A Poet Reflects

“To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.”

—T. S. Eliot

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)

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

—T. S. Eliot, from Dante (1929)

                    I am moved by fancies that are curled
                    Around these images, and cling:
                    The notion of some infinitely gentle
                    Infinitely suffering thing.

                   —T. S. Eliot, from “Preludes” lines 48-52 (1917)