The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

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The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 21

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks


  5

  Impatient tireless undirected feet!

  So confident on wrinkled ways of wrong.

  On what remote frontier of heaven and hell

  Shall time allow our divers paths to meet?

  Yet you do well to run the roads you run,

  10

  Yes you do well to keep the ways you keep;

  And we who seek to balance pleasure and pain

  We blow against the wind and spit against the rain:

  For what could be more real than sweat and dust and sun?

  And what more sure than night and death and sleep?

  15

  Appearances appearances he said,

  I have searched the world through dialectic ways;

  I have questioned restless nights and torpid days,

  And followed every by-way where it led;

  And always find the same unvaried

  20

  Intolerable interminable maze.

  Contradiction is the debt you would collect

  And still with contradiction are you paid,

  And while you do not know what else you seek

  You shall have nothing other to expect.

  25

  Appearances, appearances, he said,

  And nowise real; unreal, and yet true;

  Untrue, yet real;—of what are you afraid?

  Hopeful of what? whether you keep thanksgiving,

  Or pray for earth on tired body and head,

  30

  This word is true on all the paths you tread

  As true as truth need be, when all is said:

  That if you find no truth among the living

  You will not find much truth among the dead.

  No other time but now, no other place than here, he said.

  [Commentary I 1137–40 · Textual History II 579–80]

  35

  He drew the shawl about him as he spoke

  And dozed in his arm-chair till the morning broke.

  Across the window panes the plumes of lilac swept

  Stirred by the morning air.

  Across the floor the shadows crawled and crept

  40

  And as the thin light shivered through the trees

  Around the muffled form they danced and leapt.

  They crawled about his shoulders and his knees;

  They rested for a moment on his hair

  Until the morning drove them to their lair.

  45

  And then sprang up a little damp dead breeze

  That rattled at the window while he slept,

  And had those been human voices in the chimneys

  And at the shutters, and along the stair,

  You had not known whether they laughed or wept.

  [Commentary I 1140–44 · Textual History II 580–82]

  The Love Song of St. Sebastian

  I would come in a shirt of hair

  I would come with a lamp in the night

  And sit at the foot of your stair;

  I would flog myself until I bled,

  5

  And after hour on hour of prayer

  And torture and delight

  Until my blood should ring the lamp

  And glisten in the light

  I should arise your neophyte

  10

  And then put out the light

  To follow where you led,

  To follow where your feet are white

  In the darkness toward your bed

  And where your gown is white

  15

  And against your gown your braided hair.

  Then you would take me in

  Because I was hideous in your sight

  You would take me in without shame

  Because I should be dead

  20

  And when the morning came

  Between your breasts should lie my head.

  I would come with a towel in my hand

  And bend your head beneath my knees;

  Your ears curl back in a certain way

  25

  Like no one’s else in all the world.

  When all the world shall melt in the sun,

  Melt or freeze,

  I shall remember how your ears were curled.

  I should for a moment linger

  30

  And follow the curve with my finger

  And your head beneath my knees—

  I think that at last you would understand.

  There would be nothing more to say.

  You would love me because I should have strangled you

  35

  And because of my infamy;

  And I should love you the more because I had mangled you

  And because you were no longer beautiful

  To anyone but me.

  [Commentary I 1144–45 · Textual History II 582]

  Paysage Triste

  The girl who mounted in the omnibus

  The rainy day, and paid a penny fare

  Who answered my appreciative stare

  With that averted look without surprise

  5

  Which only the experienced can wear

  A girl with reddish hair and faint blue eyes

  An almost denizen of Leicester Square.

  We could not have had her in the box with us

  She would not have known how to sit, or what to wear

  10

  Yet if I close my eyes I see her moving

  With loosened hair about her chamber

  With naked feet passing across the skies

  She would have been most crudely ill at ease

  She would not have known how to sit, or what to wear

  15

  Nor, when the lights went out and the horn began

  Have leaned as you did, your elbow on my knees

  To prod impetuously with your fan

  The smiling stripling with the pink soaped face

  Who had your opera-glasses in his care.

