American Literary History I
Modernism: Poems by Eliot, Pound, and Stevens
1. Preludes by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
IV
5
10
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
15
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, 20
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
25
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river
Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
40
45
50
By Rihaku
3. The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens (18791955)
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
2. The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Ezra Pound
20
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
5
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
At sixteen you departed,
15
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
25
30
35
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
10
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
American Literary History I
Modernism: Poems by Eliot, Pound, and Stevens
Choose one critical comment below and use evidence from the poem to support that view. Write one sentence (a topic sentence) using some words from the quote, and make notes on
this paper. Give line numbers for words and phrases that you use as evidence. You can introduce a quotation using some of these expressions: "According to [critic's name] ...," / "As
[critic's name] points out ..."
1. "Rather than a simple speaking [voice], the poems [in "Preludes"] offered delicately rendered processes of sensation, which provide occasions for a variety of voices." Charles
Altieri. The Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry, 2006. Discuss the different "sensations" and "various voices" in the poem. How does the point of view change through the
poem? (Think about the changing pronouns.) What are some of the images in the poem and what mood do they communicate?
2. "The precise, Imagist technique of these poems ... can be seen in "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter." The speaker is a young wife, married at fourteen, who expresses,
largely through images, the loneliness and isolation she feels in separation from her husband, absent on a five-month business trip, and her eagerness to be reunited with him."
Walter Sutton. American Free Verse: The Modern Revolution in Poetry, 1973. Discuss how the poem use images to convey the speaker's sense of "loneliness and isolation."
3. "The basic "story" of "The Emperor" is that of a person who goes to the house of a neighbor, a poor old woman, who has died; the person is to help "lay out" (arrange for decent viewing) the corpse in the bedroom, while other neighbors are sending over homegrown flowers, and yet others are preparing food, including ice cream, for the wake. ...
Faced with life ... in the kitchen and death (with its protruding horny feet) on the bed, one must, however unwillingly, acquiesce in the reign of life." Jay Parini and Brett C.
Miller. The Columbia History of American Poetry, 1993. Use a quote from the comment above to help summarize the story in the poem. Give a few details from the poem to illustrate. Then discuss the speaker's feeling about the events of the story. What, for example, does the speaker mean by "the emperor of ice cream"?