Enigmatic Variations No. 1169: Sentiment by Stick Insect

There have been some fun puzzles from Stick Insect over the last few years, including his recent Listener puzzle, Reductio Ad Absurdum.

I was surprised that this solve started off quickly and continued apace with little time for tea or alcohol. Less than an hour after starting, I was faced with a completed grid, save the two unclued entries in the top and bottom rows. As it turned out, we were pretty much spoon-fed what we had to do. Firstly, the two entries were the same. Secondly, they created new words for the crossing down entries, new first letters being required in the northeast corner and new last letters in the southwest.

What we weren’t told was that we needed more than one word for the entry. After toying with …WOLD for some time, I GROW OLD finally made itself known after only a few minutes. Unfortunately, this meant nothing to me, and I needed Google to find that it was a line from a TS Eliot poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Finally, we were required to draw a line through the title character in a symmetrical and relevant shape, and J ALFRED PRUFROCK was there for the asking, starting in the main NW–SE diagonal and finishing in a circular group of cells towards the southeast. (Unfortunately, the preamble states that the line goes through fourteen cells, but it is, in fact, fifteen. A rare mistake these days.)

So that was that. Except that I couldn’t really see in what way the shape was relevant. It certainly didn’t look like one leg of a pair of trousers rolled up! I read the poem all the way through, hoping for a revelation, but nothing seemed obvious. Part of me thought that it looked a bit like a balloon drooping downwards after losing a lot of air.

I put the puzzle down for a day or so and when I returned, I read the poem again. This time, not quite half way through, I read “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;” and that seemed to be the answer. However, I wasn’t 100% convinced, and read the poem through to the end again. When creating the diagram for this blog, the shape is, indeed, like a coffee spoon, but I feel the link is somewhat tenuous.

I have some unfinished business for the first time in many, many months, and that is in the clue to MAOISM at 45ac: An ideology in Iceland embraced by middle America and old money (6). Iceland is IS, old money is O and M, but I don’t think that MA is an abbreviation for Middle America. Of course, the answer could be TAOISM, but then I’d be really stumped!

Anyway, thanks to Stick Insect for a neat, straightforward puzzle. Even just dipping my toes into the literary notes for the poem made me realise what a complex piece of work it is. Mind you, I can totally relate to the thoughts behind the two lines quoted above!

Legend:
Definition in clue
ANSWER becomes ENTRY with unclued
ABC* = anagram
ABC< = reversal
abCDef = hidden