I remember "the grass is singing" as a popular phrase (exclamation) in the
Sixties as the heads rolled side to side in front of the collective gallon
wine bottle converted into a major smoke filled pipe source - everyone
sucking on their own little hose. The patterns on the living room rug were
the closest thing to a landscape, and, certainly, except for some stray
seeds, not a blade of grass in sight - but then there was the correspondent
music (the quality of which depended on the taste of takers - whether
Donavan or Charles Mingus or, well, probably not Brahms).
Those were the days of old, my friends!!! As well as the war in Vietnam, the
USA military draft, etc.
Stephen V,
Ruminating.
> sorry to drag baleful old Eliot into the light again ... Does anyone know
> anything about "the grass is singing" as a phrase - from around the ruined
> chapel in the last section of the Waste land?
>
> i know that Doris Lessing's debut novel takes it as a title, that African
> grass beneath the enormous sky,
>
> but did Eliot actually invent this phrase all by himself? The closest thing
> in the Bible is Isiah:"for the people is grass"
>
> what does it make anyone think of?
>
> Edmund
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