T.S. Eliot

Circe's Palace

Circe's Palace - meaning Summary

Dangerous, Seductive Memory

The poem presents a haunting visit to Circe’s garden where beauty masks violence. A fountain carries the "voice of men in pain," flowers are born from corpses, and exotic animals—panthers, a python, peacocks—bear human recognition. The setting mixes enchantment and menace, suggesting transformation, memory, and moral danger. The repeated refusal to return frames the place as both alluring and irrevocably corrupting.

Read Complete Analyses

Around her fountain which flows with the voice of men in pain‚ are flowers that no man knows. Their petals are fanged and red with hideous streak and stain; They sprang from the limbs of the dead. — We shall not come here again. Panthers rise from their lairs in the forest which thickens below, along the garden stairs the sluggish python lies; The peacocks walk, stately and slow, and they look at us with the eyes of men whom we knew long ago.

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