The Unreal Wastelands & Labyrinths – What Memory Keeps and Throws Away; An Exercise in Recollection: in flashes and distortions.

The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Unreal Wastelands & Labyrinths – What Memory Keeps and Throws Away; An Exercise in Recollection: in flashes and distortions.

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You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!

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Chimes follow the Fire Sermon:

A rat crept softly through the vegetation;
departed. A cold blast at the back, So rudely forc’d, like Philomela.
It was Tiresias’, it was he who doomed all men,
throbbing between two lives, knowing which?

Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Excuse my demotic French!

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Let us go then, him (that carbuncular young man), and you –
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

You may come or go, but speak not
of Michelangelo.

When there is not solitude even in the Mountains,
When even the sound of water could dry your thirst,
Then you can lift your hands and sing of dead pine trees.

Have you yet been led,
through paths of insidious intent,
through every tedious argument,
To that overwhelming question?

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Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Sweet Thames, sweating oil and tar,
Sweet Thames, run on softly till I end my song,
for I speak not loud or long,
for I speak not clear or clean,
for I speak in the hoarse whispers of the last man,
for it was I who murdered you,
and Ganga, right under the nose, of mighty Himavant!

You who were living is now dead.
We who were living are now dying –
With a little patience!

Break The Bough, and hang yourself from it,
Sweeney, Prufrock, The Fisher King and the sterile others,
all will follow first,
like corpses etherised on well-lit tables.

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Remember me, me – Tiresias, once more, for we are all him,
yet not.

The present will always look at the mirror,
and see only a Wasteland,
The Past is always the heavenly spring,
running dry now.

Perspective,
Thy name is Poetry.

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London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
These fragments you have shored against my ruins.

Why is it impossible to say just what I mean!

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

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shantih shantih shantih

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You! Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother!

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Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

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