The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Collected and Uncollected Poems
Author: T. S. Eliot; Christopher Ricks; Jim McCue
Date: 2015-12-15 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Poetry; Classics; Reference
Description: A monumental event in Eliot scholarship. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL, Pegasus Award for Criticism of the Poetry Magazine This critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s Poems establishes a new text of the Collected Poems 1909–1962 , rectifying accidental omissions and errors that have crept in during the century since Eliot’s astonishing debut, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." As well as the masterpieces, the edition contains the poems of Eliot’s youth, which were rediscovered only decades later, others that circulated privately during his lifetime, and love
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

1.8: ELIOT COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1969

COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1962

By T. S. Eliot

verse COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1935

FOUR QUARTETS

THE COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS 1909-1950 THE CULTIVATION OF CHRISTMAS TREES COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1962

selected verse

THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS

children’s verse

OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS

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 ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

ON POETRY AND POETS

social criticism

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE

translation

ANABASIS a poem by St.-John Perse

l.S. Eliot

COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1962

Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. New York

Copyright 1930, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943,

© 1958, 1962, 1963 by T. S. Eliot

Copyright 1954, © 1956, 1959, 1963 by Thomas Stearns Eliot Copyright 1934, 1936 by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form or by any mechanical means, including mimeograph and tape recorder, without permission in writing from the publisher.

first American edition Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-21424 Manufactured in the United States of America by H. Wolff

CONTENTS

1 PRUFROCK—1917

3 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 8 Portrait of a Lady 13 Preludes 16 Rhapsody on a Windy Night 19 Morning at the Window 20 The Boston Evening Transcript 21 Aunt Helen 22 Cousin Nancy 23 Mr. Apollinax 24 Hysteria 25 Conversation Galante 26 La Figlia che Piange

27 POEMS—1920

29 Gerontion

32 Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 34 Sweeney Erect

36 A Cooking Egg

38 Le Directeur

39 Mélange Adultére de Tout

40 Lune de Miel

41 The Hippopotamus

43 45 47 49

77

Dans le Restaurant

Whispers of Immortality

Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service Sweeney Among the Nightingales

THE WASTE LAND—1922

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—1925

ASH-WEDNESDAY— 1930

I. Because I do not hope to turn again

II. Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree Ill. At the first turning of the second stair

IV. Who walked between the violet and the violet

V. If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent VI. Although I do not hope to turn again

109

111 111 118 125 125 127

131

133 134 135 135 135 136 136

ARIEL POEMS

Journey of the Magi—ı927

A Song for Simeon—1928 Animula—ı929

Marina—1930

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees—1954

UNFINISHED POEMS

Sweeney Agonistes FRAGMENT OF A PROLOGUE FRAGMENT OF AN AGON Coriolan I. TRIUMPHAL MARCH—1931

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 I. LINES TO A PERSIAN CAT II. LINES TO A YORKSHIRE TERRIER III. LINES TO A DUCK IN THE PARK

IV. LINES TO RALPH HODGSON ESQRE.

137

138 138 139 140 141 142 143

145

147 152

155 158

159

160

162 165 167

169

V. LINES FOR CUSCUSCARAWAY AND MIRZA MURAD ALI BEG Landscapes I. NEW HAMPSHIRE II. VIRGINIA III. USK IV. RANNOCH, BY GLENCOE

V. CAPE ANN

Lines for an Old Man

CHORUSES FROM ‘THE ROCK’—1934

I. The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven

II. Thus your fathers were made

III. The Word of the LORD came unto me, saying

IV. There are those who would build the Temple

V. O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent inten- tion and impure heart

VI. It is hard for those who have never known perse- cution

VII. In the beginning cop created the world

VIII. O Father we welcome your words

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

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

173

175 182 191 200

211

213 215 217 219 221

FOUR QUARTETS

Burnt Norton—1935 East Coker—1940

The Dry Salvages—ı941 Little Gidding—1942

OCCASIONAL VERSES

Defense 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

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 pitt scosse. Ma per ciö che giammai di questo fondo non tornö 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 aslcep.

[95]

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 tum 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 rcvisions 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 cofIce spoons;

EN

I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music froma 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,

5

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 towards 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

o

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 ...Igrowold... 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 cach.

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 sca-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

EI

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 blindl How keen you are!) To find a friend who has these qualities,

00

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 aricttes

Of cracked cornets

Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own, Capricious monotone

That is at least onc 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 sce.’ 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

10

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 case 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.

T have been wondering frequently of late

(But our beginnings never know our ends!)

Why we have not developed into friends.’

I fecl 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.

11

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?

12

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.

13

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 strect 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 Tis soul stretched tight across the skies That fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent fcet At four and five and six o'clock; And short square fingers stuffing pipes, And evening newspapers, and eyes Assurcd 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:

14

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.

15

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 comer 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.

Jlalf-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 onc 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 rancunc, 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,

17

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.

18

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.

19

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 tum 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.’

20

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.

21

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 modem 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.

22

Mr. Apollinax

Q ris kawórnros. ‘Hpdxdes, ris mapadofoAoias. evunxavos avOpwros. 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 fcetus.

His laughter was submarine and profound

Like the old man of the sca’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 cars. . . . 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.

23

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.

24

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 twistl

With your air indifferent and imperious

At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—’ And—‘Are we then so serious?”

25

La Figlia che Piange

O 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 tum

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.

26

POEMS

1920

Gerontion

Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were anafter dinner sleep Dreaming of 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 knce 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 owncr, Spawned in some estaminct of Antwerp, Blistered in Brusscls, patched and pecled 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 pcevish gutter. I an old man, A dull head among windy spaces.

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would sce 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;

29

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 is 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.

30

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.

31

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

32

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.

8 |

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 O 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.

Sweency addressed full length to shave Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,

34

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.

35

A Cooking Egg

En l'an trentiesme de mon aage Que toutes mes hontes ¡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

36

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.

37

Le Directeur

Malheur a la malheureuse Tamise Qui coule si prés 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 créve d’amour.

38

Mélange Adultére 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;

A 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; Jerre toujours de-ci de-là

A divers coups de tra là là

De Damas jusqu' à Omaha.

Je célébrai mon jour de féte Dans une oasis d'Afrique

Vétu d'une peau de girafe.

On montrera mon cénotaphe Aux cótes brülantes de Mozambique.

39

Lune de Miel

Ils ont vu les Pays-Bas, ils rentrent 4 Terre Haute;

Mais une nuit d’ete, les voici 4 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 écartant 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 miséres de Padoue à Milan

Ou se trouvent la Céne, 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.

40

The Hippopotamus

Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut man- datum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut Jesum Chris- tum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros autem, ut concilium Dei ct conjunctionem Apostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos sic habeo. S. IGNATIL AD TRALLIANOS.

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 scems so firm to us He is mercly 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 matcrial ends,

While the True Church necd never stir To gather in its dividends.

The 'potamus can never reach

The mango on the mango-trce;

But fruits of pomegranate and peach Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,

41

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.

42

Dans le Restaurant

Le garcon delabre qui n’a rien a faire Que de se gratter les doigts et sc 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 lc jour de lessive des gucux.’ (Bavard, baveux, à la croupc arrondie, Je te prie, au moins, ne bave pas dans la soupc). ‘Les saules trempés, et des bourgeons sur Ics ronces— C'est là, dans une averse, qu'on s'abritc. Javais sept ans, elle était plus petite. Ellé était toute mouillée, je lui ai donné des primeveres.’ 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 lubriquc, à cct âge . . . *Monsieur, le fait est dur.

Il est venu, nous peloter, un gros chien;

Moi j'avais peur, je l'ai quittec à mi-chemin.

C'est dommage.’

Mais alors, tu as ton vautourl

Va t'en te décrotter les rides du visage; Tiens, ma fourchette, décrassc-toi lc crane. De quel droit paycs-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 moucttes et la houlc de Cornouaille, Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d'étain:

43

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.

44

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 halls

Stared from the sockets of the cycs!

He knew that thought clings round dead limbs Tightening its lusts and luxurics.

Donne, I suppose, was such another Who found no substitute for sense, To seize and clutch and penctrate; 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 cye

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;

45

The sleek Brazilian jaguar Does not in its aboreal 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.

46

Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service

Look, look, master, 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 ro ëv,

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

47

Where the souls of the devout Bum 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.

48

Sweeney Among the Nightingales

pot, wémAnyuae Kaiplay wANYHY 6a.

Apeneck Sweency 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 horned gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog

Arc veiled; and hushed the shrunken scas; The person in the Spanish cape

Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees

Slips and pulls the table cloth Overturns a coffce-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;

49

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.

50

THE WASTE LAND

1922

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: ZißuAXa Tí 8éhas; respondebat illa: amodaveiv 6o."

For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro.

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the crucllest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead Jand, 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 Starnbergersce With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 19 And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, starnm’ aus Litauen, echt dentsch.

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,

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

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Maric, 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

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 2: 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

53

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; 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 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 Phocnician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

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.

54

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! “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 lecteurl-mon semblable, —mon frèrel

55

60

70

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 From which a golden Cupidon peeped out xd (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 That freshened from the window, these ascended 90 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 carvéd 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

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 100. 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

Leancd out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

56

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

‘My nerves are bad to-night. 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” 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 Shakespehcrian Rag—

It's so elegant

So intelligent

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”

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

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

57

110

130

“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—

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

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.

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

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.

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

The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been

160

the same.

58

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

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

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

170

59

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.

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

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

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse 190 Musing upon the king my brothers 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.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

60

And on her daughter They wash their fect 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 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 weckend at the Mctropole.

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 Tircsias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can sce

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives IIomeward, and brings the sailor home from sca,

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 Tircsias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

61

200

210

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 decidcd, he assaults at once; 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, 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 smoothes 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.

62

230

210

250

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, 260 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 Red sails 270 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

Beating oars 280 The stern was formed

A gilded shell

Red and gold

The brisk swell

Rippled both shores

Southwest wind

Carried down stream

63

64

The peal of bells

White towers Weialala leia 290 Wallala leialala

‘Trams 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 fect. After the event

He wept. He promised “a new start.”

I made no comment. What should I resent?’

“On Margate Sands. 300 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 O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest 810

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 O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, $20 Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

65

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

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 Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit 210 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

66

And water a 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

Who is the third who walks always beside you? 229 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

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth 3:9 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

67

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light 330 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.

It has no windows, and the door swings, 399 Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

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. Then spoke the thunder 299 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

68

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

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, aethercal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

Da

Damyata: The boat responded

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—O swallow swallow 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

69

410

430

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 associ- ate 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

70

is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authen- tic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself. Go. 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 laura 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 CIIESS

77. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, 1. 190. 92. Laquearia. V. Acneid, I, 726: dependent lychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt. 98. Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 140. gg. 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.

71

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

111. 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 . . X

199.1 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 cur- rants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women arc 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

72

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 finnat; 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’ fishennan, 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. Götterdäm- merung, 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 my- self on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and

73

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 pionecrs 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 journcy 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 (Hand- book 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 swectness 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

74

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 Wcge zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligem \Vahn am Abgrund entlang uncl 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, x 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-shect, cre the spider Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.’ 412. Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46: “ed io scntii chiavar l'uscio di sotto all’orrible torre.’

Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346.

“My external sensations are no less private to mysclf 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 clements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. . . . In brief, regarded as an existence which ap- pears 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, 148.

75

€ «c

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 Upan-

ishad. “The Peace which passeth understanding’ is our equivalent to this word.

76

THE HOLLOW MEN

192.3

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

79

7^

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

Rats 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 thc 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

80

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.

82

ASH-WEDNESDAY

1930

I

Because I do not hope to tum again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to tum

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

I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the aged 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 blesséd face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice

85

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.

86

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-trce

In the cool of the day, having fed to saticty

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 cyes 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

87

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.

88

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, jagged, 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 fig'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.

89

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,

go

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

91

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.

O 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

92

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

O 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.

O my people.

8 |

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again Although I do not hope Although I do not hope to tum

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.

f |

Blessed 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.

95

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 picces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

99

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.

100

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 comers

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 Thec and suffer in every generation

101

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.

102

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 comer of arm and knee,

Eager to he reassured, taking pleasure

In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas trec, 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;

Weck by week, offends and perplexes more With the impcratives of ‘is and scems’

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 scat 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,

103

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.

104

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

O 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 ncarer 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.

105

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.

106

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

107

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.

108

UNFINISHED POEMS

Sweeney Agonistes

Fragments of an Aristophanic Mclodrama

Orestes: You don’t see them, you don’t—but I sce them: they are hunting me down, I must mote on. CHOEPIIOROI.

Hence the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union, until it has divested itself of the love of created beings. ST. JOIN OF THE CROSS.

FRAGMENT OF A PROLOGUE

DUSTY. DORIS.

DUST Y: 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? ponis: 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. ponis: No it wouldn't do to be too nice to Percira. DUsTY: Now Sam's a gentleman through and through. Donis: 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: Tinga 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 dol 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

112

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 fect 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. Pm 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? porıs: 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 DUST Y: 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. pois: Here's the three. What's that mean? Dusty: ‘News of an absent friend’.—Pcreira! nonis: The Queen of Hearts!—Mrs. Porter! pusty: 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.

113

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!

Tuar's THE Corrın!! DORIS: THATS 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. pusty: The Knave of Spades. DORIS: Thatll be Snow DUST Y : 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

114

DUSTY: Sometimes they’re no use at all. ports: Pd 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 winlow.) Well I never What a coincidence! Cards are queer! (Whistle again.) ports: Is that Sam? DUSTY : Of course it's Saml DORIS: Of course, the Knave of Hearts is Sam! DUSTY (leaning out of the window): Hello Saml WAUCIIOPE: Hello dear How many's up there? DUSTY: Nobody's up here Tes 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 (toponıs): Cards are queer. DORIS: Id like to know about that coffin. Knock Knock Knock Knock Knock Knock Knock Knock Knock

115

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,

Ill 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. pnusTY: 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?

116

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 (Pm 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 Ill 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.

117

FRAGMENT OF AN AGON

SWEENEY. WAUCHOPE. HORSFALL. KLIPSTEIN. E RUMPACKER. SWARTS. SNOW. DORIS. DUSTY. SWEENEY: ril 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: Ill be the cannibal.

DORIS: Ill be the missionary. I'll convert youl

SWEENEY: Ill 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 Citroén, no Rolls-Royce.

118

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: Id be bored.

SWEENEY: You'd be bored. Birth, and copulation, and death.

ports: 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 dont 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

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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 dont like eggs; I never liked eggs; And I dont like life on your crocodile isle.

120

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 noontime
ee And night
diminuendo- à Morning Evening Noontime Night

DORIS: That's not life, that’s no life Why Td 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— nonis: Oh Mr. Sweeney, please dont 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 dont 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 dont 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 dont 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. S WARTS: What did he do?

All that time, what did he do? SWEENEY: What did he dol what did he do?

That dont 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?

122

SWEENEY: Well here again that dont 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 youre alone like he was alone You're either or neither I tell you again it dont 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 dont 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.

123

FULL CHORUS: WAUCHOPE, HORSFALL, ELIPSTEIN, 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 tuming 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

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Coriolan

I. TRIUMPHAL MARCH

Stone, bronze, stone, stcel, 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 sec 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 aeroplanc engines, 50,000 ammunition waggons, now 55,000 army waggons, 11,000 field kitchens, 1,150 field bakeries.

125

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. O 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. O 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.

That 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.

126

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,

O 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 incre- ments 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

127

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.

O 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

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

I a tired head among these heads

Nocks 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

O 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,

128

‘Rising and falling, crowned with dust’, the small creatures, The small creatures chirp thinly through the dust, through

the night. O mother

What shall I cry? We demand a committee, a representative committee, a

committee of investigation RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN

129

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.

133

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.

134

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.

O when will the creaking heart cease? When will the broken chair give case? 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.

135

III. LINES TOA 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 ESORE.

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.

136

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).

137

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.

138

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.

139

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.

140

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,

Langour 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.

141

V. CAPE ANN

O 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.

142

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 arched 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!

143

CHORUSES FROM "THE ROCK’

1934

I

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,

The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O 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 Gop.

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 Gop 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

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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.

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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

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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’.

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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.

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II

Thus your fathers were made

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

Of apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself the chicf corner- stone.

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

Where many are born to idleness, to frittered lives and squalid 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 cop 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 {lung 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.

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When your fathers fixed the place of cop, And settled all the inconvenient saints, Apostles, martyrs, in a kind of Whipsnade, Then they could set about imperial expansion Accompanied by industrial devclopment. Exporting iron, coal and cotton goods

And intellectual enlightenment

And everything, including capital

And several versions of the Word of cop: The British race assured of a mission Performcd it, but left much at home unsure.

Of all that was done in the past, you cat 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 cop,

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 carth 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

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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 cop. Even the anchorite who meditates alone,

For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of cop, 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.

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III

The Word of the LORD came unto me, saying:

O miserable cities of designing men,

O 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 cop, Much is your building, but not the House of cop. 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.

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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 thom 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 Lon» 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 fect 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 numbcred 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’?

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And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert. O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger, Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

O weariness of men who tum from cop

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, Tuming 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.

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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.

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V

O 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 sun- light.

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 dis- tracted for silence: seeking every one after his own eleva- tion, 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.

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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 attain- ments

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,

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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.

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VII

In the beginning Gop 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 cop

Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing, and man with- out GOD is a seed upon the wind: driven this way and that, and finding no place of lodgement and ger- mination.

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 lcd 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,

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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-secking 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 fol- lowing 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.

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Men have left cop 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.

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VIII

O 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

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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.

O cop, help us.

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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 cop 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 cop their own sorrow, the gricf they should fcel

For their sins and faults as they go about their daily occa- sions.

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 leam the joyful communion of saints.

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.

Out of the formless stone, when the artist united 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

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Joined with the artist’s eye, new life, new form, new col- our.

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 Lorp 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.

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X

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

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

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 scrpent’s golden eycs,

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

Your way and be ye separate.

Be not too curious of Good and Evil;

Seck 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.

O Light Invisible, we praise Theel

Too bright for mortal vision.

O Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less; The eastern light our spires touch at morning,

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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.

O Light Invisible, we worship Theel

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 win- dows

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.

O 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.

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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.

O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great gloryl

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FOUR QUARTETS

Burnt Norton

Tod Aöyov S'edvros Euvod [wove ol roddol ds (diay Exovres Bpovnoı. I. p. 77. Fr. 2. 658s dvo káTw pia kal ovr. I. p. 89. Fr. 6o. Diels: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratikez (Herakleitos)

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 unredcemable. 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 comer. Through the first gate,

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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, quictly,

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.

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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 cal} 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 | 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 suffcring, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

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

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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

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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

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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 spcech, 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.

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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.

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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

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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 fcet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth Mirth of thosc 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.

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lI 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 poctical 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,

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The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets

Useless in the darkness into which they peered

Or from which they tumed 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, decciving, 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 O 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,

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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,

Nobody’s 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 dark- ness on darkness,

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

And the bold imposing façade 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 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.

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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 repcating

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 arc not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no cestasy. 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 stecl That questions the distempered part; Bencath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the discase If we obey the dying nurse

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Whose constant care is not to please But to remind of our, and Adam’s 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 entre 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

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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 condi- tions

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 and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

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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.

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The Dry Salvages

(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois saucages—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 fronticr; 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. Unhonourcd, 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 riveris 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 sca anemone.

It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,

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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.

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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

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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, i

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:

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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:

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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

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And the past with an equal mind. At the moment which is not of action or inaction You can receive this: “on whatever sphcre 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.

O voyagers, O seamen, You who come to port, and you whose bodies Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sca, 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.

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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

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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 Incarna- tion.

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 d:emonic, 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.

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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 icc, 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,

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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 fagade

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 arc 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.

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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

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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-tumed 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 mecting 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: T am not eager to rehearse

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My thoughts 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.

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Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

Procecds, unless restored by that refining fire

Whcre you must move in measure, like a dancer.’ The day was breaking. In the disfigured strect

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 difler 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 ficld of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. Sce, 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

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All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shal] 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

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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

Lics in the choice of pyre or pyre—

To be redecmed from fire by fire.

\Vho 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,

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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 redeemcd 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

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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.

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OCCASIONAL VERSES

Defense of the Islands

Defense 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 Mu- seum of Modem 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 defense 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 de- feat, 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 the 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.

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A Note on War Poetry

A Note on War Poetry was written at the request of Miss Stonn 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 avery young man: but a poem is not poctry— 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.

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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.

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To the Indians Who Died in Africa

To the Indians Who Died in Africa was written at the re- quest of Miss Cornelia Sorabji for Queen Mary’s Book for India (Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1943). I dedicate it now to Bonamy Dobree, 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 moment after death, What is the fruit of action.

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To Walter de la Mare

To Walter de la Mare was written for inclusion in Tribute to Walter dela 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 treasurc-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 unscen fect, and ghosts return Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn, The sad intangible who grieve and ycarn;

When the familiar scene is suddenly strange Or the well known is what we have yet to learn, And two worlds mect, and intersect, and change;

When cats are maddencd in the moonlight dance, Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range At witches’ sabbath of the maiden aunts;

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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.

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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.

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