All Things Once Were Through the Sands of Time We Can Be Again if Only We Turn Over

T. Southward. Eliot's Picayune Gidding

Lilliputian 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 cursory sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless common cold that is the heart's estrus,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is incomprehension in the early afternoon.
And glow more than 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. At that place is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the jump time
But not in time'due south covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory bloom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summertime, the unimaginable Zero summer?

If you came this way,
Taking the route y'all would be probable to have
From the identify y'all would exist likely to come from,
If you came this mode in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sugariness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at nighttime like a broken king,
If you lot came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And plow behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what yous idea y'all came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either yous had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the terminate you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city--
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
At present and in England.

If yous came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any flavor,
It would e'er be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are non here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or acquit written report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more than
Than an lodge of words, the witting occupation
Of the praying heed, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell y'all, being expressionless: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with burn down 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'southward sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses go out.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Grit inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The expiry of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

There are overflowing and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead h2o and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the decease of earth.

Water and burn succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
H2o 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 earlier the morning time
Near the catastrophe of interminable night
At the recurrent finish of the unending
Later the night dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed beneath the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like can
Over the asphalt where no other audio was
Between 3 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 downwardly-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The outset-met stranger in the waning sunset
I caught the sudden look of some dead main
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both 1 and many; in the brownish baked features
The eyes of a familiar chemical compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
And so I causeless 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 confront still forming; yet 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 concur at this intersection fourth dimension
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
Nosotros trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: "The wonder that I feel is easy,
However ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may non embrace, may not remember."
And he: "I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things take served their purpose: let them be.
And so with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Concluding flavour's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For concluding year's words belong to terminal year'southward linguistic communication
And side by side yr'southward words await another vocalism.
Just, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I observe 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 oral communication, 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 up a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the common cold fricton of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no hope
Only bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and sould brainstorm to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At homo folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending hurting of re-enactment
Of all that you accept done, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once y'all took for practice of virtue.
And then fools' approving 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.

3

There are 3 conditions which often await akin
Yet differ completely, flourish in the aforementioned 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 two lives - unflowering, between
The alive and the expressionless nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation - not less of beloved merely expanding
Of love across desire, and and so liberation
From the futurity also as the past. Thus, beloved of a country
Begins as an attachment to our own field of action
And comes to discover that activeness of trivial importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in some other pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of matter shall be well.
If I call up, again, of this identify,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of not firsthand kin or kindness,
Merely of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of 1 who died blind and placidity,
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell 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 take taken from the defeated
What they had to leave u.s. - a symbol:
A symbol perfected in expiry.
And all shall exist well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By 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 error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To exist redeemed from burn down by burn.

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

Five

What nosotros call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where nosotros start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is correct (where every word is at home,
Taking its identify to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An piece of cake commerce of the former and the new,
The mutual give-and-take exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The consummate consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an terminate and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the ocean'south throat
Or to an illegible rock: and that is where we offset.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are built-in with the dead:
See, they return, and bring the states 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 blueprint
Of timeless moments. So, while the low-cal fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not finish from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first fourth dimension.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the concluding of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the subconscious waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Non known, because not looked for
Merely heard, one-half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the body of water.
Quick at present, here, now, always--
A status of complete simplicity
(Costing non less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of burn down
And the fire and the rose are one.

The Little Gidding is the last of T. S. Eliot'due south 4 Quartets. For a good biographical site on Eliot and some analysis of his poesy, go to the University of American Poet's website.

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Source: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/winter/w3206/edit/tseliotlittlegidding.html