Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Poetry Tuesday: In the Wasteland with Dracula

While listening to my very favorite podcast (H.P. Podcraft: The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast), an episode on Dracula made me aware of something I had never noticed, to whit, there is a Dracula reference in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Specifically


The relevant passage from Dracula:
What I saw was the Count's head coming out from the window. I did not see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms. In any case I could not mistake the hands which I had had some many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow, but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall. 


From The Wasteland:

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings 
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall


This is a little oblique, but as Richmond J. Lee and others have noted, this was more obvious in an earlier draft.

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