Exploring The Waste Land
A poetry commentary page linked from The Waste Land, Part I, line 60


Part I
Lines 60-68

Please excuse my presumption in editing the master but I was personally having a small problem following Eliot's thoughts on lines 60-68 because of the interjection of the narrator's thoughts on death's undoing of so many into the description of the flowing crowd.

60)  Unreal City,
61)  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
62)  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
63)  I had not thought death had undone so many.
64)  Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
65)  And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
66)  Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
67)  To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
68)  With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

For my own curiosity I decided to rework this section into something more prose-like, breaking Eliot's meter and demolishing what litte rhyme scheme there was. I decided to include this on the web site because, in an examination of Eliot's writing style, you may find it useful to compare the versions. While I have both changed punctuation and reordered lines I have not changed the text. This is what I came up with:

60) Unreal City.
61) Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
62) a crowd flowed over London Bridge,
66) flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
67) to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours,
68) with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
64) Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
65) and each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
62) So many,
63) I had not thought death had undone so many.


Exploring The Waste Land
File name: pq060.html
File date: Sunday, September 29, 2002
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