a seven-year stint as a woman, divinely transfigured. With The Waste Land, Eliot too was transformed. In 1922, he received $2800 for its publication, the equivalent of more than $50,000 today, a paramount prize for a single poem, and one that allowed him to quit his bookkeeping job and become a director at Faber & Faber for the next forty years.
The work that emerged in the following decades remains unsurpassed. The caustic, fine heralds of “The Hollow Men.” The grim and elaborate martyrdom of Murder in the Cathedral. The plain, illuminating tumbles across Four Quartets. And still, none quite compare with his first major publication, which set the tone for his creative magnitude and penetrating insights.
For years, I began each morning with the 1947 Harvard Vocarium recording of “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” An exploration of times before we begin. Of stopping short and daring to stare down a blur. Of accepting everything, the unacceptable foremost. And revelling in our meaningless journey’s urges. In short, I was afraid. But Eliot’s finesse held me intact. I’m more inclined now to read and listen under the dark of night. To be made new by getting old, this verse that informs in baring nothing save itself. To sleep. “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
-David Fishkind