The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950

by T. S. Eliot

  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 business 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 is 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  While time is withdrawn, consider the future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 promontory,

  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,

  Where action were otherwise movement

  Of that which is only moved

  And has in it no source of movement —

  Driven by dæmonic, 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 pentecostal 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 came 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 be 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 façade

  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 s
ea 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,

  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 order 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 of 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 suspended

  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 flood and drouth

  Over the eyes and in the mouth,

  Dead water and dead sand

  Contending for the upper hand.

  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 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 rehearse

  My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.

  These things have served their purpose: let them be.

  So with your own, and pray they be forgiven

  By others, as I pray you to forgive

  Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten

  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 words 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