Category Archives: It’s all about the pen, baby!

T. S. Eliot

Posted on by

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

The punctuation, the pacing, the imagery, it’s all so wonderful. But what gets me here is the sentence, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” That just takes my breath away.

The colon summaries the thoughts to come of what he has known already: “The evenings, mornings, afternoons”—Do you notice the order here? The semicolon separates the two full clauses, signifying that “I know the voices dying with a dying fall, beneath the music from a farter room is closely related to “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”


I wasn’t clear about the last two lines, so I asked Copilot. Here was the reply:

“Those last two lines echo with such quiet devastation. Eliot’s “voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a farther room” feel like a moment suspended in dust and memory. He borrows that phrase “dying fall” from Shakespeare (Twelfth Night), where it describes music so delicately fading it tugs at the heart—and here, Eliot reshapes it into something lonelier and more estranged.

It’s like he’s saying: I hear life happening elsewhere… voices, beauty, connection—but it’s distant, and I’m not part of it. The music is in a “farther room,” beyond reach, emotionally and physically. That subtle spatial image implies not just separation, but exclusion. The speaker isn’t just observing—he’s on the outside, weighing his life in small, safe routines while something more vibrant whispers just out of view.

It’s an ache you can almost feel between the lines. Especially paired with those ‘coffee spoons’—measuring life not in passionate crescendos, but in quiet, habitual teaspoons of existence.”


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

William Golding

Posted on by

There is nothing spectacular about the punctuation in this sentence. However, the breaks with the commas, those phrases, cut up the thought of the complete sentence almost as an introduction to what was to come that was so sweetly unexpected. And how often do we see “whelming?” Webster’s Unabridged has two meanings for this, and either or both could fit in this case:  “b. to engulf or overcome in the manner of a storm or flood with usually disastrous effect”; “c.: to overcome in thought or feeling .”

The sentence fits here because there is so much thought and emotion wrapped up in so little space that, for me, I would class it as artistry. 

“They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.“

Kathleen Alcott

Posted on by

“I had stepped, wittingly and not, into a new image: a distraction in pale green sequins, passing out of the revolving doors of midtown buildings with the last dinosaurs of publishing, old white men who taught me how to order a martini and from whose fiction mine seemed descended as they touched my knees.”

I love sentences that paint a picture and tell a story. Alcott has managed to do both with this sentence. The colon stops the action of the woman stepping almost seemingly from one era into another. The dress is elegant and symbolic of a time period when people did dress to go downtown or anywhere for that matter. The last dinosaurs of publishing brought to mind when writing a book and getting it published was really special. It was a big deal. It meant something that put an author into another league altogether. And the old white men buying drinks and fondling knees certainly is from a time when that sort of thing, along with swats on the backside were normal and ignored for the most part in society.

This one sentence is so rich and full of life that I can’t seem to let it go.

Kathleen Alcott, “Trapdoor,” Harper’s Magazine. (December 2023). https://harpers.org/archive/2023/12/trapdoor/