Time poems
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Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
(The Dry Salvagespresumably les trois sauvagesis a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
Groaner: a whistling buoy.)
Mungojerrie And Rumpelteazer
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Then the family would say: "It's that horrible cat!
It was Mungojerrie--or Rumpelteazer!"-- And most of the time
they left it at that.
Old Deuteronomy
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Old Deuteronomy lies on the floor
Of the Fox and French Horn for his afternoon sleep;
And when the men say: "There's just time for one more,"
Then the landlady from her back parlour will peep
And say: "New then, out you go, by the back door,
For Old Deuteronomy mustn't be woken--
The Ad-Dressing Of Cats
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
You've read of several kinds of Cat,
And my opinion now is that
You should need no interpreter
To understand their character.
Four Quartets 2: East Coker
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
Gus: The Theatre Cat
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss
To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.
Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
His visits are occasional to the Senior Educational
And it is against the rules
For any one Cat to belong both to that
And the Joint Superior Schools.
The Hippopotamus
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
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.
Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
IMidwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
Ash Wednesday
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.
Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Macavity: The Mystery Cat
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw--
For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime--Macavity's not there!
Journey Of The Magi
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The Garden Shukkei-en
© Carolyn Forche
It is the river she most
remembers, the living
and the dead both crying for help.
Poem For Maya
© Carolyn Forche
Dipping our bread in oil tins
we talked of morning peeling
open our rooms to a moment
of almonds, olives and wind
The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: XXIII
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Call to me to the one among your moments
that stands against you, ineluctably:
intimate as a dog's imploring glance
but, again, forever, turned away
The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: VI
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Rose, you majesty-once, to the ancients, you were
just a calyx with the simplest of rims.
But for us, you are the full, the numberless flower,
the inexhaustible countenance.
What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space
© Rainer Maria Rilke
What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,
in which you see all Forms intensified.
(In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself,
would disappear into that vastness.)
Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Yet the dead youth must go on alone.
In silence the elder Lament brings him
as far as the gorge where it shimmers in the moonlight:
The Foutainhead of Joy. With reverance she names it,
saying: "In the world of mankind it is a life-bearing stream."
The Voices
© Rainer Maria Rilke
The rich and fortunate do well to keep silent,
for no one cares to know who and what they are.
But those in need must reveal themselves,
must say: I am blind,
