MUSIC

The Arcade Fire

The story the Arcade Fire tell on Funeral starts in the middle, in mid-sentence, a sign that the story is bigger than the music, began before it, and will continue after it. Maybe it is the middle of the night. Certainly the music seems to have just woken up. It floats in from far away: some strings, then fingers wandering across piano keys, looking for the way, before an electric guitar-distant and buzzing through a wide, empty space-clears the way for Win Butler. He is alone in a world of darkness and winter, talking about what he's seen and how it feels: " . . . and if the snow buries my, my neighborhood/And if my parents are crying, then I'll dig a tunnel from my window to yours."

"Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" may be a dream, or it may be the reality of winter in Montreal, where it can snow six months a year, and where underground tunnels connect downtown. As the music heats up, what comes next is part fairy tale, part parable: a girl climbs out her chimney, meets Butler in the center of the city. They let their hair grow long, they live in the snow, their skin gets thick. She is the golden hymn in his head, the song he's been reaching for. They have babies but have forgotten how to name them. Instead, they have only memories, the memories of the bedrooms of those who are gone: parents, friends, the image of those bedrooms in their minds, clear as can be. Funeral is a remarkable record, hard to hear at first, then hard to stop hearing. It is an indie-rock cause célèbre, fiercely praised, defended, and protected, most visibly by the impassioned bloggers who are transfixed by both the disarming sincerity of the record's artistic ambitions and the septet's wild live shows-neither unusual in indie land-and Funeral's backstory, which is.

In the time leading up to its release, the band members lost two grandparents and an aunt. They found themselves constantly at memorial services, and then they found that their songs were a way to transmute their grief. Funeral returns continually to death-even the album closer, about looking out at the countryside from the backseat of a car-but also to religion, love, babies, kids playing in the snow, and community. The music-mostly recorded at Hotel2Tango, a proudly analog studio in Montreal's former Jewish ghetto that gave Funeral's songs living, breathing presence-is as emotionally unfettered as it is carefully constructed. It reaches back to '80s bands like the Cure, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Violent Femmes, and Jane's Addiction, who strummed their way through catharsis after catharsis, a sound that has become in recent years a new classicism. The Arcade Fire stretch that sound until it is both older and newer, shading it with the gloom of folk songs and the yowling urgency of indie rock. Arcade Fire songs are often called "operatic," possibly because they are full of old-world touches like violin, viola, accordion, and xylophone, and possibly because they can be oddly decentered, swelling and shifting with an oceanic pulse, spreading out as far as the eye can see, then leaping into furious rock codas at will. The vocal melodies tend toward chants, yelps, and incantations.

As much as the talk about death and bad weather and the darkness being chased away by light that pours out of our eyes, our hearts, our hands, what gives the Arcade Fire their singular charge is that they practice what they preach: family and community. Butler, a former religious-studies major, married singer and multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassagne last August, a month before Funeral was released. Butler's younger brother, Will, plays bass. In a way that every band can, the Arcade Fire provide a community for their fans, who can find in both the album packaging-quaint illustrations that evoke the 19th century-and in lyrics like "there's some spirit I used to know, that's been drowned out by the radio" typical indie invocations of the homespun and the handmade as ways of fighting off alienation. But the Arcade Fire also offer something deeper: an example of how to navigate the complexities, good and bad, that life inevitably throws at you as you get older. Death. Marriage. Children. A way of making a future. Not an easy one. "If the children don't grow up," cries Butler on Funeral's anthemic "Wake Up," "our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up." He sounds so wide open to his pain he could be John Lennon circa Plastic Ono Band, finally acknowledging that his fans were in effect his own kids.

"LITERATURE"

Ayn Rand's books were favourites of mine while I was a teenager, Fountainhead and We the Living especially. One of these days, I'd like to reread them to see what I think now.

From The New York Sun:

To call Ayn Rand, the high priestess of the human will, a mere force of nature would to her have been an insult as well as a cliche. But how else to describe this extraordinary, maddening, and indestructible individual? Born a century ago this year into the flourishing bourgeoisie of glittering, doomed St. Petersburg, Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was to triumph over revolution, civil war, Lenin's dictatorship, an impoverished immigrant existence, and bad reviews in the New York Times to become a strangely important figure in the history of American ideas.

