After "Eliot"

After “Eliot”

It happened simultaneously. A new track ‘After Eliot’  from Johnny Flynn’s album ‘Country Mile’ to be released 30^th Sep, surfaced online premiering on Spin and the book reading held at ICG last week  ‘Clear light of Day’ written by Anita Desai, foregrounded the main theme of time as destroyer and preserver from Eliots’ poems. T.S Eliot continues to drive authors,  pop stars , playwrights alike.  What is it about him that fires minds and creatives can’t seem to leave his work alone?  Recreating, adapting and reconstructing it over and over. 

Bob Dylan, the greatest legend in pop and rock, set a precedent for literate songwriters,  when in 1965, he wrote and sang his song ‘Desolation Row’ inspired by T. S Eliot.  Heavy with allusions and classical references, the song formed the last track of his sixth studio album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’.  Rock and pop age could also be a meaningful montage of competing voices endeavoring to seize on the raw material of life:  its uselessness and meaninglessness.  Eliot shunned the modern world yearning for old patterns but his writing was modernist when he wrote The Wasteland, The Hollow Men , The Four Quartets and The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock.  The poems are full of shadows- whispering voices, a heap of broken images, pealing bells-thrumming engines, shattering noise-deafening silences – the imagery appeals to the blood pounding minds of youth. When students read Eliot in their course in English literature, the doom and desolation fires the minds with pleasurable dread.  The heavy pungent phrases like "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" or "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper" tells them that the chaos and decadence they see around themselves is true and that Eliot is directing them to the core where all is not right but the light is also out of the same darkness and chaos. They eye the storm and test its strength through their verses of allusion, pastiche and impersonation sourcing life from dance bars, streets, drug dens, political rallies, war ravaged lands of antiquity to the last carnage.

Anita’s book Clear Light of Day reads like a well-orchestrated musical composition. She quotes poets sixteen times through her narrative, which is divided into four untitled parts paralleling Eliot’s Four Quartets. The poems Burnt Norton and The Wasteland are intricately woven into the narrative to foreground the themes of continuity and change and that time past and time future, dwells in time present. That deliverance from agony and pain is in intuitive meditative symbols of unity through music where all is one. Other books that I can think of now are Catch 22, Lolita and Stephen King’s books.

PJ Harvey’s latest album ‘Let England Shake’ with videos by Seamus Murphy is an experiment in poetry about the timeless cycle of conflict in England and the world. The tensions, rivalry, power structures and grotesque imagery of war ravaged England  It took her two years to get the words right, based on her research of works of TS Eliot, Harold Pinter....To offset the weight of the gruesome words, the music is hauntingly beautiful,  imbuing the  poetry with great energy. Gone is her gutted moan, she strums and sings on her autoharp finding the right chord to carry weighted lyrics of her Eliot-driven laborious honest research.

  

How is our glorious country ploughed?
Not by iron ploughs
Our land is ploughed by tanks and feet,
Feet Marching.I've seen and done things I want to forget;
I've seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat.

Strains of guitar interrupted by war trumpet charge….. Tracks in ‘Let England Shake’ are :  Let England Shake, The Last Living Rose, The Glorious Land, The Words That Maketh Murder, All And Everyone, On Battleship Hill, England, In The Dark Places, Bitter Branches, Hanging In The Wire, Written On The Forehead, The Colour Of The Earth – it is like reading a book.

Johnny Flynn does not so much as pick lines from Eliot’s poetry but surely the uneasy, discomforting atmosphere. If we were to do a workshop on modern poetry in the lyrics of literate pop songwriters like we did do one on Bob Dylan and Bob Marley an year back at Gitanjali Gallery, we shall find echoes, continuations, parody, mimetic  of  Eliot’s without doubt.
“Long live TS Eliot – The Pop Star’s Poet!”