Nature defiled by the unreal city

The violet hour or l'heure bleue is that time between dusk and twilight. The day's magical end. A time for assignations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9qrE91d4bM

Anthropomorphizing April is traditional trope : April showers bring May flowers; March comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb, June is busting out all over. April cannot be cruel, nor can it breed, mix memory and desire, or stir roots and rain. April is symbolic the rebirth promised eternally by spring; it isn't cruel at all. Antithetically, April is a busy provider.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIPjBQ48fC8

In myth Philomel was raped by her brother-in-law. She was turned into the nightingale. But only the males sing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK2_bcQcoD4

The drowned Phlebas saw eternity in the sea.

http://crossroadstarot.com/Images/10swords.jpg

Couplet to complete the first riddle of rock and water. It's like time and money, you usually have one but not both at the same time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69okNRPPQvU

He is somewhat fixated on hair (see part 2). Here the hair is a musical instrument. I love the imagery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py3w5fttedA

Hyacinths feed into the death motif inasmuch as they are short-lived flowers. They rise from bulbs, making them self-sufficient, perhaps hyacinth girl is also. self-sufficient. Later Eliot invokes "the violet hour," I picture this flower in pink or violet. Maybe a reach.

http://yesofcorsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Hyacinth-Wallpaper-HQ.jpg

The children's song, an early memory and a wistful reference to lost youth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uubCd-iqCo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbUCW6LO-WE

To imagine maternal anything is to conjure up the memory of one's own mother.

Is this the hum of the masses, the throng she is trying to elbow her way through? Or is humming foolishness?

Marble is the medium for headstones.

Repeated from earlier, as are slippers, papers. There's a cycle, birth to death—or end of an episode.

Perhaps meant to rhyme with bury. One of many buried, hurried "couplets" in this poem. (Others: Lily, Willie; size, surprise).

Don't even care what this might mean, the tumbling imagery of paper (much finer in the 20s), a bare shoulder, breath on glowing skin is like a dream.

Is Emily the housemaid who hears bits of conversations through a swinging kitchen door?

Here this phrase seems so literal, not a stand in for "anyway." Never the less. Always the greater.

There's a matrimonial—or domestic— dialogue knit into this poem. Here's the "I do" again, backward. References throughout to place settings, canning, pressing, thimbles, table linen...

"Familiarity" is the fulcrum of this poem/statement. Torment and hatred in balance with friendship and advice. A parable for the presidential campaign of 2016,

Interesting to me that the author would use "that" and "which" to modify "plums." For variety? The replacement of "which" with "that" seems like a fairly recent evolution of language usage. He uses "and" just to have another syllable. The line break could have implied a comma.

This metaphor makes me think of the stark pinkness of human flesh rising above the black asphalt or concrete of the station concourse.

Dans une gare du Métro. We would more likely write "In a Metro station" in English.

Where foul wins out over fair, and course beats the refined, it is necessary to cultivate a tough (not rough) side, a spine.

The rose's thorns make her less approachable, less likely to be petted by a tending hand.

Sikly, as in sickly?, or silky? In any case, a mignonette is a sauce, a lovely vinaigrette with shallots prepared as a condiment for oysters. Is it the dew collected in the blossoms of the delphinium?

The antithesis of her first line: Love is not all. But it is of such value, she wouldn't trade it for peace or essential nourishment.

They say Bill Gates is much taller when he stands on his wallet. To be rich is to be deaf to criticism.

If you can't manage to die young and leave a beautiful corpse, decide to live long, serve well, and be revered in death.

Would Frost make a religious reference? It is possible to read this as a reference to a diety, whose church is in the village.

'Sweep of easy' those nice long Es and sibilant Ss. This description makes the snow seem soft and inviting like a feather bed.

The poet's protagonist is calling the generation(s) after hers a pack of pussies! She sees them as physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to those of her ilk who not only bore 12 children, but managed a teeming household, it's garden, it's kitchen, and it's infirmary. Imagine 70 years of marriage: I'm perfectly happy as a dilettante.

Auld Lang Syne, the Robert Burns lyric set to a traditional Scottish tune, was published in 1799. The title/chorus translates roughly to "for old time's sake" and acknowledges "a cup of kindness" raised to those friends and loved ones who have gone before. Here the protagonist is toasting his homecoming to an isolated refuge above a town where he is no longer welcome.

More than youth, "blood" indicates vigorous good health and pigmented skin (that fades and dulls with age).

The clock is ticking on the narrator's madness. As the story progresses and they get down to three weeks, two weeks, a day, you feel the spiral shorten.

So clearly a prison or asylum cell on first read: the bars, the rings against the walls, the wallpaper scratched off to the height of an adult against the wall above the bed. Foreshadowing: At this point we don't quite know her story.

A metaphor for rage: boiling blood. At best he wishes to maintain his anger at a simmer, which is just a degree below boiling.

This description of a feeling of otherness is underscored by the yin and yang of twos - "second-sight," double-consciousness," "twoness," "two souls," "two thoughts," "two unreconciled strivings," "two warring ideals."

Boys and their toys: the essay considers technology virtuous (as in prodigious and moral), supernaturally powerful, sensual. mysterious (with movements imperceptible to Adams' senses), religiously significant...

irruption=invasion

Thinking about the overworked term "disruption" that is used to describe business technology today.

There's this persistent orgiastic quality to the enthusiasm for this technology which is disproportionate to Adams' comprehension of the science or engineering.

The dynamo was not just a perpetual producer of energy, but one of the first of an unending line of technologies. The precursors to Moore's Law.

"...nightmare... as destructive as... threatening to become as terrible..." exaggerations, comparing technology almost to natural disasters.

Just. Love. This.

Samuel Pierpont Langley, inventor, aviation pioneer. Harvard College grad. Egghead.

The "feed" is a reinforcement of pride, resolve (lion). The lion's coming is the fruition of what? Acceptance, resistance,

Muscled, grained like wood.

The hollow in a cave? Or the hollowed out cave-like thorax of the pig?

What is he telling us about the pig/trotter? That every last scrap of meat and flesh is used?

I picture workers' shovels lined up against a wall or pitched into the dirt looking like a bank of reeds.

I picture women in a petrified state, literally or spiritually dead.

"white sins" minor transgressions? or sins of white men?

A family? A farm team?

Maybe synecdoche; the bones and muscles represent people who need to be in shape, ready for action.

A poor homeland, West Virginia is bad enough, but "Kiss My Ass" is worse.

Vernacular use of "they" for "their." Lion is a metaphor for inner rage, inner strength, pride, courage.

Ten "out of" phrases creates a nice anaphora, gives the poem a sense of urgency and momentum with repetition.

With bearing butter, acids, and tar, the dark, oily, sometimes gritty texture of the assembly line or other manufacturing work.

Are these references to spiritual hymns? Antithesis: prostrate to upright.

So many shovels they make a "forest", like a clump of reeds along a riverbank.

Describes yearning for change, for useful, productive change.

Decay, decomposition of the landscape and neglected objects.