A Poet Reflects

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice,

—T. S. Eliot, Section II of Quartet no. 4 “Little Gidding,” lines 118-119, from Four Quartets (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1943)

(from section 1) The Dry Salvages

And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning.
Clangs
The bell.

—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971)

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die.  Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence … Words, strain,
Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

—T. S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton,” section V, lines 137-153, in Four Quartets (Harvest/HBJ, 1943, 1971).

Photograph: T. S. Eliot by John Loengard, 1956.