Complete Poems and Plays

by T. S. Eliot

  The peacocks walk, stately and slow,

  And they look at us with the eyes

  Of men whom we knew long ago.

  On a Portrait

  Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown

  To us of restless brain and weary feet,

  Forever hurrying, up and down the street,

  She stands at evening in the room alone.

  Not like a tranquil goddess carved of stone

  But evanescent, as if one should meet

  A pensive lamia in some wood-retreat,

  An immaterial fancy of one’s own.

  No meditations glad or ominous

  Disturb her lips, or move the slender hands;

  Her dark eyes keep their secrets hid from us,

  Beyond the circle of our thought she stands.

  The parrot on his bar, a silent spy,

  Regards her with a patient curious eye.

  Song

  The moonflower opens to the moth,

  The mist crawls in from sea;

  A great white bird, a snowy owl,

  Slips from the alder tree.

  Whiter the flowers, Love, you hold,

  Than the white mist on the sea;

  Have you no brighter tropic flowers

  With scarlet life, for me?

  Nocturne

  Romeo, grand sérieux, to importune

  Guitar and hat in hand, beside the gate

  With Juliet, in the usual debate

  Of love, beneath a bored but courteous moon;

  The conversation failing, strikes some tune

  Banal, and out of pity for their fate

  Behind the wall I have some servant wait,

  Stab, and the lady sinks into a swoon.

  Blood looks effective on the moonlit ground —

  The hero smiles; in my best mode oblique

  Rolls toward the moon a frenzied eye profound,

  (No need of ‘Love forever?’ — ‘Love next week?’)

  While female readers all in tears are drowned: —

  ‘The perfect climax all true lovers seek!’

  Humouresque

  (AFTER J. LAFORGUE)

  One of my marionettes is dead,

  Though not yet tired of the game —

  But weak in body as in head,

  (A jumping-jack has such a frame).

  But this deceasèd marionette

  I rather liked: a common face,

  (The kind of face that we forget)

  Pinched in a comic, dull grimace;

  Half bullying, half imploring air,

  Mouth twisted to the latest tune;

  His who-the-devil-are-you stare;

  Translated, maybe, to the moon.

  With Limbo’s other useless things

  Haranguing spectres, set him there;

  ‘The snappiest fashion since last spring’s,

  ‘The newest style, on Earth, I swear.

  ‘Why don’t you people get some class?

  (Feebly contemptuous of nose),

  ‘Your damned thin moonlight, worse than gas —

  ‘Now in New York’ — and so it goes.

  Logic a marionette’s, all wrong

  Of premises; yet in some star

  A hero! — Where would he belong?

  But, even at that, what mask bizarre!

  Spleen

  Sunday: this satisfied procession

  Of definite Sunday faces;

  Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces

  In repetition that displaces

  Your mental self-possession

  By this unwarranted digression.

  Evening, lights, and tea!

  Children and cats in the alley;

  Dejection unable to rally

  Against this dull conspiracy.

  And Life, a little bald and gray,

  Languid, fastidious, and bland,

  Waits, hat and gloves in hand‚

  Punctilious of tie and suit

  (Somewhat impatient of delay)

  On the doorstep of the Absolute.

  Ode

  THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

  For the hour that is left us, Fair Harvard, with thee,

  Ere we face the importunate years,

  In thy shadow we wait, while thy presence dispels

  Our vain hesitations and fears.

  And we turn as thy sons ever turn, in the strength

  Of the hopes that thy blessings bestow,

  From the hopes and ambitions that sprang at thy feet

  To the thoughts of the past as we go.

  Yet for all of these years that to-morrow has lost

  We are still the less able to grieve,

  With so much that of Harvard we carry away

  In the place of the life that we leave.

  And only the years that efface and destroy

  Give us also the vision to see

  What we owe for the future, the present, and past,

  Fair Harvard, to thine and to thee.

  The Death of Saint Narcissus

  Come under the shadow of this gray rock —

  Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or

  Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock:

  I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs

  And the gray shadow on his lips.

  He walked once between the sea and the high cliffs

  When the wind made him aware of his limbs smoothly passing each other

  And of his arms crossed over his breast.

  When he walked over the meadows

  He was stifled and soothed by his own rhythm.

  By the river

  His eyes were aware of the pointed corners of his eyes

  And his hands aware of the pointed tips of his fingers.

  Struck down by such knowledge

  He could not live men’s ways, but became a dancer before God

  If he walked in city streets

  He seemed to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and knees.

  So he came out under the rock.

  First he was sure that he had been a tree,

  Twisting its branches among each other

  And tangling its roots among each other.

