Another Commonplace Book

Posts tagged Time's Covenant

“It is not to ring the bell backward

Nor is it an incantation

To summon the spectre of a Rose.

We cannot revive old factions

We cannot restore old policies

Or follow an antique drum.

                *****

We have taken from the defeated 

What they had to leave us - a symbol:

A symbol perfected in death.

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

By the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseeching.”

T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding.”

He is riffing off of Julian of Norwich, who you really should read, because she is glorious.

All manner of thing shall be well.

“Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move along the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor 

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their patterns as before

But reconciled among the stars.”

T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”

So many ways to count time.

“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, remembered 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)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.”

T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”

All manner of thing shall be well.

“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.”

T.S. Eliot, from “East Coker”

This is what I want: a world become stranger, a lifetime burning in every moment, here and now ceasing to matter.

“The silent sister veiled in white and blue

Between the yews, behind the garden god, 

Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and sighed but

      spoke no word.

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down

Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile”

T.S. Eliot, from Part IV of Ash-Wednesday

I feel like I am being haunted by Eliot. 

“The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre - 

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.”

T. S. Eliot, section IV of “Little Gidding”

This is my favorite of Eliot’s poems, not just because of the parts that he borrows from fourteenth century mystic and holy woman, Julian of Norwich. 

An earlier line in this poem supplied the working title for my current work in progress, one draft of which was finished this morning.

“Margaret, are you grieving 

Over Goldengrove unleaving? 

Leaves, like the things of man, you 

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? 

Ah! as the heart grows older 

It will come to such sights colder 

By and by, nor spare a sigh 

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; 

And yet you will weep and know why. “

Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”

One of my favorite poems, and constantly in my head at this time of year.

If you prefer your poetry sung, Natalie Merchant recorded an absolutely haunting version, that you can listen to here.

“Out then spak the Queen o Fairies,

Out of a bush o broom,

“Them that has gotten young Tam Lin

Has gotten a stately groom.”

Out than spak the Queen o Fairies,

And an angry woman was she:

“Shame betide her ill-far’d face,

And an ill death may she die,

For she’s taen awa the bonniest knight

In a’ my companie.

“But had I kend, Tam Lin,” she says,

“What now this night I see

I wad hae taen out thy twa grey een,

And put in twa een o tree.”“

Tam Lin, Child 39-A

And pleasant is the Faerie land, but at the end of seven years, they pay the tiend to Hell. 

If you have not yet, please drop everything that you are doing and read Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. 

“I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

T.S. Eliot, the closing stanzas of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

I get chills every time I read that final line.