I have read that poem too_many times. At first I just found it calming / reassuring, and a little later I decided it was shaped around sexual jealousy. I figured that – perhaps in all poetry – form calms shape. I get few of the allusions, enough to worry about song-birds and rats. But, going through the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, I was struck by how tonally close the first line of Eliot’s poem is, to its prose paraphrase. This could be by circumstance. But could one rewrite The Waste Land in the 21st century by writing with the music of various poems or parts of poems, contemporary or historical, but shifting the tone to that of those poems’ prose paraphrase?
A relatively simple trick…