Death and Mourning

O the chimneys On the ingeniously devised habitations of death When Israel’s body drifted as smoke Through the air— Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep, A star that turned black Or was it a ray of sun? 1

That was a time when only the dead could smile.

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.

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.

Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb.

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.

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.

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.

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

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

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.

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

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