/lit/ - Literature

>There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
>“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
>“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
>“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
>“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
- TS Eliot, The Waste Land, I. The Burial of the Dead

>Who is the third who walks always beside you?
>When I count, there are only you and I together
>But when I look ahead up the white road
>There is always another one walking beside you
>Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
>I do not know whether a man or a woman
>—But who is that on the other side of you?

>What is that sound high in the air
>Murmur of maternal lamentation
>Who are those hooded hordes swarming
>Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
>Ringed by the flat horizon only
>What is the city over the mountains
>Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
>Falling towers
>Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
>Vienna London
>Unreal
- Ibid, V. What the Thunder Said

No idea why the first passage was so immediately memorable to me. I couldn't make much sense of it at all when I first read it. The imagery in the second passage is really something else though.