Complete Poems and Plays (105 page)

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Authors: T. S. Eliot

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Spleen
 
 

Sunday: this satisfied procession

Of definite Sunday faces;

Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces

In repetition that displaces

Your mental self-possession

By this unwarranted digression.

 

Evening, lights, and tea!

Children and cats in the alley;

Dejection unable to rally

Against this dull conspiracy.

 

And Life, a little bald and gray,

Languid, fastidious, and bland,

Waits, hat and gloves in hand‚

Punctilious of tie and suit

(Somewhat impatient of delay)

On the doorstep of the Absolute.

 
Ode
 

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

 
For the hour that is left us, Fair Harvard, with thee,
    Ere we face the importunate years,
In thy shadow we wait, while thy presence dispels
    Our vain hesitations and fears.
And we turn as thy sons ever turn, in the strength
    Of the hopes that thy blessings bestow,
From the hopes and ambitions that sprang at thy feet
    To the thoughts of the past as we go.
 
Yet for all of these years that to-morrow has lost
    We are still the less able to grieve,
With so much that of Harvard we carry away
    In the place of the life that we leave.
And only the years that efface and destroy
    Give us also the vision to see
What we owe for the future, the present, and past,
    Fair Harvard, to thine and to thee.
 
The Death of Saint Narcissus
 
 

Come under the shadow of this gray rock —

Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or

Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock:

I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs

And the gray shadow on his lips.

 

He walked once between the sea and the high cliffs

When the wind made him aware of his limbs smoothly passing each other

And of his arms crossed over his breast.

When he walked over the meadows

He was stifled and soothed by his own rhythm.

By the river

His eyes were aware of the pointed corners of his eyes

And his hands aware of the pointed tips of his fingers.

 

Struck down by such knowledge

He could not live men’s ways, but became a dancer before God

If he walked in city streets

He seemed to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and knees.

So he came out under the rock.

 

First he was sure that he had been a tree,

Twisting its branches among each other

And tangling its roots among each other.

 

Then he knew that he had been a fish

With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers,

Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty

Caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty.

 

Then he had been a young girl

Caught in the woods by a drunken old man

Knowing at the end the taste of his own whiteness

The horror of his own smoothness,

And he felt drunken and old.

 

So he became a dancer to God.

Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows

He danced on the hot sand

Until the arrows came.

As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him.

Now he is green, dry and stained

With the shadow in his mouth.

 
INDEX OF FIRST LINES OF POEMS
 
 

‘A cold coming we had of it 
1

A man’s destination is his own village
1

Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown
1

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
1

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
1

April is the cruellest month, breeding
1

Around her fountain which flows
1

Because I do not hope to turn again
1

Burbank crossed a little bridge
1

Bustopher Jones is
not
skin and bones
1

Children’s voices in the orchard
1

Come under the shadow of this gray rock
1

En Amérique, professeur
1

Eyes that last I saw in tears
1

For the hour that is left us, Fair Harvard, with thee
1

Growltiger was a Bravo Cat, who travelled on a barge
1

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door
1

Here I am, an old man in a dry month
1

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
1

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots
1

I once was a Pirate what sailed the ’igh seas
1

If space and time, as sages say
1

If Time and Space, as Sages say
1

Ils ont vu les Pays-Bas, ils rentrent à Terre Haute
1

In England, long before that royal Mormon
1

In my beginning is my end. In succession
1

‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul’
1

Jellicle Cats are black and white
1

Le garçon délabré qui n’a rien à faire
1

Let these memorials of built stone — music’s
1

Let us go then, you and I
1

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
1

Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw
1

Malheur à la malheureuse Tamise 
1

Midwinter spring is its own season
1

Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt
1

Miss Nancy Ellicott
1

Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were a very notorious couple of cats
1

Not the expression of collective emotion
1

Old Deuteronomy’s lived a long time
1

One of my marionettes is dead
1

Paint me a cavernous waste shore
1

Pipit sate upright in her chair
1

Polyphiloprogenitive
1

Romeo,
grand
sérieux,
to importune
1

Standing upon the shore of all we know
1

Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels
1

Sunday: this satisfied procession
1

The broad-backed hippopotamus
1

The children who explored the brook and found
1

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven
1

The moonflower opens to the moth
1

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter
1

The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows
1

The readers of the
Boston
Evening
Transcript
1

The Rum Turn Tugger is a Curious Cat
1

The songsters of the air repair
1

The tiger in the tiger-pit
1

The wind sprang up at four o’clock
1

The winter evening settles down
1

There are several attitudes towards Christmas
1

There’s a whisper down the line at
1
.
2
3

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens
1

Time present and time past
1

To whom I owe the leaping delight
1

Twelve o’clock
1

We are the hollow men
1

Webster was much possessed by death
1

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
1

When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States
1

When we came home across the hill
1

While all the East was weaving red with gray
1

You ought to know Mr. Mistoffelees!
1

You’ve read of several kinds of Cat
1

About the Author
 
 

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He came to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.

Also by T. S. Eliot
 
 

 

 

COLLECTED POEMS
1909–1962

FOUR QUARTETS

THE WASTE LAND
and
OTHER POEMS

THE WASTE LAND

A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts

Edited by Valerie Eliot

SELECTED POEMS

INVENTIONS OF THE MARCH HARE

Poems 1909–1917

Edited by Christopher Ricks

OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS

 

 

c
orrespondence

THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT

Volume 1 – 1898–1922

Edited by Valerie Eliot

 

 

p
lays

MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

THE FAMILY REUNION

THE COCKTAIL PARTY

THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK

THE ELDER STATESMAN

 

 

l
iterary
criticism

SELECTED ESSAYS

THE USE OF POETRY
and
THE USE OF CRITICISM

THE VARIETIES OF METAPHYSICAL POETRY

Edited by Ronald Schuchard

TO CRITICIZE THE CRITIC

ON POETRY AND POETS

FOR LANCELOT ANDREWES

SELECTED PROSE OF T. S. ELIOT

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