My favorite poems of T.S. Eliot's are what I think of as the "Sweeney" poems, the rhyming satires he published in 1920. In the 1980s I set two of them to music, "The Hippopotamus" and "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service," and intended to set more, but the songs I had written never attracted much attention. I admit, I prefer setting to music poems that rhyme; they give my own rhythmic sense something to play off of. This, mostly written in 1985 and refurbished in 1993, one required an accompaniment stately and vaguely Byzantine. The poem is as follows:

Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service

Polyphiloprogenitive
The sapient sutlers of the Lord
Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word.
Superfetation of tò èn,
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.

A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned

But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The Father and the Paraclete.

. . . . .

The sable presbyters approach
The avenue of penitence;
The young are red and pustular
Clutching piaculative pence.

Under the penitential gates
Sustained by staring Seraphim
Where the souls of the devout
Burn invisible and dim.

Along the garden-wall the bees
With hairy bellies pass between
The staminate and pistilate,
Blest office of the epicene. Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
Stirring the water in his bath.
The masters of the subtle schools
Are controversial, polymath.

Score (PDF)

MP3

- Kyle Gann

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