I don't know about some stone mason in ancient Greece having a hard time standing up to a bully, but I do see the work that he left: a broken column. The eyes, the looks of others that I fear from other people are here replaced with the sun. II) stuff that bothers me in the day to day doesn't even register in like. I) the stuff of life, the day to day, is without meaning. I gotta talk through this, and I don't think anyone that I know would care, so I will leave it here. I've been coming back to this poem for years and I never could figure out what its even trying to talk.
I can understand the returned Tommies and Doughboys perception of emptiness, in themselves, in their world. Still carrying their war around in their minds, with many of the hallmarks of home gone, so little to on which to base the foundation of new selves, I can only imagine how hard it was to see any any meaning, to feel the enthusiasm for the almost crazed pursuit of prosperity, the new, the flashy, the next big thing. American and possibly British serviceman who survived, found himself expected to pick their lives back up again, to throw themselves into an increasingly bright, hectic, world which turned the home they remembered and longed for on its head. In The Great War, “shell shock”, utterly misunderstood, was a shameful thing, and it had been just long enough since the Spanish American War for all but its survivors to have forgotten veterans don’t leave just leave their war on the battlefields. Those that the war didn’t kill, found that Fate wasn’t done playing with them after all, as, their bodies made so vulnerable, so many sickened and far too many of those died of the Spanish Influenza. Field stripping their weapons, time and again. In between, the hurry up and wait of almost everything but battle in the military. Their minds were flooded over and over again with all the the hormones the body produces to get us through crisis. Surviving those horrors, what it took from them to do so.
LaurieRose - I’m assuming based on when Eliot write it, 1925, that it has to do with the men who made it home from The Great War (WWI). Gathered on this beach of the tumid river With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Shape without form, shade without colour,
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