“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

— T.S. Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Source: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." by T.S. Eliot?

T.S. Eliot 270

20th century English author 1888–1965

Related quotes

“And I have known the arms already, known them all —
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair! ]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
:And how should I begin?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

“For already, sometime, I have been a boy and a girl, a shrub, a bird, and a silent fish in the sea.”

Empedocles (-490–-430 BC) ancient Greek philosopher

fr. 117
Variant translations:
Once on a time a youth was I, and I was a maiden/A bush, a bird, and a fish with scales that gleam in the ocean.
tr. Jane Ellen Harrison
Purifications
Source: Harrison, Jane Ellen. (1903). Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Princeton University Press. p. 590.

“Was this perhaps life, then?—to have loved one summer in youth and not to have been aware of it until it was over, some sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints, the fragrance of a woman, soft loving lips in the dusk of a summer night, sea birds; and then nothing more; gone.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“Have always been at daggers-drawing,
And one another clapper-clawing.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto II, line 79
Source: Hudibras, Part II (1664)

“Stately as a galleon, I sail across the floor,
Doing the military two-step, as in the days of yore.”

Joyce Grenfell (1910–1979) British comedian, singer, actress

Stately as a Galleon (1978), " Stately as a Galleon http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1241.html"

“Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

“Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p