| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: Than I ever loved before.
And since the body's maidenhood
Alone were neither rare nor good
Unless with it I gave to you
A spirit still untrammeled, too,
Take my dreams and take my mind
That were masterless as wind;
And "Master!" I shall say to you
Since you never asked me to.
The Tree of Song
I sang my songs for the rest,
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: ministerial position to contest the deeds by which the father had
deprived the daughter of her legitimate inheritance. Husband and wife
thus tacitly sanctioned what was done at Issoudun. Nevertheless,
Roguin had forced Bridau to reflect upon the future interests of his
wife which were thus compromised. He saw that if he died before her,
Agathe would be left without property, and this led him to look into
his own affairs. He found that between 1793 and 1805 his wife and he
had been obliged to use nearly thirty thousand of the fifty thousand
francs in cash which old Rouget had given to his daughter at the time
of her marriage. He at once invested the remaining twenty thousand in
the public funds, then quoted at forty, and from this source Agathe
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in
the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor
and the Merchant appear later; also the 'crowds of people', and
Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves
(an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily,
with the Fisher King himself.
60. Cf. Baudelaire:
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.
63. Cf. INFERNO, iii. 55-7.
si lunga tratta
The Waste Land |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: thoroughly in the great school of the Didots, he had yet been
ruminating for a long while over the bargain that he meant to drive
with David. All that the father made, the son, of course, was bound to
lose, but in business this worthy knew nothing of father or son. If,
in the first instance, he had looked on David as his only child, later
he came to regard him as the natural purchaser of the business, whose
interests were therefore his own. Sechard meant to sell dear; David,
of course, to buy cheap; his son, therefore, was an antagonist, and it
was his duty to get the better of him. The transformation of sentiment
into self-seeking, ordinarily slow, tortuous, and veiled by hypocrisy
in better educated people, was swift and direct in the old "bear," who
|
