As We Come to the End of Another Quarter Once Again

T. S. Eliot Poems

The Iv Quartets

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I

Fourth dimension present and time by
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time hereafter independent in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an brainchild
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to 1 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 nosotros follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, notice them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our beginning world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our start world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the fall heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird chosen, 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.
Then we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Forth the empty alley, into the box circle,
To wait downward into the drained puddle.
Dry the puddle, dry physical, brown edged,
And the puddle was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of eye of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
And then a deject passed, and the pool was empty.
Get, 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.
Fourth dimension past and time future
What might accept been and what has been
Betoken to 1 stop, which is always present.

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded beam-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings beneath 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 to a higher place the moving tree
In calorie-free upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern equally before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning earth. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still bespeak, there the dance is,
Only neither abort nor movement. And exercise not call it fixity,
Where past and hereafter are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither rise nor refuse. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is merely 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 identify it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical want,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white lite even so and moving,
Erhebung without move, concentration
Without elimination, both a new globe
And the onetime made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
All the same the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects flesh from heaven and damnation
Which mankind cannot endure.
Time by and time future
Permit but a niggling consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time tin can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain vanquish,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with by and hereafter.
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 dazzler
Wtih slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing amore from the temporal.
Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by lark
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold air current
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time earlier and fourth dimension afterward.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the current of air that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Non here
Non here the darkness, in this twittering earth.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not globe, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the earth of spirit;
This is the 1 way, and the other
Is the aforementioned, non in movement
But abstention from movememnt; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of fourth dimension past and time time to come.

4

Time and the bell accept buried the day,
the black cloud carries the dominicus away.
Volition the sunflower turn to united states, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher'south wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is withal
At the notwithstanding betoken of the turning globe.

V

Words motility, music moves
Only in time; but that which is just living
Can only die. Words, after voice communication, reach
Into the silence. Only by the class, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, every bit a Chinese jar however
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the annotation lasts,
Not that but, simply the co-existence,
Or say that the cease precedes the beginning,
And the end and the first were always in that location
Before the kickoff and later on the end.
And all is ever now. Words strain,
Scissure and sometimes break, under the burden,
Nether the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or just chattering,
E'er assault them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked past voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is motion,
Every bit in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and cease of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the attribute of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between united nations-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the grit moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, hither, now, e'er-
Ridiculous the waste matter pitiful time
Stretching earlier and subsequently.

I

In my get-go 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 manufactory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the world
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Os of homo and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses alive and dice: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a fourth dimension for the current of air to pause the loosened pane
And to milk shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my finish. Now the low-cal falls
Across the open field,, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, nighttime in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the hamlet, in the elctric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm brume the sultry light
Is absorbed, non refracted, by gray stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early on owl.

In that open up field
If you lot practise not come also close, if y'all exercise not come as well close,
On a summertime midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And meet them dancing around the bonfire
the association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie�
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
2 and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other past the manus or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and circular the burn down
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy anxiety in clumsy shoes,
Earth anxiety, 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 some other day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at body of water 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 jump
And creatures of the summer estrus,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim likewise loftier
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 cry and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive burn
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a fashion of putting it - not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical style,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was non (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked frontwards to,
Long hoped for at-home, the autumnal tranquillity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived united states of america,
Or deceived themselves, the tranquility-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us but a receipt for deceit?
The serenity just a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom but the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their optics. There is, it seems to usa,
At best, merely a limited value
In the cognition derived from experience.
The knowledge inposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the design is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all nosotros have been. Nosotros are merely undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the center, not just in the middle of the manner
merely all the style, in a nighttime 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 permit me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rahter 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 learn
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone nether the hill.

III

O night 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 night the Lord's day and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Substitution Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And common cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all become with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody'southward funeral, for there is no 1 to coffin.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you lot
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to exist inverse
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And nosotros know that the hills and the copse, the afar panorama
And the assuming imposing facade are all beingness rolled away-
Or as, when an hush-hush train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see backside every face up the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to recall about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but witting of zip-
I said to my soul, exist even so, and wait without hope
For promise would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For dear would exist love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the dear and the hope are all in the waiting.
Expect without idea, for y'all are not ready for thought:
And then the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and wintertime lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Non lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of decease and nativity.