  Then he knew that he had been a fish

  With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers,

  Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty

  Caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty.

  Then he had been a young girl

  Caught in the woods by a drunken old man

  Knowing at the end the taste of his own whiteness

  The horror of his own smoothness,

  And he felt drunken and old.

  So he became a dancer to God.

  Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows

  He danced on the hot sand

  Until the arrows came.

  As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him.

  Now he is green, dry and stained

  With the shadow in his mouth.

  INDEX OF FIRST LINES OF POEMS

  ‘A cold coming we had of it 1

  A man’s destination is his own village 1

  Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown 1

  Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon 1

  Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees 1

  April is the cruellest month, breeding 1

  Around her fountain which flows 1

  Because I do not hope to turn again 1

  Burbank crossed a little bridge 1

  Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones 1

  Children’s voices in the orchard 1

  Come under the shadow of this gray rock 1

  En Amérique, professeur 1

  Eyes that last I saw in tears 1

  For the hour that is left us, Fair Harva
rd, with thee 1

  Growltiger was a Bravo Cat, who travelled on a barge 1

  Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door 1

  Here I am, an old man in a dry month 1

  I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river 1

  I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots 1

  I once was a Pirate what sailed the ’igh seas 1

  If space and time, as sages say 1

  If Time and Space, as Sages say 1

  Ils ont vu les Pays-Bas, ils rentrent à Terre Haute 1

  In England, long before that royal Mormon 1

  In my beginning is my end. In succession 1

  ‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul’ 1

  Jellicle Cats are black and white 1

  Le garçon délabré qui n’a rien à faire 1

  Let these memorials of built stone — music’s 1

  Let us go then, you and I 1

  Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and 1

  Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw 1

  Malheur à la malheureuse Tamise 1

  Midwinter spring is its own season 1

  Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt 1

  Miss Nancy Ellicott 1

  Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were a very notorious couple of cats 1

  Not the expression of collective emotion 1

  Old Deuteronomy’s lived a long time 1

  One of my marionettes is dead 1

  Paint me a cavernous waste shore 1

  Pipit sate upright in her chair 1

  Polyphiloprogenitive 1

  Romeo, grand sérieux, to importune 1

  Standing upon the shore of all we know 1

  Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels 1

  Sunday: this satisfied procession 1

  The broad-backed hippopotamus 1

  The children who explored the brook and found 1

  The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven 1

  The moonflower opens to the moth 1

  The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter 1

  The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows 1

  The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript 1

  The Rum Turn Tugger is a Curious Cat 1

  The songsters of the air repair 1

  The tiger in the tiger-pit 1

  The wind sprang up at four o’clock 1

  The winter evening settles down 1

  There are several attitudes towards Christmas 1

  There’s a whisper down the line at 1.2 3

  They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens 1

  Time present and time past 1

  To whom I owe the leaping delight 1

  Twelve o’clock 1

  We are the hollow men 1

  Webster was much possessed by death 1

  What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands 1

  When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States 1

  When we came home across the hill 1

  While all the East was weaving red with gray 1

  You ought to know Mr. Mistoffelees! 1

  You’ve read of several kinds of Cat 1

  About the Author

  Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He came to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.

  Also by T. S. Eliot

  COLLECTED POEMS 1909–1962

  FOUR QUARTETS

  THE WASTE LAND and OTHER POEMS

  THE WASTE LAND

  A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts

  Edited by Valerie Eliot

  SELECTED POEMS

  INVENTIONS OF THE MARCH HARE

  Poems 1909–1917

  Edited by Christopher Ricks

  OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS

  correspondence

  THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT

  Volume 1 – 1898–1922

  Edited by Valerie Eliot

  plays

  MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

  THE FAMILY REUNION

  THE COCKTAIL PARTY

  THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK

  THE ELDER STATESMAN

  literary criticism

  SELECTED ESSAYS

  THE USE OF POETRY and THE USE OF CRITICISM

  THE VARIETIES OF METAPHYSICAL POETRY

  Edited by Ronald Schuchard

  TO CRITICIZE THE CRITIC

  ON POETRY AND POETS

  FOR LANCELOT ANDREWES

  SELECTED PROSE OF T. S. ELIOT

  social criticism

  THE IDEA OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

  Edited by David Edwards

  NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE

  for students

  A CONCORDANCE TO THE COMPLETE

  POEMS AND PLAYS OF T. S. ELIOT

  Edited by John Dawson, Peter Holland and David McKitterick

  A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE SELECTED POEMS

  OF T. S. ELIOT

  By B. C. Southam

  Copyright

  First published in 1969

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © This edition Valerie Eliot, 1969

  The right of T. S. Eliot to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26233–5