07 April 2006

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark...

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

T. S. Elliot
Here's to a weekend alongside the river god...

5 comments:

jules said...

enjoy the weekend. i hope it's food for the mind and soul.

thanks for sharing t.s. with me!

Eva said...

today i enjoyed you speaking eliot in my dreams. i hope your weekend with him is smashing!

Sarah Sharp said...

Ooh! Ooh! I just can't wait for my poetry weekend!

chris said...

so jealous

Anonymous said...

My favorite lines are at the very end of that poem. I memorized it for class last semester. It's incredible.


Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.