You lot say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In social club to arrive there,
To go far where you are, to get from where you are not,
You lot must go by a way wherein in that location is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you exercise not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In guild to possess what you do not possess
You must get by the way of dispossession.
In lodge to arrive at what you lot are non
Y'all must become through the way in which you lot are non.
And what yous practice not know is the only thing yous know
And what you own is what y'all do not own
And where yous are is where you are not.

Four

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That quesions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding easily we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer'due south fine art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only wellness is the disease
If nosotros obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to delight
But to remind u.s. of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to exist restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole world is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if nosotros do well, nosotros shall
Die of the absolute paternal intendance
That will not leave us, only prevents usa everywhere.

The arctic 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 claret our only beverage,
The bloody mankind our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are audio, substantial mankind and blood-
Once more, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

5

So here I am, in the middle way, having had 20 years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-
Trying to employ words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has just learnt to get the better of words
For the affair one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say information technology. 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 forcefulness and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, past men whom one cannot promise
To emulate - just at that place is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And constitute and lost once again and once again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. Just possibly neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is merely the trying. The rest is non our business.

Home is where one starts from. As nosotros grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no earlier and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
Merely of sometime stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening nether starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photo anthology).
Love is nearly near itself
When hither and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or in that location does not thing
We must be withal and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the nighttime cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my stop is my beginning.

The Dry out Salvages

(The Dry Salvages - presumably les trois sauvages - is a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. declension of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
Groaner: a whistling buoy.)

I

I exercise 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;
And then only a trouble against the builder of bridges.
The trouble in one case solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, only waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the Apr dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circumvolve in the winter gaslight.

The river is within united states of america, the bounding main is all virtually u.s.;
The ocean is the land'southward edge also, the granite,
Into which it reaches, the beaches where information technology tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale'south backbone;
The pools where information technology offers to our marvel
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses upwards 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 common salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are dissimilar voices
Oft together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on h2o,
The afar rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing alarm form the approaching headland
Are all bounding main voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures fourth dimension not our fourth dimension, rung by the unhurried
Footing corking, a fourth dimension
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by broken-hearted worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Betwixt midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, earlier the morning watch
Whem time stops and fourth dimension is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bong.

II

Where is there an finish of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is at that place and cease to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no finish, 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 every bit the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the concluding addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might laissez passer for devotionless,
In a drifting gunkhole with a irksome leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the cease of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the air current's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean non littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to accept no destination.

We accept to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their coin, drying sails at dockage;
Not every bit making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear test.

In that location is no cease of information technology, the voiceless wailing,
No finish to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the bounding main and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

It seems, every bit 1 becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence-
Or fifty-fifty development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged past superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness - non the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affecton,
Or even a very proficient dinner, simply the sudden illumination�
We had the experience just missed the meaning,
And approach to the significant restores the experience
In a unlike form, across whatsoever significant
We can assign to happiness. I take said before
That the past experience revived in the significant
Is non the experience of one life just
Merely of many generations - non forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look backside the assurance
Of recorded history, the astern half-wait
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 incorrect things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence equally fourth dimension has. We capeesh this amend
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 compunction.
People change, and grinning: 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 biting apple tree, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon mean solar day it is merely a monument,
In navigable atmospheric condition information technology is e'er a seamark
To lay a course by, but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what information technology always was.

3

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant-
Amidst other things - or i way of putting the same matter:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavander spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not all the same here to regret,
Pressed betwixt yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way upward is the way down, the style forward is the way back.
You cannot confront it steadily, but this affair is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer hither.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business messages
(And those who saw them off take left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forrad, travellers! not escaping from the by
Into dissimilar lives, or into any future;
You are non the aforementioned people who left that station
Or who will arrive at whatsoever terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
Watching the furrow that widens backside yous,
You shall not remember "the past is finished"
Or "the future is before united states".
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of fourth dimension, and not in any language)
"Fare forward, you who retrieve that yous are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Hither between the here and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the by with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of activeness or inaction
Yous tin receive this: 'on whatever sphere of existence
The mind of a human being may exist intent
At the time of death' - that is the one activity
(And the time of decease is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forrad.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your existent destination."
So Krishna, every bit when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Non fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

4

Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business organization has to do with fish, and
Those concerned with every lawful traffic
And those who conduct them.

