By Andrew Todd Nov. 27, 2018 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs has been out on Netflix … Similarly, Harrison could be invoking his lost love (perhaps of the villain’s wife, but not necessarily). Figure #2: The villain converts his wagon into a make-shift stage in “Meal Ticket”. Their most famous experiments, however, were with poultry. So there’s no reason there wouldn’t have been a medicine-show sized animal act touring small towns. La Ballade de Buster Scruggs (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) est un western à sketches américain écrit et réalisé par Joel et Ethan Coen [1], [2], sorti en 2018. When the villain purchases the chicken, Harrison knows something is amiss when he shares the back of the wagon with the bird. They do so not in the world of the narrative, but via the fictional book in which Harrison’s story is situated, nestled among the Coens’ other made-up reconstructions of the literature of the American West. As with Hendini, the chicken had no idea what it was doing: it had been taught to peck the dial until it was fed, and the pitchman secretly released the food when the dial advanced to the correct answer. The context of the Shakespeare quotation is that Portia is in love with Bassanio. the egg laying chicken, the piano playing chicken, and the dancing chicken, a dial with numbers going from zero to five, biography of screenwriter and director Clyde Bruckman. Figure #9: Harrison and the villain at the whorehouse. After the villain has thrown Harrison off of the cliff, he walks back to his wagon with an evil grin on his face, finally having executed his full revenge for an unknown sin that Harrison must have committed against him. As American Studies scholar Leo Marx argues in The Machine in the Garden, The Tempest was the first text of American literature: Shakespeare wrote the play in the wake of trans-Atlantic adventurers returning from the 1607 Jamestown colony. There’s another possible reason for this choice, too: Neeson purchases the chicken and the bell, but not the cart with the numbers. The final film of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs consists of a stagecoach ride to the underworld, a vicious desiccation of Ford’s pre-revisionist Western, Stagecoach (1939), in which a microcosm of America within the conveyance travels across the American soutwest, having to brutally repel an Indian attack in order to get to a dusty town, an early outpost which will eventually allow civilization to stabilize the Old West. And that’s before even getting into learned horses, who were commonplace enough that many of their names are not recorded, although the term was also used for horses who would perform tricks and feats of skill, not just horses who imitated human intelligence. If you value our work, please disable your ad blocker. Chicken-enthusiast Werner Herzog’s 1977 film Stroszek has a shot that pans depressingly across nearly the complete ABE catalog before showing “The Fire Chief Rabbit” and “The Dancing Chicken” in action: At the left end of the line of vending machines, obscured by the change booth, you can just make out an ABE tic-tac-toe chicken machine. De film kreeg positieve kritieken van de filmcritici met een score van 94% op Rotten Tomatoes, gebaseerd op 17 beoordelingen. In an online article summarizing that work, “West Side Story: How Shakespeare Stormed America’s Frontier,” Dickson quotes the primary source of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French scholar who wrote most eloquently about the 19th Century United States, whose observations came from his ability to see the country from an outsider’s point-of-view. What's on TV & Streaming … Touring animal acts are a later development, and touring animal acts in the American West, another still, but the Coens are still well within the realm of possibility here. TV Shows. And yet when a trained chicken appears on screen in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, it doesn’t register as strange to a 21st century audience. The story of Cain and Abel that Harrison invokes in his oration strikes closest to home in the conflict between Harrison and the villain, but it is the least interesting of the clues his speeches give to what he imagines his life to mean. The transcendent thrush is replaced by another flightless bird, this one at least edible without the stain of cannibalism. One of these machines is in the Smithsonian—presumably without its chicken—and their popularity and ubiquity gave educated chickens the “I thiiiiiiinnk I’ve heard of that” cultural currency they enjoy today. Ford’s elegant interrogation of the ironic need for barbarity to forge civilization out of the Western frontier’s barrenness pales in comparison to the bitterness of Joel and Ethan Coen’s short film, “Meal Ticket,” part of their stunning post-revisionist Western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Figure #3: The villain arrives at the cliff where he will dispose of his “wingless thrush,” replacing him with a chicken. As the instructions made clear, this was a delicate operation, requiring perfect timing and careful calibration of the dial and the spring that moved it. It is not at all clear who is the “meal ticket” in the Coens’ film. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. There’s nothing on screen that indicates Neeson has actually bought the secret to the trick—and even if he has, and plans to retrofit his own cart with the necessary machinery, it seems unlikely that a chicken, a species not known for mental flexibility, would perform as well in a similar-but-not-identical setup. Here, his oration of culture has no place, the beastly activities of his captor take place outside of his purview, in a location where to narrate would only result in more harm to his body. But how is the chicken doing it? Of course, the point is that he shouldn’t remember, because the racist American 19th century has refused to make it true. Ultimi episodi Aggiunti. Shakespeare in the American West was even more ephemeral than the Bard could have predicted: “the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.” Like the mythology of the American West, Shakespeare’s ephemeral stage pieces were preserved by the folios, and hundreds of years of repetitions of its theatrical contents. Neeson’s first, last and only attraction is “Professor Harrison: The Wingless Thrush,” an armless, legless man played by Harry Melling who recites speeches, poems, and dramatic monologues from “sources various”—Shakespeare to Shelley to Lincoln—while Neeson collects the money, provides the sound effects, and does all the things you’d have to do in the 1870s to enable a man with no arms or legs to travel around the Old West: transportation, nutrition, evacuation, and so on. The song "Cool Water" Buster Scruggs sings in the opening of the film was written in 1936 by Bob Nolan of Sons of the Pioneers and was recorded by them in 1941. Industrialization would come to overrun the pristine nature of the actual American West, just as the Garden of Eden was ruined by the human desire to use knowledge to forge their own future via dirty technologies antithetical to glorious nature. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: “Meal Ticket” (2018), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/apr/15/william-shakespeare-american-west-pioneers, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias, The Romanoffs: “Bright and High Circle” (2018), The Romanoffs: “House of Special Purpose” (2018). Figure #1: The villain advertises his performer, Harrison as “the wingless thrush”. “I’ll ask him—say, for something I’m writing—‘A guy’s wandering through upstate New York in 1802 and he comes to a tavern and there’s some sort of mountebank. The villain only speaks when he is fulfilling his carnal desires with the prostitute, and reluctantly at that. The woman, disguised as a lawyer, Balthasar, argues for the court to deny the villain Shylock’s quest to cut out a pound of flesh from Bassanio’s benefactor, Antonio. The opening film, with the eponymous title, features a deconstruction of the singing cowboy as hero. .” While we cannot trust what the villain tells us–he says that he found Harrison on the streets of London and took him in as an act of kindness–we can attend to the linkages between Harrison’s orations and his predicament. In most cases, however, the chicken hadn’t learned to do any tricks at all: One carnival hand made his name with a “Dancing Chicken” act created by sticking transparent scotch tape to a chicken’s feet so it would try to kick it off; more sadistic hucksters just made the hapless birds stand on an hotplate. “Meal Ticket” is an American film Western about literary history that has virtually no precedents. To place “Meal Ticket” in the same orbit as Twain’s brutal analysis of the failure of American civilization testifies to the power of the Coen Brothers’ new film. Figure #11: In the back of the villain’s wagon, the chicken looks at Harrison, but the man is not given the agency to look back at his avian replacement. . Lone driver sat the wagon’s backboard, but was there passenger within? Retrouvez toutes les dernières critiques sur le film La Ballade de Buster Scruggs, réalisé par Joel Coen et Ethan Coen avec Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson. )• Pinkey the Wonderful Intelligent Goose• The Scientific Pig• The Amazing Pig of Knowledge• The Incomparable Bitch• The Inimitable Dick. In fact, Jay and his work were a likely inspiration for “Meal Ticket.” The “Wingless Thrush” has more than a little in common with Matthias Buchinger, a man with no arms or lower legs who nevertheless toured Europe performing magic and playing musical instruments in the early 18th century; Ricky Jay’s book, Matthias Buchinger: “The Greatest German Living” by Ricky Jay, Whose Peregrinations in Search of the “Little Man of Nuremberg” are Herein Revealed singlehandedly rescued Buchinger from obscurity. Tom then plummets into the dustbin of history, having sacrificed his own happiness with Hallie for her sake. The most troubling of these questions is posed in “Meal Ticket,” the third chapter—the movie is structured as a 19th century anthology of adventure stories—and represents the first time the Coens have tackled one of the great questions that has bedeviled humanity for millennia: “How the heck can a chicken do mathematics?”