Life and Existence

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow.

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

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.

I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

I had not thought death had undone so many. 1 Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled. 2

Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone.

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin.

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

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

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

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I grow old… I grow old…. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

There will be time to murder and create.

Still falls the Rain— Dark as the world of man, black as our loss— Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the Cross.

The strong lean upon death as on a rock.