Echo 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'due south lips
Or in the dark pharynx which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot attain them the sound of the body of water 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,
Discover 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 volition be, some of them specially
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road,
Men'due south curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The signal of intersection of the timeless
With fourth dimension, is an occupation for the saint�
No occupation either, simply something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and cocky-surrender.
For most of u.s.a., there is just 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 and then deeply
That it is not heard at all, simply yous are the music
While the music lasts. These are just hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and activity.
The hint half guessed, the gift one-half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible spousal relationship
Of spheres of prove is actual,
Here the past and futurity
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where activeness were otherwise movement
Of that which is just moved
And has in information technology no source of movement�
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is liberty
From past and future also.
For near of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are but undefeated
Because nosotros have gone on trying;
We, content at the concluding
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not likewise far from the yew-tree)
The life of meaning soil.

I

Midwinter spring is its ain season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
Whem 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 pentecostal fire
In the nighttime time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul'due south sap quivers. There is no world odour
Or smell of living thing. This is the jump time
Simply not in time'due south covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hr with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

If you came this fashion,
Taking the route you would be probable to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would detect the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sugariness.
It would exist the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at nighttime like a cleaved king,
If you came by day not knowing what you lot came for,
It would exist the same, when y'all leave the rough road
And turn behind the squealer-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you idea you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks merely 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'south stop, some at the body of water jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city�
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
Information technology would always be the aforementioned: yous would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not hither 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 club of words, the witting occupation
Of the praying listen, or the audio of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the advice
Of the expressionless is tongued with burn across the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and e'er.

II

Ash on an old man'southward sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses exit.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a firm-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of promise and despair,
This is the decease of air.

At that place are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the oral fissure,
Dead h2o and expressionless sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the decease of world.

Water and fire succeed
The boondocks, the pasture and the weed.
H2o and burn deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
H2o and burn down shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain 60 minutes before the morning
Nigh the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the nighttime dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves nonetheless rattled on like tin can
Over the cobblestone where no other audio was
Betwixt iii 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 current of air unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the downwards-turned confront
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The starting time-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.
And then I assumed a double office, and cried
And heard another's vocalisation cry: "What! are you lot here?"
Although we were not. I was still the aforementioned,
Knowing myself yet being someone other�
And he a confront even so forming; still the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And and then, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In hold at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no earlier and later on,
We trod the pavement in a expressionless patrol.
I said: "The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is crusade of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may non comprehend, may not recall."
And he: "I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your ain, and pray they be forgiven
Past others, as I pray yous to forgive
Both bad and expert. Concluding season'south fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For terminal year's words belong to concluding yr'south 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 get much like each other,
So I find words I never idea to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our business concern was speech, and oral communication impelled u.s.
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the heed to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for historic period
To set a crown upon your lifetime'southward attempt.
Start, the common cold fricton of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
Every bit torso and sould brainstorm to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human being folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you lot have washed, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others' damage
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
And so fools' approval stings, and laurels 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 bravado of the horn.

Three

There are three atmospheric condition which oft look akin
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Zipper to self and to things and to persons, disengagement
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Existence between 2 lives - unflowering, betwixt
The alive and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation - not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and and so liberation
From the future every bit well equally the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins every bit an attachment to our own field of activity
And comes to find that action of piddling importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, at present they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, every bit it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, just
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly laudable,
Of non immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a male monarch at nightfall,
Of iii 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 than the dying?
It is not to band the bong astern
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
Nosotros accept taken from the defeated
What they had to exit us - a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
Past the purification of the motive
In the basis of our beseeching.

IV

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 promise, or else despair
Lies in the selection of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from burn by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Backside the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
Nosotros just live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

V

What we call the commencement is oftentimes the terminate
And to make and terminate is to make a outset.
The cease is where we get-go from. And every phrase
And sentence that is correct (where every word is at abode,
Taking its place to back up the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An like shooting fish in a barrel 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 whatever action
Is a stride to the block, to the fire, down the ocean's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
Come across, they depart, and we go with them.
Nosotros are born with the dead:
Encounter, 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 redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. And so, while the calorie-free fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the cartoon of this Honey and the voice of this Calling

Nosotros shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will exist to get in where we started
And know the place for the starting time fourth dimension.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the concluding of globe left to discover
Is that which was the starting time;
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 ii waves of the sea.
Quick now, hither, at present, always�
A status of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All style of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of burn down
And the burn down and the rose are one.

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Source: http://coldbacon.com/poems/fq.html

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