Four Quartets

FOUR QUARTETS

Burnt Norton
East Coker
The Dry Salvages
Little Gidding

* * *

BURNT NORTON

        I

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unreedemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been 

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

                                But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

                        Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

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

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

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

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

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

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

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

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

        II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

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

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

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

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from

        nor towards,

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

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

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

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

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

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

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

                                            Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

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

The moment in the arbour when the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefell

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

        III

Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and time after

In a dim light: neither daylight

Investing form with lucid stillness

Turning shadow into transient beauty

With slow rotation suggesting permanence

Nor darkness to purify the soul

Emptying the sensual with deprivation

Cleansing affection from the temporal.

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs

Time before and time after.

Eructation of unhealthy souls

Into the faded air, the torpid

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

Hampstead, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,

World not world, but that which is not world,

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

This is the one way, and the other

Is the same, not in movement

But abstention from movement; while the world moves

In appetency, on its metalled ways

Of time past and time future.

        IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and sprat

Clutch and cling?

Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing

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

At the still point of the turning world.

         V

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

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

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

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

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not say still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of ten stairs.

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always -

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

EAST COKER

        I

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

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

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

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Houses live and die: there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation

And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane

And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots

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

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls

Across the open field, leaving the deep lane

Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,

Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,

And the deep lane insists on the direction

Into the village, in the electric heat

Hypnostised. In a warm haze the sultry light

Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.

Wait for the early owl.

                                    In that open field

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

On a summer midnight, you can hear the music

Of the weak pipe and the little drum

And see them dancing around the bonfire

The association of man and woman

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie -

A dignified and commodious sacrament.

Two and two, necessary conjunction,

Holding eche other by the hand or the arm

Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire

Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,

Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,

Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth

Mirth of those long since under earth

Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

As in their living in the living seasons

The time of the seasons and the constellations

The time of milking and the time of harvest

The time of the coupling of man and woman

And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.

Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day

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

Wrinkles and slides. I am here

Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

        II

What is the late November doing

With the disturbance of the spring

And creatures of the summer heat,

And snowdrops writhing under feet

And hollyhocks that aim too high

Red into grey and tumble down

Late roses filled with early snow?

Thunder rolled by the rolling stars

Simulates triumphal cars

Deployed in constellated wars

Scorpion fights against the Sun

Until the Sun and Moon go down

Comets weep and Leonids fly

Hunt the heavens and the plains

Whirled in a vortex that shall bring

The world to that destructive fire

Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it - not very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter

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

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

Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity

And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us

Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,

Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,

The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets

Useless in the darkness into which they peered

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

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knoweldge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the patterm is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

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

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

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

And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,

Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear

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

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

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

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

        III

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,

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 Alamanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And all we 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 theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

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

     on darkness,

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

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away -

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

    between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious

    of nothing-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

                                    You say I am repeating

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

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

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

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

In order to arrive at what what you do not know

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

In order to possess what you do not possess

    You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

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

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

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

        IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and 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 has twenty years -

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'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

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

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

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

To emulate - but there is no competition -

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

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

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

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

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

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

THE DRY SALVAGES

        I

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

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

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

Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;

Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten

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

Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

Of what men chose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated

By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and 

        waiting.

His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,

In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,

In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,

And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

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

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

Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses

Its hints of earlier and other creation:

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

The pools where it offers to our curiosity

The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.

It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,

The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar

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

Many gods and many voices.

                                                The salt is on the briar rose,

The fog is in the fir trees.

                                        The sea howl

And the sea yelp, are different voices

Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,

The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,

The distant rote in the granite teeth,

And the wailing warning from the approaching headland

Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner

Rounded homewards, and the seagull:

And under the oppression of the silent fog

The tolling bell

Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

Grounds swell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

Than time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

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

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending;

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

The bell.

        II

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

The silent withering of autumn flowers

Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;

Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,

The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable

Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing

Consequence of further days and hours,

While emotion takes to itself the emotionless

Years of living among the breakage

Of what was believed in as the most reliable -

And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing

Pride or resentment at failing powers,

The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,

In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,

The silent listening to the undeniable

Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation,

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing

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

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless

Or of an ocean not littered with wastage

Or of a future that is not liable

Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,

Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers

Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless

Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;

Not as making a trip that will be unpayable

For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,

No end to the withering of withered flowers,

To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,

To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,

The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardle, 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, fulfillment, security or affection,

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

We had the experience but missed the meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness. I have said before

That the past experience revived in the meaning

Is not the experience of one life only

But of many generations - not forgetting

Something that is probably quite ineffable:

The backward look behind the assurance

Of recorded history, the backward half-look

Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony

(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,

Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong

        things,

Is not in question) are likewise permanent

With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this

        better

In the agony of others, nearly experienced,

Involving ourselves, than in our own.

