[lit-ideas] Re: When Lil's Husband Got Demobbed

[snip]

Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, me said, What you get married for if you don't want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked I in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

The author would like to take this opportunity to correct a printing error in two of the foregoing lines, which should read, capitals for indexical purposes, not emphasis:

>>Well, that Sunday Albert was home, THEM had a hot gammon,       
>>And THEM asked I in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—      

One reader writes:

I like Prufrock better but I like anything Eliot (even Eliot himself, with
all his low lifey foibles). Why does he say Hurry up please it's time, I
wonder, capital letters, repeated several times? I'm tempted to think
he's playing around, in a sophisticated setting (the poem, not the pub). Any ideas?

Coco Nutshells, in her monograph, Last Bus to Clapham, writes 'The repeated calls of the barkeep at closing time breaking through the desolate exchange between Lil and her companion remind us of the finitude of human existence and the vanity of desire. They recall for
us Brecht's intrusive props and slogans, flourished in the midst of the claustrophobic metaphysics of the stage, and, like them, they ringingly haunt us when the time-denying arrows of Zeno are still.' Aside from that they simply mean the pub's closing.

Robert Paul
Mutton College
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