Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

sound strangely American mingled in with his Cockney dialogue.

After a time his voice rather gets on your nerves, even though an impersonal tone is perhaps just right for this kind of poetry. Much of Eliot's violent and intellectually lush symbolism really is a way of escaping from the whirr and bang of feelings into an impersonal, almost codified moral and aesthetic order; and his reading, like his poetry, too often has the deadness and woodenness of perfect peace. Even when Eliot reads a passage like this from his New Hampshire "Landscape":

Children's voices in the orchard

Between the blossom and the fruit-time

Golden head, crimson head,

Between the green tip and the root...

Golden head, black wing,

Cling, swing,

Spring, sing,

Swing up into the apple tree.

the voice is disconcerting, like a blind man's cane, tapping and feeling its way down the colored lines.

I suppose much of his poetry isn't really meant to be read aloud. In his essay, "The Three Voices of Poetry," Eliot distinguished between the voice of the poet talking to himself, the voice of the poet addressing an audience, and the voice of the poet talking with imaginary characters; certainly Eliot's choices Monday night conformed to his distinctions: some of the poems were nearly impossible to follow in a reading, because they were in Eliot's own psychological shorthand, and spoken as though he were thinking out loud. The dramatic poems were easier to follow, and easiest of all were those addressed to an audience. It is only in these last, clearly orated poems that Eliot seemed conscious that he was reading publicly, and then he was magnificent. (An exception to all categories, of course, is his delightful "cat" poetry. He read a charming sort of Browning monologue given by an alley cat named Morgan, who wandered into the offices of Faber and Faber in London during the Little Blitz.)

Eliot's "Quarters" are elegaic lyrics, meant to be orated, and they are therefore ideal for a public reading. Their musically recurring themes and sentences are exciting for people to follow, and the language of the "Quartets" is colloquial and modern; they are free of the pedantry and metaphysical conceits that make his other poems the kind you have to re-read. This is not to say that it is easy to understand Eliot's mysticism. It is only to say that one can follow Eliot's emotion in their stern music better than in any of his other poems. He read the last ("my best"), called "Little Gidding," and he enchanted his audience: the lines spread and flowed, sometimes it was a sermon, sometimes an elegy, and always it was harmonious and beautiful--not at all like Eliot's older dissonances:

If you came this way,