T.S Eliot Quote

[Virgil]

Janine has crashed computer; thought she just acquired a new one...like two months ago. The Four Quartets could be done...crazy time of year, though.

Yeah, you think either before or after the holidays would be best? No I don't believe Janine got a new computer. She's told me fpr the longest time she had an old one.

[quasimodo1]

Selective memory. For some reason when Wallace Stevens and Eliot are up, I think of Ezra Pound. In the same package somehow.

[stlukesguild]

We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

A mantra repeated in numerous form:

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...

...Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

From Burnt Norton

In my beginning is my end...

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark...

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—

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...

from East Coker

[quasimodo1]

In Tempore Senectutis by Ezra Pound
When I am old
I will not have you look apart
From me, into the cold,
Friend of my heart,
Nor be sad in your remembrance
Of the careless, mad-heart semblance
That the wind hath blown away
When I am old.

When I am old
And the white hot wonder-fire
Unto the world seem cold,
My soul's desire
Know you then that all life's shower,
The rain of the years, that hour
Shall make blow for us one flower,
Including all, when we are old.

When I am old
If you remember
Any love save what is then
Hearth light unto life's December
Be your joy of past sweet chalices
To know then naught but this
"How many wonders are less sweet
Than love I bear to thee
When I am old."
-----------------------------------East Coker, that one got by me. The old arguments in History or Philosophy class...history as the pendulum, the circle, the straight line etc. I'm going with elipse. And Virgil, anything need be done to get Janine back on?

[stlukesguild]

Stevens is equal or better, if its not apples, oranges. He has the same kind of intensity and range. Wish I could remember more of him; is he more complex? Linguistically?

More complex? Different. Eliot... in a manner... may be the more "conservative", building upon the diction of the great poetic language he so admires: Dante, the Bible, Shakespeare, and certainly Whitman... in spite of his denial. Stevens in many ways is the more "abstract"... "hermetic"... perhaps even the more difficult. I remember being somewhat surprised that Harold Bloom suggested that he initially had his doubts about what he first read as Steven's intentional obscurity... abstraction... as mere ornate artfulness (this from a critic who'd been reading Hart Crane at an age when I was struggling with Tolkein!). I was certainly somewhat put off... or rather uncomprehending upon my first exposure to Stevens... while Eliot... for all the apparent "difficulties" immediately seduced me intellectually.

[stlukesguild]

Sailing to Byzantium

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

William Butler Yeats

(As the circle around Eliot grows ever wider...)

[quasimodo1]

There is great difficulty for me to hear any literary person, of whatever skill, talking about intentional obscurity and poetry in the same sentence. I do remember William Matthews describing how he got his job at university as an ability to write "fluent fog", but he was speaking of a genre he grew out of. Poetry by nature is not declaritive writing and its the type of fog or allusion or reference that makes it great. Poets need not follow the rules of the novel; hence its attractiveness...at least to me. And I never went to the mat with Tolkein. One sample was enough. Movie at 11.

[stlukesguild]

Perchance the difficulty of poetry for many...lies in the fact that it cannot be easily reduced to a mere "meaning"... that those simple means of analysis taught in school: character development, theme, narrative, moral, etc... are not often enough to grasp its worth... beauty... that the mere music of the words and the form they take can make all the difference in the world...

[quasimodo1]

The circle does grow wider. Of all poets, I'm drawing close to a blank on who influenced Eliot. He did his doctoral on F.H.Bradley who had scientific leanings. What that means for that era, something like old school epistemology. We had that at CU. Useless. Any thoughts on Bradley?

[quasimodo1]

.....His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
{last lines of Preludes} These lines could easily be added to "The Wasteland".

[stlukesguild]

Of all poets, I'm drawing close to a blank on who influenced Eliot.

Certainly Whitman... especially the Whitman of When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.

[quasimodo1]

Whitman was a Camden resident and a nurse in the Civil War. Do you have any concept as to how he influenced him. Stylisticly I guess but content? This needs another look.

[quasimodo1]

Stlukesguild: Since I have a meeting in the Am, let us continue tomorrow eve. This is a delight. Great fun.

[stlukesguild]

Yes... Virgil's checked out already... and I would love to go to the studio tomorrow... the first time in 3 days.

[quasimodo1]

.....The hippopotamus's day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way -
The church can sleep and feed at once

I saw the 'potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all martyr'd virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in old miasmal mist.

-- T. S. Eliot {last stanzas of "Hippopotamus"}