Of a lost fire dying in the desert, dim coals of a sandpit the Bedouins

Wandered from at dawn. . . . Ah singing prayer to what gulfs tempted

Suddenly are you more lost? To us the near-hand mountain

Be a measure of height, the tide-worn cliff at the sea-gate a measure of continuance.

The tide, moving the night's
Vastness with lonely voices,
Turns, the deep dark-shining
Pacific leans on the land,
Feeling his cold strength

To the outmost margins: you Night will resume
The stars in your time.

O passionately at peace when will that tide draw shoreward?

Truly the spouting fountains of light, Antares, Arcturus, Tire of their flow, they sing one song but they think

silence.

The striding winter giant Orion shines, and dreams darkness.

And life, the flicker of men and moths and wolf on the hill,

Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding, passionately

Remaking itself upon its mates, remembers deep inward The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the

egg,

The primal and the latter silences: dear Night it is memory

Prophesies, prophecy that remembers, the charm of the dark.

And I and my people, we are willing to love the four

score years

Heartily; but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is for harbor.

Have men's minds changed,

Or the rock hidden in the deep of the waters of the soul Broken the surface? A few centuries

Gone by, was none dared not to people

The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations.

But now, dear is the truth. Life is grown sweeter and lonelier,

And death is no evil.

CONTINENT'S END

Ar the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring, The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me

Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and doubled stretch of water.

I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral sowings that flower the south,

Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours that has followed the evening star.

The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother.

You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun's eye on the tideline.

It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains

Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone.

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me

Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

That watched you fill

your beds out of the condensation of thin vapor and watched you change them, That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat rock, shift places with the continents.

Mother, though my song's measure is like your surfbeat's ancient rhythm I never learned it of you. Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

Thomas Stearns Eliot

1888

THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question.
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

In the room the women come and
Talking of Michelangelo.

go

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window.

panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window

panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

Το prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for and time for me,
you

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair

(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!") My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin

(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!”). Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

1 should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep... tired . . . or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,