With the munching, crunching of mountain-herbs. His milk-white muzzle still stained green Till they lie, listening, round his feet.įabulous creatures creep out of their caves, Their fleecy coats catching in the thickets, Ripples the strings that gleam like rain,
He is less well-known than his older sister, the poet Edith Sitwell, but he published some travel journals, five novels, short stories, his autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand!, and two poetry collections: Argonaut and Juggernaut and At the House of Mrs Kinfoot. During WWI, he served in the trenches in France near the Belgium border, which is where he began writing poetry. Sir Osbert Sitwell (1892-1969) born Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell English writer, poet, art critic, supporter of the arts, Liberal Party member, and campaigner for the preservation of Georgian buildings - he was successful in saving Sutton Scarsdale Hall, now owned by English Heritage. Though predominantly American, we also have poets representing England, Norway, Germany, Japan, and Ancient Rome, and their themes leap from classical, to personal, to philosophical. It may have slipped between the cracks a bit in contrast to other classics by The Who, but you’ll never hear a tougher ode to desperation in your life.This week brings us another plethora of poets – eleven to be exact. If you haven’t checked out “The Seeker” in a while, be prepared to be impressed all over again by its power and profundity. Yet the façade cracks a bit when Daltrey sings, “I’m a seeker/I’m a really desperate man.” When the narrator tries to make a connection, his efforts are thwarted by the fact that those he meets seem to be having the same problems: “I’m looking for me/You’re looking for you/We’re looking in at each other/And we don’t know what to do.” As a result, the narrator takes out his frustration on all those around him, trying to feel something by inflicting pain on others. The narrator’s admission that Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Timothy Leary have all failed to help him seems to be a sly admission that nobody has all the answers, not even profound songwriters like Townshend. When he sings, “I won’t get to get what I’m after ‘til the day I die,” there’s not an ounce of hesitation or fear as he barrels toward that certain fate. on two feet as he bellows above the relentless rhythm section of John Entwistle and Keth Moon. Roger Daltrey sounds like the toughest S.O.B. One of the ingenious things about the song is how Townshend married those downbeat themes to a typically bruising Who rock arrangement. It just kind of covers a whole area where the guy’s being fantastically tough and ruthlessly nasty and he’s being incredibly selfish and he’s hurting people, wrecking people’s homes, abusing his heroes, he’s accusing everyone of doing nothing for him and yet at the same time he’s making a fairly valid statement, he’s getting nowhere, he’s doing nothing and the only thing he really can’t be sure of is his death, and that at least dead, he’s going to get what he wants. At the time of the song’s release, he talked about it with Rolling Stone: “Quite loosely, “The Seeker” was just a thing about what I call Divine Desperation, or just Desperation. If you read between the lines of “The Seeker,” you can hear Townshend trying to square that success with his constant restlessness. As a matter of fact, it was the first thing that Pete Townshend wrote for the band following Tommy, a project which gained him endless accolades as one of the preeminent rock songwriters.
“The Seeker” feels like one of those songs, in part because it was a non-album single recorded and released in 1970 between the twin triumphs of Tommy and Who’s Next. When you’ve got a catalog as vast and impressive as that of The Who, some noteworthy songs can get lost in the shuffle.