  Afternoon

  The ladies who are interested in Assyrian art

  Gather in the hall of the British Museum.

  The faint perfume of last year’s tailor suits

  And the steam from drying rubber overshoes

  5

  And the green and purple feathers on their hats

  Vanish in the sombre Sunday afternoon

  <

  [Commentary I 1145–48 · Textual History II 583]

  As they fade beyond the Roman statuary

  Like amateur comedians across a lawn

  Towards the unconscious, the ineffable, the absolute

  Suppressed Complex

  She lay very still in bed with stubborn eyes

  Holding her breath lest she begin to think.

  I was a shadow upright in the corner

  Dancing joyously in the firelight.

  5

  She stirred in her sleep and clutched the blanket with her fingers

  She was very pale and breathed hard.

  When morning shook the long nasturtium creeper in the tawny bowl

  I passed joyously out through the window.

  In the Department Store

  The lady of the porcelain department

  Smiles at the world through a set of false teeth.

  She is business-like and keeps a pencil in her hair

  But behind her sharpened eyes take flight

  5

  The summer evenings in the park

  And heated nights in second story dance halls.

  Man’s life is powerless and brief and dark

  It is not possible for me to make her happy.

  [Commentary I 1148–51 · Textual History II 583–84]

  Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?

  Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?

  Let me take ink and paper, let me take pen and ink …

  Or with my hat and gloves, as if to take the air

  Walk softly down the hall, stop at the foot of the stair<
br />
  5

  Take my letters from the porter—ask him for a drink

  If I questioned him with care, would he tell me what I think and feel

  —Or only ‘You are the gentleman who has lived on the second floor

  For a year or more’—

  Yet I dread what a flash of madness might reveal

  10

  If he said ‘Sir we have seen so much beauty spilled on the open street

  Or wasted in stately marriages or stained in railway carriages

  Or left untasted in villages or stifled in darkened chambers

  That if we are restless on winter nights, who can blame us?’

  Do I know how I feel? Do I know how I think?

  15

  There is something which should be firm but slips, just at my finger tips.

  There will be a smell of creolin and the sound of something that drips

  A black bag with a pointed beard and tobacco on his breath

  With chemicals and a knife

  Will investigate the cause of death that was also the cause of the life—

  20

  Would there be a little whisper in the brain

  A new assertion of the ancient pain

  Or would this other touch the secret which I cannot find?

  My brain is twisted in a tangled skein

  There will be a blinding light and a little laughter

  25

  And the sinking blackness of ether

  I do not know what, after, and I do not care either

  [Commentary I 1151–54 · Textual History II 584–85]

  The Death of Saint Narcissus

  Come under the shadow of this gray rock—

  Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or

  5

  Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock:

  I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs

  And the gray shadow on his lips.

  He walked once between the sea and the high cliffs

  When the wind made him aware of his limbs smoothly passing each other

  10

  And of his arms crossed over his breast.

  When he walked over the meadows

  He was stifled and soothed by his own rhythm.

  By the river

  His eyes were aware of the pointed corners of his eyes

  15

  And his hands aware of the pointed tips of his fingers.

  Struck down by such knowledge

  He could not live men’s ways, but became a dancer before God.

  If he walked in city streets

  He seemed to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and knees.

  20

  So he came out under the rock.

  First he was sure that he had been a tree,

  Twisting its branches among each other

  And tangling its roots among each other.

  Then he knew that he had been a fish

  25

  With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers,

  Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty

  Caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty.

  >

  [Commentary I 1154–57 · Textual History II 585–86]

  Then he had been a young girl

  Caught in the woods by a drunken old man

  30

  Knowing at the end the taste of his own whiteness

  The horror of his own smoothness,

  And he felt drunken and old.

  So he became a dancer to God.

  Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows

  35

  He danced on the hot sand

  Until the arrows came.

  As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him.

  Now he is green, dry and stained

  With the shadow in his mouth.

  To Helen

  While you were absent in the lavatory

  There came a negro with broad flat eyes

  Bringing a dish with oranges and bananas,

  And another brought coffee and cigars.

  5

  I was impatient, my dear, and a little unhappy

  Needing your large mouth opposite me.

