The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950

  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 Gotha

  And 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 you

  Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

  The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

  With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,

  And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama

  And the bold imposing façade are all being rolled away —

  Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

  And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

  And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

  Leaving 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 hope

  For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

  For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

  But 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 ecstasy

  Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

  Of death and birth.

  You say I am repeating

  Something 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 know

  And what you own is what you do not own

  And where you are is where you are not.

  IV

  The wounded surgeon plies the steel

  That questions the distempered part;

  Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

  The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

  Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

  Our only health is the disease

  If we obey the dying nurse

  Whose constant care is not to please

  But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,

  And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

  The whole earth is our hospital

  Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

  Wherein, if we do well, we shall

  Die of the absolute paternal care

  That 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 freeze

  And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

  Of 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 think

  That 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 guerres —

  Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

  Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

  Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

  For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

  One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

  Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

  With shabby equipment always deteriorating

  In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

  Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

  By strength and submission, has already been discovered

  Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

  To emulate — but there is no competition —

  There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

  And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

  That 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 older

  The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

  Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

  Isolated, with no before and after,

  But a lifetime burning in every moment

  And not the lifetime of one man only

  But 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 itself

  When here and now cease to matter.

  Old men ought to be explorers

  Here and there does not matter

  We must be still and still moving

  Into another intensity

  For a further union, a deeper communion

  Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

  The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

  Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

  The Dry Salvages

  (The Dry Salvages — presumably les trois sauvages — is a small group 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.)

  I

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

  Is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable,

  Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;

  Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;

  Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

  The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten

  By the dwellers in cities — ever, however, implacable,

  Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

  Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated

  By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

  His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,

  In the rank ailanthus of the Apri
l dooryard,

  In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,

  And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

  The river is within us, the sea is all about us;

  The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite

  Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses

  Its hints of earlier and other creation:

  The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;

  The pools where it offers to our curiosity

  The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.

  It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,

  The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar

  And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,

  Many gods and many voices.

  The salt is on the briar rose,

  The fog is in the fir trees.

  The sea howl

  And the sea yelp, are different voices

  Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,

  The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,

  The distant rote in the granite teeth,

  And the wailing warning from the approaching headland

  Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner

  Rounded homewards, and the seagull:

  And under the oppression of the silent fog

  The tolling bell

  Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

  Ground swell, a time

  Older than the time of chronometers, older

  Than time counted by anxious worried women

  Lying awake, calculating the future,

  Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

  And piece together the past and the future,

  Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

  The future futureless, before the morning watch

  When time stops and time is never ending;

  And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,

  Clangs

  The bell.

  II

  Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,

  The silent withering of autumn flowers

  Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;

  Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,

  The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable

  Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

  There is no end, but addition: the trailing

  Consequence of further days and hours,

  While emotion takes to itself the emotionless

  Years of living among the breakage

  Of what was believed in as the most reliable —

  And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

  There is the final addition, the failing

  Pride or resentment at failing powers,

  The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,

  In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,

  The silent listening to the undeniable

  Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

  Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing

  Into the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?

  We cannot think of a time that is oceanless

  Or of an ocean not littered with wastage

  Or of a future that is not liable

  Like the past, to have no destination.

  We have to think of them as forever bailing,

  Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers

  Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless

  Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;

  Not as making a trip that will be unpayable

  For a haul that will not bear examination.

  There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,

  No end to the withering of withered flowers,

  To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,

  To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,

  The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable

  Prayer of the one Annunciation.

  It seems, as one becomes older,

  That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence —

  Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy

  Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution‚

  Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

  The moments of happiness — not the sense of well-being,

  Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,

  Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination —

  We had the experience but missed the meaning,

  And approach to the meaning restores the experience

  In a different form, beyond any meaning

  We can assign to happiness. I have said before

  That the past experience revived in the meaning

  Is not the experience of one life only

  But of many generations — not forgetting

  Something that is probably quite ineffable:

  The backward look behind the assurance

  Of recorded history, the backward half-look

  Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

  Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony

  (Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,

  Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,

  Is not the question) are likewise permanent

  With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better

  In the agony of others, nearly experienced,

  Involving ourselves, than in our own.

  For our own past is covered by the currents of action,

  But the torment of others remains an experience

  Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.

  People change, and smile: but the agony abides.

  Time the destroyer is time the preserver,

  Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,

  The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.

  And the ragged rock in the restless waters,

  Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;

  On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,

  In navigable weather it is always a seamark

  To lay a course by: but in the sombre season

  Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

  III

  I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant —

  Among other things — or one way of putting the same thing:

  That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray

  Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,