Society and the World

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place.

The only freedom the gods grant us Of our own free will to their sovereignty. Since only in the illusion of freedom

How should I know what I’ll be, I who don’t know what I am? Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can’t all be it! Genius? At this moment A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me, And it may be that history won’t remember even one, All their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

But fare forward, voyagers.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels Over the paving.

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

But at my back from time to time I hear 3 The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water.

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

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

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

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

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

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.

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.

“Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy And the dogs that talk revolution, Drunk with talk, liars and believers. I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,” Said the gamey black-maned wild boar Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I’d toddle safely home and die—in bed.

Who will remember, passing through this gate, The unheroic dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate— Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Who will remember, passing through this gate, The unheroic dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate— Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Soldiers are citizens of death’s gray land.