so I'm trying to write a paper on The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (which I'm enjoying probably more than any normal person should) and I kind of want to write about the common themes it shares with Quadrophenia. kdjfasdfasjdfhaskdf why must I be like this?
seriously though. it's mainly the last section of the poem/the last song on the album, and both have this recurring motif of water and rain bringing life, and this sudden climactic thunderstorm at the end - here:
"And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain"
- the waste land, section five: "what the thunder said"
"Only love
Can bring the rain
That makes you yearn to the sky
Only love
Can bring the rain
That falls like tears from on high
Love, reign o'er me
On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain
I can't sleep and I lay and I think
The night is hot and black as ink
Oh God, I need a drink of cool, cool rain"
- "love, reign o'er me"
well, now Blogger won't let me get out of italics, which is a pain. but do you see? I wonder if Pete Townshend knew he was evoking one of the most famous works of epic modernist poetry when he wrote this shit.
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