Thomas Stearns Eliot – Song 2

If space and time, as sages say,    Are things which cannot be,The fly that lives a single day    Has lived as long as we.But let us live while yet we may,    While love and life are free,For time is time, and runs away,    Though sages disagree.The...

Thomas Stearns Eliot – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S'io credesse chc mia risposta fosseA persona che mai tornasse al mondo,Questa Gamma staria senza piu scosse.Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondoNon torno viva alcun, s'i'odo il vero,Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.Let us go then, you and I,When the evening is spread out against...

Thomas Stearns Eliot – Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages

(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a smallgroup of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann,Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.Groaner: a whistling buoy.)II do not know much about gods; but I think that the riverIs a strong brown...

Thomas Stearns Eliot – La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo ...Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—Lean on a garden urn—Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—Fling them to the ground and turnWith a fugitive resentment in your eyes:But weave, weave the sunlight...

Thomas Stearns Eliot – Gerontion

Thou hast nor youth nor ageBut as it were an after dinner sleepDreaming of both.Here I am, an old man in a dry month,Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.I was neither at the hot gatesNor fought in the warm rainNor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,Bitten by flies,...