Even the smaller details of Rand's life come with the sort of epic implausibility found in - oh, an Ayn Rand novel. On her first day of looking for work in Hollywood, who gives her a lift in his car? Cecil B. DeMille. Of course he does. Frank Lloyd Wright designs a house for her. Years later, when she's famous, the sage of selfishness, ensconced in her Murray Hill eyrie, a young fellow by the name of Alan Greenspan becomes a member of the slightly creepy set that sits at the great woman's feet. Apparently he went on to achieve some prominence in later life. To Rand, none of this would really have mattered (well, the fame was nice). To her, an intensely Russian intellectual despite everything, it was ideas that counted. They were everything. When, after nearly 50 years, her beloved long-lost youngest sister, Nora, made it over from the USSR, they promptly fell out - over politics, naturally. Poor Nora was on her way within six weeks, back to the doubtless more easygoing embrace of Leonid Brezhnev.

Scarred by her Soviet experiences, Rand was a woman on a mission. She couldn't stop: not for her sister, not for anyone. She had plenty to say, and she said it - again, and again, and again. She wrote, she lectured, she hectored, she harangued. Words flowed, how they flowed, too much sometimes, too insistent often, but infinitely preferable to the silence of the Soviet Union that she had left behind. And somehow her work has endured in the country she made her own. Her creed of ego and laissez-faire, and the reception it won, was one of the more interesting - and encouraging - cultural phenomena of mid-20th-century America. It has persisted, lasting longer, even, than the vast, daunting paragraphs that mark her prose style. Just over a decade ago, "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) was voted Americans' most influential novel in a joint poll conducted by the Book-of-the-Month club and the Library of Congress.

Hers is a remarkable story, and I find it curious that one of the only publications being brought out to commemorate the 100th-birthday girl - besides new printings of the novels by Plume - is Jeff Britting's new, very very brief account (Overlook Duckworth, 144 pages, $19.95). The latest in the series of Overlook Illustrated Lives, it's too short to do Rand much justice; any reader already familiar with Rand's life won't learn much. Biographies in this series are intended as overviews rather than something more comprehensive. The author is an archivist at the Ayn Rand institute, the associate producer of an Oscar-nominated documentary about Rand, and obviously a keeper of the flame. Thus Mr. Britting has little to say about the romantic entanglements, more Peyton Place than Galt's Gulch, that devastated Rand's circle in later years. Most notably, Rand had an affair with her chosen intellectual heir, Nathaniel Brandon. While both Rand's husband and the wife of the intellectual heir agreed (sort of) to this arrangement, it added further emotional complications to what was, given Rand's prominence, a surprisingly hermetic, claustrophobic little world, one best described in "The Passion of Ayn Rand" (Bantam Dell) - the compelling, and sympathetic, biography of Rand written by, yes, the intellectual heir's ex-wife. As I said, Peyton Place. Closed, neurotic environments filled with true believers are the hallmark of a cult, and there's a good case to be made that that's exactly what Rand was running. Take a look at the way in which she treated her acolytes: angry excommunications, overbearing diktats, dramatic interventions, and, disappointing in one who preached self-determination, rather too much fuhrer prinzip.

The cult-or-not controversy goes unmentioned in Mr. Britting's book. What a reader will find, particularly in the excellent selection of illustrations, is a real sense of how Rand's life related to her novels. One glance at her Hollywood-handsome husband, and the rugged succession of steely supermen who dominate her fiction make more sense ("All my heroes will always be reflections of Frank"). Rand herself, alas, was no beauty; her glorious heroines, ridiculously gorgeous, impossibly named, remarkably lithe, are less the template for - as some allege - a sinister eugenic agenda than the stuff of Ayn's randy dreams garnished with a dollop of Art Deco kitsch. The first, extraordinarily violent, coupling in "The Fountainhead" of Howard Roark with Dominique Francon is not a general prescription for the relationship between the sexes but merely Rand's own erotic fantasy ("wishful thinking," she once announced, to the cheers of a delighted crowd). Likewise, her sometimes-overwrought style is no more than - well, judge this sentence from "Atlas Shrugged" for yourself: "She looked at the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building rising in the distance - and then she thought she understood: these people hated Jim because they envied him." Call Dr. Freud. If sex in Rand's fiction can be savage, so is argument. Her sagas deal in moral absolutes, her protagonists are the whitest of knights or the blackest of villains, caricatures of good or evil lacking the shadings of gray that make literature, and life, so interesting. Yet "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," at least, have a wild, lunatic verve that sweeps all before them. Like Busby Berkeley, the Chrysler Building, or a Caddy with fins, they are aesthetic disasters, very American aesthetic disasters, which somehow emerge as something rather grand.

