By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

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But my eyes, like the bloody setting sun, peer through the veils and mists which rise from sorrow, towards that meeting which I must have or die. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept: The Novel as a Poem by Alice Van Wart, in Studies in Canadian Literature a b c Barton, Laura (March 6, 2013). "The poems and punch-ups of By Grand Central Station". The Guardian. London . Retrieved September 8, 2019. This is about love, desperation, and mental disparity (contemplated suicide also plays a role here). It is beautiful and disjointed; somber, yet hopeful; trenchant, yet gracious, and articulate, but at times, also reticent.

The novel has been referenced many times by the British singer Morrissey. The title was adapted by the band The Kitchens of Distinction in the song "On Tooting Broadway Station". For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action. I'm awful at praising things I really like. "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" captures doomed and terminal love that will never fully die in a wonderful / painful manner.

Injure me, betray me, but only make me sure of the love, for all day and night, away from him and with him, everywhere and always, that is my gravity, and the apples (which ben ripe in my gardayne) fall only towards that.

Just 2000 copies of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept were printed on its initial publication in 1945, and it did not achieve popularity at its initial release. Smart's mother Louise led a successful campaign with government officials to have its publication banned in Canada. She bought up as many copies as she could find of those that made their way into the country, and had them burned. [2] Barker himself, in a letter to Smart, described the novel as " a Catherine wheel of a book." [1] What hand of fate placed this book in my path after I'd finished a long series of Muriel Spark books I do not know. All I know is that I found myself taking this book home and loving it all evening, and all through the next day, and when I reached the end, I started loving it all over again from the beginning, this time reveling in the difference between it and Spark's books. Where Spark is all concision, Smart is all excess, where Spark is firm and trim, Smart is soft and yielding. I didn't know I needed this excess of words, this soft pulpy innerness, but I did. I see now that I was thirsty for writing that had feelings and heart instead of control and cleverness. I just didn't know it. One day, while browsing in a London bookshop, Elizabeth Smart chanced upon a slim volume of poetry by George Barker – and fell passionately in love with him through the printed word. Eventually they communicated directly and, as a result of Barker’s impecunious circumstances, Elizabeth Smart flew both him and his wife from Japan, where he was teaching, to join her in the United States. Thus began one of the most extraordinary, intense and ultimately tragic love affairs of our time. They never married but Elizabeth bore George Barker four children and their relationship provided the impassioned inspiration for one of the most moving and immediate chronicles of a love affair ever written – ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’.

Written by Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986), this tells her passionate love affair with a married man, poet George Baker (1913-1991). Their relationship lasted for 18 years and resulted to four children. The book barely describes Baker but it is able to impart the variety of emotions that a woman-in-love with a married man feels. There is the intensity of love no matter if it is forbidden but at the same time she has to content herself with having stolen moments from the family of the subject of that love. It is sad. Falling in love can be sad, we all know that. However, you can't help be mesmerized by Smart's poetic prose as you will keep on wondering if you have to be that in love to be able to write a brilliant work of art like this. No, I believe you, of course, I believe you for didn't you say I was the one? Yes, you said, Take care of this girl for she is what makes my blood circulate and all the stars revolve and the seasons return.