T.S. ELIOT, a poet whose very name conjures images (at least for me) of cups of tea and all its trappings, gave J. Alfred Prufrock the line: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

Lines like that get many an undergraduate into writing poetry. It confirmed my love of tea, or rather gladness that, as a tea drinker from age 4, I had escaped bearing this clinking measurement associated with the ineffectual, middling-minded Prufrock. Twenty years and a swirling hoard of tiny animals later and I see that I, too, am measuring out my life in ways no coffee drinker ever has to face. How many silver spoons or plastic stirrers does one use or own in a lifetime?

But when more than 60 Noah’s Ark animals saved from boxes of Red Rose tea start spilling off the kitchen windowsill, each representing 48 cups of tea, with several hundred more in a plastic bin in the basement, any attempts to deny my longing for tea — my need for tea — are refuted by this preponderance of porcelain.

The animals, figurines from George Wade Pottery of Burslem, England, have cycled through various series over the past 50 years, seem too common (at least in my house) to be valuable, yet too nice to throw away. So they become the glazed stalactites of the lifelong drip of tea.

Far from feeling a Prufrock-like shame, I love my collection, or rather, my saving. I have never sought to build a collection, just drink tea. Although I must say I switched from buying boxes of 100 bags to 48 when I learned a store downtown was selling them for as much as $3.

They have taught me about how collecting works. In the mid-90s, when the Circus set was out, I seemed to get the gray seal in every other box, and only the occasional clown. There were, I was told, two clowns, one holding a pie, which was far more rare. I know I have one or two of them. It also became clear when the Endangered Animal set supplanted the circus, that I was getting far more falcons than giant turtles or manatees.

The thing I like most about the animals is they can make meaningful little gifts. A friend gave me an elephant (my favorite animal) from an earlier collection one Valentine’s Day. I gave a manatee to a friend for her husband’s Christmas stocking.

Tea is the only way I have ever entertained. I started having people over for tea several years ago. I had a downtown apartment at the time and thought I’d invite friends and co-workers to stop in as they were going out, a visit of perhaps 45 minutes in which they could relax, drop their gossip, and leave.

It never worked out that way. Tea parties broke up of their own accord, usually after several hours. Unlike the Seinfeld episode where George realizes with regret that “coffee is sex,” I began to realize that tea was more than the drink itself, and included the time to drink it in and the accompanying conversations, talks often too intimate for the workplace, but not intimate enough for the bedroom.

I would play music, sometimes light candles, and offer wine, but somehow the word tea meant relaxing, never having to shout to be heard as in a bar, all the redemptive aspects of socializing, with none of the struggles.

After several teas, I began collecting quotes on tea to answer Prufrock, narrowing my focus to high-volume tea drinking.

One of my favorites comes from the Edward Thomas novel, “The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans”: “Tea was his vice, tempered by sugar and plenty of milk and cream. Three or four distinct brews of an evening suited him. Once a woman assured him she was handing him his sixteenth cup.”

One-upping that was Samuel Johnson, who, according to one biographer, once pushed his saucer forward for cup 17. “Another one, Doctor,” his host asked. Johnson frowned and said, “Madam, you are rude!”

So although I have not escaped Prufrock’s liquid metrics for life assessment, I do believe that my mound of birds and mammals reflects a life far less stressful, and much more connected to people.