There are two metaphors that I am running into but cannot find explanations of.
First: time is a string of pearls
Somewhere I read an explanation of this as meaning that each pearl in the strand reflects what went before and what is to come. Is there anything else? And is there an original source?
Second: the moon has lost her memory
From “Memory” in Cats, but also Rhapsody on a Windy Night by t. s. eliot. Is there any explanation at all? Did Cats simply yank it from eliot?
Honestly the only origin I can find for the first is U2, maybe my google fu is just failing me though. To be honest my interpretation of that phrase would be more like “every moment it precious like a pearl.”
It appears though that Elliot did indeed invent that phrase for his Rhapsody. The only meaning I can scrounge up in a short time is that one of the previous phrases is “the moon never holds a grudge” (albeit in French), so its kind of like saying “forgive and forget.” It also seems to contrast with Elliot still remembering the rather distrubing thing that have occured.
Cats yanked an awful lot from Eliot, actually.
In the poem, it appears to be referring to old age, but I think a lot of phrases in that poem aren’t there specifically to mean something, but rather to provoke imagination - take, for example:
-Doesn’t really refer - as far as I know - to a common occurrence or idiom, it just creates an image - so it’s a creative simile, rather than a metaphor to something familiar.
No secret is made of that though - I read or watched an interview somewhere with Andrew Lloyd Webber where he said that he needed to pad out the prose from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, but was delighted to find that he could do it almost exclusively from other bits of Eliot’s work - including, I think, some unpublished material.
I can’t believe that I never before realized it was t. s. eliot–Waste Land eliot–Hollow Men eliot–who wrote the Book of Practical Cats. How weird and varied can one poet get?
Okay, dumb question answered, nothing to see here, move on…
There’s Vonnegut’s “It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever” from Slaughterhouse Five. Dunno if that’s related or helpful to you.
By the way, T. S. Eliot’s name is capitalized, just like any other name. You might be thinking of E. E. Cummings, a completely different poet, whose name is often presented all in lowercase (but which is also properly capitalized just like any other name).