  I hung suspended on the finger bowl

  Till a white rabbit hopped around the corner

  And twitched his nose toward the crumbs.

  After the turning of the inspired days

  After the turning of the inspired days

  After the praying and the silence and the crying

  And the inevitable ending of a thousand ways

  And frosty vigil kept in withered gardens

  5

  After the life and death of lonely places

  After the judges and the advocates and wardens

  And the torchlight red on sweaty faces

  After the turning of inspired nights

  And the shaking spears and flickering lights—

  10

  After the living and the dying—

  [Commentary I 1157–59 · Textual History II 586–87]

  After the ending of this inspiration

  And the torches and the faces and the shouting

  The world seemed futile—like a Sunday outing.

  I am the Resurrection and the Life

  I am the Resurrection and the Life

  I am the things that stop, and those that flow.

  I am the husband and the wife

  And the victim and the sacrificial knife

  5

  I am the fire, and the butter also.

  So through the evening, through the violet air

  So through the evening, through the violet air

  One tortured meditation dragged me on

  Concatenated words from which the sense seemed gone—

  —When comes, to the sleeping or the wake

  5

  The This-do-ye-for-my-sake

  When to the sullen sunbaked houses and the trees

  The one essential word that frees

  The inspiration that delivers and expresses

  This wrinkled road which twists and winds and guesses:

  10

  Oh, through the violet sky, through the evening air

  A chain of reasoning whereof the thread was gone

  Gathered strange images through which we walked alone:

  >

  [Commentary I 1159–61 · Textual History II 587–88]

  A woman drew her long black hair out tight

  And fiddled whisper-music on those strings

  15

  The shrill bats quivered through the violet air

  Whining, and beating wings.

  A man, distorted by some mental blight

  Yet of abnormal powers

  I saw him creep head downward down a wall

  20

  And upside down in air were towers

  Tolling reminiscent bells.

  And there were chanting voices out of cisterns and of wells.

  My feverish impulsions gathered head

  A man lay flat upon his back, and cried

  25

  ‘It seems that I have been a long time dead:

  Do not report me to the established world

  It has seen strange revolutions since I died’.

  As a deaf mute swimming deep below the surface

  Knowing neither up nor down, swims down and down

  30

  In the calm deep water where no stir nor surf is

  Swims down and down;

  And about his hair the seaweed purple and brown.

  So in our fixed confusion we persisted, out from town.

  Introspection

  The mind was six feet deep in a cistern and a brown snake with a triangular head having swallowed his tail was struggling like two fists interlocked. His
head slipped along 5 the brick wall, scraping at the cracks.

  [Commentary I 1161–62 · Textual History II 588–89]

  The Engine

  I

  The engine hammered and hummed. Flat faces of American business men lay along the tiers of chairs in one plane, broken only by the salient of a brown cigar and the red angle of a six-penny magazine. The machine was hard, deliberate, and alert; having chosen with motives and ends unknown to cut through the fog it pursued its course; the life of the deck stirred and was silent like a restless scale on the smooth surface. The machine was certain and sufficient as a rose bush, indifferently justifying the aimless parasite. II

  After the engine stopped, I lay in bed listening while the wash subsided and the scuffle of feet died out. The music ceased, but a mouth organ from the steerage picked up the tune. I switched on the light, only to see on the wall a spider taut as a drumhead, the life of endless geological periods concentrated into a small spot of intense apathy at my feet. ‘And if the ship goes down’ I thought drowsily ‘he is prepared and will somehow persist, for he is very old. But the flat faces …’ I tried to assemble these nebulae into one pattern. Failing, I roused myself to hear the machine recommence, and then the music, and the feet upon the deck.

  [Commentary I 1162–65 · Textual History II 589–90]

  Hidden under the heron’s wing

  Hidden under the heron’s wing

  Or the song before daybreak that the lotos-birds sing

  Evening whisper of stars together

  Oh my beloved what do you bring—

  5

  With evening feet walking across the grass

  And fragile arms dividing the evening mist.

  I lie on the floor a bottle’s broken glass

 

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