T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was published 100 years ago today in the first issue of "The Criterion". Although I haven't returned to it as a whole in years, I have read it many times before. Still, its sound on reading it again is entrancing. Many forgotten passages strike me anew, but even all the familiar passages remain overwhelming – this most of all: "Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, / Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 15 October 2022)
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