Τ. S. ELIOT

Collected Poems
1909–1962

Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM
Nobel Prize for Literature
Born St Louis 1888,
died London 1965

Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication

PRUFROCK and Other Observations 1917
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Portrait of a Lady
Preludes
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Morning at the Window
The ‘Boston Evening Transcript’
Aunt Helen 
Cousin Nancy
Mr. Apollinax
Hysteria
Conversation Galante
La Figlia Che Piange

POEMS 1920 : POEMS
Gerontion
Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar
Sweeney Erect
A Cooking Egg
Le Directeur
Mélange Adultère de Tout
Lune de Miel
The Hippopotamus
Dans le Restaurant
Whispers of Immortality
Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service
Sweeney Among the Nightingales

THE WASTE LAND
I. The Burial of the Dead
II. A Game of Chess
III. The Fire Sermon
IV. Death by Water
V. What the Thunder Said
Notes on The Waste Land

THE HOLLOW MEN
The Hollow Men

ASH-WEDNESDAY
I
II
III
IV
V
VI

ARIEL POEMS
Journey of the Magi
A Song for Simeon
Animula
Marina
The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

UNFINISHED POEMS
Sweeney Agonistes
Fragment of a Prologue
Fragment of an Agon

Coriolan
I. Triumphal March
II. Difficulties of a Statesman

MINOR POEMS
Eyes that last I saw in tears
The wind sprang up at four o’clock
Five-Finger Exercises
Landscapes
Lines for an Old Man

CHORUSES FROM ‘THE ROCK’
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X

FOUR QUARTETS
Burnt Norton
East Coker
The Dry Salvages
Little Gidding

OCCASIONAL VERSES
Defence of the Islands
A Note on War Poetry
To the Indians who Died in Africa
To Walter de la Mare
A Dedication to my Wife
Index of Titles of Poems
About the Author
By T. S. Eliot
Copyright

PRUFROCK
and Other Observations
1917

For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915
mort aux Dardanelles

Or puoi la quantitate
comprender dell’amor ch’a te mi scalda,
quando dismento nostra vanitate,
trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo
fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair –

(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin

(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all –

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

    So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all –

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

    And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all –

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

    And should I then presume?

    And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep … tired … or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ –

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

    Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.

    That is not it, at all.’

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor –

And this, and so much more? –

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

    ‘That is not it at all,

    That is not what I meant at all.’

. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Portrait of a Lady

Thou hast committed –
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.

The Jew of Malta

I

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon

You have the scene arrange itself – as it will seem to do –

With ‘I have saved this afternoon for you’;

And four wax candles in the darkened room,

Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,

An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb

Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.

We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole

Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.

‘So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul

Should be resurrected only among friends

Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom

That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.’

– And so the conversation slips

Among velleities and carefully caught regrets

Through attenuated tones of violins

Mingled with remote cornets

And begins.

‘You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,

And how, how rare and strange it is, to find

In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,

(For indeed I do not love it … you knew? you are not blind!

How keen you are!)

To find a friend who has these qualities,

Who has, and gives

Those qualities upon which friendship lives.

How much it means that I say this to you –

Without these friendships – life, what cauchemar!’

Among the windings of the violins

And the ariettes

Of cracked cornets

Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins

Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,

Capricious monotone

That is at least one definite ‘false note.’

– Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,

Admire the monuments,

Discuss the late events,

Correct our watches by the public clocks.

Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

II

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

‘Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands’;

(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

‘You let it flow from you, you let it flow,

And youth is cruel, and has no remorse

And smiles at situations which it cannot see.’

I smile, of course,

And go on drinking tea.

‘Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall

My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,

I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world

To be wonderful and youthful, after all.’

The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune

Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:

‘I am always sure that you understand

My feelings, always sure that you feel,

Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.

You will go on, and when you have prevailed

You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

But what have I, but what have I, my friend,

To give you, what can you receive from me?

Only the friendship and the sympathy

Of one about to reach her journey’s end.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends ….’

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends

For what she has said to me?

You will see me any morning in the park

Reading the comics and the sporting page.

Particularly I remark

An English countess goes upon the stage.

A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,

Another bank defaulter has confessed.

I keep my countenance,

I remain self-possessed

Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired

Reiterates some worn-out common song

With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

Recalling things that other people have desired.

Are these ideas right or wrong?

III

The October night comes down; returning as before

Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease

I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door

And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.

‘And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?

But that’s a useless question.

You hardly know when you are coming back,

You will find so much to learn.’

My smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac.

‘Perhaps you can write to me.’

My self-possession flares up for a second;

This is as I had reckoned.

‘I have been wondering frequently of late

(But our beginnings never know our ends!)

Why we have not developed into friends.’

I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark

Suddenly, his expression in a glass.

My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

‘For everybody said so, all our friends,

They all were sure our feelings would relate

So closely! I myself can hardly understand.

We must leave it now to fate.

You will write, at any rate.

Perhaps it is not too late.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.’

And I must borrow every changing shape

To find expression … dance, dance

Like a dancing bear,

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance –

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,

Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;

Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand

With the smoke coming down above the housetops;

Doubtful, for a while

Not knowing what to feel or if I understand

Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon …

Would she not have the advantage, after all?

This music is successful with a ‘dying fall’

Now that we talk of dying –

And should I have the right to smile?

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness

Of faint stale smells of beer

From the sawdust-trampled street

With all its muddy feet that press

To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades

That time resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,

You lay upon your back, and waited;

You dozed, and watched the night revealing

The thousand sordid images

Of which your soul was constituted;

They flickered against the ceiling.

And when all the world came back

And the light crept up between the shutters,

And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands;

Sitting along the bed’s edge, where

You curled the papers from your hair,

Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies

That fade behind a city block,

Or trampled by insistent feet

At four and five and six o’clock;

And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

And evening newspapers, and eyes

Assured of certain certainties,

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Twelve o’clock.

Along the reaches of the street

Held in a lunar synthesis,

Whispering lunar incantations

Dissolve the floors of memory

And all its clear relations,

Its divisions and precisions.

Every street-lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drum,

And through the spaces of the dark

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,

The street-lamp sputtered,

The street-lamp muttered,

The street-lamp said, ‘Regard that woman

Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door

Which opens on her like a grin.

You see the border of her dress

Is torn and stained with sand,

And you see the corner of her eye

Twists like a crooked pin.’

The memory throws up high and dry

A crowd of twisted things;

A twisted branch upon the beach

Eaten smooth, and polished

As if the world gave up

The secret of its skeleton,

Stiff and white.

A broken spring in a factory yard,

Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left

Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,

The street-lamp said,

‘Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,

Slips out its tongue

And devours a morsel of rancid butter.’

So the hand of the child, automatic,

Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.

I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.

I have seen eyes in the street

Trying to peer through lighted shutters,

And a crab one afternoon in a pool,

An old crab with barnacles on his back,

Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,

The lamp sputtered,

The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:

‘Regard the moon,

La lune ne garde aucune rancune,

She winks a feeble eye,

She smiles into corners.

She smooths the hair of the grass.

The moon has lost her memory.

A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,

Her hand twists a paper rose,

That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,

She is alone

With all the old nocturnal smells

That cross and cross across her brain.’

The reminiscence comes

Of sunless dry geraniums

And dust in crevices,

Smells of chestnuts in the streets,

And female smells in shuttered rooms,

And cigarettes in corridors

And cocktail smells in bars.

The lamp said,

‘Four o’clock,

Here is the number on the door.

Memory!

You have the key,

The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.

Mount.

The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,

Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.’

The last twist of the knife.

Morning at the Window

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,

And along the trampled edges of the street

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids

Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me

Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,

And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts

An aimless smile that hovers in the air

And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

The ‘Boston Evening Transcript’

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript

Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

When evening quickens faintly in the street,

Wakening the appetites of life in some

And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,

I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning

Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to La Rochefoucauld,

If the street were time and he at the end of the street,

And I say, ‘Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.’

Aunt Helen 

Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,

And lived in a small house near a fashionable square

Cared for by servants to the number of four.

Now when she died there was silence in heaven

And silence at her end of the street.

The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet –

He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.

The dogs were handsomely provided for,

But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.

The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,

And the footman sat upon the dining-table

Holding the second housemaid on his knees –

Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

Cousin Nancy

Miss Nancy Ellicott

Strode across the hills and broke them,

Rode across the hills and broke them –

The barren New England hills –

Riding to hounds

Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked

And danced all the modern dances;

And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,

But they knew that it was modern.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch

Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,

The army of unalterable law.

Mr. Apollinax

Ω τς καινότητος. ‘Hράκλεις, τς παραδοξολογίας. εὐμήχανος ἄνθρωπος.

LUCIAN

When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States

His laughter tinkled among the teacups.

I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees,

And of Priapus in the shrubbery

Gaping at the lady in the swing.

In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing-Cheetah’s

He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.

His laughter was submarine and profound

Like the old man of the sea’s

Hidden under coral islands

Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence,

Dropping from fingers of surf.

I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair

Or grinning over a screen

With seaweed in its hair.

I heard the beat of centaur’s hoofs over the hard turf

As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon.

‘He is a charming man’ – ‘But after all what did he mean?’ –

‘His pointed ears…. He must be unbalanced.’ –

‘There was something he said that I might have challenged.’

Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah

I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.

Hysteria

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …’ I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

Conversation Galante

I observe: ‘Our sentimental friend the moon!

Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)

It may be Prester John’s balloon

Or an old battered lantern hung aloft

To light poor travellers to their distress.’

    She then: ‘How you digress!’

And I then: ‘Someone frames upon the keys

That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain

The night and moonshine; music which we seize

To body forth our own vacuity.’

    She then: ‘Does this refer to me?’

    ‘Oh no, it is I who am inane.’

‘You, madam, are the eternal humorist,

The eternal enemy of the absolute,

Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!

With your air indifferent and imperious

At a stroke our mad poetics to confute –’

    And – ‘Are we then so serious?’

La Figlia Che Piange

Ο quam te memorem virgo …

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair –

Lean on a garden urn –

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair –

Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise –

Fling them to the ground and turn

With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:

But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,

So I would have had her stand and grieve,

So he would have left

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,

As the mind deserts the body it has used.

I should find

Some way incomparably light and deft,

Some way we both should understand,

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather

Compelled my imagination many days,

Many days and many hours:

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

And I wonder how they should have been together!

I should have lost a gesture and a pose.

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze

The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

POEMS

1920

Gerontion

           Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming on both.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,

Bitten by flies, fought.

My house is a decayed house,

And the Jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;

Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

                    I an old man,

A dull head among windy spaces.

Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,

Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year

Came Christ the tiger

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,

To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero

With caressing hands, at Limoges

Who walked all night in the next room;

By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;

By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room

Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp

Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles

Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,

An old man in a draughty house

Under a windy knob.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late

What’s not believed in, or if still believed,

In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon

Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with

Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices

Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last

We have not reached conclusion, when I

Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last

I have not made this show purposelessly

And it is not by any concitation

Of the backward devils.

I would meet you upon this honestly.

I that was near your heart was removed therefrom

To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it

Since what is kept must be adulterated?

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:

How should I use them for your closer contact?

These with a thousand small deliberations

Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,

Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,

With pungent sauces, multiply variety

In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,

Suspend its operations, will the weevil

Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled

Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear

In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,

White, feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

And an old man driven by the Trades

To a sleepy corner.

  Tenants of the house,

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

Burbank with a Baedeker:
Bleistein with a Cigar

Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire – nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus – the gondola stopped, the old palace was there, how charming its grey and pink – goats and monkeys, with such hair too! – so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.

Burbank crossed a little bridge

    Descending at a small hotel;

Princess Volupine arrived,

    They were together, and he fell.

Defunctive music under sea

    Passed seaward with the passing bell

Slowly: the God Hercules

    Had left him, that had loved him well.

The horses, under the axletree

    Beat up the dawn from Istria

With even feet. Her shuttered barge

    Burned on the water all the day.

But this or such was Bleistein’s way:

    A saggy bending of the knees

And elbows, with the palms turned out,

    Chicago Semite Viennese.

