The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #105065   Message #3665651
Posted By: MGM·Lion
03-Oct-14 - 07:47 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Req; The Moon Shines Down on Charlie Chaplin
Subject: RE: Lyr Req; The Moon Shines Down on Charlie Chaplin
Has it been noted that the Mrs Porter lines are quoted by T S Eliot somewhere in The Waste Land? --
(to make what point I am not sure, but then IMO that is not the greatest poem of C20 as often claimed, but a bit of a farrago of discrete quotations and ideas. YMMV -- and probably will.   I think this citation should be noted here anyhow.)

In Ernest Raymond's semi-autobiographical WWi novel, Tell England [1922, & still occasionally reprinted in pb, most recently in 2005], his self-representing hero, serving as an infantry officer -- in the Dardanelles campaign, note, to which the Charlie Chaplin version makes reference -- remembers his men "incessantly singing a song which went, 'O the moon shines bright on Mrs Porter, And on her daughter, A regular snorter. She has washed her neck in soda water. She didn't oughta. The dirty cat'."

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