Thomas Stearns Eliot (T. S.) (1888 – 1965)
American-born English poet, dramatist and literary critic.
Your burden is not to clear your conscience
But to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: —
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless
Joined with the artist's eye, new life, new form, new colour.
Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.
We did not wish anything to happen.
We understood the private catastrophe,
The personal loss, the general misery,
Living and partly living;
It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.
Resign yourself to be the fool you are.
O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.
And I have known the arms already, known them all —
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.
One thing you cannot know:
The sudden extinction of every alternative,
The unexpected crash of the iron cataract.
You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
You only know what it is not to hope:
You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you,
Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless
Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
There are several symptoms
Which must occur together, and to a marked degree,
To qualify a patient for my sanatorium:
And one of them is an honest mind. That is one of the causes of their suffering.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.
Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.
I'd say that she suffered all that we should suffer
In fear and pain and loathing — all these together —
And reluctance of the body to become a thing.
I'd say she suffered more, because more conscious
Than the rest of us.
And we all say: OH!
Well I never!
Was there ever
A Cat so clever
As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!
This is what matters, but it is unspeakable.
Untranslatable: I talk in general terms
Because the particular has no language.
The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.
He is every bit as sane as you or I,
He sees the world as clearly as you or I see it,
It is only that he has seen a great deal more than that.