The sluggish python lies;
The peacocks walk, stately and slow,
And they look at us with the eyes
Of men whom we knew long ago.
On a Portrait
Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown
To us of restless brain and weary feet,
Forever hurrying, up and down the street,
She stands at evening in the room alone.
Not like a tranquil goddess carved of stone
But evanescent, as if one should meet
A pensive lamia in some wood-retreat,
An immaterial fancy of one’s own.
No meditations glad or ominous
Disturb her lips, or move the slender hands;
Her dark eyes keep their secrets hid from us,
Beyond the circle of our thought she stands.
The parrot on his bar, a silent spy,
Regards her with a patient curious eye.
Song
The moonflower opens to the moth,
The mist crawls in from sea;
A great white bird, a snowy owl,
Slips from the alder tree.
Whiter the flowers, Love, you hold,
Than the white mist on the sea;
Have you no brighter tropic flowers
With scarlet life, for me?
Nocturne
Romeo, grand sérieux, to importune
Guitar and hat in hand, beside the gate
With Juliet, in the usual debate
Of love, beneath a bored but courteous moon;
The conversation failing, strikes some tune
Banal, and out of pity for their fate
Behind the wall I have some servant wait,
Stab, and the lady sinks into a swoon.
Blood looks effective on the moonlit ground —
The hero smiles; in my best mode oblique
Rolls toward the moon a frenzied eye profound,
(No need of ‘Love forever?’ — ‘Love next week?’)
While female readers all in tears are drowned: —
‘The perfect climax all true lovers seek!’
Humouresque
(AFTER J. LAFORGUE)
One of my marionettes is dead,
Though not yet tired of the game —
But weak in body as in head,
(A jumping-jack has such a frame).
But this deceasèd marionette
I rather liked: a common face,
(The kind of face that we forget)
Pinched in a comic, dull grimace;
Half bullying, half imploring air,
Mouth twisted to the latest tune;
His who-the-devil-are-you stare;
Translated, maybe, to the moon.
With Limbo’s other useless things
Haranguing spectres, set him there;
‘The snappiest fashion since last spring’s,
‘The newest style, on Earth, I swear.
‘Why don’t you people get some class?
(Feebly contemptuous of nose),
‘Your damned thin moonlight, worse than gas —
‘Now in New York’ — and so it goes.
Logic a marionette’s, all wrong
Of premises; yet in some star
A hero! — Where would he belong?
But, even at that, what mask bizarre!
Spleen
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
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
&n
bsp; 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
correspondence
THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT
Volume 1 – 1898–1922
Edited by Valerie Eliot
plays
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
THE FAMILY REUNION
THE COCKTAIL PARTY
THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK
THE ELDER STATESMAN
literary 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
social criticism
THE IDEA OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
Edited by David Edwards
NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE
for students
A CONCORDANCE TO THE COMPLETE
POEMS AND PLAYS OF T. S. ELIOT
Edited by John Dawson, Peter Holland and David McKitterick
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE SELECTED POEMS
OF T. S. ELIOT
By B. C. Southam
Copyright
First published in 1969
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition published in 2011
All rights reserved
© This edition Valerie Eliot, 1969
The right of T. S. Eliot to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26233–5