A literary/cinema game

Cafe Society
1

From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

That’s three movie titles in ten lines of poetry. And that’s the game: Find movie titles in snippets taken form poems, song lyrics, or prose - but the the title of the poem, song, or prose doesn’t count. (I mean, otherwise we’d have to include every book adaptation.) Of course, the more in one snippet, the merrier.

2

Out of Africa

A pretty obvious one from Hamlet:*

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country , from whose bourne
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.*

3

For books, there’s this:

Andrew Marvell
To his Coy Mistress

HAD we but World enough, and Time, (novel by Robert Penn Warren; also a couple of sf short stories)
This coyness Lady were no crime.
…
And you should if you please refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews (Novel by Philip Roth)
My vegetable Love should grow
Vaster then Empires, and more slow (Story by Ursula LeGuin)
…
And your quaint Honour turn to dust;
And into ashes all my Lust.
The Grave’s a fine and private place, (novel by Ellery Queen)
But none I think do there embrace.

4

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

5

To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause…

6

It’s not a movie title, but it’s surely no great surprise that someone has used No Traveller Returns as a book title.

7

Not a bad choice at all, but there’s a far better novel of the same name by Peter S. Beagle.

8

More thoughts…on ones almost the same

"I must be cruel only to be kind "
–Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by…”
–Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

Shakespeare is a lode of literature titles, as is the Bible.
More posted when I think of them (it’s Friday night, and I’m ready to sleep…)