With fear lurking, eyes denuded of sight

It was Shakespeare who said in ‘The Tempest’: “Those are pearls that were his eyes”. So powerful was the impact of the line that T S Eliot repeated in ‘The Waste Land’: “I Remember/Those are pearls that were his eyes”.

Eliot goes on to catch a comparable image in ‘The Burial of the Dead’, albeit in greater detail:

There is shadow under this red rock,/ (Come in under the…