#that he was happiest before he came to think of her as vulgar & resented himself for wanting her
Text
A Cooking Egg
by T.S. Eliot
En l'an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beues
Pipit sate upright in her chair
Some distance from where I was sitting;
Views of the Oxford Colleges
Lay on the table, with the knitting.
Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,
Her grandfather and great great aunts,
Supported on the mantelpiece
An Invitation to the Dance.
. . . . .
I shall not want Honour in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney
And have talk with Coriolanus
And other heroes of that kidney.
I shall not want Capital in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond:
We two shall lie together, lapt
In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.
I shall not want Society in Heaven,
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
Her anecdotes will be more amusing
Than Pipit's experience could provide.
I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me …
. . . . .
But where is the penny world I bought
To eat with Pipit behind the screen?
The red-eyed scavengers are creeping
From Kentish Town and Golder's Green;
Where are the eagles and the trumpets?
Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.
Over buttered scones and crumpets
Weeping, weeping multitudes
Droop in a hundred A.B.C.'s.
#this poem is from the same era as prufrock but isn’t as well known#it's a shame because i could talk about it for hours#once you've read and explicated it within a framework of literary & historical & biographical context you can have fun interpreting it#sometimes i'll read it with trans goggles on#works like syncing dark side of the moon to the wizard of oz#it's not just about the title--the narrator is somebody who is indefinitely postponing transition. the inanity of hatching into a dull bird#he is assuring himself that when he dies none of it will matter. he won't feel ugly or lonely or bored or stupid#but the dismissal of pipit and her simplicity pivots into the bittersweet realization that he's given her up for nothing.#that he was happiest before he came to think of her as vulgar & resented himself for wanting her#the world will end all the same and all he'll ever have is joylessness and the absence of pipit#t.s. eliot#poetry#i read much of the night and go south in the winter
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