Thomas Stearns Eliot – Preludes

I

The winter's evening settles down

With smells of steaks in passageways.

Six o'clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves across your feet

And newpapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On empty blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness

Of faint stale smells of beer

From the sawdust-trampled street

With all the muddy feet that press

To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades

That time resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,

You lay upon your back, and waited;

You dozed, and watched the night revealing

The thousand sordid images

Of which your soul is constituted;

They flickered against the ceiling.

And when all the world came back

And the light crept up between the shutters

And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands;

Sitting along the bed's edge, where

You curled the papers from your hair,

And clasped the yellowed soles of feet

In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies

That fade behind a city block,

Or trampled by insistent feet

At four and five and six o'clock,

And short square fingers stuffing pipes

And evening newspapers, and eyes

Assured of certain certainties,

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Thomas Stearns Eliot – Whispers of Immortality

Webster was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breastless creatures under ground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls

Stared from the sockets of the eyes!

He knew that thought clings round dead limbs

Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Donne, I suppose, was such another

Who found no substitute for sense;

To seize and clutch and penetrate,

Expert beyond experience,

He knew the anguish of the marrow

The ague of the skeleton;

No contact possible to flesh

Allayed the fever of the bone.

. . . . .

Grishkin is nice: her

Russian eye is underlined for emphasis;

Uncorseted, her friendly bust

Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

The couched Brazilian jaguar

Compels the scampering marmoset

With subtle effluence of cat;

Grishkin has a maisonette;

The sleek Brazilian jaguar

Does not in its arboreal gloom

Distil so rank a feline smell

As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

And even the Abstract Entities

Circumambulate her charm;

But our lot crawls between dry ribs

To keep our metaphysics warm.

Thomas Stearns Eliot – Old Deuteronomy

Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;

He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.

He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme

A long while before Queen Victoria's accession.

Old Deuteronomy's buried nine wives

And more--I am tempted to say, ninety-nine;

And his numerous progeny prospers and thrives

And the village is proud of him in his decline.

At the sight of that placid and bland physiognomy,

When he sits in the sun on the vicarage wall,

The Oldest Inhabitant croaks: "Well, of all . . .

Things. . . Can it be . . . really! . . . No!. . . Yes!. . .

Ho! hi!

Oh, my eye!

My mind may be wandering, but I confess

I believe it is Old Deuteronomy!"

Old Deuteronomy sits in the street,

He sits in the High Street on market day;

The bullocks may bellow, the sheep they may bleat,

But the dogs and the herdsmen will turn them away.

The cars and the lorries run over the kerb,

And the villagers put up a notice: ROAD CLOSED--

So that nothing untoward may chance to distrub

Deuteronomy's rest when he feels so disposed

Or when he's engaged in domestic economy:

And the Oldest Inhabitant croaks: "Well, of all . . .

Things. . . Can it be . . . really! . . . No!. . . Yes!. . .

Ho! hi!

Oh, my eye!

My sight's unreliable, but I can guess

That the cause of the trouble is Old Deuteronomy!"

Old Deuteronomy lies on the floor

Of the Fox and French Horn for his afternoon sleep;

And when the men say: "There's just time for one more,"

Then the landlady from her back parlour will peep

And say: "New then, out you go, by the back door,

For Old Deuteronomy mustn't be woken--

I'll have the police if there's any uproar"--

And out they all shuffle, without a word spoken.

The digestive repose of that feline's gastronomy

Must never be broken, whatever befall:

And the Oldest Inhabitant croaks: "Well, of all . . .

Things. . . Can it be . . . really! . . . No!. . . Yes!. . .

Ho! hi!

Oh, my eye!

My legs may be tottery, I must go slow

And be careful of Old Deuteronomy!"

Of the awefull battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles:

together with some account of the participation of the

Pugs and the Poms, and the intervention of the Great Rumpuscat

The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows,

Are proud and implacable passionate foes;

It is always the same, wherever one goes.

And the Pugs and the Poms, although most people say

That they do not like fighting, yet once in a way,

They will now and again join in to the fray

And they

Bark bark bark bark

Bark bark BARK BARK

Until you can hear them all over the Park.

Now on the occasion of which I shall speak

Almost nothing had happened for nearly a week

(And that's a long time for a Pol or a Peke).

The big Police Dog was away from his beat--

I don't know the reason, but most people think

He'd slipped into the Wellington Arms for a drink--

And no one at all was about on the street

When a Peke and a Pollicle happened to meet.

They did not advance, or exactly retreat,

But they glared at each other, and scraped their hind feet,

And they started to

Bark bark bark bark

Bark bark BARK BARK

Until you can hear them all over the Park.

Now the Peke, although people may say what they please,

Is no British Dog, but a Heathen Chinese.

And so all the Pekes, when they heard the uproar,

Some came to the window, some came to the door;

There were surely a dozen, more likely a score.

And together they started to grumble and wheeze

In their huffery-snuffery Heathen Chinese.

But a terrible din is what Pollicles like,

For your Pollicle Dog is a dour Yorkshire tyke,

And his braw Scottish cousins are snappers and biters,

And every dog-jack of them notable fighters;

And so they stepped out, with their pipers in order,

Playing When the Blue Bonnets Came Over the Border.

Then the Pugs and the Poms held no longer aloof,

But some from the balcony, some from the roof,

Joined in

To the din

With a

Bark bark bark bark

Bark bark BARK BARK

Until you can hear them all over the Park.

Now when these bold heroes together assembled,

That traffic all stopped, and the Underground trembled,

And some of the neighbours were so much afraid

That they started to ring up the Fire Brigade.

When suddenly, up from a small basement flat,

Why who should stalk out but the GREAT RUMPUSCAT.

His eyes were like fireballs fearfully blazing,

He gave a great yawn, and his jaws were amazing;

And when he looked out through the bars of the area,

You never saw anything fiercer or hairier.

And what with the glare of his eyes and his yawning,

The Pekes and the Pollicles quickly took warning.

He looked at the sky and he gave a great leap--

And they every last one of them scattered like sheep.

And when the Police Dog returned to his beat,

There wasn't a single one left in the street.

Thomas Stearns Eliot – The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz-he dead

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us-if at all-not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind's singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death's dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer-

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death's other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death's twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Thomas Stearns Eliot – To Walter de la Mare

The children who explored the brook and found

A desert island with a sandy cove

(A hiding place, but very dangerous ground,

For here the water buffalo may rove,

The kinkajou, the mungabey, abound

In the dark jungle of a mango grove,

And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree -

The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)

Recount their exploits at the nursery tea

And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn

Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,

At not quite time for bed? ...

Or when the lawn

Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return

Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,

The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;

When the familiar is suddenly strange

Or the well known is what we yet have to learn,

And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,

Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range

At witches' sabbath of the maiden aunts;

When the nocturnal traveller can arouse

No sleeper by his call; or when by chance

An empty face peers from an empty house;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

By you; by those deceptive cadences

Wherewith the common measure is refined;

By conscious art practised with natural ease;

By the delicate, invisible web you wove -

The inexplicable mystery of sound.