Public-domain ebook
Ara vus prec
by T. S. Eliot
Language: en413 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Poetry·Classics of Literature·British Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #72472.
The opening · free to read
Here I am, an old man in a dry month Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man, A dull head among windy spaces.
Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign.” The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room; By Hakagama, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles; Fraülein von Kulp Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues; deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted, And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What’s not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands what’s thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last We have not reached conclusion, when I Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation Of the backward devils. I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. I have lost my passion: why should I want to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated? I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact?
These with a thousand small deliberations Protract the profit of their chilled delirium, Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, With pungent sauces, multiply variety In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do, Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs Cammell, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits Of Belle Isle, or running by the Horn, White feathers in the snow, the gulf claims And an old man, driven on the Trades To a sleepy corner. Tenants of the house, Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
BURBANK WITH A BAEDEKER: BLEISTEIN WITH A CIGAR.
Tra la la la la la laire—nil nisi divinum stabile est; cætera fumus—the gondola stopped the old palace was there How charming it’s grey & pink—Goats & monkeys, with such hair too!—so the Countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, & so departed.
Burbank crossed a little bridge Descending at a small hotel; Princess Volupine arrived, They were together, and he fell.
Defunctive music under sea Passed seaward with the passing bell Slowly: the god Hercules Had left him, that had loved him well.
The horses, under the axletree Beat up the dawn from Istria With even feet. Her shuttered barge Burned on the water all the day.
But this or such was Bleistein’s way: A saggy bending of the knees And elbows, with the palms turned out, Chicago Semite Viennese.
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot. Money in furs. The boatman smiles,
Princess Volupine extends A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights, She entertains Sir Ferdinand
Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings And flea’d his rump and pared his claws? —Thought Burbank, meditating on Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.
Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees Letting his arms hang down to laugh, The zebra stripes along his jaw Swelling to maculate giraffe.
The circles of the stormy moon Slide westward to the River Plate, Death and the Raven drift above And Sweeney guards the horned gate.
Gloomy Orion and the Dog Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas; The person in the Spanish cape Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees
Slips and pulls the table cloth Overturns a coffee cup, Reorganised upon the floor She yawns and draws a stocking up;
The silent man in mocha brown Sprawls at the window sill and gapes; The waiter brings in oranges, Bananas, figs and hot-house grapes;
The silent vertebrate exhales, Contracts and concentrates, withdraws; Rachel née Rabinovitch Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;
She and the lady in the cape Are suspect, thought to be in league; Therefore the man with heavy eyes Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,
Leaves the room and reappears Outside the window, leaning in, Branches of wistaria Circumscribe a golden grin;
The host with someone indistinct Converses at the door apart, The nightingales are singing near The convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
Sweeney Erect
And the trees about me Let them be dry & leafless; let the rocks Groan with continual surges; & behind me Make all a desolation. Look, Look, wenches!
Paint me a cavernous waste shore Cast in the unstilled Cyclades, Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.
Display me Æolus above Reviewing the insurgent gales Which tangle Ariadne’s hair And swell with haste the perjured sails.
Morning stirs the feet and hands (Nausicaa and Polypheme); Gesture of orang-outang Rises from the sheets in steam.
This withered root of knots of hair Slitted below and gashed with eyes, This oval O cropped out with teeth; The sickle motion from the thighs
Jackknifes upward at the knees Then straightens down from heel to hip Pushing the framework of the bed And clawing at the pillow slip.
Sweeney addressed full-length to shave Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base, Knows the female temperament And wipes the suds around his face.
(The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, says Emerson, Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
Tests the razor on his leg Waiting until the shriek subsides; The epileptic on the bed Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
The ladies of the corridor Find themselves involved, disgraced; Call witness to their principles Deprecate the lack of taste
Observing that hysteria Might easily be misunderstood; Mrs. Turner intimates It does the house no sort of good.
But Doris towelled from the bath Enters padding on broad feet, Bringing sal volatile And a glass of brandy neat.
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