Prompt: Time + Place + Love + Death
“You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel. . .” T.S. Eliot
I went to sleep hating T.S. Eliot, I woke up appreciating him.
I started in the wrong place.
Eliot’s picture has been in the Dead Poets Live banner as a sort of placeholder, a reminder that I need to visit him and his work. I have been intimidated, for good reason!
T.S. Eliot is the antithesis of Bashō, the haiku master. Eliot verbalizes complicated ideas through even more complex poems. If you go into Eliot’s work with the wrong expectations, like I did, you may find yourself longing for a poem about a frog jumping in a pond!
There is a different sort of beauty in Eliot’s writing. . .almost like a magic eye painting, when you cross your eyes and forget what you are seeing and look to the picture beyond, then you understand.
If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. And 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. Here, the intersection of the timeless moment Is England and nowhere. Never and always. — T.S. Eliot
I explain my journey in a poem below By the Look of Some Dead Master, a poem based on Little Gidding, the Fourth of the Quartets, which Eliot considered his best work.
Prompt: Time + Place + Love + Death
It may sound like a crazy challenge, to write about all these concepts at once, but is entirely possible. . .even in the simplest form. Remember the Basho poem?
“Written at the house of a person whose child has died”
a withered, leaning, out-of-joint world — bamboo upside down under snow
You can do it!
I look forward to reading your poems on time Time + Place + Love + Death!
I’ll be away for my 17th!! anniversary this weekend, so apologies if I’m a little slow posting your stories.
Please let me know in the comments if you would like to be added as a writer!
By the Look of Some Dead Master
by David S.
TS Eliot stares at me unblinking. He knows I’ve been derelict. He’s considering a lawsuit against me for using his likeness without studying his art So I jump in the deep end With J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion, Marina, the Quartets
I stare back at Eliot, unblinking, unseeing. Like the blind man and the elephant, I touch, but don’t comprehend
Eliot answers my confusion,
“I am not eager to rehearse My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten. These things have served their purpose: let them be. So with your own, and pray they be forgiven By others, as I pray you to forgive Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail. For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.”
And I understand there is no understanding, Only paradox of being; Time and no time, Death and undeath, Place and no place, Speaking and silence. . . Summer can be winter England can be America, easy as a thought, quick as a daydream.
Understanding, what I thought I came for, “is only a shell, a husk of meaning from which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled if at all.”
Good.
TS Eliot stares at me unblinking, but, a hint of a smile around his eyes, “Do you really think I would sue you? What evil could I wage against you, worse than that of time itself? What harm could I wish you, worse than the harm life itself will inflict?
“Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder. Second, the conscious impotence of rage At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others’ harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.”
*By the Look of Some Dead Master is a line from the Fourth Quartet.
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