There is plenty in Rand to make a modern reader queasy, though you would not know so from Mr. Britting's worshipful text. For example, there is something to the claim that like so many of the intellectuals, left or right, of her time she succumbed to the cruder forms of social Darwinism. For a woman who worshiped man, Rand did not always seem that fond of mankind. But the accusation by Whittaker Chambers in National Review that there was a whiff of the gas chamber about her writings is wrong. Rand lived in an era of stark ideological choices; to argue in muted, reasonable tones was to lose the debate. As a graduate of Lenin's Russia, she knew that the stakes were high, and how effective good propaganda could be. Rand's nonfiction may have a greater claim to intellectual respectability, but it was the lurid, occasionally harsh, simplicities of her novels that would deliver her message to the mass audience she believed was out there. She was right. Her key insight was to realize that there was an appetite among Americans for a moral case for capitalism. In a restless age that believed in the Big Answer, neither historical tradition nor utilitarian notions of efficiency would suffice. Ayn Rand gave Americans that case, perhaps not the best case, but a case, and she knew how to sell it.

The establishment always disapproved. Critics sneered. Academics jeered. The publishers Macmillan turned down "Anthem" (1938), saying that Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, "did not understand socialism." Oh, but she did, and so did those millions of Americans who bought her books, books that played their part in ensuring that the dull orthodoxies of collectivism never prevailed here. The last image in Mr. Britting's biography is of an exultant Rand speaking at a conference in New Orleans in 1981, the final public appearance of this magnificent, brilliant oddball. Her hosts tried to lure her there with the promise of payment in gold coins and travel in a private rail car. Needless to say, she accepted.



THE COMPLETE CARTOONS OF THE NEW YORKER
Edited by Robert Mankoff.
656 pp.
Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers.
$60.

Now that America's urbane sophisticates have had to acknowledge their status as a fringe group so out of touch with mainstream moral values, tournament bass fishing, Nascar and Christian rock that their electoral and cultural clout is marginally less than that of Casper, Wyo., legions of self-doubting highbrows are asking themselves how this decline into decadence occurred. Because of what enfeebling bad habit did the proud and potent thinking class that gave us F.D.R. and J.F.K. fade into a cynical, ironic, smirking bunch of spiritual weaklings headed up by Al Franken and Michael Moore? Was the problem attending movies instead of church? Deserting Burger King for Whole Foods Market? No, I've concluded. The blame lies elsewhere. The seduction of America's elites by the vices of humanism and skepticism can only be blamed on the New Yorker cartoon, an agent of corruption more insidious than LSD or the electric guitar.

For proof of this theory, please obtain and study ''The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker,'' a coffee-table book so broad and thick that it doesn't need a table under it because it's its own table -- just bolt on legs. And the book might have been even larger, its editor, Robert Mankoff, writes. Of more than 68,000 pieces of art that could have been included in its pages, only about 2,000 have been printed on paper, while the rest are reproduced on two CD's attached to the inside of the front cover. The book is an astonishing object, still. The thought that all (or even just all the best) New Yorker cartoons can be gathered in one volume means that the set isn't infinite after all. It's like finding out there are only so many sad songs or only so many attractive blondes.

The subversion of ruling-class piety by wit dates back to the mid 1920's and a cartoon by Peter Arno, the form's first master. A scantily-dressed flapper with heels like black daggers, endless legs and perfect posterior cleavage is pressing herself into the padded abdomen of a stuffy older gentleman in tails. He's dancing, but she's on the verge of copulating. ''Good God, woman! Think of the social structure!'' Funny? Sort of. Not really. It's something else; a smirky, gently cynical something else that will characterize the form for decades to come, right up until the present. The key phrase in this instance is ''social structure,'' of course, which the fellow has presumably picked up from some asinine conversation at his club or some best-selling history of Western Man, and the key visual detail is his mustache, so walrusy and pompous and well-brushed. The girl stands for jazzy Freudian libido, the man for repressed Victorian lust. Hers is the irresistible new attitude, and all the old gent can do to hold it off -- in her, but chiefly in himself -- is sputter high-minded jargon.