. In a powerful moment of irony, Pompey apologizes that he cannot remember that part. The Bard’s work is ripped out of its original early 17th century context as popular entertainment, now forced into a deadened form of high culture. Harrison provides the labor which allows the two men to eat. In the Coens’ existentially pessimistic hands, Harrison’s oratory masterpieces prove no more meaningful than the chicken’s. Ben hasn’t told us whether he intends to travel with Mr. Chicken or not, but we would advise him to do so, as with his talent and that of the chicken he can make himself independently rich in a short time. Afterwards a pack of playing cards is introduced, with which he seems well-versed, and particularly in the game of cribbage; these are placed upon a board on the floor; on receiving orders, he takes up the card desired and delivers it to his master between his lips. Buster Scruggs to śpiewający kowboj, który ciągle pakuje się w kłopoty, prowokując strzelaniny z bandytami. What's on TV & Streaming What's on TV & Streaming … Harrison’s final resting place is even more unstable than Ramses’: the rushing river into which the villain discards the living torso sculpture will lead the corpse to parts unknown downstream, and certainly not to a warm museum in Shakespeare’s London. Figure #17: The crowd for Harrison’s transcendent orations of civilization’s great achievements has dwindled to unsustainable levels, Whereas Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence complexly yet affirmatively celebrates the mythology of the American West, the “Meal Ticket” story within The Ballad of Buster Scruggs refuses any such palliative. Choosing to use a chicken, rather than the dog or horse or pig who might actually have been able to pull off the routine, makes the contrast between the chicken and the Wingless Thrush that much sharper, and makes it all the more damning that Neeson sees them as basically equivalent. The quotation itself is a reconstruction of The Holy Bible. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ging op 31 augustus 2018 in première op het Filmfestival van Venetië. For its part, the statue of Ramses, a leader long since forgotten, is reborn as a captive, to be put on display in London for the “educated” to be confirmed in their superiority to the cultures which preceded them. The caption below the image reads, “The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,” a quotation from Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice. What would the mountebank be doing?’ And Ricky goes to his library and then sends me an entire description of what the mountebank would be doing.”. Unfortunately, Jay died a few weeks ago, so there’s no way to ask him whether or not a mountebank in Colorado around 1870 might have exhibited a mathematical chicken without exploring a whole other realm of carnival trickery. Here’s the Baltimore Sun’s account of an 1881 performance, which does not leave the impression that Little Dick was a college graduate: Bob Mack, formerly of Haverly’s Colored Minstrels, gives his clever imitations of a barnyard rooster, and a genuine rooster of the game species has a bout with him, struts around and crows lustily in defiance, and makes again for the gigantic counterfeit of his kind, crowing occasionally and bowing to the audience in return for their applause. The emptiness of the back of the villain’s cart is expressed by the same camera set-up that captured both the chicken and Harrison in the same shot earlier. The villain markets his captive as “the wingless thrush.” An avian conceit dominates the thematic structure of the film: the songbird is eventually replaced by a chicken, the former who soars in performance but cannot fly in the real world, the latter who is too dumb to do either. Academy Award-winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen return to the Old West in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Netflix-produced anthology of six Western stories that each have thought-provoking endings.. Here are just a few of them: • Munito the Learned Dog• Munito the Learned Dog Who Started Touring Again After a Few Years’ Break, During Which Time He Somehow Changed From a Water Spaniel to a Poodle• Minetto, the Dog Whose