Friday, June 18, 2010

The Man with the Blue Guitar






I

The man bent over his guitar, 
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar, 
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are 
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must, 
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar 
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round, 
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero'd head, large eye 
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can 
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man 
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade 
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one, 
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board 
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door, 
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho, 
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang it from a savage blue, 
Jangling the metal of the strings...

IV

So that's life, then: things are they are? 
It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string? 
And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong, 
And all their manner, weak and strong?

And that's life, then" things as they are, 
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, 
Of the torches wisping in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. 
There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep. 
There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare. 
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place 
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place, 
Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI

A tune beyond us as we are, 
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in the tune as if in space, 
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place 
As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed so, beyond the compass of change, 
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way 
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew. 
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are, 
A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII

It is the sun that shares our works. 
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

When shall I come to say of the sun, 
It is a sea; it shares nothing;

The sun no longer shares our works 
And the earth is alive with creeping men,

Mechanical beetles never quite warm? 
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

I stand in the moon, and call it good, 
the immaculate, the merciful good,

Detached from us, from things as they are? 
Not to be part of the sun? To stand

Remote and call it merciful? 
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII

The vivid, florid, turgid sky, 
The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night, 
The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords 
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged 
By gold antagonists in air--

I know my lazy, leaden twang 
Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear. 
I twang it out and leave it there.

IX

And the color, the overcast blue 
Of the air, in which the blue guitar

Is a form, described but difficult, 
And I am merely a shadow hunched

Above the arrowy, still string, 
The maker of a thing yet to be made;

The color like a thought that grows 
Out of a mood, the tragic robe

Of the actor, half his gesture, half 
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

Sodden with his melancholy words, 
The weather of his stage, himself.

X

Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell 
And clap the hollows full of tin.

Throw papers in the streets, the wills 
Of the dead, majestic in their seals.

And the beautiful trombones--behold 
The approach of him whom none believes,

Whom all believe that all believe, 
A pagan in a varnished car.

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar. 
Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,

"Here am I, my adversary, that 
Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,

Yet with a petty misery 
At heart, a petty misery,

Ever the prelude to your end, 
The touch that topples men and rock."

XI

Slowly the ivy on the stones 
Becomes the stones. Women become

The cities, children become the fields 
And men in waves become the sea.

It is the chord that flasifies. 
The sea returns upon the men,

The fields entrap the children, brick 
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,

Wingless and withered, but living alive. 
The discord merely magnified.

Deeper within the belly's dark 
Of time, time grows upon the rock.

XII

Tom-tom, c'est moi. the blue guitar 
And I are one. The orchestra

Fills the high hall with shuffling men 
High as the hall. The whirling noise

Of a multitude dwindles, all said, 
To his breath that lies awake at night.

I know that timid breathing. Where 
Do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up 
That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet 
Must be. It could be nothing else.

XIII

The pale intrusions into blue 
Are corrupting pallors...ay di mi,

Blue buds of pitchy blooms. Be content-- 
Expansions, diffusions--content to be

The unspotted imbecile revery, 
The heraldic center of the world

Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, 
The amorist Adjective aflame...

XIV

First one beam, then another, then 
A thousand are radiant in the sky.

Each is both star and orb; and day 
Is the riches of their atmosphere.

The sea appends its tattery hues. 
The shores are banks of muffling mist.

One says a German chandelier-- 
A candle is enough to light the world.

It makes it clear. Even at noon 
It glistens in essential dark.

At night, it lights the fruit and wine, 
The book and bread, things as they are,

In a chiaroscuro where 
One sits and plays the blue guitar.

XV

Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard 
Of destructions," a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society? 
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon, 
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed. 
Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold? 
Is my thought a memory, not alive?

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood 
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

XVI

The earth is not earth but a stone, 
Not the mother that held men as they fell

But stone, but like a stone, no: not 
The mother, but an oppressor, but like

An oppressor that grudges them their death, 
As it grudges the living that they live.

To live in war, to live at war, 
To chop the sullen psaltery,

To improve the sewers in Jerusalem, 
To electrify the nimbuses--

Place honey on the altars and die, 
You lovers that are bitter at heart.

XVII

The person has a mould. But not 
Its animal. The angelic ones

Speak of the soul, the mind. It is 
An animal The blue guitar--

On that its claws propound, its fangs 
Articulate its desert days.

The blue guitar a mould? That shell? 
Well, after all, the north wind blows

A horn, on which its victory 
Is a worm composing on a straw.

