I have written several pieces themed around art, my love for which goes right back to my schooldays and the course I then took in the History of Art at uni. That was what was known as a ‘minor’ subject, as my  main studies were in English and American Literature, and it struck me that I have never written about that. It feels like its time is due.

My most recent post on art was Some Art, And A Tune which, thanks to WordPress featuring it in their Freshly Pressed section, has zoomed to the top of my all time likes and viewings ratings. Hopefully you, including those who have joined since then, will enjoy some thoughts on my main degree subject too. I closed that post with the comment “Art, music and literature: they go together, don’t they?” and today I’m sharing something else which makes part of the same connection.

I immediately found a big difference when I decided to take this on: it is easy to show a painting, less so to talk about a work of literature. One of the most obvious things I could have written about is Wuthering Heights – I love the book but hate the song, and how would I cover a novel of several hundred pages to set the scene anyway? So, my first tentative toe into the literature waters is about a poem that I studied at uni. Even now I am making things hard for myself, as it is a long poem – six to eight pages in print editions – so I don’t have space for all of it, but let’s give it a go, shall we?

My text for today is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which was the first professionally published poem by the American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and relates the varying thoughts of its title character in a stream of consciousness. Eliot began writing it in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of his fellow American expatriate, the poet Ezra Pound. It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem chapbook entitled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917 – the header picture is its cover. At the time of its publication, the poem was considered outlandish but it is now seen as heralding a shift in poetry from late-19th-century Romanticism and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.

I’m sharing the link to Wikipedia’s article about the poem, which is very detailed, but will quote this part to give you a feel for the work:

“Its structure was heavily influenced by Eliot’s extensive reading of Dante Alighieri and makes several references to the Bible and other literary works—including William Shakespeare’s plays Henry IV Part II, Twelfth Night and Hamlet; the works of Andrew Marvell, a 17th-century metaphysical poet; and the 19th-century French Symbolists. Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as a “drama of literary anguish”, is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said “to epitomize [the] frustration and impotence of the modern individual” and “represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment”.

Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life, and lack of spiritual progress, and is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay and an awareness of ageing and mortality, the poem has become one of the most recognised works in modern literature.”

Clearly not a happy chappie! I can vaguely recall feeling slightly bamboozled by this poem when we studied it, and that I was never entirely sure that I understood everything about it, but as Eliot started writing it when he was 22, just a couple of years older than I was then, I was extremely impressed by his range of literary knowledge and the way he joins up all of those dots: he had read much more widely than I had at a similar age.

As I have said, the poem is much too long for me to share in its entirety, but if you want to read it here is the link to the 1917 text.

And here is a brief extract, which shows the poet’s musings about life, the passing of time, and how we react to that:

Afternoons & Coffee Spoons was a track on Crash Test Dummies’ album God Shuffled His Feet, and if you’d like to see the lyrics in full take this trip to genius.com for them. The song is about growing older, and contains the line

Oh-oh-oh-oh, afternoons will be measured out
Measured out, measured with
Coffee spoons and T.S. Eliot

just to make the connection for its inspiration a bit more obvious! And I also love the lines

Someday I’ll have a disappearing hairline
Someday I’ll wear pyjamas in the daytime

which refer back to one of Eliot’s observations.

The album was the band’s second and gave them their big breakthrough, reaching #1 in New Zealand, #2 in the UK (I bought it!), #5 in Australia, #9 in the US and #11 in Canada. Possibly a disappointing result for a Canadian band, but the single release of the song made up for it by peaking at #7 there, though it only got to #23 in the UK and #66 in the US. Lead vocalist Brad Roberts, who wrote the song, called it “a song about being afraid of getting old, which is a reflection of my very neurotic character.”

The music video for Afternoons & Coffeespoons was directed by Tim Hamilton and as you saw it features Brad Roberts as a patient in a hospital, with the rest of the band playing the doctors operating on him. A bored Grim Reaper passes the time smoking, talking on his mobile phone and watching the other patients as he waits for him to expire. I love the way the video ends with Roberts getting discharged, with a choreographed wheelchair dance on the hospital helipad! An uplifting end, I think, as the Grim Reaper didn’t get to do his thing and life went on.

I hope you have enjoyed this first trip into the world of literature combined with music, and if so I may do it again. For now, though, I bid you adieu until I return for Song Lyric Sunday. Take care 😊