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

But the torment of others remains an experience

Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.

People change, and smile: but the agony abides,

Time the destroyer is time the preserver,

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

        chicken coops,

The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,

Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;

On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,

In navigable weather it is always a seamark

To lay a course by: but in the sombre season

Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

        III

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant -

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

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

        spray

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

Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been

        opened.

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

        way back.

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

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

When the train starts, and the passengers are settled

To fruit, periodicals and busienss 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 us before us'.

At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,

Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,

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

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

You are not those who saw the harbour

Receding, or those who will disembark.

Here between the hither and the farther shore

While time is withdrawn, consider the future

And the past with an equal mind.

At the moment which is not of action or inaction

You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being

The mind of a man may be intent

At the time of death" - that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others:

And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare forward.

                    O voyagers, O seamen,

You who come to port, and you whose bodies

Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,

Or whatever event, this is your real destination.'

so Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

On the field of battle.

                                Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.

        IV

Lady, whose shrine stands on the promonotory,

Pray for all those who are in ships, those

Whose business has to do with fish, and

THose concerned with every lawful traffic

And those who conduct them.

Repeat a prayer also on behalf of

Women who have seen their sons or husbands

Setting forth, and not returning:

Figlia del tuo figlio,

Queen of Heaven.

Also pray for those who were in ships, and

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

Or in the dark throat which will not reject them

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

Perpetual angelus.

        V

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,

To report the behaviour of the sea monster,

Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,

Observe disease in signatures, evoke

Biography from the wrinkles of the palm

And tragedy from fingers; release omens

By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable

With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams

Or barbituric acids, or dissect

The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors -

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

Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:

And always will be, some of them especially

When there is distress of nations and perplexity

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

Men's curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint-

No occupation either, but something given

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

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

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

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

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

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

Here the impossible union

Of spheres of existence is actual,

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled,

Wherre action were otherwise movement

Of that which is only moved

And has in it no source of movement-

Driven by daemonic, chthonic

Powers. And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realised;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil.

LITTLE GIDDING

        I

Midwinter spring is its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,

Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.

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

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

In windless cold that is the heart's heat,

Reflecting in a watery mirror

A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

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

Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecoastal 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 come 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 the same at the end of the journey,

If you came at night like a broken king,

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

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

And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade

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 of a city -

But this is the nearest, in place and time,

Now and in England.

                                If you came this way.

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

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

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an oder 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 fo the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

        II

Ash on an old man's sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspensded

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 floods and drouth

Over the eyes and in the mouth,

Dead water and dead sand

Contending for the upper hand.

The parched eviscerate soul

Gapes at the vanity of toil,

Laughs without mirth,

        This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed

The town, the pasture and the weed.

Water and fire deride

The sacrifice that we denied.

Water and fire shall rot

The marred foundations we forgot,

Of sanctuary and choir.

        This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning

    Near the ending of interminable night

    At the recurrent end of the unending

After the dark dove with the flickering tongue

    Had passed below the horizon of his homing

    While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin

Over the asphalt where no other sound was

    Between three districts whence the smoke arose

    I met one walking, loitering and hurried

As if blown towards me like the metal leaves

    Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.

    And as I fixed upon the down-turned face

That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge

    The first-met stranger in the waning dusk

    I caught the sudden look of some dead master

Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled

    Both one and many; in the brown baked features

    The eyes of a familiar compound ghost

Both intimate and unidentifiable.

    So I assumed a double part, and cried

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

Although we were not. I was still the same,

    Knowing myself yet being someone other -

    And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed

To compel the recognition they preceded.

    And so, compliant to the common wind,

    Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,

In concord at this intersection time

    Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,

    We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.

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

    Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:

    I may not comprehend, may not remember.'

And he: 'I am not eager to reheards

    My thought and theory which you have forgotten.

    These things have served their purpose: let them be.

So with your own, and pray they be forgivem

    By others, as I pray you to forgive

    Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eatern

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 wirds I never thought to speak

    In streets I never thought I should revisit

    When I left my body on a distant shore.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

    To purify the dialect of the tribe

    And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

    To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort,

    First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment, offering no promise

    But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit

    As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

Second, the conscious impotence of rage

    At human folly, and the laceration

    Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

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

    Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others' harm

    Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

    Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

    Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

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

The day was breaking. In the disfigured street

    He left me, with a kind of valediction,

    And faded on the blowing of the horn.

