Happy Birthday, Tom Eliot

The Writer's Almanac tells me it's the birthday of T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot today, Anglicized American poet extraordinaire and writer of what I think I would like on a gravestone if I end up on a ranch and get to be buried there:

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance. 

(From "Ash Wednesday," of course.) 

Next Poem, Please

I picked the next poem in my 3+1 Things project--most of the final section of "Ash Wednesday," by our buddy Tom Eliot--to coincide with Lent and Easter. (Actually, they're all seasonally appropriate--"Starlings in Winter" falls in December, Dark Harbor comes in summer, etc.)

Since today is indeed the actual Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar, I guess it's time to move on from "The Poems of Our Climate" and start memorizing this one:


Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

Want To Travel Europe Vicariously?

My work friend "Josie," who took the wine class with me and is all kinds of awesome, has QUIT (slightly less awesome, although it was to move) and is now taking the summer to travel Europe with her husband. Follow her adventures on her awesome blog.

She started her travels in London this week, and guess what? She got to go to T.S.Eliot's grave in East Coker! I am very jealous.

Poem For Snow, Although It Was Better Suited To The Inversion

The weekend was so gloomy that I was starting to feel sad, so I had to go find some T.S. Eliot. This is from "Little Gidding," from the Four Quartets.

Midwinter 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,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

Feel Free To Start Any Time, Spring

Now that it's April, I can post the part from The Wasteland that everyone knows and uses to complain about the weather:

APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

"Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still."

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar, which reminded me of the T.S. Eliot poem of the same name. I wish I had studied this one in college, because I'm sure there's a lot more to it than I'm getting now. It's long; you can read it all here. But this excerpt from the end of the last section seemed to fit with the weather today and my general mood. (Not literally "the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation," as Wikipedia says, but maybe the hope for spring? And better times?)

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Happy 2009

"For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning."

T.S. Eliot