By the 1930's and 40's, the New Yorker cartoon had adopted two basic modes. First, it made fun of its readers' aspirations -- social, intellectual, economic and romantic -- by satirizing their language, their professions, their pastimes, their dress and their physical mannerisms. This was the humor of self-recognition, but also of self-congratulation, since a fool who can laugh at his folly is not a fool but something rarer and finer: a self-ironist. Under drawings of dance parties, cruise ships, tennis matches, clothing stores and theaters the artists set captions -- usually bits of dialogue -- that showed up their speakers as posing, posturing, preening, pedantic pretenders. James Thurber, whose influential innovation was to draw as crudely as a 5-year-old, making only the most cursory effort to individualize his figures (because, really, why bother; we're all just talking apes), gives us two couples seated at a table, holding up glasses of dark liquid. The fanciest of the drinkers -- he wears a bow tie -- says: ''It's a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.'' Thus did the wine snob get his donkey tail, and his kind has worn it ever since.

The second, less common species of cartoon relied more heavily on visual gags and traded in featherweight absurdism. Two politicians and an engineer stand at the edge of a massive and sweeping Western dam. ''The other side!'' one of the politicians bellows. ''The water's supposed to be on the other side.'' In a mute, seven-panel sketch by Otto Soglow, a generic male figure appears first in a crib, then in a playpen, then behind various grates and fences, and then, in the next-to-last image, inside a bank cage under a sign: ''Receiving Teller.'' The motif of bold vertical lines pays off with a picture of the poor everyman in jail, probably as punishment for embezzlement, the sole act of rebellion in his dry and pent-up life.

Toward the 50's this second, more graphic, laconic style started to predominate. The captions got shorter, or vanished altogether, while the drawings grew louder, cuter, trickier. The Jazz Age, its Great Depression hangover and World War II were all behind the country, and the cartoons seemed to lack a subject for a while, substituting trickiness for punch. This enervated spirit of the early cold war is crystallized in a creation by Chon Day: A pudgy, tie-wearing nonentity of a man holds a pistol to one side of his head while plugging a finger in his opposite ear. He doesn't want to hear the shot, he doesn't really want to fire the shot -- he just wants a respite, a little peace. He's spent. (The cartoon rather closely reprises an earlier piece done by Saul Steinberg in 1946 that shows another suited sad sack aiming a revolver not at his temple but at an apple perched on his bald scalp.)

The morbid streak that emerged around this time made a pop-culture sensation of Charles Addams. Memories of ''The Addams Family,'' the campy TV show spun off from his work, make it hard to assess his cartoons' original impact. They certainly didn't resemble their predecessors. To begin with, they were darker in hue, their objects and characters often framed in a barren, timeless gloom that's closer to Sartre and Beckett than Hollywood horror films. Instead of the dapper, devilish good fun offered by the TV show, a disquieting cruelty keeps cropping up. In a 1949 cartoon, an automobile pulling a travel trailer is parked alongside a high, sheer cliff. A man in a raincoat stands next to the car, facing the trailer's door, which faces the cliff. ''Oh, darling,'' he says, ''can you step out for a moment?'' Gothic fun-house spookiness? Not quite. The tone of blandly vicious marital malice feels troublingly real. By dividing the collection into decades that begin and end at the five-year mark, and by adding brief topical and historical essays, the editor seeks to convince us that the cartoons represent a progression of some sort linked to current events and social trends. One of the better essays, by John Updike (the other two good ones are Calvin Trillin's and Ian Frazier's), notes a lag between the subjects of the cartoons and the headlines of the day, particularly in regard to heated issues such as civil rights. In the decade from 1955 to 1964, Updike observes, only one cartoon features a black face.

