Ara Vus Prec

by
T. S. Eliot

THE OVID PRESS

Or puoi, la quantitate

Comprender dell’ amor ch’a te mi scalda,

Quando dismento nostra vanitate

Trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.

CONTENTS

THIS IS NO.

GERONTION

Thou hast nor youth nor age

But as it were, an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both.

ere 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.

urbank 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.

SWEENEY AMONG THE
NIGHTINGALES

ὤμοι, πέπληγμαι καιρίαν πγελὴν ἔσω

WHY SHOULD I SPEAK OF THE NIGHTINGALE?

THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS OF ADULTEROUS WRONG.

peneck 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!

aint 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.

MR. ELIOT’S SUNDAY
MORNING SERVICE

“Look, look master, here comes two of the religious caterpillars”.

JEW OF MALTA

olyphiloprogenitive

The sapient sutlers of the Lord

Drift across the window-panes.

In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word,

Superfetation of το εν

And at the mensual turn of time

Produced enervate Origen.

A painter of the Umbrian school

Designed upon a gesso ground

The nimbus of the Baptised God.

The wilderness is cracked and browned

But through the water pale and thin

Still shine the unoffending feet

And there above the painter set

The father and the Paraclete.

The sable presbyters approach

The avenue of penitence;

The young are red and pustular

Clutching piaculative pence,

Under the penitential gates

Sustained by staring Seraphim

Where the souls of the devout

Burn invisible and dim.

Along the garden-wall the bees

With hairy bellies pass between

The staminate and pistilate:

Blest office of the epicene.

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham

Stirring the water in his bath.

The masters of the subtle schools

Are controversial, polymath.

WHISPERS OF IMMORTALITY

ebster was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breastless creatures under ground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls

Stared from the sockets of the eyes!

He knew that thought clings round dead limbs

Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Donne, I suppose, was such another

Who found no substitute for sense

To seize and clutch and penetrate,

Expert beyond experience

He knew the anguish of the marrow

The ague of the skeleton;

No contact possible to flesh

Allayed the fever of the bone.

Grishkin is nice; her Russian eye

Is underlined for emphasis;

Uncorseted, her friendly bust

Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

The couched Brazilian jaguar

Compels the scampering marmoset

With subtle effluence of cat;

Grishkin has a maisonette:

The sleek and sinuous jaguar

Does not in his arboreal gloom

Distil so rank a feline smell

As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

And even abstracter entities

Circumambulate her charm;

But our lot crawls between dry ribs

To keep its metaphysics warm.

THE HIPPOPOTAMUS

Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut mandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut Jesum Christum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros autem, ut concilium Dei et Conjunctionem Apostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos sic habeo.

S. Ignatii Ad Trallianos.

And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans.

he broad backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly on the mud;