Prufrock and Old Possum

A recent post had the Rev. J. Alfred Prufrock at East Coker, dressed in plimsolls and meeting a merry band of assorted poets in East Coker. He commented on the season ( a cruel April) and suggested some stout to go with their lunch sandwiches.

It seems a good time to give the T.S. Eliot comedy files an airing. 

Eliot was fond of puns and parodies and practical jokes. Ezra Pound dubbed him  “Possum” for his talent at lying low, and Eliot, delighted, turned the joke into a comic mask – eventually reappearing as Old Possum in Practical Cats, the poet who played dead until he could play. 

For this post I’ll confine myself to Prufrock and keep the rich vein of The Wasteland and The Four Quartets for another time. 

J.Edgar Hoover

Here’s a parody originally published in The National Lampoon. This one will take you back in time. 

THE LOVE SONG OF J. EDGAR HOOVER
By Sean Kelly, 1972

We’d better go quietly, you and I,
When the evening is smeared against the sky
Like a witness before a House committee.

We’d better tail each other through the streets
The undercover beats
Of stakeout nights in Mafia hotels
And restaurants that front for mob cartels;
Streets that follow like a DA’s argument
Establishing intent
To overwhelm you with a leading question….
Oh, let’s go and bust a traitor
We’ll pick up the warrant later.

…

I grow old … I grow old …
Some whom I sent up for life have been paroled.
Are my agents wearing sideburns? Who dared to say impeach?
I shall give communion breakfast my Commie-menace speech.
I have heard canaries singing, each to each.

I don’t think any more will sing for me.

I have seen them burning draft cards in the park
Burning the files of bureaus and committees,
The wind is black with burning flags and cities.

We have, played with fire, bringing down the heat
To smother reds and blacks in screens of smoke
Till human torches touch us, and we croak.

There’s more 

Lit Crit in Verse

This is not parody from C.S.Lewis, but rather literary criticism is verse form

It’s sceptic’s take on a evening sky like a patient etherized upon a table.:

“I don’t believe one person in a million, under any emotional distress, would see an evening like that,” Lewis wrote Katherine Farrer.

So the  literary scholar and intellectual put on his bluff ordinary bloke voice to respond with a verse of his own:

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening—any evening—would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.

Lavatory Humor

Professor Prufrock

J.Alfred Prufrock Grades Papers

Do I dare to give an “F”
To my student, Amber Luck,
Who does not give a fuck?
I’m always out of breath
When I lecture them on death,
And my eyes trail the floor
Discussing poems of amor.
Do I suggest an “Incomplete?”
Shall we privately meet
To correct the wrongs
She imposed on Song of Songs?
Do I consult the dean?
All four of them, and all green?
Who gives a fuck
About Amber Luck
Who cannot write?
And yet—when I lie in bed at night,
Letting poems run through my head
Amber is the name, instead.

Tomorrow I teach World War One,
And all the slaughtering that was done,
And how it afflicted the minds
Of brilliant poets like me,
Who pull down the blinds
And weep alone in the nursery.
The war inspired poets to write “fuck,”
And I will make it clear to Amber Luck
That her attitude belongs to history.
I don’t see her as a mystery.
I only see her as a student in my class,
Another chair and another ass,
As the dean of recruitment and enrollment says.

– Scarriett editors

And who has described male isolation, alienation, and social anxiety better than T,S,Eliot. Here it is updated for the internet era:

The Incel Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like an equal redistribution of sexual resources.
Let us go, through certain half-considered tweets
and form tedious arguments
about entitlement.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Maya Angelou.

The sex robot that rubs its boobs against my cargo pants,
The sex robot that rubs its latex mouth against my cargo pants,
Licked its tongue into corners and pleats
From which human females retreat,
Powered down, and went to sleep.

– Juliana Gray