        III

There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing

        between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives - unflowering, between

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

For liberation- not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

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

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish, 

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

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.

If I think, again, of this place,

And of people, not wholly commendable,

Of no immediate kin or kindness,

But some of peculiar genius,

United in the strife which divided them;

If I think of a king at nightfall,

Of three men, and more, on the scaffold

And a few who died forgotten

In other places, here and abroad,

And of one who died blind and quiet,

Why should we celebrate

These dead men more than the dying?

It is not to ring the bell backward

Nor is it an incantation

To summon the spectre of a Rose.

We cannot revive old factions

We cannot restore old policies

Or follow an antique drum.

These men, and those who opposed them

And those whom they opposed

Accept the constitution of silence

And are folded in a single party.

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated

What they had to leave us - a symbol:

A symbol perfected in death.

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

By the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseeching.

        IV

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

    Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre -

    To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

    We only live, only suspire

    Consumed by either fire or fire.

        V

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. And every phrase

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

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident not ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

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

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

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

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

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

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

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

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

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always -

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongue of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

- T.S. Eliot

(Personal note - It is all exploratory. Some sections, like gold)

Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

- Robert Frost

Hyla Brook

By June our brook's run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow) -

Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat -

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.

We love the things we love for what they are.

- Robert Frost

The Tuft of Flowers

I went to turn the grass once after one

Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen

Before I came to view the levelled secne.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been, - alone,

"As all must be," I said within my heart,

"Whether they work together or apart."

But as I said it, swift there passed me by

On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night

Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,

As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,

And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared 

Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to known them by their name,

Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

"Men work together," I told him from the heart,

"Whether they work together or apart."

- Robert Frost

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. - You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I shan't be gone long. - You come too.

- Robert Frost

The value of poetry

"The essential feature of his theory, which he sees as separating it from the others, is its commitment to the proposition that the mind through concentrated study and discipline can apprehend some degree of truth about human experience and can then express that truth in poetic language which realizes it both emotionally and intellectually. He also sees that the effect of such apprehension and expression is not just intellectual, but also moral: the mind is enabled not only to recognize in truth what a particular good is, but also to define, and then avoid, those things that would interfere with the realization of the good in question. The value of poetry is that it achieves this end in a more inclusive manner than philosophical or scientific discourse by utilising both aspects of language, the connotative and the denotative, and by appealing to and engaging both the emotional and the intellectual faculties of the human being."

(A long chain of links to reach this: Here, the author (a dissertation by John Martin Finlay, University of Albama) summarises the Foreword of Yvor Winters' In Defense of Reason)

Keep your eye clear

North

I returned to a long strand,

the hammered curve of a bay,

and found only the secular

powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical

invitations of Iceland,

the pathetic colonies

of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders,

those lying in Orkney and Dublin

measured against

their long swords rusting.

those in the solid

belly of stone ships,

those hacked and glinting

in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices

warning me, lifted again

in violence and epiphany.

The longship's swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight -

it said Thor's hammer swung

to geography and trade,

thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behind-backs

of the althing, lies and women,

exhaustions nominated peace.

memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, 'Lie down

in the word-hoard, burrow

the coil and gleam

of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness

Expect aurora borealis

in the long foray

but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear

as the bleb of the icicle,

trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.'

- Seamus Heaney

Ground of being

I was four but I turned four hundred maybe
Encountering the ancient dampish feel

Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats

In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould

Around the terracotta water-crock.

Ground of being. Body's deep obedience

To all its shifting tenses. A half-door

Opening directly into starlight.

Out of that earth house I inherited

A stack of singular, cold memory-weights

To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

(Squarings: xl)

- Seamus Heaney

The Dying Swan

I

The plain was grassy, wild and bare,

Wide, wild, and open to the air,

Which had built up everywhere

An under-roof of doleful gray.

With an inner voice the river ran,

Adown it floated a dying swan,

And loudly did lament.

It was the middle of the day.
Ever the weary wind went on,

And took the reed-tops as it went.

II

Some blue peaks in the distance rose,

And white against the cold-white sky,

Shone out their crowning snows.

