Where all shall be well.
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— 40
[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, 50
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? 60
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?
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— 40
[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, 50
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? 60
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?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Go.
34 comments:
Holy shit!
I'm out in the back yard looking over the grill when I hear a sudden hum which was getting louder and louder. A low flying plane I thought. But no, it sounds like bees. Angry bees.
I look back towards the yard and about ten feet away a gigantic swarm of bees is lifting off from a bush and circling around and above said bush and getting still louder.
I said gigantic. The swarm, when they had all left the bush, was maybe twenty feet high and ten feet across and quite dense.
I ran into the house. The dog had gone outside with me and had oddly gone back into the house through the open door before I heard the bees. He heard them first.
They are now circling above the house. Buzzing. I am armed with a broom and a blanket in case they find a way in.
Never seen anything like that before. Scared the shit out of my normally manly self.
If I don't make it, been nice knowing you guys.
A very different Eliot, 25 or so years later, talking about the Pentecost in "Little Gidding":
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Are you there Rabel?
Can you block the chimney flu, Rabel?
Earthquakes, floods, bees.
End times.
Like most brilliant types Eliot was a stupid man;
Moped away most of his life blind to the great I AM.
They seem to be gone now. Except for a few dozen stragglers around the original bush.
I'm going to assume that they didn't go into the attic. Really, they are not in the attic. Or hiding on the other side of the house where I dare not venture. Really, they're gone. I know it.
And I'm starting to itch. Something psychosomatic?
I'll light the gas in the fireplace.
Gas. Fireplace. Good.
(Gas logs in what -- a vented fireplace?)
I would think you would have heard them go into the attic.
Watch the dog, he'll know.
Take a Tylenol®. Placebo effect. A benadryl might put you to sleep and then, if the bees came back ...
(Sounds like a song?)
ricpic:
"Like most brilliant types Eliot was a stupid man;
Moped away most of his life blind to the great I AM."
IIRC he converted to Catholicism and was an anti-Semite. But if we hold foibles against great artists, we'll not have much great art.
Lydia, I love Little Gidding a lot more than Prufrock. After time, Prufrock can come across as sophomoric and melodratic, but Little Gidding has intricate staying power.
Are you anaphylactic, Rabel?
No logs. Just a gas feed in the bottom of the fireplace.
The fireplace is the nicest thing about this house. It's big and building a blazing fire in your living room is pretty cool when you think about it.
I've run into yellowjacket swarms before. Nothing like this though.
Honeybees. Sweet, cute, innocent honeybees. They wanted to kill me. I could tell.
Not that I know, Chick.
My apologies to Deb for the threadjack.
Not at all, Rabel! I don't hold with strict on topic discussion...that's no fun. Glad you and your dog are okay.
You reminded me of the hilarious scene from The Great Outdoors with Candy and Akroyd where a bat got in the cabin.
Was the swarm just hanging in the air? This happened to a friend of mine on her property. Freaked her out.
More like circling than hanging.
Quoth the Rabel, Nevermore!
Above the buzz, buzzing, buzzing, of the swarm encircling the house and door, the tap, tap, tapping of a broom armed Rabel could be heard, signaling satellites circling overhead and sending the largest net in the world into vibration with a different buzz.
Good story, Rabel. Better than betamax and the birds combined, with a good outcome.
I absolutely love a really succulent peach.
Chip S. said...
I absolutely love a really succulent peach.
La pesca, la pace, la Pasqua...'tis the season.
Don't forget the fishes...
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
"I absolutely love a really succulent peach."
This is worse than herding cats.
The directive this time around was "Go." without so much as an exclamation point!
At least the peach and mermaid crowd went.
The bee thing sounds like a normal honey bee hiving swarm. Unless you have Africanized bees in your area, you were in no danger. The swarm consisted of the old queen and about half of a current colony, which is located somewhere nearby. If you had the proper equipment, you could have shaken the center of the ball of bees containing the queen, into a hive super and started your own honey making hobby.
Ugh, so sing-song. Reads like doggerel. And this:
"I know the voices dying with a dying fall"
We talk about Eliot being a phrase-maker, but that's just bad.
Lydia, I love Little Gidding a lot more than Prufrock. After time, Prufrock can come across as sophomoric and melodratic, but Little Gidding has intricate staying power.
Damn, I've never read this poem. It reads nothing like the Eliot I'm familiar with, it's well-formed, serious, and breathes like a hymn:
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
I like it! And *that* is where that business about knowing the place for the first time is from! Are the rest of the Four Quartets comparable?
"East Coker":
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
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.
Older Eliot is almost Buddhist in his rhythms. But notice how he puts himself in the etherized state, not surgeon but patient. Thus, the empathic distinction.
Mitch, I think I mentioned before that dying fall is borrowed from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night:
"That strain again, it had a dying fall"
I honestly don't see the problem with the line, as he seems to be alluding to over-hearing couples in other rooms in his lodgings, I think probably, making love. This man is seriously lonely and in need of sex.
As to the three other quartets, I've only glanced at them and not given them half a chance, but they didn't seem as good as Gidding. I should give them a serious look.
Mitch, I've read this part to be an allusion to a return to Eden:
"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)"
Yes, it's a reference to Eden, but also, apparently, a call-back to "Burn Norton", which was set in the garden of the English manor of that name, and is littered with Edenic references in between meditations on time and mindfulness striking enough to cause at least one western Buddhist to try and recruit Eliot posthumously. I think I like "The Dry Salvages" least of the four, but there are very fine elements to "East Coker" and "Burnt Norton".
Interesting. I look forward to giving them a closer look.
What I appreciate most about poetry is the invitation it presents, to myself and others, to see and think differently.
Karen Armstrong began and ended her book, The Spiral Staircase, My Climb Out of Darkness recounting the way Eliot's Ash-Wednesday reflected her experience of climb.
"In Eliot's Ash-Wednesday, we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase. This image is reflected in the twisting sentences of the verse, which often revolves upon itself, repeating the same words and phrases, apparently making little headway, but pushing steadily forward nevertheless. My own life has progressed in the same way. For years it seemed a hard Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter. I toiled round and round in pointless circles, covering the same ground, repeating the same mistakes, quite unable to see where I was going. Yet all the time without realizing it, I was slowly climbing out of the darkness.
However seriously lonely or in need of sex either author may have been, their published words offered affirmation, voice and vision to another, and that is no small thing.
In Eliot's Ash-Wednesday, we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase.
Helices descend and ascend -- as does our DNA.
It bothers me in a stupid way that spiral and helix are conflated because for me a spiral is two dimensional (spirograph!) while a helix is 3D.
In poetry, I associate a spiral with a gyre: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
Dante wrote about helices, but I've never read Dante except in abridged form.
BTW, who invented poetry? Did Scripture rhyme in the original?
There is a fair amount of "rhyming" in chemistry: link
Would that be an helictical staircase then?
(The chemistry rhyming link goes to an empty page)
As for who invented poetry, my guess would be parents and children engaging in the back and forth that constitutes the serious yet playful business of learning to communicate with language.
Would that be an helictical staircase then?
Etymology suggests that an helix is derivative or equivalent to a spire, so spiral staircase it is. Yet I maintain that one rises and one spreads.
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