That's more than a lag; it suggests that the cartoons were, for the most part, a refuge from reality -- or an antidote, like a stiff cocktail -- rather than a trailing reflection. Just because more and more drawings included TV sets and other period accouterments doesn't mean they engaged the the larger culture at any interesting level -- with some exceptions. One work of art, yes, art, by William Steig (who, with Steinberg, was one of the magazine's licensed weirdos) uses shaky psychedelic lines that thin and thicken and curl around themselves to give us a lumpy, not-quite-human creature standing glumly under a tall flower. ''The Burden of Self-Consciousness.'' It's perfect. It levels the era's turtlenecked existentialism with one decisive comic blow, but after its point is made it keeps on moving, burrowing through the eye to the subconscious and lodging there like an abstract parasite. Depending on the reader's age, a point will come in the book when the cartoons stop representing The New Yorker's history, let alone American society's, and start recalling bits of his own life. For me, this happened on Page 382 with a William Hamilton cartoon from 1972. I was 9 years old when I first saw it, growing up in a Minnesota village that had changed in four or five short years from a sleepy ma-and-pa farm town to a hip colony for outdoorsy Twin City professionals. This new crowd, which included my parents, was on a tear just then, drinking, dancing and divorcing. When my parents threw one of their smoky, noisy parties (many featuring fondue) a terrible sense of moral peril floated upstairs to my bedroom. Please save us, God. My fear that my family, and all of civilization, was about to collapse in some swinging, groovy orgy that would leave me and all other young children homeless merged somehow with certain objects: the bottle of Smirnoff vodka in our pantry, the copy of ''The Happy Hooker'' in my father's sock drawer and, most frightening of all, the stack of magazines beside the toilet in our downstairs bathroom.

I'd opened one of them once and seen a drawing -- angular, snappy and very mod in precisely the manner I found so menacing -- of a strange man and a woman seated in a restaurant in front of a crowded, lively bar. The man had long hair, big glasses, a droopy mustache and a flowery wide tie. The woman had a plume of frizzy hair, chunky earrings and startlingly thin arms. He was leaning back, smoking. She was drinking wine. She was saying something, but I didn't get the joke. It hardly mattered. The picture's feeling, its vibe, was disturbing enough. It haunted me. Seeing it again, I got the chills. (''It's hard to believe,'' the forgotten caption reads, ''that someday we'll be just so much nostalgia.'')

In the 80's and afterward, the cartoons tended to loosen up and grow freewheeling, branching out from ingenious visual jokes and the light comedy of upper-middle-class manners into more idiosyncratic terrain. Roz Chast's 1981 three-panel piece titled ''The Three Certainties'' begins with a faux-naïf skull and crossbones, ''Death.'' A check made out to the I.R.S. and surrounded by disembodied angels' wings signifies ''Taxes.'' The final panel shows a clown in a curly wig and a ruffed collar -- ''Bobo.'' Get it? Of course you don't. Such humor can't be gotten, in the old sense, only inexplicably chuckled at. Chast and her quirky contemporary counterparts practice a sort of comic expressionism that depends for its effects on the reader's ability to recognize, identify with and mysteriously anticipate the habitual, signature movements of individual artists' minds. The most one can say of a good Chast cartoon is that it's deeply Chast-like. And that's sufficient.

Such recent cartoons don't make a point, they are a point -- a sign, perhaps, that the genre has reached maturity. It's playing with its own traditions now and milking the expectations of a fan base whose tastes have become slightly jaded, even perverse. The appearance of this encyclopedic anthology, though it's nominally linked to the The New Yorker's 80th anniversary next year, can only feel a bit final and funereal, just as the volume's slablike heft makes it feel like a tombstone. And though it would be foolish to suggest the medium has run its course and that renaissance and revival aren't still possible (America might elect another Democratic Senate someday, too) one does sense that the cartoons have done the job they first set out to do: purging any lingering puritanism from their relatively well-heeled audience and replacing it with a smart-aleck self-awareness that suddenly -- just look around -- feels useless, lonely and crippling. But still amusing.



MUSIC

IRON AND WINE, "Jezebel": An artfully expanded version of a song that first surfaced on a Sam Beam demo circulating among the faithful as 09/20/02. Don't let the melody's passing similarity to Jewel's "Who Will Save Your Soul" put you off -- this is as memorable as anything he has ever committed to tape, officially or otherwise.

BECK, "E-Pro": If you're a sucker for big, dumb guitar riffs and choruses that go "Na, na, na, na, na, na, na," this is a nigh on perfect choice as the first single from the man's return to musical extroversion.

Other Tracks:
Recoil - Ani Difranco
Georgia on my mind - Willie Nelson
Twilight - Elliott Smith
Such Great Heights - Iron & Wine
867-5309 - Tommy Tutone
I'm from further north than you - The Wedding Present
You've been loved - Joseph Arthur
By the time it gets dark - Yo la Tengo
Virginia - Vic Chesnutt

POETRY

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T.S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains.
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys.
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me.
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!']
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!']
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep. . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.'

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
``That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.''
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.



FILM

Recommended:


Talk Cinema: Take My Eyes


Alias


Hotel Rwanda