One willow over the water wept,

And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;

Above in the wind was the swallow,

Chasing itself at its own wild will,

And far thro' the marish green and still

The tangled water-courses slept,

Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.

III

The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul

Of that waste place with joy

Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear

The warble was low, and full and clear;

And floating about the under-sky,

Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole

Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;

But anon her awful jubilant voice,

With a music strange and manifold,

Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold;

As when a mighty people rejoice

With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold,

And the tumult of their acclaim is roll'd

Thro' the open gates of the city afar,

To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star.

And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,

And the willow-branches hoar and dank,

And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,

And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,

And the silvery marish-flowers that throng

The desolate creeks and pools among,

Were flooded over with eddying song.

- Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

        When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

        The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

        Like strings of broken lyers.

And all mankind that haunted nigh

        Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

        The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

        The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

        Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

        Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

        The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

        Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

        In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

        Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

        Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

        Afar or nigh around.

That I could think there trembled through

        His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

        And I was unaware.

- Thomas Hardy

The poem that took the place of a mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,

Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed

A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,

Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,

Where he would be complete in an unexplained

    completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness

Would discover, at last, the view toward which they

    had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,

Recognize his unique and solitary home.

- Wallace Stevens

The Planet on the Table

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.

They were of a remembered time

Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun

Were waste and welter

And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one

And his poems, although makings of his self,

Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.

What mattered that they should bear

Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,

In the poverty of their words,

Of the planet of which they were part.

- Wallace Stevens

That appear and then pop

Like a large blot of smudged fire
The setting sun lingers in the clouds that remain.

I hear a faint whistle in the distance of the still evening.

It must be a distant train.

In this moment I feel a vague nostalgia

Along with a vague and placid desire

That comes and goes.

So too, sometimes, on the surface of streams,

There are bubbles of water

That appear and then pop.

And they have no meaning

But to be bubbles of water

That appear and then pop.

- Fernando Pessoa

What mystery pervades a well

What mystery pervades a well!
That water lives so far -
A neighbour from another world

Residing in a jar.

Whose limit none has ever seen,

But just his lid of glass -

Like looking every time you please

In an abyss' face!

The grass does not appear afraid,

I often wonder he

Can stand so close and look so bold

At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be,

The sedge stands near the sea -

Where he is floorless

And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet:

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret

That those who know her, know her less

The nearer her they get.

- Emily Dickinson

The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding

titles: oak, aspen, willow.

Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north

have dozens of words to describe its

different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their

thick fur, theor shy and wordless gaze. Their

infallible sense of what their lives 

are meant to be. Thus the world

grows rich, grows wild, and you too,

grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too

were born to be.

- Mary Oliver

Stopping by woods on a snowy evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

- Robert Frost

Devotion

The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean -

Holding the curve of one position,

Counting an endless repetition.

- Robert Frost

Never again would birds' song be the same

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round

From having heard the daylong voice of Eve

Had added to their own an oversound,

Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Admittedly an eloquence so soft

Could only have had an influence on birds

When call or laughter carried it aloft.

Be that as may be, she was in their song.

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed

Had now persisted in the woods so long

That probably it never would be lost.

Never again would birds' song be the same.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

- Robert Frost

Two Tramps in Mud Time

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard

And one of them put me off my aim

By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"

I knew pretty well why he dropped behind

And let the other go on a way.

I knew pretty well what he had in mind:

He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,

As large around as the chopping block;

And every piece I squarely hit

Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.

The blows that a life of self-control

Spares to strife for the common good,

That day, giving a loose to my soul,

I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still

You're one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight

And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,

His song so pitched as not to excite

A single flower as yet to bloom.

It is snowing a flake: and he half knew

Winter was only playing possum.

Except in color he isn't blue,

But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look

In summertime with a witching wand,

In every wheelrut's now a brook,

In every print of hoof a pond.

Be glad of water, but don't forget

The lurking frost in the earth beneath

That will steal forth after the sun is set

And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task

These two must make it love it more

By coming with what they come to ask.

You'd think I never had felt before

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,

The grip on earth of outspread feet,

The life of muscles rocking soft

And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the woods two hulking tramps

(From sleeping God knows where last night,

But not long since in the lumber camps).

They thought all chopping was theirs of right.

Men of the woods and lumberjacks,

They judged me by their appropriate tool,

Except as a fellow handles an ax

They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.

They knew they had but to stay their stay

And all their logic would fill my head:

As that I had no right to play

With what was another man's work for gain.

My right might be love but theirs was need.

