#26 Anfractuous

DDW March Challenge #26 Anfractuous


Paint me a cavernous waste shore
Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.
T.S. Eliot, from the poem Sweeney Erect

Tim Robinson, from the book Connemara: A little Gaelic Kingdom, writes about the word anfractuous:
'Paint me a cavernous waste shore,' demands T.S. Eliot in the sonorous introductory verse of his 'Sweeney Erect,' a poem....which has echoed in my head ever since I read it as a youngster, drunk on modernism, to whom it was not yet hateful but cryptic and therefore probably profound. And it still resonates, especially in the phrase 'the bold anfractuous rocks.' I have come across this valuable word, anfractuous, nowhere else; it means, according to the OED, sinuous or circuitous, but with the sound of fracturing in its heart it seems to answer not just to the winding course of the south Connemara coast but to its intimate texture, with its heaps of boulders worn into smoothly curving rims and basins by the almost ceaseless pounding of the waves.


These anfractuous rocks abut the snarled and yelping seas along the coast of Puget Sound.