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“For you know only a heap of broken images”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The Waste Land is the poem I return to the most. Eliot, possibly, my favourite poet. This is because of intellectual depth, based on important premises. We can’t understand the present without gazing at the past. Won’t be able to say much, comprehensively, unless we look high at Dante and low into a London pub. We need a recognition of time and thus human limitation, society but something deeper; intimacy but solitude. It’s all there in Eliot. Not much nature, although The Waste Land has this line: “In the mountains, there you feel free.“
I won’t explain the images in this picture except for two, which lead elsewhere. That’s W.B. Yeats in the boat with Maud Gonne, one of the influences on Eliot. That’s the Hanged Man in the tree, a Tarot card referred to in his poem.
The sign, a dreary experience, is close to the River Mersey where I often walk, on this occasion with a beautiful moon on a wintry cold day.