Life and Existence

A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well 10 When the tongues of flame are infolded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

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.

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.

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.

In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing.

Time the destroyer is time the preserver.

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

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. 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.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. 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.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, 8 and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, 8 and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God.

O dark dark dark. 7 They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

In my beginning is my end.

In my beginning is my end.

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars And reconciles forgotten wars.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose garden.

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

Human kind cannot bear very much reality. 6

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

Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb.