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The meaning of Prufrock

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Old man discussing the value of life and failing to grasp life's meaning. Women are his desire for love which is also a failure because he does not fully live, rather observes.

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Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised 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?" / Let us go and make our visit. / In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo

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Prufrock

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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

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Prufrock

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For I have known them all already, know them all: - / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

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Prufrock

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Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!] / Is it perfumed from a dress / That makes me so digress? / Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

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Prufrock

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

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Prufrock

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I am no prophet - and here's no great matter; / I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.

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Prufrock

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Would it have been worth while, / To have bitten off the matter with a smile, / To have squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question, / To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" - / If one, settling a pillow by her head, / Should say: "That is not what I mean at all. / That is not it, at all.

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Prufrock

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No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two

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Prufrock

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I grow old... I grow old... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. / Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.

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Prufrock

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Now that lilacs are in bloom / She has a bowl of lilacs in her room / And twists one in her fingers while she talks. / "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know / What life is, you who hold it in your hands"; / (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks) / "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, / And youth is cruel, and has no remorse, / And smiles at situations which it cannot see." / I smile, of course, / And go on drinking tea. / "Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall / My buried life, and Paris in the Spring, / I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world / To be wonderful and youthful, after all.

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Portrait of a Lady

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You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel. / You will gon on, and when you have prevailed / You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

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Portrait of a Lady

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And I must borrow every changing shape / To find expression... dance, dance / Like a dancing bear, / Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape. / Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance

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Portrait of a Lady

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Well! and what is she should die some afternoon, / Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose; / Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand/ With the smoke coming down about the housetops

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Portrait of a Lady

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Meaning of Portrait of a Lady

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Old, aristocratic, sour, lonely lady pretending that she is younger. She entertains the young men and tells them of their luck in their young life. The young men do not actually care for her, just visit her for their own entertainment. She is concerned with youth and beauty, talks down to the young.

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Meaning of Preludes

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Disembodied people, dirty and busy city, clock time, people are not fully conscious and aware of life.

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The morning comes to consciousness / Of faint stale smells of beer / From the sawdust-trampled street / With all its muddy feet that press / To early coffee-stands. / With the other masquerades / THat time resumes, / One thinks of all the hands / That are raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms.

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Preludes

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I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.

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Preludes

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Wipe your hand across youth mouth, and laugh; / The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

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Preludes

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Meaning of Rhapsody of a Windy Night

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Experiential/real time, abstract memories, "half-past one," analytical/synthetic - moon's light isn't its own because it is the sun's reflection off the moon.

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Twelve o'clock. / Along the reaches of the street / Held in a lunar synthesis, / Whispering lunar incantations / Dissolve the floors of memory / And all its clear relations / Its divisions and precisions, / Every street lamp that I pass / Beats like a fatalistic drum, / And through the spaces of the dark / Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

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Rhapsody of a Windy Night

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Menaing of Morning at the Window

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"Damp" is worse than dry. Damp = opposite of fire, would be a bad soul.

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I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids / Sprouting despondently at area gates.

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Morning at the Window

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Menaing of Cousin Nancy

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Atomistic (and fashionable and modern): all things come from atoms and molecules but nothing more. Materialistic not spiritual.

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"He is a charming man" - "But after all what did he mean?" - / "His pointed ears... He must be unbalanced," - / "There was something he said that I might have challenged." / Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah / I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macroon.

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Mr. Apollinax

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Meaning of Mr. Apollinax

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Russell visiting the US. Eliot hates upper-class academic America.

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Meaning of Gerontion

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Old atomist man who is unsure about his atomistic beliefs. "Christ tiger" is scary which shows his doubt. Are his theories right?

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Here I am, an old man in a dry month, / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

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Gerontion

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Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!" / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year / Came Christ the tiger

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Gerontion

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After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now / History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities

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Gerontion

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The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at least / We have not reached conclusion, when I / Stiffen in a rented house.

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Gerontion

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I that was near your heart was removed therefrom / To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. / I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it / Since what is kept must be adulterated? / I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: / How should I use them for your closer contact?

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Gerontion

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Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, / With pungent sauces, multiply variety / In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do, / Suspend its operations, will the weevil / Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled / Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear / In fractured atoms.

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Gerontion

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The meaning of Burial of the Dead (Waste Land part I)

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Hyacinth girl, Madame Sosostris, and bridge. Earth from the four elements. Pieces of a whole, disconnection with reality.

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April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. / Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.

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Burial of the dead, waste land part 1

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Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.

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Burial of the dead, waste land part 1

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"They called me the hyacinth girl." / -Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, / Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

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Burial of the dead, waste land part 1

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Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

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Burial of the dead, waste land part 1

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"That corpse you planted last year in your garden, - / "Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / "Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? / "Oh deep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, / "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! / "You! hypocrite lecteur!

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Burial of the dead, waste land part 1

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Meaning of A Game of Chess, Waste Land part II

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Two women - rushed time, silent pain, bad relationships, "making moves" to win man's love

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"My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. / "What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / "I never know what you are thinking. Think."

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A Game of Chess, Waste Land part II

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"Do / "You know nothing? Do you see nothign? Do you remember / "nothing?" / I remember / THose are pearls that were his eyes. / "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

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A Game of Chess, Waste Land part II

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I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, / It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. / (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) / The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been / the same. / You are a proper fool, I said. / Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said, / What you get married for if you don't want children? / HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.

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A Game of Chess, Waste Land part II

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Meaning of The Fire Sermon, Waste Land part III

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the suffering, the hell on earth, a desire for salvation

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The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. / A rat crept softly through the vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I was finishing in the dull canal / On a winter evening round behind the gashouse / Musing upon the king my brother's wreck / And on the king my feather's death before him. / White bodies naked on the low damp ground / And bones cast in a little low dry garrett, / Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.

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The Fire Sermon, Waste Land part III

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I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, / Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see / At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

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The Fire Sermon, Waste Land part III

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The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,/ endeavours to engage her in caresses/ Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

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The Fire Sermon, Waste Land part III

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She smooths her hair with automatic hand,/ And puts a record on the gramophone

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The Fire Sermon, Waste Land part III

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Meaning of What the Thunder Said, Waste Land part V

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Even in the midst of a culture/society of despair, proper ordering of self; i.e. living virtuously, can lead to inner peace, freeing one from despair.

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After the torchlight on sweaty faces / After the frosty silence in the gardens / After the agony in stony places / ... / He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience

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What the Thunder Said, Waste Land part V

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Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you / Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded / I do not know whether a man or a woman / -But who is that on the other side of you?

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What the Thunder Said, Waste Land part V

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Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel / There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home. / It has no windows, and the door swings, / Dry bones can harm no one. / Only a cock stood on the rooftree / Co co rico co co rico / In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust / Bringing rain

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What the Thunder Said, Waste Land part V

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My friend, blood shaking my heart / The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed / Which is not to be found in our obituaries

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What the Thunder Said, Waste Land part V

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These fragments I have shored against my ruins / Why then Ile fit you. / Hieronymo's mad againe. / Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih

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What the Thunder Said, Waste Land part V

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Meaning of The Hollow Men

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Evidence of Eliot's road toward conversion, examining the ideas of salvation and damnation. Wasteland type images of neither living nor dead. Presenting the dangers of living a "lukewarm" apathetic life. No hope of salvation for hollow men, but for empty men--they have the potential to be filled.

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We are the hollow men / we are the stuffed men/Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw.

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The Hollow Men

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This is the dead land/This is the cactus land/Here the stone images/Are raised, here they receive/The supplication of a dead man's hand/Under the twinkle of a fading star.

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The Hollow Men

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Sightless, unless / The eyes reappear / As the perpetual star / Multifoliate rose / Of death's twilight kingdom / The hope only / Of empty men.

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The Hollow Men

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This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper

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The Hollow Men

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Between the idea/and reality/between the motion/and the act/Falls the shadow

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The Hollow Men

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Meaning of Ash Wednesday

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The first steps toward coming to God, emptying of self, letting God raise you and purify you, learning to pray, confessing, learning that His will is our peace. -Colors -Journey of faith

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Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree / In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety / On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained / In the hollow round of my skull. And God said / Shall these bones live?

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Ash Wednesday

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At the first turning of the third stair / Was a slotted window bellied like the fig's fruit / And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene / The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green / Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

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Ash Wednesday

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The silent sister veiled in white and blue / Between the yews, behind the garden god, / Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

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Ash Wednesday

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Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden, / Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood / Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still / Even among these rocks / Sister, mother / And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea / Suffer me not to be separated / And let my cry come unto Thee.

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Ash Wednesday

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Meaning of Journey of the Magi

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Eliot doesn't focus on birth as a joyous occasion, this birth is a death--sacrifice. Narrator = one of the Magi. The Magi come back changed and distanced.

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With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, / And three trees on the low sky

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Journey of the Magi

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Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, / We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. / We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another death.

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Journey of the Magi

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Meaning of A Song for Simeon

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He has lived according to God, but is now old and wants to see the Infant "grant Israel's consolation" through death

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"Now at this birth season of decease, / Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word, / Grand Israel's consolation / To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow."

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A Song for Simeon

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Grant me thy peace. (And a sword shall pierce thy heart, Thine also). I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me. Let thy servant depart, Having seen thy salvation."

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A Song for Simeon

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Meaning of Animula

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The growing up of a child in the broken world. Continued theme in the Ariel poems of birth as death. Time corrupts and destroys. Christ child entered this corrupt world.

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The heavy burden of the growing soul/ Perplexes and offends more, day by day;/ Week by week, offends and perplexes more/ with the imperatives of 'is and seems'/ and may and may not, desire and control.

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Animula

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Pray for Floret, by the boarhound slain between the yew trees/ pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.

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Animula

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Meaning of Marina

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"that unspoken" is the Christ child (what we discussed in class), which leads into the hope and new ships. Winds are winds of change

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This form, this face, this life / Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me / Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, / The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

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Marina

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Meaning of Choruses

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Eliot writing plays in order to save Churches in the city from being taken down to make room for businesses. Reactions against people who say that there is no place for Churches in the city. Against Enlightenment ideas, and humanism Rationalism leads you to thinking you can do it all on your own and that's wrong. Eliot says morality isn't possible without religion.

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Endless invention, endless experiment, / Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness

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Choruses from the Rock

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In the City, we need no bells: / Let them waken the suburbs. / I journeyed to the suburbs, and there I was told: / We toil for six days, on the weekend we must motor / To Hindhead, or Madienhead

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Choruses from the Rock

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You, have you built well, have you forgotten the cornerstone?

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Choruses from the Rock

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Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten / or ripe. / And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, / and always being restored.

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Choruses from the Rock

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What life have you if you have not life together? / There is no life that is not in community, / And no community not lived in praise of God. / Even the anchorite who meditates alone, / For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God, / Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.

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Choruses from the Rock

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And the wind shall say "here were decent godless people: / Their only monument the asphalt road / And a thousand lost golf balls."

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2nd male voice, Choruses from the Rock

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When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city? / Do you huddle close together because you love each other?" / What will you answer? "We all dwell together / To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?

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Choruses from the Rock

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Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator, / Engaged in working out a rational morality, / Engaged in printing as many books as possible, / Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles, / Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm / For nation or race or what you call humanity

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Choruses from the Rock

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Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her / laws? / She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget./ She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where there/ like to be soft... They constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be / good.

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Choruses from the Rock

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Our age is an age of moderate virtue / And of moderate vice / When men will not lay down the Cross / Because they will never assume it.

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Choruses from the Rock

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Meaning of Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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Via negativa and Positiva (John of the Cross, St. Francis) Temporal vs. Spatial arts (comparison to Keats' Grecian Urn) Time as the fourth dimension Epigraph from Hericlitus-Logos (truth) is common to all Spring/Air "The way up and the way down are the same" - changes into the opposite, there is pattern within change God is the still point

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Time present and time past, / Are both perhaps present in time future / and time future contained in time past./

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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Down the passage which we did not take/ Towards the door we never opened/ Into the rose garden. My words echo/ Thus, in your mind

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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To look down into the drain pool./ Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,/and the pool was filled with water out of sunlight.

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;/ Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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Yet the enrichment of past and future/ woven in the weakness of the changing body,/ protects mankind from heaven and damnation/ which flesh cannot endure

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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To be conscious is not to be in time/ But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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Investing form with lucid stillness/ Turning shadow into transient beauty/ With slow rotation suggesting permanence/ Nor darkness to purify the soul/ Emptying the sensual with deprivation/ Cleansing affection from the temporal./ Neither plentitude nor vacancy

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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Words move, music moves/ Only in time; but that which is only living/ Can only die. Words, after speech, reach/ Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern/ Can words, or music reach/ The stillness, as a Chinese jar still/ Moves perpetually in its stillness.

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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The detail of the pattern is movement./ As in the figure of the ten stairs.

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Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

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Meaning of Four Quartets: East Coker

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Summer/Earth (season and element) "In my beginning is my end" bookends this section. Theme: Life, both human and spiritual forms (marriage, dirt, dung stanza vs. communion, death, and new beginning at the end of poem)

question

In my beginning is my end.

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Four Quartets: East Coker

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In that open field / If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close / On a Summer midnight, you can hear the music / Of the weak pip and the little drum / And see them dancing around the bonfire / The association of man and woman / In a daunsinge, signifying matrimonie-- / A dignified and commodious sacrament.

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Four Quartets: East Coker

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Do not let me hear / Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, / Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, / Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. / The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless

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Four Quartets: East Coker

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O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, / The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, / The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters

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Four Quartets: East Coker

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In order to arrive at what you do not know / You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. / In order to possess what you do not possess / You must go by the way of dispossession. / In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not.

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Four Quartets: East Coker

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What there is to conquer / By strength and submission, has already been discovered / Once or twice, or several items, by men whom one cannot hope / To emulate -but there is no competition- / There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. / For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

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Four Quartets: East Coker

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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.

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Four Quartets: East Coker

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Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter.

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Four Quartets: East Coker

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Old men ought to be explorers / Here and 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.

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Four Quartets: East Coker

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Meaning of Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

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Interweaving of elements Fall/Water seasons

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I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river/ is a strong brown god-- sullen, untamed, and intractable,/ patient to some degree, at first recognised as the frontier;/ useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;/ then only a problem confronting the builder of the bridges.

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Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

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And under the impression of silent fog/ the tolling bell/ measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried/ ground swell, a time/ older than the time of chronometers, older/ than time counted by anxious worried women/ lying awake, calculating the future,/ trying to unweave, unwind, unravel,/ and piece together the past and the future/ between midnight and dawn,/ when the past is all deception/ the future futureless, before the morning watch/ when time stops and time is never ending;/ and the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,/ clangs/ the bell.

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Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

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Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,/ The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable/ prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

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Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

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I have said before/ that the past experience revived in the meaning/ is not the experience of one life only/ but of many generations-- not forgetting/ something that is probably quite ineffable:/ the backwards look behind the assurance/ of recorded history, the backwards half-look/ over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror./ Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony/ (whether, or not, due to misunderstanding./ Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,/ Is not in question) are likewise permanent/ wish such permanence as time has.

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Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

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Time the destroyer is time the preserver

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Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

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And the way us is the way down, the way forward is the way back./ You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure/ that time is no healer: the patient is no longer here

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Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

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Lady, whose shrine sands on the promontory,/ pray for all those who are in ships, those/ whose business has to do with fish, and/ those concerned with every lawful traffic/ and those who conduct them.

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Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

question

Men's curiosity searches past and future/ and clings to that dimension. But to apprehend/ that point of intersection of the timeless/ with time, is an occupation for the saint--/ no occupation either, but something given/ and taken, in a lifetime's death in love, ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

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Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

question

Of spheres of existence is actual,/ Here the past and future/ are conquered, and reconciled,/ Where action were otherwise movement/ Of that which is only moved/ And has in it no source of movement--/ Driven by daemonic, chthonic/ Powers. And right action is freedom/ from past and future also./ for most of us, this is the aim/ Never here to be realised;/ who are only undefeated/ because we have gone on trying; we, content at the last/ if our temporal reversion nourish/ (not too far from the yew-tree)/ The life of significant soil

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Four Quartets: Dry Salvages

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Meaning of Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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-Place of peace are where the problems of time and human fault are relieved through quiet prayer. - The intersection between time and timelessness. - Human faults are acknowledged, only divine mercy can remedy them. - Two kinds of fire: divine mercy and divine wrath. Man is either saved or destroyed. All will be well when these two fires become one. Winter/Fire

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Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

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Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

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Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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And what the dead had no speech for, when living, / They can tell you, being dead: the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

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Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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And last, the rending pain of re-enactment / Of all that you have done, and been; the shame / Of things ill done and done to others' harm / Which once you took for exercise of virtue. / Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains. / From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.

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Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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Whatever we inherit from the fortunate / 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.

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Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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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.

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Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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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.

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Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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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 flames are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.

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Four Quartets: Little Gidding

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Summary of Murder in the Cathedral

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Issue of Church & State. Beckett used to go out and have a good ole time with the King, but then he became Archbishop of Canterbury and started taking his role seriously. Beckett ends up becoming a martyr, killed by the King's men. All scenes occur in the cathedral in Canterbury. The first three tempters Thomas Beckett easily refuses, but the fourth tempter tempts him with his own desire: to be a true Christian and give up his life for the church. If Thomas does this for his own glory, he falls into temptation. If he does it for the glory of God (which he does), he is a true martyr

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For good or ill, let the wheel turn. The wheel has been still, these seven years, and no good. For ill or good, let the wheel turn. For who knows the end of good or evil?

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-Third Priest, Part I Murder in the Cathedral

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Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain: Temptation shall not come in this kind again. The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason. Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain: Temptation shall not come in this kind again. The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

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-Thomas, Part I Murder in the Cathedral

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That is why I tell you, Your thoughts have more power than kings to compel you.

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-Tempter Four, Part I Murder in the Cathedral

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A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of man's will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men. A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of becoming a martyr.

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-Thomas, Interlude Murder in the Cathedral

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Themes in The Family Reunion

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Innocence vs. experience Duty vs. yourself Generational sin Hamlet reference

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You are all people to whom nothing has happened, at most a continual impact of external events. You have gone through life in sleep, never woken to the nightmare. I tell you, life would be unendurable if you were wide awake. You do not know the noxious smell untraceable in the drains, inaccessible to the plumbers, that has its hour of the night; you do not know the unspoken voice of sorrow in the ancient bedroom at three o'clock in the morning. I am not speaking of my own experience, but trying to give you comparisons in a more familiar medium. I am the old house with the noxious smell and the sorrow before morning, in which all past is present, all degradation is unredeemable. As for what happens-- of the past you can only see what is past, not what is always present. That is what matters.

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Harry, Part 1 scene 1 The Family Reunion

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I mean painful, because everything is irrevocable, because the past is irremediable, because the future can only be built upon the real past. Wandering in the tropics or against the painted scene of the Mediterranean, Harry must often have remembered WIshwood - The nursery tea, the school holiday, the daring feats on the old pony, and thought to creep back through the little door. He will find a new Wishwood. Adaptation is hard.

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Agatha, scene 1 The Family Reunion

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You are all people to whom nothing has happened, at most a continual impact of external events. You have gone through life in sleep, never woken to the nightmare. I tell you, life would be unendurable if you were wide awake.

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Harry, scene 1 The Family Reunion

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We all of us make the pretension to be the uncommon exception to the universal bondage. We like to appear in the newspapers so long as we are in the right column. We know about the railway accident we know about the sudden thrombosis and the slowly hardening artery. We like to be thought well of by others so that we may think well of ourselves. And any explanation will satisfy: We only ask to be reassured about the noises in the cellar and the window that should not have been open.

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Chorus, scene 1 The Family Reunion

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What have we been saying? I think I was saying that it seemed s if I had been always here and you were someone who had come from a long distance. Whether I know what I am saying, or why I say it, that does not matter. You bring me news of a door that opens at the end of a corridor, sunlight and singing; when I had felt sure that every corridor only led to another, or to a blank wall; that I kept moving only so as not to stay still. Singing and light. Stop! What is that? Do you feel it?

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Harry, scene 2 The Family Reunion

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The cold spring now is the time for the ache in the moving root the agony in the dark the slow flow throbbing the trunk the pain of the breaking bud. These are the ones that suffer least: The aconite under the snow and the snowdrop crying for a moment in the wood. Pain is the opposite of joy but joy is a kind of pain.

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Mary, scene 2 The Family Reunion

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So I had supposed. What of it? What have we written is not a story of detection, of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation. It is possible that you do not know what sin you shall expiate, or whose, or why. It is certain that the knowledge of it must precede the expiation. It is possible that sin may strain and struggle in its dark instinctive birth, to come to consciousness and so find expurgation. It is possible you are the consciousness of your unhappy family, its bird sent flying through the purgatorial flame. Indeed it is possible. You may learn hereafter, moving alone through flames of ice, chosen to resolve the enchantment under which we suffer.

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Agatha, scene 3 The Family Reunion

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It's only when they see nothing that people can always show the suitable emotions - And so far as tehy feel at all, their emotions are suitable. They don't understand what it is to be awake.

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Harry, Act 2, scene 1 The Family Reunion

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What you call the normal is merely the unreal and the unimportant.

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Harry, act 2, scene 1 The Family Reunion

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Whatever you have learned, Harry, you must remember that there is always more: we cannot rest in being the impatient spectators of malice or stupidity. We must try to penetrate the other private worlds of make-believe and fear. To rest in our own suffering is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.

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Harry, Act 2, Scene 1 The Family Reunion

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Summary of The Cocktail Party

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Distraught relationships caused by vice-driven motives. Those with selfish motives become lonely or feel unwanted, because they have broken all of their true friendships. One who is involved with all of these relationships, but at some distance, is able to see through the chaos and make some sense of all this mess. Relationships are restored, people start seeing life through a healthier perspective. Ability to genuinely love The guardians: Julia, Dr. Reilly, and Alex Comedy is a reminder that you are not "all that." Self-awareness Identity People have conscious and unconscious roles/masks

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You no longer feel quite human. You're suddenly reduced to the status of an object - A living object, but no longer a person. It's always happening, because one is an object As well as a person. But we forget about it As quickly as we can

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Unidentified Guest, Act I Scene I The Cocktail Party

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It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are

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Unidentified Guest, Act I scene I The Cocktail Party

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You will find that you survive humiliation And that's an experience of incalculable value.

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Unidentified Guest, Act I Scene I The Cocktail Party

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You will change your mind, but you are not free. Your moment of freedom was yesterday. You made a decision. You set in motion Forces in your life and in the lives of others Which cannot be reversed.

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Unidentified Guest, Act I Scene I The Cocktail Party

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Ah, but we die to each other daily. What we know of other people Is only our memory of the moments During which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same Is a useful and convenient social convention Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

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Unidentified Guest, Act I Scene III The Cocktail Party

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There was a door And I could not open it. I could not touch the handle. Why could I not walk out of my prison? What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

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Edward, Act I Scene III The Cocktail Party

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I think, that every moment is a fresh beginning

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Edward, Act III The Cocktail Party

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What is Reflections on Vers Libre about?

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Vers Libre is not a genuine verse-form. Hatin' on Milton. There is always a pull towards form. So is free verse even existent?

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It this is a genuine verse-form it will have a positive definition. And I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.

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Reflections on Vers Libre

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We may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation.

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Reflections on Vers Libre

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So much for metre. There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery.

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Reflections on Vers Libre

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When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent.

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Reflections on Vers Libre

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We conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and this does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.

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Reflections on Vers Libre

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What is Tradition and the Individual Talent about?

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Old and new is a continuum. New is created by collecting the old. Eliot thinks that the best of "individualism" comes from the old. Good authors recognize the need for balance.

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Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is an inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

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Tradition and the Individual Talent

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Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition.

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Tradition and the Individual Talent

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Tradition is a matter of such wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

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Tradition and the Individual Talent

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What happens when a new work of art is created happens simultaneously to all the works preceding it. The existing monuments from an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.

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Tradition and the Individual Talent

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That change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen.

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Tradition and the Individual Talent

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Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we knew so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

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Tradition and the Individual Talent

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What is Hamlet about?

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Literary failure, characters are unable to reach themselves. Shakespeare could not understand what he was trying to do with Hamlet therefore the characters have qualities that are inexpressible.

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The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

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Hamlet

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Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure.

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Hamlet

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What is The Perfect Critic about?

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Talking about how Aristotle is the perfect critic because he had the ability to be "objective" and focused on the singular object. This leads to an increase in knowledge of the physical world.

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for there is no method except to be very intelligent, but of intelligence itself swiftly operating the analysis of sensation to the point of principle and definition. (talking about Aristotle)

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The Perfect Critic

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The end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion are removed; thus we aim to see the object as it really is and find a meaning for the words of Arnold. (in class)

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The Perfect Critic

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What is The Metaphysical Poets about?

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- "metaphysical poets:" those who took drastically different ideas and associated them with each other. In doing so, they lost their ability to feel their thoughts: dissociation of sensibility. - Eliot disagrees with this unique "metaphysical" characterization, but respects it, especially because he respects the one whom coined it.

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The force of this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland to justify Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry.

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The Metaphysical poets

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The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray., And as this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music.

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The Metaphysical poets

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It is something that happened to the mind of England....they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as in natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century.

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The Metaphysical poets

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Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires.

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Ulysses, Order, and Myth

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What is Marie Lloyd about?

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The upper class follows the lower class to the music hall for "real entertainment" allowing a collective experience: it's learl, it's live, you're a part of it. essentially, we'll die of boredom (Lockerd's words)

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No other comedian succeeded so well in giving expression to the life of that audience, in raising it to a kind of art. It was, I think this capacity for expressing the soul of the people that made her unique.

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Marie Lloyd

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With the decay of the music-hall, with the encroachment of the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema, the lower classes will tend to drop into the same state of protoplasm as the bourgeoisie. The working man who went to the music hall and saw her and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the act.

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Marie Lloyd

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When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motorcars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loudspeaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.

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Marie Lloyd

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What is Phillip Massinger about?

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Pretty self explanatory ;) It is a good thing to learn from the works of past artists, we learn by imitation. It's just about what we do with what we take.

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Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

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Phillip Massinger

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What is Baudelaire about?

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Eliot acknowledges Baudelaire for choosing something, for not living this life of apathy so commonly illustrated in his poetry (Gerontion, Hollow Men, etc). Salvation would not be necessary or...sweet, if there was not also the reality of damnation. Baudelaire's contribution, what Eliot takes from him (pg. 234)

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So far as we are human, what we must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation.

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Baudelaire

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The recognition of the reality of Sin is a New Life; and the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation.

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Baudelaire

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Having an imperfect, vague romantic conception of Good, he was at least able to understand that the sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural, 'life-giving', cheery automatism of the modern world.

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Baudelaire

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This introduces something new, and something universal in modern life. It is not merely in the use of imagery of common life, not merely in the use of imagery of the sordid life of the great metropolis... (pg 234)

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Baudelaire

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What is Lencelot Andrews about?

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Lancelot Andrews is equivalent to Aquinas. He is what gives the church respect.

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This is not an error: a Church is to be judged by its intellectual fruits, by its influence on the sensibility of the most sensitive and on the intellect of the most intelligent, and it must be made real to the eye by monuments of artistic merit. The English Church has no literary monument equal to that of Dante, no intellectual monument equal to that of St. Thomas, no devotional monument equal to that of St. John of the Cross, no building so beautiful as the Cathedral of Modena or the basilica of St. Zeno in Verona.

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Lencelot Andrews

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What is the Humanism of Irving Babbitt about?

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Balance of faith and reason. Organized building - more than just a religion. Religion needs a place to congregate. Babbitt is not anti-religious, but he is also not religious

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The problem of humanism is undoubtedly related to the problem of religion. Mr. Babbitt makes it very clear, here and there throughout the book, that he is unable to make the religious view-- that is to say that he cannot accept any dogma or revelation; and that humanism is the alternative to religion.

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