The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950

by T. S. Eliot

O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great glory!

  FOUR QUARTETS

  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 unredeemable.

  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 where the rain beat,

  The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

  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 and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,

  Highgate, 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 spray

  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 stay 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 the 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

  Hypnotised. 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, necessarye coniunction,

  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 knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

  For the pattern 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,