Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm David Kern, and today's Tuesday,

September 26th, 2003. Today's poem is by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Stern's Elliot, who was born on this day

in 1888. So while Sean did share a poem with you by Elliot earlier this month, we can't bypass the man's

birthday without sharing one of his poems. Of course, he lived until 1965 and was not just a poet.

He was also an essayist, a playwright, a critic. He worked in publishing and he was an editor.

And he is one of the most important figures of modernist literature, one of the most important poets of the 20th century.

You probably know him for poems like the Love Song of Jay Alfred Proofrock,

The Hollow Men, the Four Quartet, Ash Wednesday, and of course the wasteland,

for which he is best known.

In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in literature, among many other

awards that he received throughout his career. The poem that I'm going to read today is called

Rhapsody on a Winter Night. This is one of his more early poems. It's a bit long, so I'm going

to keep my comments to a minimum, so I'll say, before I read it, just keep an eye on place and time,

because for all his seeming obfuscation in his poetry,

Elliot does give us a pretty consistent sense of time and place in this poem,

which you can kind of grip onto as you're listening to it when it gets a little bit out there, so to speak.

So here is Rhapsody on a winter night. I'll read it once, offer some very brief comments, and then read it a second time.

Here we go.

12 o'clock, along the reaches of the street held in a lunar synthesis, whispering lunar incantations dissolve the floors of memory,

and all its clear relations, its divisions and precisions, every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum,

and through the spaces of the dark midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half past one, the street lamp sputtered. The street lamp muttered. The street lamp muttered. The streetlamp said,

...