OT: George and Ira Eliot

So Beche-la-mer over at Two Cents (a blog that linked here, thanks very much) notes that it's both George Gershwin's and T.S. Eliot's birthday today. She wrote this:
One of these mornings
You're going to rise up singing,
Then you'll spread your wings
And you'll take to the sky.
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
And I reply thusly:
I'll build a stairway to paradise
At the first turning of the second stair
With a new step every day
I turned and saw below
I'm going to get there at any price
The same shape twisted on the banister
Step aside, I'm on my way
Under the vapor in the fetid air
I've got the blues, and up above it's so fair
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
Shoes, come on and carry me there
The deceitful face of hope and despair
I'll build a stairway to paradise
At the second turning of the second stair
With a new step every day.
One could do this all day.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's very clear
Time present and time past
Our love is here to stay
Are both perhaps present in time future
Not for a year
And time future contained in time past
But ever and a day.
If all time is eternally present
The radio and the telephone
All time is unredeemable
And the movies that we know
What might have been is an abstraction
May just be passing fancies
Remaining a perpetual possibility
And in time may go!
Only in a world of speculation.

Okay, not quite as successful, but it's a fun game!

Delicious said...

Lisa Simeone +1

beche-la-mer said...

'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
Listen to my tale of woe,
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
It's terribly sad, but true.
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
All dressed up, no place to go,
Your arms full, and your hair wet,
Each ev'ning I'm awfully blue
I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
I know I'm a winsome miss, I must win some handsome guy
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Can't go on like this,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
I could blossom out I know,
Od' und leer das Meer.
With somebody just like you.

Delicious said...

Veronica Geng (who is missed) and Garrison Keillor once wrote a casual which was the correspondence between Flannery O'Connor and S.J. Perelman. As I recall the plot, they had met at the Iowa workshop, been attracted to each other, and Perelman kept wanting O'Connor to come up to New York and write musicals.

This reminds me of that.