And where the two exist in twain

Theirs was the better right - agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.

Only where love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done

For Heaven and the future's sakes.

- Robert Frost

Evening in a Sugar Orchard

From where I lingered in a lull in March

Outside the sugarhouse one night for choice,

I called the fireman with a careful voice

And bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:

"O fireman, give the fire another stoke,

And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke."

I thought a few might tangle, as they did,

Among bare maple boughs, and in the rare

Hill atmosphere not cease to glow,

And so be added to the moon up there.

The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show

On every tree a bucket with a lid,

And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.

The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.

They were content to figure in the trees

As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.

And that was what the boughs were full of soon.

- Robert Frost

Gathering Leaves

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise

Of rustling all day

Like rabbit and deer 

Running away.

But the mountains I raise

Elude my embrace,

Flowing over my arms

And into my face.

I may load and unload

Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,

And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight;

And since they grew duller

From contact with earth,

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.

But a crop is a crop

And who's to say where

The harvest shall stop?

- Robert Frost

The Diviner

Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick
That he held tight by the arms of the V:

Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck

Of water, nervous, but professionally

Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a string.

The rod jerked with precise convulsions,

Spring water suddenly broadcasting

Through a green hazel its secret stations.

The bystanders would ask to have a try.

He handed them the rod without a word.

It lay dead in their grasp till, nonchalantly,

He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred.

- Seamus Heaney

Modesties

Words as plain as hen-birds' wings
Do not lie,
Do not over-broider things -

Are too shy.

Thoughts that shuffle round like pence

Through each reign,

Wear down to their simplest sense,

Yet remain.

Weeds are not supposed to grow,

But by degrees

Some achieve a flower, although

No one sees.

- Philip Larkin

The Dancer

    Butterfly
    Or falling leaf,
    Which ought I to imitate
    In my dancing?

And if she were to admit

The world weaved by her feet

Is leafless, is incomplete?

And if she abandoned it,

Broke the pivoted dance,

Set loose the audience?

Then would the moon go raving,

The moon, the anchorless

Moon go swerving

Down at the earth for a catastrophic kiss.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

    If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken.

    And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

    Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

    And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

- Rudyard Kipling

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

    Of deities or mortals, or of both,

        In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

    What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

        What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

    Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

        Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss;

Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;

    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

        For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

    Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

    For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

        For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to sacrifice?

    To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea shore,

    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 

    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

    When old age shall this generation waste,

        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

    Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

-John Keats

life is more true than reason will deceive

life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)

deeper is life than lose:higher than have

- but beauty is more each than living's all

multiplied with infinity sans if

the mightiest meditations of mankind

cancelled are by one merely opening leaf

(beyond whose nearness there is no beyond)

or does some littler bird than eyes can learn

look up to silence and completely sing?

futures are obsolete;pasts are unborn

(here less than nothing's more than everything)

death,as men call him,ends what they call men

- but beauty is more now than dying's when

- e.e.cummings

in time of daffodils

in time of daffodils(who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why, remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim

the aim of waking is to dream,

remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze

our now and here with paradise)

forgetting if, remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond

whatever mind may comprehend,

remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be

(when time from time shall set us free)

forgetting me, remember me

yes is a pleasant country

yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let' open the year

both is the very weather

(not either)

my treasure,

when violets appear

love is a deeper season

than reason;

my sweet one

(and april's where we're)

- e.e.cummings

Spring is like a perhaps hand

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging

a window,into which people look(while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps 

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things,while

people stare carefully

moving a perhaps 

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

- e.e.cummings

The Roses of the Gardens of Adonis

The roses of the gardens of Adonis
Are what I love, Lydia, those flitting roses

    That in the day when they are born,

           Within that day, die.

The light's for them eternal, because they

Are born with the sun born already, and sink

    Before Apollo may yet leave

        The visible course he has.

Like them, let us make of our lives one day, -

Voluntarily, Lydia, unknowing

    That there is night before and after

        The little that we last.

- Fernando Pessoa

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

And interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

- The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because 

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stand plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

- Philip Larkin

Proud Songsters

The thrushes sing as the sun is going,
And the finches whistle in one and pairs,

And as it gets dark loud nightingales

                In bushes,

Pipe, as they can when April wears,

                As if all Time were theirs.

These are brand-new birds of twelve-months' growing,

Which a year ago, or less than twain,

No finches were, nor nightingales,

                Nor thrushes,

But only particles of grain,

                And earth, and air, and rain.

