SLSL Intro. Tendril is the night

[William Zantzinger]

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets
Burnt Norton, I,iv

This stanza reminds me of Blake, sunflower, tendril
and clematis. Of course the clutch and cling, the
questioning,  are pure Eliot. 

I am moved by fancies that are curled/Around these
images, and cling:/ The notion of some infinitely
gentle/Infinitely suffering thing. (Preludes)


Tendrils are an important symbol in Blake's art. 

Slumped there in your favorite chair, with your nine
drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array,
and your hand never far from them, and your other hand
holding on to the plump belly of the overfed child,
and perhaps rocking a bit, if the chair is a rocking
chair as mine was in those days, then it is true that
a tiny tendril of contempt-strike that, content-might
curl up from the storehouse where the world's content
is kept, and reach into your softened brain and take
hold there, persuading you that this, at last, is the
fruit of all your labors, which you'd been wondering
about in some such terms as, "Where is the fruit?"

"Critique de la Vie Quotidienne"

Don B 

A tendril creeping, curled about the night's shadows, 
the illness of insomnia. 

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