I’m going with T.S. Elliot’s “Morning at the Window” for
this week. He composed this short piece in September of 1912; it was later
published in Prufrock and Other
Observations in 1920.
Elliot approaches his interpretation of a morning’s unfurl
in a poignantly-unflattering way, describing what he sees from his view of a
window which I presume is his room’s. With a bank of some actually very
undesirable words, like “damp”, “despondently”, “brown”, and “muddy,” Elliot
lets us into the archive of his personal distaste of a morning scene and the
people subjected to working through it, which include the maids, the passersby
on the street, and the ambiguous “they” of the first line. The only actual indulgence of positivity we can see, “An aimless smile . . . vanishes along the
levels of the roofs” is even consumed with the downcast mood Elliot is so keen
to project. If I had to tag a color to the feel this poem is giving me, and
this is excluding the instances of mud and brown, it would be a solid and very
tangible grey. Elliot gives us grey in a strong way and in such short a period
of introspective observation, and it’s depressing me the more I go on about it.
The poem, like Berman’s (my previous choice), doesn’t
follow a meter or a rhyme scheme. It chooses to detach itself from the
conventional poetic structures, I’ve theorized, because the content of the poem
doesn’t seem good enough for those conventions, like they don’t deserve
structure or flow. Elliot wants us to feel uneasy and rattled by his
descriptions, so what better way to do it than a lack of connective rhyme and a
clatter of bumpy syllables? The sheer injection of realism and equally-sheer absence
of theatrical, grandeur phrasing mixes well with just how awfully dismal this
thing is, and I love it.
And I wasn’t overwhelmed by any of this. When I usually skim
through an, for supreme lack of a better word, emo poem, I can’t help but roll
my eyes at how self-involved and pitiful it is. But I can believe Elliot’s
interpretation here. I feel like anyone can wake up, take a glance out the
window, and feel just as despondent about how crappy today is going to be. The
human element indicative of this near-surreal experience of looking outside is powerful. This poem makes me want to look outside and see
the world as Elliot did that day. It’s so drawing, and all at once, so very
dispelling. But we don’t have any maids around here, so it might be a little
different.
- Dylan
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