A Cooking Egg (by T.S. Eliot)

T.S. Eliot
A Cooking Egg
[from Poems, 1920]
En l'an trentiesme de mon age
Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beucs ...
Pipit sat 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
* * * * *





Thanks for putting up this rather obscure Eliot poem. Don't think I've ever read it before. Not Tommy's best poem, to be sure; but the Sidney/kidney rhyme is a loud echo of Laforgue, the fin-de-siecle French poet who so much fired young Tommy's imagination, and it's great to see this influence at work. Thanks kindly!
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Thank you, Willie! I'm woefully ignorant of Laforgue - now you've got me wanting to investigate.
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Why am I so afraid of depth?
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