T. S Eliot's Poems

East Coker

I.In my beginning is my end. In successionHouses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their placeIs 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 earthWhich is already flesh, fur, and faeces,Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.Houses live and die: there is a time for buildingAnd a time for living and for generationAnd a time for the wind to break the loosened paneAnd to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trotsAnd to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto. In my beginning is my end. Now the light fallsAcross 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 heatHypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry lightIs absorbed, not reflected, by grey stone.The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.Wait for the early owl. In that open fieldIf 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 drumAnd see them dancing around the bonfireThe association of man and woman In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—A dignified and commodiois sacrament.Two and two, necessarye coniunction,Holding eche other by the hand or the armWhiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fireLeaping through the flames, or joined in circles,Rustically solemn or in rustic laughterLifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirthMirth of those long since under earthNourishing the corn. Keeping time,Keeping the rhythm in their dancingAs in their living in the living seasonsThe time of the seasons and the constellationsThe time of milking and the time of harvestThe time of the coupling of man and womanAnd that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.Eating and drinking. Dung and death. Dawn points, and another dayPrepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn windWrinkles and slides. I am hereOr there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.II.What is the late November doingWith the disturbance of the springAnd creatures of the summer heat,And snowdrops writhing under feetAnd hollyhocks that aim too highRed into grey and tumble downLate roses filled with early snow?Thunder rolled by the rolling starsSimulates triumphal carsDeployed in constellated warsScorpion fights against the sunUntil the Sun and Moon go downComets weep and Leonids flyHunt the heavens and the plainsWhirled in a vortex that shall bringThe world to that destructive fireWhich burns before the ice-cap reigns That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactoryA periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matterIt was not (to start again) what one had expected.What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,Long hope 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 hebitude,The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secretsUseless in the darkness into which they peeredOr from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,At best, only a limited valueIn the knowledge derived from experience.The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,For the pattern is new in every momentAnd every moment is a new and shockingValuation of all we have been. We are only undeceivedOf that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.In the middle, not only in the middle of the wayBut 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 hearOf the wisdom of old men, but rather 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 acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.III.O dark 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 dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de GothaAnd the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon youWhich shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changedWith a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panoramaAnd the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stationsAnd the conversation rises and slowly fades into silenceAnd you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepenLeaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without loveFor love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasyNot lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth. You say I am repeatingSomething I have said before. I shall say it again,Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession.In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not.And what you do not know is the only thing you knowAnd what you own is what you do not ownAnd where you are is where you are not.IV.The wounded surgeon plies the steelThat questions the distempered part;Beneath the bleeding hands we feelThe sharp compassion of the healer's artResolving the enigma of the fever chart. Our only health is the diseaseIf we obey the dying nurseWhose constant care is not to pleaseBut to remind of our, and Adam's curse,And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. The whole earth is our hospitalEndowed by the ruined millionaire,Wherein, if we do well, we shallDie of the absolute paternal careThat will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere. The chill ascends from feet to knees,The fever sings in mental wires.If to be warmed, then I must freezeAnd quake in frigid purgatorial firesOf which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars. The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.V.So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerresTrying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulateWith shabby equipment always deterioratingIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquerBy strength and submission, has already been discoveredOnce or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hopeTo emulate—but there is no competition—There is only the fight to recover what has been lostAnd found and lost again and again: and now, under conditionsThat seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. Home is where one starts from. As we grow olderThe world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicatedOf dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every momentAnd not the lifetime of one man onlyBut of old stones that cannot be deciphered.There is a time for the evening under starlight,A time for the evening under lamplight(The evening with the photograph album).Love is most nearly itselfWhen here and now cease to matter.Old men ought to be explorersHere and there does not matterWe must be still and still movingInto another intensityFor a further union, a deeper communionThrough the dark cold and empty desolation,The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast watersOf the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

***************************************************

Published in 1940.

Publicado en 1940.