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Thursday 25 June 2009

My life in verse

If you get a chance, watch Robert Webb's exploration of TS Eliot's poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. Webb - of Peep Show and Mitchell and Webb fame - takes a tour round the poem, Eliot's story intertwined with Webb's own relationship with this wonderfully restless and evocative work. It's the wrong end of the day but here are the opening lines:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.

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