XVIII

A dream (to call it a dream) in which 
I can believe, in face of the object,

A dream no longer a dream, a thing, 
Of things as they are, as the blue guitar

After long strumming on certain nights 
Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,

But the very senses as they touch 
The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,

Like light in a mirroring of cliffs, 
Rising upward from a sea of ex.

XIX

That I may reduce the monster to 
Myself, and then may be myself

In face of the monster, be more than part 
Of it, more than the monstrous player of

One of its monstrous lutes, not be 
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,

Two things, the two together as one, 
And play of the monster and of myself,

Or better not of myself at all, 
But of that as its intelligence,

Being the lion in the lute 
Before the lion locked in stone.

XX

What is there in life except one's ideas. 
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

Is it ideas that I believe? 
Good air, my only friend, believe,

Believe would be a brother full 
Of love, believe would be a friend

Friendlier than my only friend, 
Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar...

XXI

A substitute for all the gods: 
This self, not that gold self aloft,

Alone, one's shadow magnified, 
Lord of the body, looking down,

As now and called most high, 
The shadow of Chocorua

In an immenser heaven, aloft, 
Alone, lord of the land and lord

Of the men that live in the land, high lord. 
One's self and the mountains of one's land,

Without shadows, without magnificence, 
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

XXII

Poetry is the subject of the poem, 
From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two, 
Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality, 
Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it 
An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun's green, 
Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives, 
In the universal intercourse.

XXIII

A few final solutions, like a duet 
With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

Another on earth, the one a voice 
Of ether, the other smelling of drink.

The voice of ether prevailing, the swell 
Of the undertaker's song in the snow

Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice 
In the clouds serene and final, next

The grunted breath serene and final, 
The imagined and the real, thought

And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all 
Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps on playing year by year, 
Concerning the nature of things as they are.

XXIV

A poem like a missal found 
In the mud, a missal for that young man,

That scholar hungriest for that book, 
The very book, or, less, a page

Or, at the least, a phrase, that phrase, 
A hawk of life, that latined phrase:

To know; a missal for brooding-sight. 
To meet that hawk's eye and to flinch

Not a the eye but at the joy of it. 
I play. But this is what I think.

XXV

He held the world upon his nose 
And this-a-way he gave a fling.

His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi-- 
And that-a-way he twirled the thing.

Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats 
Moved in the grass without a sound.

They did not know the grass went round. 
The cats had cats and the grass turned gray

And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way: 
The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

And the nose is eternal, that-a-way. 
Things as they were, things as they are,

Things as they will be by and by... 
A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.

XXVI

The world washed in his imagination, 
The world was a shore, whether sound or form

Or light, the relic of farewells, 
Rock, of valedictory echoings,

To which his imagination returned, 
From which it sped, a bar in space,

Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought 
Against the murderous alphabet:

The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams 
Of inaccessible Utopia.

A mountainous music always seemed 
To be falling and to be passing away.

XXVII

It is the sea that whitens the roof. 
The sea drifts through the winter air.

It is the sea that the north wind makes. 
The sea is in the falling snow.

This gloom is the darkness of the sea. 
Geographers and philosophers,

Regard. But for that salty cup, 
But for the icicles on the eaves--

The sea is a form of ridicule. 
The iceberg settings satirize

The demon that cannot be himself, 
That tours to shift the shifting scene.

XXVIII

I am a native in this world 
And think in it as a native thinks,

Gesu, not native of a mind 
Thinking the thoughts I call my own,

Native, a native in the world 
And like a native think in it.

It could not be a mind, the wave 
In which the watery grasses flow

And yet are fixed as a photograph, 
The wind in which the dead leaves blow.

Here I inhale profounder strength 
And as I am, I speak and move

And things are as I think they are 
And say they are on the blue guitar.

XXIX

In the cathedral, I sat there, and read, 
Alone, a lean Review and said,

"These degustations in the vaults 
Oppose the past and the festival.

What is beyond the cathedral, outside, 
Balances with nuptial song.

So it is to sit and to balance things 
To and to and to the point of still,

To say of one mask it is like, 
To say of another it is like,

To know that the balance does not quite rest, 
That the mask is strange, however like."

The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false. 
The bells are the bellowing of bulls.

Yet Franciscan don was never more 
Himself than in this fertile glass.

XXX

From this I shall evolve a man. 
This is his essence: the old fantoche

Hanging his shawl upon the wind, 
Like something on the stage, puffed out,

His strutting studied through centuries. 
At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole 
Supporting heavy cables, slung

Through Oxidia, banal suburb, 
One-half of all its installments paid.

Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing 
From crusty stacks above machines.

Ecce, Oxidia is the seed 
Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

Oxidia is the soot of fire, 
Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI

How long and late the pheasant sleeps... 
The employer and employee contend,

Combat, compose their droll affair. 
The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek. 
The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek 
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind, 
In the museum of the sky. The cock

Will claw sleep. Mourning is not sun, 
It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched 
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none, 
The rhapsody of things as they are.

XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions, 
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that, 
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know 
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations? 
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take 
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself. 
The blue guitar surprises you.

XXXIII

That generation's dream, availed 
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

That's it, the only dream they knew, 
Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams. 
Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread 
Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night. 
We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play 
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.




~ Wallace Stevens
(The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens)




Wednesday, June 16, 2010

What Is There Beyond Knowing?




.
.
What is there beyond knowing that keeps
calling to me? I can't
.
turn in any direction
but it's there. I don't mean
.
the leaves' grip and shine or even the thrush's
silk song, but the far-off
.
fires, for example,
of the stars, heaven's slowly turning
.
theater of light, or the wind
playful with its breath;
.
or time that's always rushing forward,
or standing still
.
in the same -- what shall I say --
moment.
.
What I know
I could put into a pack
.
as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
on one shoulder,
.
important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained
.
and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly
.
to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.
.
But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing
.
in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.
.
If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet.
I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass
and the weeds.
.
~ Mary Oliver
(New and Selected Poems Volume Two)
.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

EAST COKER (No. 2 of 'Four Quartets')






I

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is 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 earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across 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 heat
Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

In that open field
If 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 drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The 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 arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.



II

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped 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 hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But 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 hear
Of 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 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 facade 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 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 or 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.



~ T. S. Eliot



Monday, June 14, 2010

BURNT NORTON (No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')




I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.



II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.



III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.



IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.


V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.



T.S. Eliot

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Ernest-Hyde




.


My mind was a mirror:
It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew.
In youth my mind was just a mirror
In a rapidly flying car,
Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.
Then in time
Great scratches were made on the mirror,
Letting the outside world come in,
And letting my inner self look out.
For this is the birth of the soul in sorrow,
A birth with gains and losses.
The mind sees the world as a thing apart,
And the soul makes the world at one with itself.
A mirror scratched reflects no image —
And this is the silence of wisdom.



Edgar Lee Masters, (1868-1950)
(Spoon River Anthology)




Another Night in the Ruins




.
.
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
.
~ Galway Kinnell
(A New Selected Poems)
.

I Follow Barefoot




.
.
I long for You so much
I follow barefoot Your frozen tracks
.
That are high in the mountains
That I know are years old.
.
I long for You so much
I have even begun to travel
Where I have never been before.
.
Hafiz, there is no one in this world
Who is not looking for God.
.
Everyone is trudging along
With as much dignity, courage
And style
.
As they possibly
Can.
.
~ Hafiz
(The Subject Tonight Is Love, version by Daniel Ladinsky)
..

Forest Lake


.
.
I was alone on a sunny shore
by the forest's pale blue lake,
in the sky floated a single cloud
and on the water a single isle.
The ripe sweetness of summer dripped
in beads from every tree
and straight into my opened heart
a tiny drop ran down.
.
~ Edith Sodergran
(translated by: Stina Katchadourian)
.

On foot


.

On foot
I had to walk through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air, 
to other reckless hearts.


~ Edith Sodergran, (1892-1923)
(translated by: Stina Katchadourian)

The Rose


.
.
The treasure at the heart of the rose
is your own heart's treasure.
Scatter it as the rose does:
your pain becomes hers to measure.
.
Scatter it in a song,
or in one great love's desire.
Do not resist the rose
lest you burn in its fire.
.
~ Gabriela Mistral
(translated by: Langston Hughes)
.
art by Betty Jansma
.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

What the Heart Wants






See then
what the heart wants,
that pliable iron
sprung to the poppy's redness,
the honey's gold, winged
as the heron-lit water is:
by reflecting.
As an aged elephant answers
the slightest, first gesture of hand,
it puts itself at the mercy --
utterly docile, the forces
that brought it there vanished,
fold into fold.
And the old-ice ivory, the unstartlable
black of the eye that has traveled so far
with the fringed, peripheral howdah
swaying behind, look mildly back
as it swings the whole bulk of the body
close to the ground. Over and over
it does this, bends to what asks.
Whatever asks, heart kneels and offers to bear.



~ Jane Hirshfield
(The October Palace)