A lustreless protrusive eye

    Stares from the protozoic slime

At a perspective of Canaletto.

    The smoky candle end of time

Declines. On the Rialto once.

    The rats are underneath the piles.

The Jew is underneath the lot.

    Money in furs. The boatman smiles,

Princess Volupine extends

    A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand

To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,

    She entertains Sir Ferdinand

Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings

    And flea’d his rump and pared his claws?

Thought Burbank, meditating on

    Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.

Sweeney Erect

        And the trees about me,
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!

Paint me a cavernous waste shore

    Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,

Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks

    Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

Display me Aeolus above

    Reviewing the insurgent gales

Which tangle Ariadne’s hair

    And swell with haste the perjured sails.

Morning stirs the feet and hands

    (Nausicaa and Polypheme).

Gesture of orang-outang

    Rises from the sheets in steam.

This withered root of knots of hair

    Slitted below and gashed with eyes,

This oval Ο cropped out with teeth:

    The sickle motion from the thighs

Jackknifes upward at the knees

    Then straightens out from heel to hip

Pushing the framework of the bed

    And clawing at the pillow slip.

Sweeney addressed full length to shave

    Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,

Knows the female temperament

    And wipes the suds around his face.

(The lengthened shadow of a man

    Is history, said Emerson

Who had not seen the silhouette

    Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.)

Tests the razor on his leg

    Waiting until the shriek subsides.

The epileptic on the bed

    Curves backward, clutching at her sides.

The ladies of the corridor

    Find themselves involved, disgraced,

Call witness to their principles

    And deprecate the lack of taste

Observing that hysteria

    Might easily be misunderstood;

Mrs. Turner intimates

    It does the house no sort of good.

But Doris, towelled from the bath,

    Enters padding on broad feet,

Bringing sal volatile

    And a glass of brandy neat.

A Cooking Egg

En l’an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues …

Pipit sate upright in her chair

    Some distance from where I was sitting;

Views of Oxford Colleges

    Lay on the table, with the knitting.

Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,

    Her grandfather and great great aunts,

Supported on the mantelpiece

    An Invitation to the Dance.

. . . . .

I shall not want Honour in Heaven

    For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney

And have talk with Coriolanus

    And other heroes of that kidney.

I shall not want Capital in Heaven

    For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond.

We two shall lie together, lapt

    In a five per cent. Exchequer Bond.

I shall not want Society in Heaven,

    Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;

Her anecdotes will be more amusing

    Than Pipit’s experience could provide.

I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:

    Madame Blavatsky will instruct me

In the Seven Sacred Trances;

    Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.

. . . . .

But where is the penny world I bought

    To eat with Pipit behind the screen?

The red-eyed scavengers are creeping

    From Kentish Town and Golder’s Green;

Where are the eagles and the trumpets?

    Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.

Over buttered scones and crumpets

    Weeping, weeping multitudes

Droop in a hundred A.B.C.’s.

Le Directeur

Malheur à la malheureuse Tamise

Qui coule si près du Spectateur.

Le directeur

Conservateur

Du Spectateur

Empeste la brise.

Les actionnaires

Réactionnaires

Du Spectateur

Conservateur

Bras dessus bras dessous

Font des tours

A pas de loup.

Dans un égout

Une petite fille

En guenilles

Camarde

Regarde

Le directeur

Du Spectateur

Conservateur

Et crève d’amour.

Mélange Adultère de Tout

En Amérique, professeur;

En Angleterre, journaliste;

C’est à grands pas et en sueur

Que vous suivrez à peine ma piste.

En Yorkshire, conférencier;

Α Londres, un peu banquier,

Vous me paierez bien la tête.

C’est à Paris que je me coiffe

Casque noir de jemenfoutiste.

En Allemagne, philosophe

Surexcité par Emporheben

Au grand air de Bergsteigleben;

J’erre toujours de-ci de-là

Α divers coups de tra là là

De Damas jusqu’à Omaha.

Je célébrai mon jour de fête

Dans une oasis d’Afrique

Vêtu d’une peau de girafe.

On montrera mon cénotaphe

Aux côtes brûlantes de Mozambique.

Lune de Miel

Ils ont vu les Pay-Bas, ils rentrent à Terre Haute;

Mais une nuit d’été, les voici à Ravenne,

A l’aise entre deux draps, chez deux centaines de punaises;

La sueur aestivale, et une forte odeur de chienne.

Ils restent sur le dos écartent les genoux

De quatre jambes molles tout gonflées de morsures.

On relève le drap pour mieux égratigner.

Moins d’une lieue d’ici est Saint Apollinaire

En Classe, basilique connue des amateurs

De chapitaux d’acanthe que tournoie le vent.

Ils vont prendre le train de huit heures

Prolonger leurs misères de Padoue à Milan

Où se trouve la Cène, et un restaurant pas cher.

Lui pense aux pourboires, et rédige son bilan.

Ils auront vu la Suisse et traversé la France.

Et Saint Apollinaire, raide et ascétique,

Vieille usine désaffectée de Dieu, tient encore

Dans ses pierres écroulantes la forme précise de Byzance.

The Hippopotamus

And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans.

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud;

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,

Susceptible to nervous shock;

While the True Church can never fail

For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err

In compassing material ends,

While the True Church need never stir

To gather in its dividends.

The ’potamus can never reach

The mango on the mango-tree;

But fruits of pomegranate and peach

Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice

Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,

But every week we hear rejoice

The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day

Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;

God works in a mysterious way –

The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ’potamus take wing

Ascending from the damp savannas,

And quiring angels round him sing

The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean

And him shall heavenly arms enfold,

Among the saints he shall be seen

Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,

By all the martyr’d virgins kist,

While the True Church remains below

Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Dans le Restaurant

Le garçon délabré qui n’a rien à faire

Que de se gratter les doigts et se pencher sur mon épaule:

    ‘Dans mon pays il fera temps pluvieux,

    Du vent, du grand soleil, et de la pluie;

    C’est ce qu’on appelle le jour de lessive des gueux.’

(Bavard, baveux, a la croupe arrondie,

Je te prie, au moins, ne bave pas dans la soupe).

    ‘Les saules trempés, et des bourgeons sur les ronces –

    C’est là, dans une averse, qu’on s’abrite.

J’avais sept ans, elle était plus petite.

    Ellé était toute mouillée, je lui ai donné des primevères.’

Les taches de son gilet montent au chiffre de trente-huit.

    ‘Je la chatouillais, pour la faire rire.

    J’éprouvais un instant de puissance et de délire.’

    Mais alors, vieux lubrique, à cet âge …

‘Monsieur, le fait est dur.

    Il est venu, nous peloter, un gros chien;

    Moi j’avais peur, je l’ai quittée à mi-chemin.

    C’est dommage.’

             Mais alors, tu as ton vautour!

Va t’en te décrotter les rides du visage;

Tiens, ma fourchette, décrasse-toi le crâne.

De quel droit payes-tu des expériences comme moi?

Tiens, voilà dix sous, pour la salle-de-bains.

Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,

Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,

Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d’étain:

Un courant de sous-mer l’emporta très loin,

Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure.

Figurez-vous donc, c’était un sort pénible;

Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille.

Whispers of Immortality

Webster was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breastless creatures under ground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls

Stared from the sockets of the eyes!

He knew that thought clings round dead limbs

Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Donne, I suppose, was such another

Who found no substitute for sense,

To seize and clutch and penetrate;

Expert beyond experience,

He knew the anguish of the marrow

The ague of the skeleton;

No contact possible to flesh

Allayed the fever of the bone.

. . . . .

Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye

Is underlined for emphasis;

Uncorseted, her friendly bust

Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

The couched Brazilian jaguar

Compels the scampering marmoset

With subtle effluence of cat;

Grishkin has a maisonnette;

The sleek Brazilian jaguar

Does not in its arboreal gloom

Distil so rank a feline smell

As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

And even the Abstract Entities

Circumambulate her charm;

But our lot crawls between dry ribs

To keep our metaphysics warm.

Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service

Look, look, mastery here comes two religious caterpillars.

The Jew of Malta.

Polyphiloprogenitive

The sapient sutlers of the Lord

Drift across the window-panes.

In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word.

Superfetation of τò ἕν,

And at the mensual turn of time

Produced enervate Origen.

A painter of the Umbrian school

Designed upon a gesso ground

The nimbus of the Baptized God.

The wilderness is cracked and browned

But through the water pale and thin

Still shine the unoffending feet

And there above the painter set

The Father and the Paraclete.

. . . . .

The sable presbyters approach

The avenue of penitence;

The young are red and pustular

Clutching piaculative pence.

Under the penitential gates

Sustained by staring Seraphim

Where the souls of the devout

Burn invisible and dim.

Along the garden-wall the bees

With hairy bellies pass between

The staminate and pistillate,

Blest office of the epicene.

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham

Stirring the water in his bath.

The masters of the subtle schools

Are controversial, polymath.

Sweeney Among the Nightingales

ὤμοι, πέπληγμαι καιρίαν πληγὴν ἔσω.

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees

Letting his arms hang down to laugh,

The zebra stripes along his jaw

Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon

Slide westward toward the River Plate,

Death and the Raven drift above

And Sweeney guards the hornèd gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog

Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;

The person in the Spanish cape

Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees

Slips and pulls the table cloth

Overturns a coffee-cup,

Reorganised upon the floor

She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown

Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;

The waiter brings in oranges

Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

The silent vertebrate in brown

Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;

Rachel née Rabinovitch

Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

She and the lady in the cape

Are suspect, thought to be in league;

Therefore the man with heavy eyes

Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears

Outside the window, leaning in,

Branches of wistaria

Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct

Converses at the door apart,

The nightingales are singing near

The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood

When Agamemnon cried aloud,

And let their liquid siftings fall

To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

THE WASTE LAND

1922

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεîν θέλω.’

For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

10 And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

20 Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

30 I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

                         Frisch weht der Wind

                         Der Heimat zu

                         Mein Irisch Kind,

                         Wo weilest du?

‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’

– Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

40 Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

50 The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

60 Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!

70 ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!’

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

80 From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid – troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

90 That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

100 So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

110 Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. 

‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.

    What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

‘What is that noise?’

                      The wind under the door.

‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’

120               Nothing again nothing. 

                                                                            ‘Do

You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

‘Nothing?’

    I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’

                                                                             But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag –

It’s so elegant

130 So intelligent 

‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?

I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

What shall we ever do?’

                                                    The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said –

140 I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

150 Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

160 (She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot –

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

170 Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. 

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

III. The Fire Sermon

The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

180 And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept …

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

While I was fishing in the dull canal

190 On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck

And on the king my father’s death before him.

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

Ο the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

200 And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water

Et, O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

210 Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants 

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

220 At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives 

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest –

230 I too awaited the expected guest. 

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

240 Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronising kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit …

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

250 Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smooths her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

‘This music crept by me upon the waters’

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

Ο City city, I can sometimes hear

260 Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

                   The river sweats

                   Oil and tar

                   The barges drift

                   With the turning tide

270                   Red sails 

                   Wide

                   To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

                   The barges wash

                   Drifting logs

                   Down Greenwich reach

                   Past the Isle of Dogs.

                                         Weialala leia

                                         Wallala leialala

                   Elizabeth and Leicester

280           Beating oars 

                   The stern was formed

                   A gilded shell

                   Red and gold

                   The brisk swell

                   Rippled both shores

                   Southwest wind

                   Carried down stream

                   The peal of bells

                   White towers

290                              Weialala leia 

                                      Wallala leialala

                   ‘Trains and dusty trees.

                   Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

                   Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

                   Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’

                   ‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

                   Under my feet. After the event

                   He wept. He promised “a new start.”

                   I made no comment. What should I resent?’

300                    ‘On Margate Sands.

                   I can connect

                   Nothing with nothing.

                   The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

                   My people humble people who expect

                   Nothing.’

                                      la la

                   To Carthage then I came

                   Burning burning burning burning

                   Ο Lord Thou pluckest me out

310                    Ο Lord Thou pluckest

                   burning

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

                                              A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

                                              Gentile or Jew

320 Ο you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

330 With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

340 Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

                                                  If there were water

    And no rock

    If there were rock

    And also water

350    And water

    A spring

    A pool among the rock

    If there were the sound of water only

    Not the cicada

    And dry grass singing

    But sound of water over a rock

    Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

    Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

    But there is no water

360 Who is the third who walks always beside you? 

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

– But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

370 Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth 

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And riddled whisper music on those strings

380 And bats with baby faces in the violet light 

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.

390 It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the roof tree

Co co rico co co rico

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

400 Then spoke the thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

410 In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: The boat responded

420 Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar 

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

                                                 I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon – Ο swallow swallow

430 Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie 

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                         Shantih shantih shantih

Notes on The Waste Land

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies. 

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

Line 20. Cf. Ezekiel II, i.

23. Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v.

31. V. Tristan und Isolde, I, verses 5–8.

42. Id. III, verse 24.

46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the ‘crowds of people’, and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.

60. Cf. Baudelaire:
‘Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
‘Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.’

63. Cf. Inferno III, 55–57:

                        si lunga tratta

               di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto

                   che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.

64. Cf. Inferno IV, 25–27:

               Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,

               non avea pianto ma’ che di sospiri

               che l’aura eterna facevan tremare.

68. A phenomenon which I have often noticed.

74. Cf. the Dirge in Webster’s White Devil.

76. V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal. 

II. A GAME OF CHESS

77. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, l. 190.

92. Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I, 726:

            dependent lychni laquearibus aureis

            incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt.

98. Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 140.

99. V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, Philomela.

100. Cf. Part III, l. 204.

115. Cf. Part III, l. 195.

118. Cf. Webster: ‘Is the wind in that door still?’

126. Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.

138. Cf. the game of chess in Middleton’s Women beware Women.

III. THE FIRE SERMON

176. V. Spenser, Prothalamion.

192. Cf. The Tempest, I, ii.

196. Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress,

197. Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees:

            ‘When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear,

            ‘A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring

            ‘Actaeon to Diana in the spring,

            ‘Where all shall see her naked skin …’

199. I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.

202. V. Verlaine, Parsifal.

210. The currants were quoted at a price ‘cost insurance and freight to London’; and the Bill of Lading, etc., were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft.

218. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest:

… Cum Iunone iocos et ‘maior vestra profecto est

Quam quae contingit maribus’, dixisse, ‘voluptas.’

Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti

Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota.

Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva

Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu

Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem

Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem

Vidit et ‘est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae’,

Dixit ‘ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet,

Nunc quoque vos feriam!’ percussis anguibus isdem

Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.

Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa

Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto

Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique

Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte,

At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam

Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto

Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore.

221. This may not appear as exact as Sappho’s lines, but I had in mind the ‘longshore’ or ‘dory’ fisherman, who returns at nightfall.

253. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.

257. V. The Tempest, as above.

264. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren’s interiors. See The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.).

266. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here. From line 292 to 306 inclusive they speak in turn. V. Götterdämmerung, III, i: the Rhine-daughters.

279. V. Froude, Elizabeth, Vol. I, ch. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain:
‘In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. (The Queen) was alone with Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be married if the queen pleased.’

293. Cf. Purgatorio, V. 133:‘Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
‘Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma.’

307. V. St. Augustine’s Confessions: ‘to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.’

308. The complete text of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.

309. From St. Augustine’s Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston’s book) and the present decay of eastern Europe.

357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) ‘it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats…. Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.’ Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.

360. The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.

367–77. Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos: ‘Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligen Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen.’

402. ‘Datta, dayadhvam, damyata’ (Give, sympathise, control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka – Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen’s Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489.

408. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi:

                                            ‘… they’ll remarry

Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider

Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.’

412. Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46:
    ‘ed io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto
    all’ orribile torre.’
  Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 306.
‘My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it…. In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.’

425. V. Weston: From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King.

428. V. Purgatorio, XXVI, 145.

     ‘“Ara vos prec per aquella valor

     “que vos condus al som de l’escalina,

     “sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.”

     Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.’

429. V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III.

430. V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado.

432. V. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.

434. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. The Peace which passeth understanding’ is our equivalent to this word.

THE HOLLOW MEN

1925

Mistah Kurtz – he dead.

The Hollow Men

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us – if at all – not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death’s dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer –

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man’s hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death’s other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

                                           Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

ASH-WEDNESDAY

1930

I

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessèd face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

Shall these bones live? shall these

Bones live? And that which had been contained

In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:

Because of the goodness of this Lady

And because of her loveliness, and because

She honours the Virgin in meditation,

We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled

Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love

To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

It is this which recovers

My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions

Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn

In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.

Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.

There is no life in them. As I am forgotten

And would be forgotten, so I would forget

Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only

The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping

With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences

Calm and distressed

Torn and most whole

Rose of memory

Rose of forgetfulness

Exhausted and life-giving

Worried reposeful

The single Rose

Is now the Garden

Where all loves end

Terminate torment

Of love unsatisfied

The greater torment

Of love satisfied

End of the endless

Journey to no end

Conclusion of all that

Is inconclusible

Speech without word and

Word of no speech

Grace to the Mother

For the Garden

Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,

Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye

Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity

Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair

I turned and saw below

The same shape twisted on the banister

Under the vapour in the fetid air

Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears

The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair

I left them twisting, turning below;

There were no more faces and the stair was dark,

Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,

Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair

Was a slotted window bellied like the figs’s fruit

And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene

The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green

Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,

Lilac and brown hair;

Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,

Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair

Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy

Lord, I am not worthy

                       but speak the word only.

IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet

Who walked between

The various ranks of varied green

Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour,

Talking of trivial things

In ignorance and in knowledge of eternal dolour

Who moved among the others as they walked,

Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand

In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour,

Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing

Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring

One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathed about her, folded.

The new years walk, restoring

Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring

With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem

The time. Redeem

The unread vision in the higher dream

While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue

Between the yews, behind the garden god,

Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down

Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.

        Ο my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word

Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence

Not on the sea or on the islands, not

On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,

For those who walk in darkness

Both in the day time and in the night time

The right time and the right place are not here

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for

Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,

Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between

Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait

In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray

For children at the gate

Who will not go away and cannot pray:

Pray for those who chose and oppose

        Ο my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender

Yew trees pray for those who offend her

And are terrified and cannot surrender

And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks

In the last desert between the last blue rocks

The desert in the garden the garden in the desert

Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

        Ο my people.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

From the wide window towards the granite shore

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying

Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices

And the weak spirit quickens to rebel

For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell

Quickens to recover

The cry of quail and the whirling plover

And the blind eye creates

The empty forms between the ivory gates

And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth

The place of solitude where three dreams cross

Between blue rocks

But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away

Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

ARIEL POEMS

Journey of the Magi

‘A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

A Song for Simeon

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and

The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;

The stubborn season has made stand.

My life is light, waiting for the death wind,

Like a feather on the back of my hand.

Dust in sunlight and memory in corners

Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.

I have walked many years in this city,

Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,

Have given and taken honour and ease.

There went never any rejected from my door.

Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children

When the time of sorrow is come?

They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,

Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation

Grant us thy peace.

Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,

Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,

Now at this birth season of decease,

Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,

Grant Israel’s consolation

To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word.

They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation

With glory and derision,

Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.

Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,

Not for me the ultimate vision.

Grant me thy peace.

(And a sword shall pierce thy heart, Thine also).

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,

I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.

Let thy servant depart,

Having seen thy salvation.

Animula

‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul’

To a flat world of changing lights and noise,

To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm;

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,

Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,

Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,

Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,

Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure

In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,

Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea;

Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor

And running stags around a silver tray;

Confounds the actual and the fanciful,

Content with playing-cards and kings and queens,

What the fairies do and what the servants say.

The heavy burden of the growing soul

Perplexes and offends more, day by day;

Week by week, offends and perplexes more

With the imperatives of ‘is and seems’

And may and may not, desire and control.

The pain of living and the drug of dreams

Curl up the small soul in the window seat

Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Issues from the hand of time the simple soul

Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,

Unable to fare forward or retreat,

Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,

Denying the importunity of the blood,

Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,

Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;

Living first in the silence after the viaticum.

Pray for Guiterriez, avid of speed and power,

For Boudin, blown to pieces,

For this one who made a great fortune,

And that one who went his own way.

Pray for Floret, by the boarhound slain between the yew trees,

Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.

Marina

Quis hic locus, quae

regio, quae mundi plaga?

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands

What water lapping the bow

And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog

What images return

Ο my daughter.

Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning

Death

Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning

Death

Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning

Death

Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning

Death

Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,

A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog

By this grace dissolved in place

What is this face, less clear and clearer

The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger –

Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet

Under sleep, where all the waters meet.

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.

I made this, I have forgotten

And remember.

The rigging weak and the canvas rotten

Between one June and another September.

Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.

This form, this face, this life

Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers

And woodthrush calling through the fog

My daughter.

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,

Some of which we may disregard:

The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,

The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),

And the childish – which is not that of the child

For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel

Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree

Is not only a decoration, but an angel.

The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:

Let him continue in the spirit of wonder

At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;

So that the glittering rapture, the amazement

Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,

So that the surprises, delight in new possessions

(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),

The expectation of the goose or turkey

And the expected awe on its appearance,

So that the reverence and the gaiety

May not be forgotten in later experience,

In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,

The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,

Or in the piety of the convert

Which may be tainted with a self-conceit

Displeasing to God and disrespectful to the children

(And here I remember also with gratitude

St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):

So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas

(By ‘eightieth’ meaning whichever is the last)

The accumulated memories of annual emotion

May be concentrated into a great joy

Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion

When fear came upon every soul:

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end

And the first coming of the second coming.

UNFINISHED POEMS

Sweeney Agonistes

Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama

Orestes: You don’t see them, you don’t – but I see them: they are hunting me down, I must move on.

Choephoroi.

Hence the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union, until it has divested itself of the love of created beings.

St. John of the Cross.

Fragment of a Prologue

DUSTY. DORIS.

DUSTY:  How about Pereira?

DORIS:                              What about Pereira?

              I don’t care.

DUSTY:                             You don’t care!

              Who pays the rent?

DORIS:                              Yes he pays the rent

DUSTY:  Well some men don’t and some men do

              Some men don’t and you know who

DORIS:   You can have Pereira

DUSTY:                              What about Pereira?

DORIS:  He’s no gentleman, Pereira:

               You can’t trust him!

DUSTY:                              Well that’s true.

             He’s no gentleman if you can’t trust him

             And if you can’t trust him –

             Then you never know what he’s going to do.

DORIS:  No it wouldn’t do to be too nice to Pereira.

DUSTY: Now Sam’s a gentleman through and through.

DORIS:  I like Sam

DUSTY:                            I like Sam 

             Yes and Sam’s a nice boy too.

             He’s a funny fellow

DORIS:                              He is a funny fellow

             He’s like a fellow once I knew.

             He could make you laugh.

DUSTY:                            Sam can make you laugh:

             Sam’s all right

DORIS:                              But Pereira won’t do.

             We can’t have Pereira

DUSTY:                              Well what you going to do?

TELEPHONE:  Ting a ling ling

                     Ting a ling ling

DUSTY:                              That’s Pereira

DORIS:  Yes that’s Pereira

DUSTY:                              Well what you going to do?

TELEPHONE:  Ting a ling ling

                       Ting a ling ling

DUSTY:                              That’s Pereira

DORIS:  Well can’t you stop that horrible noise?

             Pick up the receiver

DUSTY:                              What’ll I say?

DORIS:  Say what you like: say I’m ill,

             Say I broke my leg on the stairs

             Say we’ve had a fire

DUSTY:                              Hello Hello are you there?

             Yes this is Miss Dorrance’s flat –

             Oh Mr. Pereira is that you? how do you do!

             Oh I’m so sorry. I am so sorry

             But Doris came home with a terrible chill

             No, just a chill

             Oh I think it’s only a chill

             Yes indeed I hope so too –

             Well I hope we shan’t have to call a doctor

             Doris just hates having a doctor

             She says will you ring up on Monday

             She hopes to be all right on Monday

             I say do you mind if I ring off now

             She’s got her feet in mustard and water

             I said I’m giving her mustard and water

             All right, Monday you’ll phone through.

             Yes I’ll tell her. Good bye. Goooood bye.

             I’m sure, that’s very kind of you.

                                           Ah-h-h

DORIS:  Now I’m going to cut the cards for to-night.

             Oh guess what the first is

DUSTY:                              First is. What is?

DORIS:  The King of Clubs

DUSTY:                              That’s Pereira

DORIS:  It might be Sweeney

DUSTY:                              It’s Pereira

DORIS:  It might just as well be Sweeney

DUSTY:  Well anyway it’s very queer.

DORIS:  Here’s the four of diamonds, what’s that mean?

DUSTY: (reading) ‘A small sum of money, or a present

                             Of wearing apparel, or a party’.

                             That’s queer too.

DORIS:  Here’s the three. What’s that mean?

DUSTY: ‘News of an absent friend’. – Pereira!

DORIS:  The Queen of Hearts! – Mrs. Porter!

DUSTY: Or it might be you

DORIS:                              Or it might be you

             We’re all hearts. You can’t be sure.

             It just depends on what comes next.

             You’ve got to think when you read the cards,

             It’s not a thing that anyone can do.

DUSTY: Yes I know you’ve a touch with the cards

             What comes next?

DORIS:                              What comes next. It’s the six.

DUSTY: ‘A quarrel. An estrangement. Separation of friends’.

DORIS:  Here’s the two of spades.

DUSTY:                              The two of spades!

             THAT’S THE COFFIN!!

DORIS:                              THAT’S THE COFFIN?

             Oh good heavens what’ll I do?

             Just before a party too!

DUSTY: Well it needn’t be yours, it may mean a friend.

DORIS:  No it’s mine. I’m sure it’s mine.

             I dreamt of weddings all last night.

             Yes it’s mine. I know it’s mine.

             Oh good heavens what’ll I do.

             Well I’m not going to draw any more,

             You cut for luck. You cut for luck.

             It might break the spell. You cut for luck.

DUSTY: The Knave of Spades.

DORIS:                              That’ll be Snow

DUSTY: Or it might be Swarts

DORIS:                              Or it might be Snow

DUSTY: It’s a funny thing how I draw court cards –

DORIS:  There’s a lot in the way you pick them up

DUSTY: There’s an awful lot in the way you feel

DORIS:  Sometimes they’ll tell you nothing at all

DUSTY: You’ve got to know what you want to ask them

DORIS: You’ve got to know what you want to know

DUSTY: It’s no use asking them too much

DORIS:  It’s no use asking more than once

DUSTY: Sometimes they’re no use at all.

DORIS:  I’d like to know about that coffin.

DUSTY: Well I never! What did I tell you?

             Wasn’t I saying I always draw court cards?

             The Knave of Hearts!

                          (Whistle outside of the window.)

                                           Well I never

             What a coincidence! Cards are queer!

                                        (Whistle again.)

DORIS:  Is that Sam?

DUSTY: Of course it’s Sam!

DORIS:  Of course, the Knave of Hearts is Sam!

DUSTY: (leaning out of the window): Hello Sam!

WAUCHOPE:                              Hello dear

             How many’s up there?

DUSTY:                              Nobody’s up here

             How many’s down there?

WAUCHOPE:                              Four of us here.

             Wait till I put the car round the corner

             We’ll be right up

DUSTY: All right, come up.

DUSTY: (to DORIS): Cards are queer.

DORIS:  I’d like to know about that coffin.

             KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

             KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

             KNOCK

             KNOCK

             KNOCK 

DORIS. DUSTY. WAUCHOPE. HORSFALL. KLIPSTEIN. KRUMPACKER

WAUCHOPE: Hello Doris! Hello Dusty! How do you do!

              How come? how come? will you permit me –

              I think you girls both know Captain Horsfall –

              We want you to meet two friends of ours,

              American gentlemen here on business.

              Meet Mr. Klipstein. Meet Mr. Krumpacker.

KLIPSTEIN:   How do you do

KRUMPACKER:                  How do you do

KLIPSTEIN:   I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance

KRUMPACKER: Extremely pleased to become acquainted

KLIPSTEIN: Sam – I should say Loot Sam Wauchope

KRUMPACKER: Of the Canadian Expeditionary Force –

KLIPSTEIN: The Loot has told us a lot about you.

KRUMPACKER: We were all in the war together

              Klip and me and the Cap and Sam.

KLIPSTEIN: Yes we did our bit, as you folks say,

              I’ll tell the world we got the Hun on the run

KRUMPACKER: What about that poker game? eh what Sam?

              What about that poker game in Bordeaux?

              Yes Miss Dorrance you get Sam

              To tell about that poker game in Bordeaux.

DUSTY: Do you know London well, Mr. Krumpacker?

KLIPSTEIN: No we never been here before

KRUMPACKER: We hit this town last night for the first time

KLIPSTEIN: And I certainly hope it won’t be the last time.

DORIS: You like London, Mr. Klipstein?

KRUMPACKER: Do we like London? do we like London!

              Do we like London!! Eh what Klip?

KLIPSTEIN: Say, Miss – er – uh – London’s swell.

              We like London fine.

KRUMPACKER:                   Perfectly slick.

DUSTY:  Why don’t you come and live here then?

KLIPSTEIN: Well, no, Miss – er – you haven’t quite got it

              (I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch your name –

              But I’m very pleased to meet you all the same) –

              London’s a little too gay for us

              Yes I’ll say a little too gay.

KRUMPACKER: Yes London’s a little too gay for us

              Don’t think I mean anything coarse –

              But I’m afraid we couldn’t stand the pace.

              What about it Klip?

KLIPSTEIN:                   You said it, Krum.

              London’s a slick place, London’s a swell place,

              London’s a fine place to come on a visit –

KRUMPACKER: Specially when you got a real live Britisher

              A guy like Sam to show you around.

              Sam of course is at home in London,

              And he’s promised to show us around.

Fragment of an Agon

SWEENEY. WAUCHOPE. HORSFALL. KLIPSTEIN. KRUMPACKER. SWARTS. SNOW. DORIS. DUSTY.

SWEENEY:                        I’ll carry you off

             To a cannibal isle.

DORIS:  You’ll be the cannibal!

SWEENEY: You’ll be the missionary!

             You’ll be my little seven stone missionary!

             I’ll gobble you up. I’ll be the cannibal.

DORIS: You’ll carry me off? To a cannibal isle?

SWEENEY: I’ll be the cannibal.

DORIS:                          I’ll be the missionary.

             I’ll convert you!

SWEENEY:                     I’ll convert you!

             Into a stew.

             A nice little, white little, missionary stew.

DORIS: You wouldn’t eat me!

SWEENEY:                     Yes I’d eat you!

             In a nice little, white little, soft little, tender little,

             Juicy little, right little, missionary stew.

             You see this egg

             You see this egg

             Well that’s life on a crocodile isle.

             There’s no telephones

             There’s no gramophones

             There’s no motor cars

             No two-seaters, no six-seaters,

             No Citroën, no Rolls-Royce.

             Nothing to eat but the fruit as it grows.

             Nothing to see but the palmtrees one way

             And the sea the other way,

             Nothing to hear but the sound of the surf.

             Nothing at all but three things

DORIS:                             What things?

SWEENEY: Birth, and copulation and death.

             That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all,

             Birth, and copulation, and death.

DORIS: I’d be bored.

SWEENEY:                     You’d be bored.

             Birth, and copulation, and death.

DORIS: I’d be bored.

SWEENEY:                     You’d be bored.

             Birth, and copulation, and death.

             That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:

             Birth, and copulation, and death.

             I’ve been born, and once is enough.

             You don’t remember, but I remember,

             Once is enough.

SONG BY WAUCHOPE AND HORSFALL.
SWARTS AS TAMBO. SNOW AS BONES

             Under the bamboo

             Bamboo bamboo

             Under the bamboo tree

             Two live as one

             One live as two

             Two live as three

             Under the bam

             Under the boo

             Under the bamboo tree.

             Where the breadfruit fall

             And the penguin call

             And the sound is the sound of the sea

             Under the bam

             Under the boo

             Under the bamboo tree

             Where the Gauguin maids

             In the banyan shades

             Wear palmleaf drapery

             Under the bam

             Under the boo

             Under the bamboo tree.  

             Tell me in what part of the wood

             Do you want to flirt with me?

             Under the breadfruit, banyan, palmleaf

             Or under the bamboo tree?

             Any old tree will do for me

             Any old wood is just as good

             Any old isle is just my style

             Any fresh egg

             Any fresh egg

             And the sound of the coral sea.

DORIS:  I don’t like eggs; I never liked eggs;

              And I don’t like life on your crocodile isle.

SONG BY KLIPSTEIN AND KRUMPACKER.
SNOW AND SWARTS AS BEFORE

             My little island girl

             My little island girl

             I’m going to stay with you

             And we won’t worry what to do

             We won’t have to catch any trains

             And we won’t go home when it rains

             We’ll gather hibiscus flowers

             For it won’t be minutes but hours

             For it won’t be hours but years   

And the morning

And the evening

And noontide

diminuendo
And night

Morning

Evening

Noontime

Night

DORIS:  That’s not life, that’s no life

             Why I’d just as soon be dead.

SWEENEY: That’s what life is. Just is

DORIS:                     What is?

             What’s that life is?

SWEENEY: Life is death.

             I knew a man once did a girl in –

DORIS:  Oh Mr. Sweeney, please don’t talk,

             I cut the cards before you came

             And I drew the coffin

SWARTS:                     You drew the coffin?

DORIS:  I drew the COFFIN very last card.

             I don’t care for such conversation

             A woman runs a terrible risk.

SNOW:  Let Mr. Sweeney continue his story.

             I assure you, Sir, we are very interested.

SWEENEY: I knew a man once did a girl in

             Any man might do a girl in

             Any man has to, needs to, wants to

             Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.

             Well he kept her there in a bath

             With a gallon of lysol in a bath

SWARTS: These fellows always get pinched in the end.

SNOW:  Excuse me, they don’t all get pinched in the end.

             What about them bones on Epsom Heath?

             I seen that in the papers

             You seen it in the papers

             They don’t all get pinched in the end.

DORIS:  A woman runs a terrible risk.

SNOW:  Let Mr. Sweeney continue his story.

SWEENEY: This one didn’t get pinched in the end

             But that’s another story too.

             This went on for a couple of months

             Nobody came

             And nobody went

             But he took in the milk and he paid the rent,

SWARTS: What did he do?

             All that time, what did he do?

SWEENEY: What did he do! what did he do?

             That don’t apply.

             Talk to live men about what they do.

             He used to come and see me sometimes

             I’d give him a drink and cheer him up.

DORIS: Cheer him up?

DUSTY:                     Cheer him up?

SWEENEY: Well here again that don’t apply

             But I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.

             But here’s what I was going to say.

             He didn’t know if he was alive

                                           and the girl was dead

             He didn’t know if the girl was alive

                                           and he was dead

             He didn’t know if they both were alive

                                           or both were dead

             If he was alive then the milkman wasn’t

                                            and the rent-collector wasn’t

             And if they were alive then he was dead.

             There wasn’t any joint

             There wasn’t any joint

             For when you’re alone

             When you’re alone like he was alone

             You’re either or neither

             I tell you again it don’t apply

             Death or life or life or death

             Death is life and life is death

             I gotta use words when I talk to you

             But if you understand or if you don’t

             That’s nothing to me and nothing to you

             We all gotta do what we gotta do

             We’re gona sit here and drink this booze

             We’re gona sit here and have a tune

             We’re gona stay and we’re gona go

             And somebody’s gotta pay the rent

DORIS:                     I know who

SWEENEY: But that’s nothing to me and nothing to you.

FULL CHORUS:
WAUCHOPE, HORSFALL, KLIPSTEIN, KRUMPACKER

             When you’re alone in the middle of the night and you wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright

             When you’re alone in the middle of the bed and you wake like someone hit you in the head

             You’ve had a cream of a nightmare dream and you’ve got the hoo-ha’s coming to you.

             Hoo hoo hoo

             You dreamt you waked up at seven o’clock and it’s foggy and it’s damp and it’s dawn and it’s dark

             And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock for you know the hangman’s waiting for you.

             And perhaps you’re alive

             And perhaps you’re dead

             Hoo ha ha

             Hoo ha ha

             Hoo

             Hoo

             Hoo

             KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

             KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

             KNOCK

             KNOCK

             KNOCK

Coriolan

I. Triumphal March

Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels

Over the paving.

And the flags. And the trumpets. And so many eagles.

How many? Count them. And such a press of people.

We hardly knew ourselves that day, or knew the City.

This is the way to the temple, and we so many crowding the way.

So many waiting, how many waiting? what did it matter, on such a day?

Are they coming? No, not yet. You can see some eagles.

And hear the trumpets.

Here they come. Is he coming?

The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving.

We can wait with our stools and our sausages.

What comes first? Can you see? Tell us. It is

                5,800,000 rifles and carbines,

                    102,000 machine guns,

                      28,000 trench mortars,

                      53,000 field and heavy guns,

I cannot tell how many projectiles, mines and fuses,

                 13,000 aeroplanes,

                 24,000 aeroplane engines,

                 50,000 ammunition waggons,

now          55,000 army waggons,

                 11,000 field kitchens,

                   1,150 field bakeries.

What a time that took. Will it be he now? No,

Those are the golf club Captains, these the Scouts,

And now the société gymnastique de Poissy

And now come the Mayor and the Liverymen. Look

There he is now, look:

There is no interrogation in his eyes

Or in the hands, quiet over the horse’s neck,

And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent.

Ο hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast,

Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water

At the still point of the turning world. Ο hidden.

Now they go up to the temple. Then the sacrifice.

Now come the virgins bearing urns, urns containing

Dust

Dust

Dust of dust, and now

Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels

Over the paving.

This is all we could see. But how many eagles! and how many trumpets!

(And Easter Day, we didn’t get to the country,

So we took young Cyril to church. And they rang a bell

And he said right out loud, crumpets.)

                                              Don’t throw away that sausage,

It’ll come in handy. He’s artful. Please, will you

Give us a light?

Light

Light

Et les soldats faisaient la haie? ILS LA FAISAIENT.

II. Difficulties of a Statesman

CRY what shall I cry?

All flesh is grass: comprehending

The Companions of the Bath, the Knights of the British Empire, the Cavaliers,

Ο Cavaliers! of the Legion of Honour,

The Order of the Black Eagle (1st and 2nd class),

And the Order of the Rising Sun.

Cry cry what shall I cry?

The first thing to do is to form the committees:

The consultative councils, the standing committees, select committees and sub-committees.

One secretary will do for several committees.

What shall I cry?

Arthur Edward Cyril Parker is appointed telephone operator

At a salary of one pound ten a week rising by annual increments of five shillings

To two pounds ten a week; with a bonus of thirty shillings at Christmas

And one week’s leave a year.

A committee has been appointed to nominate a commission of engineers

To consider the Water Supply.

A commission is appointed

For Public Works, chiefly the question of rebuilding the fortifications.

A commission is appointed

To confer with a Volscian commission

About perpetual peace: the fletchers and javelin-makers and smiths

Have appointed a joint committee to protest against the reduction of orders.

Meanwhile the guards shake dice on the marches

And the frogs (O Mantuan) croak in the marshes.

Fireflies flare against the faint sheet lightning

What shall I cry?

Mother mother

Here is the row of family portraits, dingy busts, all looking  remarkably Roman,

Remarkably like each other, lit up successively by the flare

Of a sweaty torchbearer, yawning.

Ο hidden under the … Hidden under the … Where the dove’s foot rested and locked for a moment,

A still moment, repose of noon, set under the upper branches of noon’s widest tree

Under the breast feather stirred by the small wind after noon

There the cyclamen spreads its wings, there the clematis droops over the lintel,

Ο mother (not among these busts, all correctly inscribed)

I a tired head among these heads

Necks strong to bear them

Noses strong to break the wind

Mother

May we not be some time, almost now, together,

If the mactations, immolations, oblations, impetrations,

Are now observed

May we not be

Ο hidden

Hidden in the stillness of noon, in the silent croaking night.

Come with the sweep of the little bat’s wing, with the small flare of the firefly or lightning bug,

‘Rising and falling, crowned with dust’, the small creatures,

The small creatures chirp thinly through the dust, through the night.

Ο mother

What shall I cry?

We demand a committee, a representative committee, a committee of investigation

RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN

MINOR POEMS

Eyes that last I saw in tears

Eyes that last I saw in tears

Through division

Here in death’s dream kingdom

The golden vision reappears

I see the eyes but not the tears

This is my affliction.

This is my affliction

Eyes I shall not see again

Eyes of decision

Eyes I shall not see unless

At the door of death’s other kingdom

Where, as in this

The eyes outlast a little while

A little while outlast the tears

And hold us in derision.

The wind sprang up at four o’clock

The wind sprang up at four o’clock

The wind sprang up and broke the bells

Swinging between life and death

Here, in death’s dream kingdom

The waking echo of confusing strife

Is it a dream or something else

When the surface of the blackened river

Is a face that sweats with tears?

I saw across the blackened river

The camp fire shake with alien spears.

Here, across death’s other river

The Tartar horsemen shake their spears.

Five-Finger Exercises

I. Lines to a Persian Cat

The songsters of the air repair

To the green fields of Russell Square.

Beneath the trees there is no ease

For the dull brain, the sharp desires

And the quick eyes of Woolly Bear.

There is no relief but in grief.

Ο when will the creaking heart cease?

When will the broken chair give ease?

Why will the summer day delay?

When will Time flow away?

II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier

In a brown field stood a tree

And the tree was crookt and dry.

In a black sky, from a green cloud

Natural forces shriek’d aloud,

Screamed, rattled, muttered endlessly.

Little dog was safe and warm

Under a cretonne eiderdown,

Yet the field was cracked and brown

And the tree was cramped and dry.

Pollicle dogs and cats all must

Jellicle cats and dogs all must

Like undertakers, come to dust.

Here a little dog I pause

Heaving up my prior paws,

Pause, and sleep endlessly.

III. Lines to a Duck in the Park

The long light shakes across the lake,

The forces of the morning quake,

The dawn is slant across the lawn,

Here is no eft or mortal snake

But only sluggish duck and drake.

I have seen the morning shine,

I have had the Bread and Wine,

Let the feathered mortals take

That which is their mortal due,

Pinching bread and finger too,

Easier had than squirming worm;

For I know, and so should you

That soon the enquiring worm shall try

Our well-preserved complacency.

IV. Lines to Ralph Hodgson Esqre.

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson!

         (Everyone wants to know him)

With his musical sound

And his Baskerville Hound

Which, just at a word from his master

Will follow you faster and faster

And tear you limb from limb.

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson!

Who is worshipped by all waitresses

(They regard him as something apart)

While on his palate fine he presses

The juice of the gooseberry tart.

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson!

         (Everyone wants to know him).

He has 999 canaries

And round his head finches and fairies

In jubilant rapture skim.

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson!

         (Everyone wants to meet him).

V. Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

With his features of clerical cut,

And his brow so grim

And his mouth so prim

And his conversation, so nicely

Restricted to What Precisely

And If and Perhaps and But.

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

With a bobtail cur

In a coat of fur

And a porpentine cat

And a wopsical hat:

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

         (Whether his mouth be open or shut).

Landscapes

*

I. New Hampshire

Children’s voices in the orchard

Between the blossom-and the fruit-time:

Golden head, crimson head,

Between the green tip and the root.

Black wing, brown wing, hover over;

Twenty years and the spring is over;

To-day grieves, to-morrow grieves,

Cover me over, light-in-leaves;

Golden head, black wing,

Cling, swing,

Spring, sing,

Swing up into the apple-tree.

II. Virginia

Red river, red river,

Slow flow heat is silence

No will is still as a river

Still. Will heat move

Only through the mocking-bird

Heard once? Still hills

Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,

White trees, wait, wait,

Delay, decay. Living, living,

Never moving. Ever moving

Iron thoughts came with me

And go with me:

Red river, river, river. 

III. Usk

Do not suddenly break the branch, or

Hope to find

The white hart behind the white well.

Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell

Old enchantments. Let them sleep.

‘Gently dip, but not too deep’,

Lift your eyes

Where the roads dip and where the roads rise

Seek only there

Where the grey light meets the green air

The hermit’s chapel, the pilgrim’s prayer. 

IV. Rannoch, by Glencoe

Here the crow starves, here the patient stag

Breeds for the rifle. Between the soft moor

And the soft sky, scarcely room

To leap or soar. Substance crumbles, in the thin air

Moon cold or moon hot. The road winds in

Listlessness of ancient war,

Languor of broken steel,

Clamour of confused wrong, apt

In silence. Memory is strong

Beyond the bone. Pride snapped,

Shadow of pride is long, in the long pass

No concurrence of bone. 

V. Cape Ann

Ο quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow,

Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow

At dawn and dusk. Follow the dance

Of the goldfinch at noon. Leave to chance

The Blackburnian warbler, the shy one. Hail

With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bob-white

Dodging by bay-bush. Follow the feet

Of the walker, the water-thrush. Follow the flight

Of the dancing arrow, the purple martin. Greet

In silence the bullbat. All are delectable. Sweet sweet sweet

But resign this land at the end, resign it

To its true owner, the tough one, the sea-gull.

The palaver is finished.

Lines for an Old Man

The tiger in the tiger-pit

Is not more irritable than I.

The whipping tail is not more still

Than when I smell the enemy

Writhing in the essential blood

Or dangling from the friendly tree.

When I lay bare the tooth of wit

The hissing over the archèd tongue

Is more affectionate than hate,

More bitter than the love of youth,

And inaccessible by the young.

Reflected from my golden eye

The dullard knows that he is mad.

Tell me if I am not glad!

CHORUSES FROM ‘THE ROCK’

I

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,

The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

Ο perpetual revolution of configured stars,

Ο perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

Ο world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

I journeyed to London, to the timekept City,

Where the River flows, with foreign flotations.

There I was told: we have too many churches,

And too few chop-houses. There I was told:

Let the vicars retire. Men do not need the Church

In the place where they work, but where they spend their Sundays.

In the City, we need no bells:

Let them waken the suburbs.

I journeyed to the suburbs, and there I was told:

We toil for six days, on the seventh we must motor

To Hindhead, or Maidenhead.

If the weather is foul we stay at home and read the papers.

In industrial districts, there I was told

Of economic laws.

In the pleasant countryside, there it seemed

That the country now is only fit for picnics.

And the Church does not seem to be wanted

In country or in suburb; and in the town

Only for important weddings.

CHORUS LEADER:

Silence! and preserve respectful distance.

For I perceive approaching

The Rock. Who will perhaps answer our doubtings.

The Rock. The Watcher. The Stranger.

He who has seen what has happened

And who sees what is to happen.

The Witness. The Critic. The Stranger.

The God-shaken, in whom is the truth inborn.

Enter the ROCK, led by a BOY:

THE ROCK:

The lot of man is ceaseless labour,

Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,

Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.

I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know

That it is hard to be really useful, resigning

The things that men count for happiness, seeking

The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting

With equal face those that bring ignominy,

The applause of all or the love of none.

All men are ready to invest their money

But most expect dividends.

I say to you: Make perfect your will.

I say: take no thought of the harvest,

But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,

But one thing does not change.

In all of my years, one thing does not change.

However you disguise it, this thing does not change:

The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;

The men you are in these times deride

What has been done of good, you find explanations

To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.

Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.

The desert is not remote in southern tropics,

The desert is not only around the corner,

The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,

The desert is in the heart of your brother.

The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.

I will show you the things that are now being done,

And some of the things that were long ago done,

That you may take heart. Make perfect your will.

Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.

The lights fade; in the semi-darkness the voices of WORKMEN are heard chanting.

In the vacant places

We will build with new bricks

There are hands and machines

And clay for new brick

And lime for new mortar

Where the bricks are fallen

We will build with new stone

Where the beams are rotten

We will build with new timbers

Where the word is unspoken

We will build with new speech

There is work together

A Church for all

And a job for each

Every man to his work.

Now a group of WORKMEN is silhouetted against the dim sky. From farther away, they are answered by voices of the UNEMPLOYED.

No man has hired us

With pocketed hands

And lowered faces

We stand about in open places

And shiver in unlit rooms.

Only the wind moves

Over empty fields, untilled

Where the plough rests, at an angle

To the furrow. In this land

There shall be one cigarette to two men,

To two women one half pint of bitter

Ale. In this land

No man has hired us.

Our life is unwelcome, our death

Unmentioned in ‘The Times’.

Chant of WORKMEN again.

The river flows, the seasons turn

The sparrow and starling have no time to waste.

If men do not build

How shall they live?

When the field is tilled

And the wheat is bread

They shall not die in a shortened bed

And a narrow sheet. In this street

There is no beginning, no movement, no peace and no end

But noise without speech, food without taste.

Without delay, without haste

We would build the beginning and the end of this street.

We build the meaning:

A Church for all

And a job for each

Each man to his work.

II

Thus your fathers were made

Fellow citizens of the saints, of the household of GOD, being built upon the foundation

Of apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself the chief cornerstone.

But you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?

Where many are born to idleness, to frittered lives andsqualid deaths, embittered scorn in honeyless hives,

And those who would build and restore turn out the palms of their hands, or look in vain towards foreign lands for alms to be more or the urn to be filled.

Your building not fitly framed together, you sit ashamed and wonder whether and how you may be builded together for a habitation of GOD in the Spirit, the Spirit which moved on the face of the waters like a lantern set on the back of a tortoise.

And some say: ‘How can we love our neighbour? For love must be made real in act, as desire unites with desired; we have only our labour to give and our labour is not required.

We wait on corners, with nothing to bring but the songs we can sing which nobody wants to hear sung;

Waiting to be flung in the end, on a heap less useful than dung.’

You, have you built well, have you forgotten the cornerstone?

Talking of right relations of men, but not of relations of men to GOD.

‘Our citizenship is in Heaven’; yes, but that is the model and type for your citizenship upon earth.

When your fathers fixed the place of GOD,

And settled all the inconvenient saints,

Apostles, martyrs, in a kind of Whipsnade,

Then they could set about imperial expansion

Accompanied by industrial development.

Exporting iron, coal and cotton goods

And intellectual enlightenment

And everything, including capital

And several versions of the Word of GOD:

The British race assured of a mission

Performed it, but left much at home unsure.

Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten or ripe.

And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.

For every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence:

For sloth, for avarice, gluttony, neglect of the Word of GOD,

For pride, for lechery, treachery, for every act of sin.

And of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance.

For good and ill deeds belong to a man alone, when he stands alone on the other side of death,

But here upon earth you have the reward of the good and ill that was done by those who have gone before you.

And all that is ill you may repair if you walk together in humble repentance, expiating the sins of your fathers;

And all that was good you must fight to keep with hearts as devoted as those of your fathers who fought to gain it.

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without;

For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while there is time of prosperity

The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity they will decry it.

What life have you if you have not life together?

There is no life that is not in community,

And no community not lived in praise of GOD.

Even the anchorite who meditates alone,

For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of GOD,

Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,

And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour

Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,

But all dash to and fro in motor cars,

Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Nor does the family even move about together,

But every son would have his motor cycle,

And daughters ride away on casual pillions.

Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore;

Let the work not delay, time and the arm not waste;

Let the clay be dug from the pit, let the saw cut the stone,

Let the fire not be quenched in the forge.

III

The Word of the LORD came unto me, saying:

Ο miserable cities of designing men,

Ο wretched generation of enlightened men,

Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,

Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:

I have given you hands which you turn from worship,

I have given you speech, for endless palaver,

I have given you my Law, and you set up commissions,

I have given you lips, to express friendly sentiments,

I have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust.

I have given you power of choice, and you only alternate

Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.

Many are engaged in writing books and printing them,

Many desire to see their names in print,

Many read nothing but the race reports.

Much is your reading, but not the Word of GOD,

Much is your building, but not the House of GOD.

Will you build me a house of plaster, with corrugated roofing,

To be filled with a litter of Sunday newspapers?

1ST MALE VOICE:

A Cry from the East:

What shall be done to the shore of smoky ships?

Will you leave my people forgetful and forgotten

To idleness, labour, and delirious stupor?

There shall be left the broken chimney,

The peeled hull, a pile of rusty iron,

In a street of scattered brick where the goat climbs,

Where My Word is unspoken.

2ND MALE VOICE:

A Cry from the North, from the West and from the South

Whence thousands travel daily to the timekept City;

Where My Word is unspoken,

In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels

The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,

The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,

And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent godless people:

Their only monument the asphalt road

And a thousand lost golf balls.’

CHORUS:

We build in vain unless the LORD build with us.

Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?

A thousand policemen directing the traffic

Cannot tell you why you come or where you go.

A colony of cavies or a horde of active marmots

Build better than they that build without the LORD.

Shall we lift up our feet among perpetual ruins?

I have loved the beauty of Thy House, the peace of Thy sanctuary,

I have swept the floors and garnished the altars.

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes,

Though you have shelters and institutions,

Precarious lodgings while the rent is paid,

Subsiding basements where the rat breeds

Or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors

Or a house a little better than your neighbour’s;

When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?

Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’

What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together

To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community’?

And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.

Ο my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,

Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

Ο weariness of men who turn from GOD

To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,

To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,

To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited,

Binding the earth and the water to your service,

Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,

Dividing the stars into common and preferred,

Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,

Engaged in working out a rational morality,

Engaged in printing as many books as possible,

Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,

Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm

For nation or race or what you call humanity;

Though you forget the way to the Temple,

There is one who remembers the way to your door:

Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

You shall not deny the Stranger.

IV

There are those who would build the Temple,

And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.

In the days of Nehemiah the Prophet

There was no exception to the general rule.

In Shushan the palace, in the month Nisan,

He served the wine to the king Artaxerxes,

And he grieved for the broken city, Jerusalem;

And the King gave him leave to depart

That he might rebuild the city.

So he went, with a few, to Jerusalem,

And there, by the dragon’s well, by the dung gate,

By the fountain gate, by the king’s pool,

Jerusalem lay waste, consumed with fire;

No place for a beast to pass.

There were enemies without to destroy him,

And spies and self-seekers within,

When he and his men laid their hands to rebuilding the wall.

So they built as men must build

With the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.

V

Ο Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.

Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arabian: were doubtless men of public spirit and zeal.

Preserve me from the enemy who has something to gain: and from the friend who has something to lose.

Remembering the words of Nehemiah the Prophet: ‘The trowel in hand, and the gun rather loose in the holster.’

Those who sit in a house of which the use is forgotten: are like snakes that lie on mouldering stairs, content in the sunlight.

And the others run about like dogs, full of enterprise, sniffing and barking: they say, ‘This house is a nest of serpents, let us destroy it,

And have done with these abominations, the turpitudes of the Christians.’ And these are not justified, nor the others.

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

If humility and purity be not in the heart, they are not in the home: and if they are not in the home, they are not in the City.

The man who has builded during the day would return to his hearth at nightfall: to be blessed with the gift of silence, and doze before he sleeps.

But we are encompassed with snakes and dogs: therefore some must labour, and others must hold the spears.

VI

It is hard for those who have never known persecution,

And who have never known a Christian,

To believe these tales of Christian persecution.

It is hard for those who live near a Bank

To doubt the security of their money.

It is hard for those who live near a Police Station

To believe in the triumph of violence.

Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World

And that lions no longer need keepers?

Do you need to be told that whatever has been, can still be?

Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments

As you can boast in the way of polite society

Will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?

Men! polish your teeth on rising and retiring;

Women! polish your fingernails:

You polish the tooth of the dog and the talon of the cat.

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?

She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.

She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.

She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.

They constantly try to escape

From the darkness outside and within

By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

But the man that is will shadow

The man that pretends to be.

And the Son of Man was not crucified once for all,

The blood of the martyrs not shed once for all,

The lives of the Saints not given once for all:

But the Son of Man is crucified always

And there shall be Martyrs and Saints.

And if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps

We must first build the steps;

And if the Temple is to be cast down

We must first build the Temple.

VII

In the beginning GOD created the world. Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And when there were men, in their various ways, they struggled in torment towards GOD

Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing, and man without GOD is a seed upon the wind: driven this way and that, and finding no place of lodgement and germination.

They followed the light and the shadow, and the light led them forward to light and the shadow led them to darkness,

Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils rather

than nothing: crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh.

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.

And the Spirit moved upon the face of the water.

And men who turned towards the light and were known of the light

Invented the Higher Religions; and the Higher Religions were good

And led men from light to light, to knowledge of Good and Evil.

But their light was ever surrounded and shot with darkness

As the air of temperate seas is pierced by the still dead breath of the Arctic Current;

And they came to an end, a dead end stirred with a flicker of life,

And they came to the withered ancient look of a child that has died of starvation.

Prayer wheels, worship of the dead, denial of this world, affirmation of rites with forgotten meanings

In the restless wind-whipped sand, or the hills where the wind will not let the snow rest.

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.

Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time,

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,

A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.

Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the light of the Word,

Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being;

Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before, selfish and purblind as ever before,

Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their march on the way that was lit by the light;

Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before

That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,

And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.

The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do

But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards

In an age which advances progressively backwards?

VOICE OF THE UNEMPLOYED (afar off):

                                             In this land

There shall be one cigarette to two men,

To two women one half pint of bitter

Ale….

CHORUS:

What does the world say, does the whole world stray in high-powered cars on a by-pass way?

VOICE OF THE UNEMPLOYED (more faintly):

                             In this land

No man has hired us….

CHORUS:

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.

Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?

When the Church is no longer regarded, not even opposed, and men have forgotten

All gods except Usury, Lust and Power.

VIII

Ο Father we welcome your words,

And we will take heart for the future,

Remembering the past.

The heathen are come into thine inheritance,

And thy temple have they defiled.

Who is this that cometh from Edom?

He has trodden the wine-press alone.

There came one who spoke of the shame of Jerusalem

And the holy places defiled;

Peter the Hermit, scourging with words.

And among his hearers were a few good men,

Many who were evil,

And most who were neither.

Like all men in all places,

Some went from love of glory,

Some went who were restless and curious,

Some were rapacious and lustful.

Many left their bodies to the kites of Syria

Or sea-strewn along the routes;

Many left their souls in Syria,

Living on, sunken in moral corruption;

Many came back well broken,

Diseased and beggared, finding

A stranger at the door in possession:

Came home cracked by the sun of the East

And the seven deadly sins in Syria.

But our King did well at Acre.

And in spite of all the dishonour,

The broken standards, the broken lives,

The broken faith in one place or another,

There was something left that was more than the tales

Of old men on winter evenings.

Only the faith could have done what was good of it;

Whole faith of a few,

Part faith of many.

Not avarice, lechery, treachery,

Envy, sloth, gluttony, jealousy, pride:

It was not these that made the Crusades,

But these that unmade them.

Remember the faith that took men from home

At the call of a wandering preacher.

Our age is an age of moderate virtue

And of moderate vice

When men will not lay down the Cross

Because they will never assume it.

Yet nothing is impossible, nothing,

To men of faith and conviction.

Let us therefore make perfect our will.

Ο GOD, help us.

IX

Son of Man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears

And set thine heart upon all that I show thee.

Who is this that has said: the House of GOD is a House of Sorrow;

We must walk in black and go sadly, with longdrawn faces

We must go between empty walls, quavering lowly, whispering faintly,

Among a few flickering scattered lights?

They would put upon GOD their own sorrow, the grief they should feel

For their sins and faults as they go about their daily occasions.

Yet they walk in the street proudnecked, like thoroughbreds ready for races,

Adorning themselves, and busy in the market, the forum,

And all other secular meetings.

Thinking good of themselves, ready for any festivity,

Doing themselves very well.

Let us mourn in a private chamber, learning the way of penitence,

And then let us learn the joyful communion of saints.

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.

Out of the formless stone, when the artist unites himself with stone,

Spring always new forms of life, from the soul of man that is joined to the soul of stone;

Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless

Joined with the artist’s eye, new life, new form, new colour.

Out of the sea of sound the life of music,

Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,

Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,

There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.

LORD, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service?

Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers

For life, for dignity, grace and order,

And intellectual pleasures of the senses?

The LORD who created must wish us to create

And employ our creation again in His service

Which is already His service in creating.

For man is joined spirit and body,

And therefore must serve as spirit and body.

Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man;

Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple;

You must not deny the body.

Now you shall see the Temple completed:

After much striving, after many obstacles;

For the work of creation is never without travail;

The formed stone, the visible crucifix,

The dressed altar, the lifting light,

Light

Light

The visible reminder of Invisible Light.

X

You have seen the house built, you have seen it adorned

By one who came in the night, it is now dedicated to GOD.

It is now a visible church, one more light set on a hill

In a world confused and dark and disturbed by portents of fear.

And what shall we say of the future? Is one church all we can build?

Or shall the Visible Church go on to conquer the World?

The great snake lies ever half awake, at the bottom of the pit of the world, curled

In folds of himself until he awakens in hunger and moving his head to right and to left prepares for his hour to devour.

But the Mystery of Iniquity is a pit too deep for mortal eyes to plumb. Come

Ye out from among those who prize the serpent’s golden eyes,

The worshippers, self-given sacrifice of the snake. Take

Your way and be ye separate.

Be not too curious of Good and Evil;

Seek not to count the future waves of Time;

But be ye satisfied that you have light

Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

Ο Light Invisible, we praise Thee!

Too bright for mortal vision.

Ο Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less;

The eastern light our spires touch at morning,

The light that slants upon our western doors at evening,

The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,

Moon light and star light, owl and moth light,

Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.

Ο Light Invisible, we worship Thee!

We thank Thee for the lights that we have kindled,

The light of altar and of sanctuary;

Small lights of those who meditate at midnight

And lights directed through the coloured panes of windows

And light reflected from the polished stone,

The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.

Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward

And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.

We see the light but see not whence it comes.

Ο Light Invisible, we glorify Thee! 

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.

We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play.

We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep,

Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons.

And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it;

Forever must quench, forever relight the flame.

Therefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.

We thank Thee who hast moved us to building, to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.

And when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light, we may set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision is made.

And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.

Ο Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great glory!

FOUR QUARTETS

το λόγου δ’ἐόντος ζυνο ζώουσιν οί πολλοί ώς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες ϕρόνησιν.

1. p. 77. Fr. 2.

ὀδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή

1. p. 89. Fr. 60.

 Diels: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Herakleitos).

Burnt Norton

I

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

                              But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

                              Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

                                               Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

III

Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and time after

In a dim light: neither daylight

Investing form with lucid stillness

Turning shadow into transient beauty

With slow rotation suggesting permanence

Nor darkness to purify the soul

Emptying the sensual with deprivation

Cleansing affection from the temporal.

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs

Time before and time after.

Eructation of unhealthy souls

Into the faded air, the torpid

Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,

Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,

Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,

World not world, but that which is not world,

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

This is the one way, and the other

Is the same, not in movement

But abstention from movement; while the world moves

In appetency, on its metalled ways

Of time past and time future.

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray

Clutch and cling?

Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world.

V

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always –

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

East Coker

I

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Houses live and die: there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation

And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane

And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots

And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls

Across the open field, leaving the deep lane

Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,

Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,

And the deep lane insists on the direction

Into the village, in the electric heat

Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light

Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.

Wait for the early owl.

In that open field

If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,

On a summer midnight, you can hear the music

Of the weak pipe and the little drum

And see them dancing around the bonfire

The association of man and woman

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie

A dignified and commodious sacrament.

Two and two, necessarye coniunction,

Holding eche other by the hand or the arm

Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire

Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,

Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,

Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth

Mirth of those long since under earth

Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

As in their living in the living seasons

The time of the seasons and the constellations

The time of milking and the time of harvest

The time of the coupling of man and woman

And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.

Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day

Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind

Wrinkles and slides. I am here

Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

II

What is the late November doing

With the disturbance of the spring

And creatures of the summer heat,

And snowdrops writhing under feet

And hollyhocks that aim too high

Red into grey and tumble down

Late roses filled with early snow?

Thunder rolled by the rolling stars

Simulates triumphal cars

Deployed in constellated wars

Scorpion fights against the Sun

Until the Sun and Moon go down

Comets weep and Leonids fly

Hunt the heavens and the plains

Whirled in a vortex that shall bring

The world to that destructive fire

Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it not very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

It was not (to start again) what one had expected.

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,

Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity

And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us,

Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,

Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,

The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets

Useless in the darkness into which they peered

Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

In the middle, not only in the middle of the way

But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,

And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,

Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

III

dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

Nobodys funeral, for there is no one to bury.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama

And the bold imposing faade are all being rolled away

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healers art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adams curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of lentre deux guerres

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate but there is no competition

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

The Dry Salvages

The Dry Salvages – presumably les trois sauvages – is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.

I

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,

Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;

Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;

Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten

By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable,

Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated

By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,

In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,

In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,

And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;

The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite

Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses

Its hints of earlier and other creation:

The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;

The pools where it offers to our curiosity

The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.

It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,

The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar

And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,

Many gods and many voices.

                                                The salt is on the briar rose,

The fog is in the fir trees.

                                          The sea howl

And the sea yelp, are different voices

Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,

The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,

The distant rote in the granite teeth,

And the wailing warning from the approaching headland

Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner

Rounded homewards, and the seagull:

And under the oppression of the silent fog

The tolling bell

Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

Ground swell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

Than time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending;

And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,

Clangs

The bell.

II

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,

The silent withering of autumn flowers

Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;

Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,

The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable

Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing

Consequence of further days and hours,

While emotion takes to itself the emotionless

Years of living among the breakage

Of what was believed in as the most reliable –

And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing

Pride or resentment at failing powers,

The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,

In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,

The silent listening to the undeniable

Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing

Into the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless

Or of an ocean not littered with wastage

Or of a future that is not liable

Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,

Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers

Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless

Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;

Not as making a trip that will be unpayable

For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,

No end to the withering of withered flowers,

To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,

To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,

The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely

        prayable

Prayer of the one Annunciation.

It seems, as one becomes older,

That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere

        sequence –

Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy

Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,

Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning

        the past.

The moments of happiness – not the sense of well-being,

Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,

Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination –

We had the experience but missed the meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness. I have said before

That the past experience revived in the meaning

Is not the experience of one life only

But of many generations – not forgetting

Something that is probably quite ineffable:

The backward look behind the assurance

Of recorded history, the backward half-look

Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony

(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,

Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,

Is not in question) are likewise permanent

With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better

In the agony of others, nearly experienced,

Involving ourselves, than in our own.

For our own past is covered by the currents of action,

But the torment of others remains an experience

Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.

People change, and smile: but the agony abides.

Time the destroyer is time the preserver,

Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,

The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,

Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;

On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,

In navigable weather it is always a seamark

To lay a course by: but in the sombre season

Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

III

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant –

Among other things – or one way of putting the same thing:

That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray

Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,

Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,

That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

When the train starts, and the passengers are settled

To fruit, periodicals and business letters

(And those who saw them off have left the platform)

Their faces relax from grief into relief,

To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.

Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past

Into different lives, or into any future;

You are not the same people who left that station

Or who will arrive at any terminus,

While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;

And on the deck of the drumming liner

Watching the furrow that widens behind you,

You shall not think ‘the past is finished’

Or ‘the future is before us’.

At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,

Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,

The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)

‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;

You are not those who saw the harbour

Receding, or those who will disembark.

Here between the hither and the farther shore

While time is withdrawn, consider the future

And the past with an equal mind.

At the moment which is not of action or inaction

You can receive this: “on whatever sphere of being

The mind of a man may be intent

At the time of death” – that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others:

And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare forward.

                      Ο voyagers, Ο seamen,

You who come to port, and you whose bodies

Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,

Or whatever event, this is your real destination.’

So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

On the field of battle.

                                   Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.

IV

Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,

Pray for all those who are in ships, those

Whose business has to do with fish, and

Those concerned with every lawful traffic

And those who conduct them.

Repeat a prayer also on behalf of

Women who have seen their sons or husbands

Setting forth, and not returning:

Figlia del tuo figlio,

Queen of Heaven.

Also pray for those who were in ships, and

Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips

Or in the dark throat which will not reject them

Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell’s

Perpetual angelus.

V

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,

To report the behaviour of the sea monster,

Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,

Observe disease in signatures, evoke

Biography from the wrinkles of the palm

And tragedy from fingers; release omens

By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable

With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams

Or barbituric acids, or dissect

The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors –

To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual

Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:

And always will be, some of them especially

When there is distress of nations and perplexity

Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.

Men’s curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint –

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

Here the impossible union

Of spheres of existence is actual,

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled,

Where action were otherwise movement

Of that which is only moved

And has in it no source of movement –

Driven by dæmonic, chthonic

Powers. And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realised;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil.

Little Gidding

I

Midwinter spring is its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,

Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.

When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,

The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,

In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,

Reflecting in a watery mirror

A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,

Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire

In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing

The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell

Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time

But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow

Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom

Of snow, a bloom more sudden

Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,

Not in the scheme of generation.

Where is the summer, the unimaginable

Zero summer?

                         If you came this way,

Taking the route you would be likely to take

From the place you would be likely to come from,

If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges

White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.

It would be the same at the end of the journey,

If you came at night like a broken king,

If you came by day not knowing what you came for,

It would be the same, when you leave the rough road

And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade

And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all. Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places

Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,

Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city –

But this is the nearest, in place and time,

Now and in England.

                                   If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

II

Ash on an old man’s sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspended

Marks the place where a story ended.

Dust inbreathed was a house –

The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.

The death of hope and despair,

          This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth

Over the eyes and in the mouth,

Dead water and dead sand

Contending for the upper hand.

The parched eviscerate soil

Gapes at the vanity of toil,

Laughs without mirth.

         This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed

The town, the pasture and the weed.

Water and fire deride

The sacrifice that we denied.

Water and fire shall rot

The marred foundations we forgot,

Of sanctuary and choir.

          This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning

    Near the ending of interminable night

    At the recurrent end of the unending

After the dark dove with the flickering tongue

    Had passed below the horizon of his homing

    While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin

Over the asphalt where no other sound was

    Between three districts whence the smoke arose

    I met one walking, loitering and hurried

As if blown towards me like the metal leaves

    Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.

    And as I fixed upon the down-turned face

That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge

    The first-met stranger in the waning dusk

    I caught the sudden look of some dead master

Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled

    Both one and many; in the brown baked features

    The eyes of a familiar compound ghost

Both intimate and unidentifiable.

    So I assumed a double part, and cried

    And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’

Although we were not. I was still the same,

    Knowing myself yet being someone other –

    And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed

To compel the recognition they preceded.

    And so, compliant to the common wind,

    Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,

In concord at this intersection time

    Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,

    We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.

I said: ‘The wonder that I feel is easy,

    Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:

    I may not comprehend, may not remember.’

And he: ‘I am not eager to rehearse

    My thought and theory which you have forgotten.

    These things have served their purpose: let them be.

So with your own, and pray they be forgiven

    By others, as I pray you to forgive

    Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten

And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.

    For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

    And next year’s words await another voice.

But, as the passage now presents no hindrance

    To the spirit unappeased and peregrine

    Between two worlds become much like each other,

So I find words I never thought to speak

    In streets I never thought I should revisit

    When I left my body on a distant shore.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

    To purify the dialect of the tribe

    And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

    To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.

    First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment, offering no promise

    But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit

    As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

Second, the conscious impotence of rage

    At human folly, and the laceration

    Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

    Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

    Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others’ harm

    Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

    Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

    Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

    Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’

The day was breaking. In the disfigured street

    He left me, with a kind of valediction,

    And faded on the blowing of the horn.

III

There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives – unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:

For liberation – not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.

If I think, again, of this place,

And of people, not wholly commendable,

Of no immediate kin or kindness,

But some of peculiar genius,

All touched by a common genius,

United in the strife which divided them;

If I think of a king at nightfall,

Of three men, and more, on the scaffold

And a few who died forgotten

In other places, here and abroad,

And of one who died blind and quiet,

Why should we celebrate

These dead men more than the dying?

It is not to ring the bell backward

Nor is it an incantation

To summon the spectre of a Rose.

We cannot revive old factions

We cannot restore old policies

Or follow an antique drum.

These men, and those who opposed them

And those whom they opposed

Accept the constitution of silence

And are folded in a single party.

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated

What they had to leave us – a symbol:

A symbol perfected in death.

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

By the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseeching.

IV

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

    Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –

    To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

     We only live, only suspire

     Consumed by either fire or fire.

V

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always –

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

OCCASIONAL VERSES

Defence of the Islands

Defence of the Islands cannot pretend to be verse, but its date – just after the evacuation from Dunkirk – and occasion have for me a significance which makes me wish to preserve it. McKnight Kauffer was then working for the Ministry of Information. At his request I wrote these lines to accompany an exhibition in New York of photographs illustrating the war effort of Britain. They were subsequently published in Britain At War (the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1941). I now dedicate them to the memory of Edward McKnight Kauffer.

Let these memorials of built stone – music’s

enduring instrument, of many centuries of

patient cultivation of the earth, of English

verse

be joined with the memory of this defence of

the islands

and the memory of those appointed to the grey

ships – battleship, merchantman, trawler –

contributing their share to the ages’ pavement

of British bone on the sea floor

and of those who, in man’s newest form of gamble

with death, fight the power of darkness in air

and fire

and of those who have followed their forebears

to Flanders and France, those undefeated in defeat,

unalterable in triumph, changing nothing

of their ancestors’ ways but the weapons

and those again for whom the paths of glory are

the lanes and streets of Britain:

to say, to the past and the future generations

of our kin and of our speech, that we took up

our positions, in obedience to instructions.

A Note on War Poetry

A Note on War Poetry was written at the request of Miss Storm Jameson, to be included in a book entitled London Calling (Harper Brothers, New York, 1942).

Not the expression of collective emotion

Imperfectly reflected in the daily papers.

Where is the point at which the merely individual

Explosion breaks

In the path of an action merely typical

To create the universal, originate a symbol

Out of the impact? This is a meeting

On which we attend

Of forces beyond control by experiment –

Of Nature and the Spirit. Mostly the individual

Experience is too large, or too small. Our emotions

Are only ‘incidents’

In the effort to keep day and night together.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen

To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry –

That is a life.

War is not a life: it is a situation,

One which may neither be ignored nor accepted,

A problem to be met with ambush and stratagem,

Enveloped or scattered.

The enduring is not a substitute for the transient,

Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception

Of private experience at its greatest intensity

Becoming universal, which we call ‘poetry’,

May be affirmed in verse.

To the Indians who Died in Africa

To the Indians who Died in Africa was written at the request of Miss Cornelia Sorabji for Queen Mary’s Book for India (Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1943). I dedicate it now to Bonamy Dobrée, because he liked it and urged me to preserve it.

A man’s destination is his own village,

His own fire, and his wife’s cooking;

To sit in front of his own door at sunset

And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson

    Playing in the dust together.

Scarred but secure, he has many memories

Which return at the hour of conversation,

(The warm or the cool hour, according to the climate)

Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places,

    Foreign to each other.

A man’s destination is not his destiny,

Every country is home to one man

And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely

At one with his destiny, that soil is his.

    Let his village remember.

This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands,

And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard.

Let those who go home tell the same story of you:

Of action with a common purpose, action

None the less fruitful if neither you nor we

Know, until the judgement after death,

    What is the fruit of action.

To Walter de la Mare

To Walter de la Mare was written for inclusion in Tribute to Walter de la Mare (Faber & Faber Ltd., 1948), a book presented to him on his seventy-fifth birthday.

The children who explored the brook and found

A desert island with a sandy cove

(A hiding place, but very dangerous ground,

For here the water buffalo may rove,

The kinkajou, the mangabey, abound

In the dark jungle of a mango grove,

And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree –

The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)

Recount their exploits at the nursery tea

And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn

Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,

At not quite time for bed? …

                                              Or when the lawn

Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return

Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,

The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;

When the familiar scene is suddenly strange

Or the well known is what we have yet to learn,

And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,

Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range

At witches’ sabbath of the maiden aunts;

When the nocturnal traveller can arouse

No sleeper by his call; or when by chance

An empty face peers from an empty house;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

By you; by those deceptive cadences

Wherewith the common measure is refined;

By conscious art practised with natural ease;

By the delicate, invisible web you wove –

The inexplicable mystery of sound.

A Dedication to my Wife

To whom I owe the leaping delight

That quickens my senses in our wakingtime

And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,

         The breathing in unison

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other

Who think the same thoughts without need of speech

And babble the same speech without need of meaning.

No peevish winter wind shall chill

No sullen tropic sun shall wither

The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only

But this dedication is for others to read:

These are private words addressed to you in public.

Index of Titles of Poems

A Cooking Egg

A Dedication to my Wife

A Game of Chess

‘Although I do not hope to turn again’

Animula

A Note on War Poetry

Ash-Wednesday

A Song for Simeon

‘At the first turning of the second stair’

Aunt Helen

‘Because I do not hope to turn again’

Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar

Burnt Norton

Cape Ann

Conversation Galante

Coriolan

Cousin Nancy

Dans le Restaurant

Death by Water

Defence of the Islands

Difficulties of a Statesman

East Coker

Eyes that last I saw in tears

Five-Finger Exercises

Four Quartets

Fragment of an Agon

Fragment of a Prologue

Gerontion

Hysteria

‘If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent’

‘In the beginning God created the world’

‘It is hard for those who have never known persecution’

Journey of the Magi

‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’

La Figlia Che Piange

Landscapes

Le Directeur

Lines for an Old Man

Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg

Lines to a Duck in the Park

Lines to a Persian Cat

Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier

Lines to Ralph Hodgson Esqre.

Little Gidding

Lune de Miel

Marina

Mélange Adultère de Tout

Morning at the Window

Mr. Apollinax

Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service

New Hampshire

Notes on The Waste Land

‘O Father we welcome your words’

‘O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart’

Portrait of a Lady

Preludes

Rannoch, by Glencoe

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

‘Son of Man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears’

Sweeney Agonistes

Sweeney Among the Nightingales

Sweeney Erect

The ‘Boston Evening Transcript’

The Burial of the Dead

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

The Dry Salvages

‘The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven’

The Fire Sermon

The Hippopotamus

The Hollow Men

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

‘There are those who would build the Temple’

The Waste Land

The wind sprang up at four o’clock

‘The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying’

‘Thus your fathers were made’

To the Indians who Died in Africa

To Walter de la Mare

Triumphal March

Usk

Virginia

What the Thunder Said

Whispers of Immortality

‘Who walked between the violet and the violet’

‘You have seen the house built, you have seen it adorned’

About the Author

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888. He was educated at Harvard, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at Merton College, Oxford.

His early poetry was profoundly influenced by the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Laforgue. In his academic studies he specialised in philosophy and logic. His doctoral thesis was on F. H. Bradley. He settled in England in 1915, the year in which he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and also met his contemporary Ezra Pound for the first time. After teaching for a year or so he joined Lloyds Bank in the City of London in 1917, the year in which he published his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations. In 1919 Poems was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. His first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, appeared in 1920. His most famous work, The Waste Land, was published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce’s Ulysses. The poem was included in the first issue of his journal The Criterion, which he founded and edited. Three years later he left the bank to become a director of Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber. His Poems 1909–25 was one of the original titles published by Geoffrey Faber’s new firm, and the basis of his standard Collected Poems 1909–1962. In 1927 he was received into the Church of England and also became a British citizen. Ash Wednesday was published at Easter 1930. His masterpiece Four Quartets began with ‘Burnt Norton’ in 1936, continued with ‘East Coker’ in 1940, ‘The Dry Salvages’ in 1941 and ‘Little Gidding’ in 1942. The separate poems were gathered together as one work in 1943.

Eliot’s writing for the theatre began with the satirical ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ fragments. In 1934 he wrote the London churches’ pageant play ‘The Rock’, the choruses from which are preserved in Collected Poems, and the next year he was commissioned by the Canterbury Festival to write Murder in the Cathedral, about the martyrdom of St Thomas à Becket. The Family Reunion followed in 1939, when he also published his children’s classic, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the jacket drawn by Eliot himself. (The Possum was Eliot’s alias among friends). He later wrote three more verse plays, all of which were premièred at the Edinburgh Festival: The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman. A film of Murder in the Cathedral was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.Eliot’s most important literary criticism is collected in Selected Essays 1917–1932, which he enlarged in 1951. There are a number of other volumes of lectures and essays, among them The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, For Lancelot Andrewes, On Poetry and Poets, and two works of social criticism – The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.

Eliot was appointed to the Order of Merit in January 1948 and in the autumn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He married for the second time in 1957, to Valerie Fletcher. He died in January 1965. There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey, beside those to Tennyson and Browning. His ashes are in St Michael’s Church, East Coker, the Somerset village from which his ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated to America in 1667. After his death his widow edited the long-lost original manuscript of the The Waste Land and a volume of his letters. She also commissioned editions of his early poems Inventions of a March Hare and his Clark and Turnbull lectures The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats provided the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s dance musical Cats, which has been performed all over the world for the past 25 years.

By T. S. Eliot

THE COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS OF T. S. ELIOT
(includes Poems Written in Early Youth)

verse
FOUR QUARTETS
THE WASTE LAND and OTHER POEMS
THE WASTE LAND
A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts
Edited by Valerie Eliot
SELECTED POEMS
INVENTIONS OF THE MARCH HARE
Poems 1909–1917
Edited by Christopher Ricks
OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS

correspondence
THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT
Volume 1 – 1898–1922
Edited by Valerie Eliot

plays
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
THE FAMILY REUNION
THE COCKTAIL PARTY
THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK
THE ELDER STATESMAN

literary criticism
THE SACRED WOOD
SELECTED ESSAYS
THE USE OF POETRY AND THE USE OF CRITICISM
THE VARIETIES OF METAPHYSICAL POETRY
Edited by Ronald Schuchard
TO CRITICIZE THE CRITIC
ON POETRY AND POETS
FOR LANCELOT ANDREWES
SELECTED PROSE OF T. S. ELIOT
Edited by Frank Kermode

social criticism
THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
Edited by David Edwards
NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE

for students
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE SELECTED POEMS OF T. S. ELIOT
By B. C. Southam
A CONCORDANCE TO THE COMPLETE POEMS
AND PLAYS OF T. S. ELIOT
Edited by John Dawson, Peter Holland and David McKitterick

Copyright

First published in England in 1925
As Poems 1909-1925
By Faber and Gwyer Ltd
24 Russell Square London WC1
Published in 1936
As Collected Poems 1909-1935
By Faber and Faber Ltd
Published in 1963
As Collected Poems 1909-1962
By Faber and Faber Ltd
Reset edition published in 2002
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2009

All rights reserved
© T. S. Eliot, 1925, 1936, 1963

The right of T. S. Eliot to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–0–571–25433–0 [epub edition]