by Eliot · Cluster: Dreams · Moon
Abstract
Ironic Laforguean sonnet staging Romeo and Juliet under a ‘bored but courteous moon’; the poet-puppeteer has Romeo murdered for an effective bloody climax, mocking romantic love.
Connections
Motifs: Moon, Blood, Night Themes & Concepts: Romantic Love, Disillusionment, Satire of Society Forms & Genres: Sonnet, Parody
Testo integrale / Full text
Nocturne
Romeo, grand sérieux, to importune
Guitar and hat in hand, beside the gate
With Juliet, in the usual debate
Of love, beneath a bored but courteous moon;
The conversation failing, strikes some tune
Banal, and out of pity for their fate
Behind the wall I have some servant wait,
Stab, and the lady sinks into a swoon.
Blood looks effective on the moonlit ground —
The hero smiles; in my best mode oblique
Rolls toward the moon a frenzied eye profound,
(No need of ‘Love forever?’ — ‘Love next week?’)
While female readers all in tears are drowned: —
‘The perfect climax all true lovers seek!’
Humouresque
(AFTER J. LAFORGUE)
One of my marionettes is dead,
Though not yet tired of the game —
But weak in body as in head,
(A jumping-jack has such a frame).
But this deceasèd marionette
I rather liked: a common face,
(The kind of face that we forget)
Pinched in a comic, dull grimace;
Half bullying, half imploring air,
Mouth twisted to the latest tune;
His who-the-devil-are-you stare;
Translated, maybe, to the moon.
With Limbo’s other useless things
Haranguing spectres, set him there;
‘The snappiest fashion since last spring’s,
‘The newest style, on Earth, I swear.
‘Why don’t you people get some class?
(Feebly contemptuous of nose),
‘Your damned thin moonlight, worse than gas —
‘Now in New York’ — and so it goes.
Logic a marionette’s, all wrong
Of premises; yet in some star
A hero! — Where would he belong?
But, even at that, what mask bizarre!