Life and Existence

Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb.

They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer. They know and do not know, that acting is suffering.

Yet we have gone on living, Living and partly living.

Yet we have gone on living, Living and partly living.

What seas what shores what gray rocks and what islands What water lapping the bow And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog What images return O my daughter.

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

Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.

The time. Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream While jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the center of the silent Word.

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair; Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair, Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair Climbing the third stair.

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Two live as one One live as two Two live as three Under the bam Under the boo Under the bamboo tree.

Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

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

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

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

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.