And if She Falls Off Again Shell Find Another Guy to Like
T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding
I
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in fourth dimension, between pole and tropic.
When the curt day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the water ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the center'south heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal burn down
In the night time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul'southward sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or olfactory property of living affair. This is the spring time
But not in fourth dimension'south covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more than 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 lot came this fashion,
Taking the route you would exist probable to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this manner in may time, you lot would detect the hedges
White once more, in May, with voluptuary sugariness.
It would be the aforementioned at the end of the journeying,
If you came at night like a broken rex,
If you came by day non knowing what yous came for,
It would be the same, when you get out the crude road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what yous thought y'all came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when information technology 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 likewise are the world'southward end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city--
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.
If you lot came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would accept to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. Y'all are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an social club of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the vox praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you lot, beingness dead: the communication
Of the expressionless is tongued with fire beyond the linguistic communication of the living.
Hither, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and ever.
Two
Is all the ash the burnt roses exit.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of promise and despair,
This is the death of air.
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Expressionless water and dead sand
Contending for the upper paw.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and burn down deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and burn shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
In the uncertain hour earlier the morning
Almost the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent stop of the unending
After the nighttime dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed beneath the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves withal rattled on like can
Over the cobblestone where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if diddled towards me similar the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn air current unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the downwards-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The offset-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, one-half recalled
Both one and many; in the dark-brown broiled features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's vox cry: "What! are yous here?"
Although we were not. I was still the aforementioned,
Knowing myself yet existence someone other--
And he a face notwithstanding forming; nonetheless the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And and so, compliant to the common wind,
Also strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In agree at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no earlier and later,
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 non comprehend, may non think."
And he: "I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which yous accept forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them exist.
So with your own, and pray they exist forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and practiced. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to final year's language
And adjacent year'due south words await some other voice.
Simply, equally the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds go much like each other,
So I observe words I never thought to speak
In streets I never idea I should revisit
When I left my torso on a afar shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled the states
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 fricton of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
Just biting tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and sould begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to charm.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
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 incorrect the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining burn
Where you must move in measure, similar 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
At that place are three atmospheric condition which oftentimes expect akin
Notwithstanding differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Zipper to cocky and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing betwixt them, indifference
Which resembles the others equally death resembles life,
Being between two lives - unflowering, betwixt
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of retentivity:
For liberation - not less of dearest only expanding
Of honey beyond desire, then liberation
From the future as well as the by. Thus, love of a country
Begins as an attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may exist 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 blueprint.
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of matter shall be well.
If I call back, again, of this identify,
And of people, non wholly commendable,
Of not immediate kin or kindness,
Merely of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more than, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of i who died blind and quiet,
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is non 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 onetime policies
Or follow an antique pulsate.
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
Nosotros have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave u.s.a. - a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of affair shall exist well
By the purification of the motive
In the footing of our beseeching.
4
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one dischage from sin and mistake.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the pick of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire past burn.
Who so devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Proper noun
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which man ability cannot remove.
We only live, simply suspire
Consumed by either burn or fire.
V
What we call the beginning is oft the end
And to brand and end is to make a starting time.
The cease is where we get-go from. And every phrase
And judgement that is right (where every discussion is at home,
Taking its place to back up the others,
The give-and-take neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the sometime and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal discussion precise only non pedantic,
The complete espoused dancing together)
Every phrase and every judgement 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 pharynx
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where nosotros start.
We dice with the dying:
See, they depart, and nosotros go with them.
We are born with the dead:
Run into, they render, and bring u.s. with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the lite fails
On a winter'southward afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Dear and the phonation of this Calling
We shall non cease from exploration
And the terminate of all our exploring
Will be to make it where nosotros started
And know the place for the commencement time.
When the last of earth left to observe
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The vocalization of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, considering non looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between 2 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 exist well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are i.
The Little Gidding is the last of T. Due south. Eliot's Iv Quartets. For a adept biographical site on Eliot and some assay of his poetry, get to the University of American Poet's website.
Source: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/winter/w3206/edit/tseliotlittlegidding.html