Howling in The Waste Land

"who bared their brains to Heaven under the EL and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,"

"who passed through universities with radient cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,"

"who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,"

"who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall," A.G.

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.---" T.S.E.

"a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdoted and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement," A.G.

"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

"I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones." T.S.E.

"who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices," A.G.

"At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting," T.S.E.

"The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar" T.S.E.

"who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg.

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality," A.G.

"After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverbation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience." T.S.E.

"Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here on can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the Mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water--" T.S.E.

"to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,"

"with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies to eat a thousand years." A.G.

HOWL by Allen Ginsberg 1956 THE WASTE LAND T.S. Eliot 1922