Name Seems Deliberately Designed to Confuse People Who Wanted to See the Much More Famous Munito• Monetto the Faithful Dog With Yet Another Easy to Confuse Name• Toby the Sapient Pig (exhibited by Nicholas Hoare, the same man who cooked up Monetto; he also ghost-wrote a memoir on Toby’s behalf)• The Incredible and Astonishing Learned Goose (another Hoare act)• The Unrivalled Chinese Swinish Philosopher, Toby the Real Learned Pig (Not a Nicholas Hoare production, although he could hardly complain about the name after the whole Monetto thing; Toby later became a generic name for learned pigs. Accessed: December 26, 2018. As opposed to the visual conceit of the rest of the film, where we follow the villain’s actions in setting up the wagon, the passive unmoving camera merely observes Harrison on the stage. Even if you succeeded, the main appeal of acts like Munito and his many imitators was the idea that a dog was human enough that it might be capable of human-like thought. November 2018 in das Programm von Netflix aufgenommen wurde. The delivery of the poem is a theatrical tour-de-force, matched by the Coens’ filming of our first encounter with Harrison’s work as an artist, reciting from memory the entirety of Shelley’s poem. The Impressario seemed to care for the Artist (and we question whether they may be father and son), but as the story continues, we realize they never speak to each other and the somber Artist seems to understand his literal shelf life has a time limit. Bob Worden and Mr. Chicken don’t seem to have struck it rich, and if any other chicken Svengalis became independently wealthy, they didn’t advertised. While not particularly interested in racial justice, Ranse does earnestly want to bring civilization to the American West. As is true in virtually every other shot of him in the film. Harrison only soars on the stage. Animal acts are ancient—just ask Christians lucky enough to get front row seats at the Colosseum’s Lion Show—and trained animal acts are not much younger. But there’s one species that doesn’t show up much in 19th century accounts of educated animals: gallus domesticus. Après sa projection en avant-première à la Mostra de Venise 2018, le long métrage est diffusé sur Netflix fin 2018 notamment en France et aux États-Unis [3. A bird in Joel’s and Ethan’s hands is worth none in the sagebrush. . The Brelands seem to have been the first trainers to fully combine the older tradition of “educated” animals with poultry, beginning with an act known variously as “Hendini,” “The Quiz Chicken,” or “Bird Brain” in which a barker would ask a chicken yes or no questions and the chicken would indicate its answer by illuminating lights marked “Yes” or “No.” The chicken really was trained to pull a ring that would turn on the appropriate light, but it had no idea it was answering questions—hidden lights, secretly controlled by the operator, indicated to the chicken which answer to give. Here’s an account from Iowa’s Prairie City Index of June 14, 1872, which gives some insight into the appeal a mathematical chicken act would have had at the time, to audiences and impresarios alike: We have seen trained hogs, trained mules, trained horses, etc., but it remained for us to witness a trained chicken. One literary exception is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which features a vicious American parody of Hamlet and Macbeth. La Ballade de Buster Scruggs vf streaming complet. Following the tales of a sharp-shooting songster, a wannabe bank robber, two weary traveling performers, a lone gold prospector, a woman traveling the W Hallie has Pompey recite the foundational texts of American democracy. Dickson claims, “The most popular play in the 19th century American West was Richard III.” In that play, a murderer of children takes political control over England. Figure #15: Opening text of the short story, “Meal Ticket” within The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ist ein Western von Ethan und Joel Coen, der am 31. It is among the most literate Westerns ever made, interrogating in far more complex ways than do the films of John Ford, the incompatibility of civilization and the American West. However, the villain is the one who feeds Harrison, also holding him in his embrace to allow Harrison to urinate (and presumably defecate, the impropriety of which even the Coens cannot abide). Ne spoilez pas ici. What we find there is as bleak as anything ever seen in an American Western. ABE’s mathematical chickens could give the correct answer only if it was a number between one and five, and they did this not by pecking the correct number, but by pecking in the same spot over and over until secretly signaled to stop. Like Harrison, the statue of Ramses II is an incomplete depiction of the human form, consisting of “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.”. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Vignettes weaving together the stories of six individuals in the old West at the end of the Civil War. It is no surprise that the dismemberment of human beings is part and parcel of the barbarity of the American West as depicted in the Coens’ “Meal Ticket.” In a world where the white clad singing cowboy, Buster Scruggs shoots off all five of a man’s fingers, it is just one more small step toward the extreme that results in some monster severing all of Harrison’s four limbs. “The Song of Moses: Pastoral in Reverse.” Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation. How does "Meal Ticket" connect to the Coens' own meal ticket? De Tocqueville states, “There is scarcely a pioneer’s hut… where one does not encounter some odd volumes of Shakespeare.”. Verse 32 of Deuteronomy states: “My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as they dew; as the small rain upon the tender grass, and as the showers upon the herd.” Literary scholar Harold Fisch calls this a “pastoral in reverse,” a formulation that might be equally apropos of the American Western as it is of the Bible. Figure #10: The villain drives Harrison in his wagon through the wintry landscape of the American West at the beginning of “Meal Ticket”. Presented as a book of Old West tall tales, the Coens brothers wrote these short stories over the course of 25 years. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a 2018 American Western anthology film written, directed, and produced by the Coen brothers.It stars James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Kazan, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Tom Waits, Tyne Daly, Bill Heck, Grainger Hines, Harry Melling, Jonjo O'Neill, Chelcie Ross, and Saul Rubinek, and features six vignettes that take place on the American frontier. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.” In his recitation of Shelley’s poem, Harrison does just that, celebrating the power of the human spirit to invoke civilization amidst the most horrendous of social circumstances. Many answers to questions were requested by the company, such as the cards required to make fifteen, and other numbers, also the card containing the score of each number—all of which he carefully delivered to his master. This bleak ending grotesquely perverts that of the first film in the omnibus, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” in which the evil gunslinger ascends to Heaven with wings, singing a jaunty tune. Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe. Release Calendar DVD & Blu-ray Releases Top Rated Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Showtimes & Tickets In Theaters Coming Soon Coming Soon Movie News India Movie Spotlight. Harrison merely passively looks horrified, past the camera. We have no sense that the villain is literate, in fact he rarely speaks. It is only the Coens who have the power to intervene. Partially, that’s because people have a vague sense of educated animal exhibits without knowing the specific animals who were educated—but mostly it’s because we lived through the golden age of trained chickens, which began in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Arkansas. The Calculating Capon, the Pecking Pythagorean, Gallus Mathematicus. Worlds Elsewhere, “Cold, Hard Facts, But No Newspaper Nor Legend”. en) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in de Internet Movie Database In shooting the film in this fashion, the Coens have rendered cinematic that which the fictional book within their film presents merely as words on a page. Th… Before the villain has sex with the whore, he turns Harrison around, creating an image where we are able to look at both Harrison in the foreground and the fornicators in the background. However, the structure of the play is such that we come to revel in Richard finally getting his comeuppance. And that act, if it existed, could easily have featured animals doing math: there was a positive craze for educated animals in the first half of the 19th century. Meal Ticket prend la forme d’un conte sombre et triste, dans lequel un imprésario en mal d’argent (Liam Neeson) promène de villes en villes un comédien infirme (bouleversant Harry Melling). Figure #13: With eyes wide open, Harrison realizes the meaning of the chicken in the cage before him. In the violent West of American barbarism, his passionate delivery of learned culture cannot take flight, despite a brief moment at the beginning of the film when people came to his show in significant numbers. After the villain has sex with a prostitute, she inquires whether Harrison has ever had any “lovin’.” “Once,” mutters the villain. But even if we assume the Coen brothers’ chicken is somehow receiving an unambiguous signal, undetectable to the audience, that specifies exactly the right plate to peck—which is how the educated animals who spelled things out