In “After the Procedure,” poet Sydney Lea begins with an image of awakening from anesthesia, which tenuously references the notorious opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a foundational modernist poem by T. S. Eliot: “Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table.” The poem thus becomes, with its speaker struggling to regain consciousness, a reflection on poetry itself as both a response to the ongoing scientific advances that sparked the modernist movement and, paradoxically, a visceral expression of élan vital, the creative life force posited by French philosopher Henri Bergson that traces its roots to Aristotle, invoked in the final stanza. With its various kaleidoscopic contradictions and half-reiterations, the poem seems to enact some of the complex discourse relating to modernist poetry, being mutable, vexing, utterly new and yet evolving, and at the same time holding fast to poetry’s traditional function as an essential expression of the embodied human voice. So the poem at once beats arrhythmically in its quasi–terza rima form, punning on the “archaic” yet unusual word “bedizened,” while simultaneously transcending “old saw labels” in the hallucinatory, “bright-lit gloom” of a modern hospital’s recovery room. If the poem does not resolve any long-standing literary debates, perhaps it rather means to remind us of an idea more important: that in the end, through the fog, “a face…assumes/a shape,” that poetry is human, omnipresent, and timelessly “pervades this striking, raucous silence.”
