greykit.poetry — #1920s
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1928
[w-b-yeats]
Sailing to Byzantium
Yeats leaves the country of the young and sensual — dying generations caught in their music — and sails to the holy city of Byzantium, asking its gold-mosaic sages to gather him out of nature into the artifice of eternity, a hammered golden bird singing of what is past, or passing, or to come.
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1925
[t-s-eliot]
The Hollow Men
In five sections the hollow men inhabit death's dream kingdom — paralysed force, gesture without motion — circling the prickly pear as the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.
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1922
[t-s-eliot]
The Waste Land
Eliot's fractured masterpiece in five parts — voices from the ruins of post-war Europe, the Fisher King, the Thames, a game of chess, the fire sermon — ending in the Sanskrit peace of Shantih shantih shantih.
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1920
[t-s-eliot]
Gerontion
An old man in a dry month speaks his meditation on history, faith, and the failure of knowledge — thought without action, passion lost, a dry brain in a dry season.
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1920
[w-b-yeats]
The Second Coming
The widening gyre of history unravels ceremony and conviction; out of Spiritus Mundi a rough beast with lion body and human head slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.