with playing cards did it, however that signal was sent—the act would still be five times as complicated as anything anyone’s successfully trained a chicken to do. All rights reserved. This is an allegory for the difference between the art of civilization (the Coen’s film, Shelley’s and Shakespeare’s poetry, Lincoln’s elegant lamentation at the butchery zone that is Gettysburg) and the banalities of life (formulaic genre films which celebrate violence, very much the kind of films Hollywood makes, but the Coens do not). The Coens engineer a slippage between Shelley’s depiction of the Pharaoh and Harrison’s identity as a statue on the same sort of pedestal that Shelley describes. This slippage between the villain and Harrison is one of the most compelling aspects of “Meal Ticket.” Neither man speaks while alone together. For America, the chickens have come home to roost: crass entertainments in the guise of superhero movies push the sophisticated analysis of literature in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs off of the cliff, into the rushing waters that is the chaos of Netflix. 1x16. No one makes that mistake with a chicken, and in the vanishingly rare instances where a trained chicken showed up in the press, the emphasis was on its rarity and the skill of its trainer, not the native intelligence attributed to the Munitos and Tobys of the world. The alphabet on cards was then introduced; these were indiscriminately placed upon a board; the Christian and surname of any person present is given him, when, at a glance at the letters, he picks them up, and gives them to his master—all done without trick or deception. And yet the filmmakers had no trouble resting the entire emotional weight of the story “Meal Ti Meal Ticket, is a gothic tale about two weary travelling performers (Liam Neeson and Harry Melling). Menu. The Bard’s words were “performed on the stump of a giant redwood tree,” Dickson continues, “[by] gutsy, tight-knit groups of actors [who] roamed the mining camps on what became known as the ‘gold circuit’.” It is here that the Coens stage their most radical adaptational project, even more complex than O Brother Where Art Thou (2000), their beautiful reconstruction of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, forced into the American context in the Depression era. Chang Reynolds’ history of western circuses is essentially a history of transportation: the first circuses travelled to California by ship; the interior opened up along with the railroads. Instead, what lies in wait for the little scamp are beasts who enslave their brothers, discarding them over cliffs when the public’s taste for entertainment shifts from the recitation of poetry to fowl who, via charlatanry, feign computational skill. Could it be that Harrison had sex with the villain’s wife, causing the enraged man to extract his pound of flesh in vengeance over the lifetime ahead of them? This largely untold cinematic story of Shakespeare in the American West strikes at the heart not only of the barbarity of the frontier, but the contemporary distortion of the work of William Shakespeare. “West Side Story: How Shakespeare Stormed America’s Frontier.” The Guardian. Release Calendar DVD & Blu-ray Releases Top Rated Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Showtimes & Tickets In Theaters Coming Soon Coming Soon Movie News India Movie Spotlight. 6x18. Accessed: December 26, 2018. The new Coen Brothers movie The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a brilliant deconstruction ... “Meal Ticket” stars Liam Neeson as an impresario touring the Rockies with a … Arkansas native Charles Portis must have seen a version of this at some point, because his great 1966 novel Norwood features an appearance from “Joann the Wonder Hen, the College Educated Chicken,” who, despite having a mortarboard attached to her head with a rubber band, answers the protagonist’s yes or no question by dispensing a slip of paper reading “Charity Endureth All Things.”. « La Ballade de Buster Scruggs » : l’Ouest, terrain de jeu des frères Coen . What would otherwise be a hilarious comic callback to the prior shot becomes heartbreaking given the Coens’ earlier celebration of the talents of the thespian. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Score: ... 3 Meal Ticket . The unveiling of the curtain revealing Harrison placed on the stool, as if an artwork on a pedestal, is shocking, but the aggressiveness with which Harrison lunges into the recitation of the poem leaves us little time to reflect upon our biases against people different from us. As the crowd for Harrison diminishes, the barbarity increases. The show begins with Harrison’s oration of the entirety of Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias.” The poem begins: “I met a traveler from an antique land, / Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert.