The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

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The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 17

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks


  A symbol perfected in death.

  And all shall be well and

  All manner of thing shall be well

  By the purification of the motive

  50

  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.

  5

  The only hope, or else despair

  Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

  To be redeemed from fire by fire.

  Who then devised the torment? Love.

  Love is the unfamiliar Name

  10

  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.

  [Commentary I 1036–39 · Textual History II 536–42]

  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,

  5

  Taking its place to support the others,

  The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

  An easy commerce of the old and the new,

  The common word exact without vulgarity,

  The formal word precise but not pedantic,

  10

  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.

  15

  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

  20

  Are of equal duration. A people without history

  Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

  Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

  On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

  History is now and England.

  25

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

  [Commentary I 1040–42 · Textual History II 542–44]

  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.

  30

  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

  35

  And the children in the apple-tree

  Not known, because not looked for

  But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

  Between two waves of the sea.

  Quick now, here, now, always—

  40

  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

  45

  Into the crowned knot of fire

  And the fire and the rose are one.

  [Commentary I 1042–44 · Textual History II 544–45]

  Occasional Verses

  Defence of the Islands

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

  Let these memorials of built stone—music’s

  enduring instrument, of many centuries of

  patient cultivation of the earth, of English

  verse

  [5]

  be joined with the memory of this defence of

  the islands

  and the memory of those appointed to the grey

  ships—battleship, merchantman, trawler—

  contributing their share to the ages’ pavement

  [10]

  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

  [15]

  to Flanders and France, those undefeated in de-

  feat, unalterable in triumph, changing nothing

  of their ancestors’ ways but the weapons

  [Commentary I 1046–49 · Textual History II 547–51]

  and those again for whom the paths of glory are

  the lanes and the streets of Britain:

  <

  [20]

  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.

  [Commentary I 1049–50 · Textual History II 551]

  A Note on War Poetry

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

  Not the expression of collective emotion

  Imperfectly reflected in the daily papers.

  Where is the point at which the merely individual

  Explosion breaks

  5

  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—

  10

  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

  15

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

  That is a life.

  War is not a life: it is a situation,

  One which may neither be ignored nor accepted,

  A problem to be met with ambush and stratagem,

  20

  Enveloped or scattered.

  The enduring is not a substitute for the transient,

  Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception

  Of private experience at its greatest intensity

  Becoming universal, which we call ‘poetry’,

  25

  May be affirmed in verse.

  [Commentary I 1050–54 · Textual History II 551–53]

  To the Indians who Died in Africa

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

  A man’s destination is his own village,

  His own fire, and his wife’s cooking;

  To sit in front of his own door at sunset

  And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson

  5

  Playing in the dust together.

  Scarred but secure, he has many memories

&n
bsp; 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,

  10

  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.

  15

  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

  20

  None the less fruitful if neither you nor we

  Know, until the judgment after death,

  What is the fruit of action.

  [Commentary I 1054–57 · Textual History II 553–54]

  To Walter de la Mare

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

  The children who explored the brook and found

  A desert island with a sandy cove

  (A hiding place, but very dangerous ground,

  For here the water buffalo may rove,

  5

  The kinkajou, the mangabey, abound

  In the dark jungle of a mango grove,

  And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree—

  The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)

  Recount their exploits at the nursery tea

  10

  And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn

  Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,

  At not quite time for bed? …

  Or when the lawn

  Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return

  Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,

  15

  The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;

  When the familiar scene is suddenly strange

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

  And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

  When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,

  20

  Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range

  At the witches’ sabbath of the maiden aunts;

  <

  [Commentary I 1057–59 · Textual History II 554–56]

  When the nocturnal traveller can arouse

  No sleeper by his call; or when by chance

  An empty face peers from an empty house;

  25

  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;

  30

  By conscious art practised with natural ease;

  By the delicate, invisible web you wove—

  The inexplicable mystery of sound.

  [Commentary I 1059–60 · Textual History II 556–58]

  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

  5

  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

  10

  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.

  [Commentary I 1060–61 · Textual History II 558–559]

  Uncollected Poems

  A Lyric

  If Time and Space, as Sages say,

  Are things which cannot be,

  The sun which does not feel decay

  No greater is than we.

  5

  So why, Love, should we ever pray

  To live a century?

  The butterfly that lives a day

  Has lived eternity.

  The flowers I gave thee when the dew

  10

  Was trembling on the vine,

  Were withered ere the wild bee flew

  To suck the eglantine.

  So let us haste to pluck anew

  Nor mourn to see them pine,

  15

  And though our days of love be few

  Yet let them be divine.

  Song

  If space and time, as sages say,

  Are things that cannot be,

  The fly that lives a single day

  Has lived as long as we.

  5

  But let us live while yet we may,

  While love and life are free,

  For time is time, and runs away,

  Though sages disagree.

  <

  [Commentary I 1069–70 · Textual History II 561–62]

  The flowers I sent thee when the dew

  10

  Was trembling on the vine

  Were withered ere the wild bee flew

  To suck the eglantine.

  But let us haste to pluck anew

  Nor mourn to see them pine,

  15

  And though the flowers of life be few

  Yet let them be divine.

  A Fable for Feasters

  In England, long before that royal Mormon

  King Henry VIII found out that monks were quacks,

  And took their lands and money from the poor men,

  And brought their abbeys tumbling at their backs,

  5

  There was a village founded by some Norman

  Who levied on all travelers his tax;

  Nearby this hamlet was a monastery

  Inhabited by a band of friars merry.

  They were possessors of rich lands and wide,

  10

  An orchard, and a vineyard, and a dairy;

  Whenever some old villainous baron died,

  He added to their hoards—a deed which ne’er he

  Had done before—their fortune multiplied,

  As if they had been kept by a kind fairy.

  15

  Alas! no fairy visited their host,

  Oh, no; much worse than that, they had a ghost.

  Some wicked and heretical old sinner

  Perhaps, who had been walled up for his crimes;

  At any rate, he sometimes came to dinner,

  20

  Whene’er the monks were having merry times.

  He stole the fatter cows and left the thinner

  To furnish all the milk—upset the chimes,

  And once he sat the prior on the steeple,

  To the astonishment of all the people.

  [Commentary I 1070–71 · Textual History II 562–63]

  25

  When Christmas time was near the Abbot vowed

  They’d eat their meal from ghosts and phantoms free,

  The fiend must stay at home—no ghosts allowed

  At this exclusive feast. From over sea

  He purchased at his own expense a crowd

  30

  Of relics from a Spanish saint—said he:

  ‘If ghosts come uninvited, then, of course,

  I’ll be compelled to keep them off by force.’

  He drencht the gown he wore with holy water,

  The turkeys, capons, boars, they were to eat,

  35

  He even soakt the uncomplaining porter

  Who stood outside the door from head to feet.

  To make a rather lengthy story shorter,

>   He left no wise precaution incomplete;

  He doused the room in which they were to dine,

  40

  And watered everything except the wine.

  So when all preparations had been made,

  The jovial epicures sat down to table.

  The menus of that time I am afraid

  I don’t know much about—as well’s I’m able

  45

  I’ll go through the account: They made a raid

  On every bird and beast in Æsop’s fable

  To fill out their repast, and pies and puddings,

  And jellies, pasties, cakes among the good things.

  A mighty peacock standing on both legs

  50

  With difficulty kept from toppling over,

  Next came a viand made of turtle eggs,

  And after that a great pie made of plover,

  And flagons which perhaps held several kegs

  Of ale, and cheese which they kept under cover.

  55

  Last, a boar’s head, which to bring in took four pages,

  His mouth an apple held, his skull held sausages.

  [Commentary I 1071 · Textual History II 563]

  Over their Christmas wassail the monks dozed,

  A fine old drink, though now gone out of use—

  His feet upon the table superposed

  60

  Each wisht he had not eaten so much goose.

  The Abbot with proposing every toast

  Had drank more than he ought t’ have of grape juice.

  The lights began to burn distinctly blue,

  As in ghost stories lights most always do.

 

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