Sybil
Found during my readings of Elliot’s Wasteland (off sparksnotes):
A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem’s epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl’s predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire.
I’ve read and translated quite a bit of the Satyricon though and never encountered her…more things i wish i had time to go back and look it up.
I remember really liking East Coker.
Edward Ocampo-Gooding
April 14, 2007 at 1:46 pm