- Thomas Hardy

rendering death and forever with each breathing

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

- e.e. cummings

love makes the little thickness of the coin

hate blows a bubble of despair 

hate blows a bubble of despair into

hugeness world system universe and bang

-fear buries a tomorrow under woe

and up comes yesterday most green and young

pleasure and pain are merely surfaces

(one itself showing, itself hiding one)

life's only and true value neither is

love makes the little thickness of the coin.

comes here a man would have from madame death

nevertheless now and without winter spring?

she'll spin that spirit her own fingers with

and give him nothing (if he should not sing)

how much more than enough for both of us

darling. And if i sing you are my voice,

- e.e.cummings

A prose poem

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.

- T. S. Eliot

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

- W.B. Yeats

That we must labour to be beautiful

Adam's Curse


We sat together at one summer's end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, ' A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon yout marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.'

                                        And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake

There's many a one shall find out all heartache

On finding that her voice is sweet and low

Replied, ' To be born woman is to know -

Although they do not talk of it as school -

That we must labour to be beautiful.'

I said, 'It's certain there is no fine thing

Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be

So much compounded of high courtesy

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks

Precedents out of beautiful old books;

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.'

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove 

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it has all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

The House was Quiet and the World was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be 

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summet night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The turth in a calm wolrd,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

There is another sky

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields -
Here is a little forest,
whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a forst has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

Study of Two Pears

                        I

Opusclulm paedagogum.

The pears are not viols,

Nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

                        II

They are yellow forms

Composed of curves

Blulging toward the base.

They are touched red.

                        III

They are not flat surfaces

Having curved outlines.

They are round

Tapering toward the top.

                        

                        IV

In the way they are modelled

There are bits of blue.

A hard dry leaf hangs

From the stem.

                        V

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin.

                        VI 

The shadows of the pears 

are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills.

not-thinking, not-remembering, not-wanting

Six Recognitions of the Lord

1.

I know a lot of fancy words.

I tear them from my heart and my tongue.

Then I pray

2.

Lod God, mercy is in your hands, pour

me a little. And tenderness too. My

need is great. Beauty walks so freely

and with such gentleness. Impatience puts

a halter on my face and I run away over

the green fields wanting your voice, your

tenderness, but having to do with only

the sweet grasses of the fields against

my body. When I first found you I was

filled with light, now the darkness grows

and it is filled with crooked things, bitter

and weak, each one bearing my name.

3.

I lounge on the grass, that's all. So

simple. Then I lie back until I am

inside the cloud that is just above me 

but very high, and shaped like a fish.

Or, perhaps not. Then I enter the place

of not-thinking, not-remembering, not-

wanting. When the blue jay cries out his

riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always

near. Over and back, over and back. Then

I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I

have been asleep. But I have not been 

asleep. I have been, as I say, inside

the cloud, or, perhaps, the lily floating

on the water. Then I go back to town,

to my own house, my own life, which has 

now become brighter and simpler, some-

where I have never been before.

4.

Of course I have always known you

are present in the clouds, and the

black oak I especially adore, and the

wings of birds. But you are present 

too in the body, listening to the body,

teaching it to live, instead of all

that touching, wiht disembodied joy.

We do not do that easily. We have

lived so long in the heaven of touch,

and we maintain our mutability, our

physicality, even as we begin to

apprehend the other world. Slowly we

make our appreciative response.

Slowly appreciation swells to

astonishment. And we enter the dialogue

of our lives that is beyond all under-

standing or conclusion. It is mystery.

It is love of God. It is obedience.

5.

Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with

the fragrance of the fields and the

freshness of the oceans which you have

made, and help me to hear and to hold

in all dearness those exacting and wonderful

words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying:

Follow me.

6.

Every summer the lilies rise

    and open their white hands until they almost

cover the black waters of the pond. And I give

    thanks but it does not seem like adequate thanks,

it doesn't seem

    festive enough or constant enough, nor does the

name of the Lord or the words of thanksgiving come

    into it often enough. Everywhere I go I am 

treated like royalty, which I am not. I thirst and

    am given water. My eyes thirst and I am given

the white lilies on the black water. My heart 

    sings but the apparatus of singing doesn't convey

hald what it feels and means. In spring there's hope,

    in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, in

winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its

    leafy cave, but in summer there is

everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,

    the hospitality of the Lord and my

inadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body

    through this water-lily world.