(No. 2 of ‘Four Quartets’)<\/p>\n
I<\/b><\/p>\n
In my beginning is my end. In succession
\nHouses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
\nAre removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
\nIs an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
\nOld stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
\nOld fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
\nWhich is already flesh, fur and faeces,
\nBone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
\nHouses live and die: there is a time for building
\nAnd a time for living and for generation
\nAnd a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
\nAnd to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
\nAnd to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.<\/p>\n
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
\nAcross the open field, leaving the deep lane
\nShuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
\nWhere you lean against a bank while a van passes,
\nAnd the deep lane insists on the direction
\nInto the village, in the electric heat
\nHypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
\nIs absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
\nThe dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
\nWait for the early owl.<\/p>\n
In that open field
\nIf you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
\nOn a summer midnight, you can hear the music
\nOf the weak pipe and the little drum
\nAnd see them dancing around the bonfire
\nThe association of man and woman
\nIn daunsinge, signifying matrimonie\u2014
\nA dignified and commodiois sacrament.
\nTwo and two, necessarye coniunction,
\nHolding eche other by the hand or the arm
\nWhiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
\nLeaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
\nRustically solemn or in rustic laughter
\nLifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
\nEarth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
\nMirth of those long since under earth
\nNourishing the corn. Keeping time,
\nKeeping the rhythm in their dancing
\nAs in their living in the living seasons
\nThe time of the seasons and the constellations
\nThe time of milking and the time of harvest
\nThe time of the coupling of man and woman
\nAnd that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
\nEating and drinking. Dung and death.<\/p>\n
Dawn points, and another day
\nPrepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
\nWrinkles and slides. I am here
\nOr there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.<\/p>\n
II<\/b><\/p>\n
What is the late November doing
\nWith the disturbance of the spring
\nAnd creatures of the summer heat,
\nAnd snowdrops writhing under feet
\nAnd hollyhocks that aim too high
\nRed into grey and tumble down
\nLate roses filled with early snow?
\nThunder rolled by the rolling stars
\nSimulates triumphal cars
\nDeployed in constellated wars
\nScorpion fights against the Sun
\nUntil the Sun and Moon go down
\nComets weep and Leonids fly
\nHunt the heavens and the plains
\nWhirled in a vortex that shall bring
\nThe world to that destructive fire
\nWhich burns before the ice-cap reigns.<\/p>\n
That was a way of putting it\u2014not very satisfactory:
\nA periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
\nLeaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
\nWith words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
\nIt was not (to start again) what one had expected.
\nWhat was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
\nLong hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
\nAnd the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
\nOr deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
\nBequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
\nThe serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
\nThe wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
\nUseless in the darkness into which they peered
\nOr from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
\nAt best, only a limited value
\nIn the knowledge derived from experience.
\nThe knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
\nFor the pattern is new in every moment
\nAnd every moment is a new and shocking
\nValuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
\nOf that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
\nIn the middle, not only in the middle of the way
\nBut all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
\nOn the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
\nAnd menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
\nRisking enchantment. Do not let me hear
\nOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
\nTheir fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
\nOf belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
\nThe only wisdom we can hope to acquire
\nIs the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.<\/p>\n
The houses are all gone under the sea.<\/p>\n
The dancers are all gone under the hill.<\/p>\n
III<\/b><\/p>\n
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
\nThe vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
\nThe captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
\nThe generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
\nDistinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
\nIndustrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
\nAnd dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
\nAnd the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
\nAnd cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
\nAnd we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
\nNobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
\nI said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
\nWhich shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
\nThe lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
\nWith a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
\nAnd we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
\nAnd the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away\u2014
\nOr as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
\nAnd the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
\nAnd you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
\nLeaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
\nOr when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing\u2014
\nI said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
\nFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
\nFor love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
\nBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
\nWait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
\nSo the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
\nWhisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
\nThe wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
\nThe laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
\nNot lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
\nOf death and birth.<\/p>\n
You say I am repeating
\nSomething I have said before. I shall say it again.
\nShall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
\nTo arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
\nYou must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
\nIn order to arrive at what you do not know
\nYou must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
\nIn order to possess what you do not possess
\nYou must go by the way of dispossession.
\nIn order to arrive at what you are not
\nYou must go through the way in which you are not.
\nAnd what you do not know is the only thing you know
\nAnd what you own is what you do not own
\nAnd where you are is where you are not.<\/p>\n
IV<\/b><\/p>\n
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
\nThat questions the distempered part;
\nBeneath the bleeding hands we feel
\nThe sharp compassion of the healer’s art
\nResolving the enigma of the fever chart.<\/p>\n
Our only health is the disease
\nIf we obey the dying nurse
\nWhose constant care is not to please
\nBut to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
\nAnd that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.<\/p>\n
The whole earth is our hospital
\nEndowed by the ruined millionaire,
\nWherein, if we do well, we shall
\nDie of the absolute paternal care
\nThat will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.<\/p>\n
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
\nThe fever sings in mental wires.
\nIf to be warmed, then I must freeze
\nAnd quake in frigid purgatorial fires
\nOf which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.<\/p>\n
The dripping blood our only drink,
\nThe bloody flesh our only food:
\nIn spite of which we like to think
\nThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood\u2014
\nAgain, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.<\/p>\n
V<\/b><\/p>\n
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years\u2014
\nTwenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres<\/i>
\nTrying to use words, and every attempt
\nIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
\nBecause one has only learnt to get the better of words
\nFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
\nOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
\nIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
\nWith shabby equipment always deteriorating
\nIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
\nUndisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
\nBy strength and submission, has already been discovered
\nOnce or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
\nTo emulate\u2014but there is no competition\u2014
\nThere is only the fight to recover what has been lost
\nAnd found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
\nThat seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
\nFor us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.<\/p>\n
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
\nThe world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
\nOf dead and living. Not the intense moment
\nIsolated, with no before and after,
\nBut a lifetime burning in every moment
\nAnd not the lifetime of one man only
\nBut of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
\nThere is a time for the evening under starlight,
\nA time for the evening under lamplight
\n(The evening with the photograph album).
\nLove is most nearly itself
\nWhen here and now cease to matter.
\nOld men ought to be explorers
\nHere or there does not matter
\nWe must be still and still moving
\nInto another intensity
\nFor a further union, a deeper communion
\nThrough the dark cold and the empty desolation,
\nThe wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
\nOf the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.<\/p>\n