Salon Inadequacies

Dear Colleagues Across the Curriculum.

Salon Inadequacy:

J Alfred Prufrock.s internal reservations,
discretion, good sense, deliberation,
prudence, circumspection, caution....

Who can blame him?

To be great is to be misunderstood, says
Ralph Waldo E., but to be misunderstood
is not so great.

Frontiers yet unknown on the one hand.
Stalwart pioneering. on the other. Hey
diddle diddle  the cat & the fiddle, cow
jumped over the moon; little dog laughed
to see such sport and dish ran away with
                the spoon.

Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all,
I shall tell you all"

If one, settling a pillow by her head,
  Should say,
 
"That is not what I meant at all.
  That is not it, at all."
 
(It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves
in patterns on a screen: )

Do I dare to eat a peach?

"Do I dare?" and,
"Do I dare?"
 
And in short, I was afraid.