By T.S.Elliot

Emily Dickinson

The Bustle in a House

The Morning after Death

Is solemnest of industries

Enacted upon Earth -

The Sweeping up the Heart

And putting Love away

We shall not want to use again

Until Eternity

Emily Dickinson.

3 poems

There is no frigate like a book

To take us lands away,

Nor any Coursers like a page

Of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of toll.

How frugal is the chariot

That bears the human soul!

-----------------------

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreadful to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

-----------------------

Much madness is divinest sense

To a discerning eye,

Much sense, the starkest madness.

'Tis the majority

In this, as all, prevail:

Assent, and you are sane;

Demur, and you're straightway dangerous

and handled with a chain.

By T.S.Elliot

The Hollow Men

1925

Mistah Kurtz - he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas !

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed 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.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear :

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind's singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death's dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer -

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death's other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death's twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thin is the Kingdom

For Thin is

Life is

For Thin is the

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love's day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges' side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found.

Nor in thy marble vault my echoing song shall sound.

And your quaint honor turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust:

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpire

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

"THERE is no God," the wicked saith,

"And truly it's a blessing,

For what He might have done with us

It's better only guessing."

"There is no God," a youngster thinks,

"or really, if there may be,

He surely did not mean a man

Always to be a baby."

"There is no God, or if there is,"

The tradesman thinks, "'twere funny

If He should take it ill in me

To make a little money."

"Whether there be," the rich man says,

"It matters very little,

For I and mine, thank somebody,

Are not in want of victual."

Some others, also, to themselves,

Who scarce so much as doubt it,

Think there is none, when they are well,

And do not think about it.

But country folks who live beneath

The shadow of the steeple;

The parson and the parson's wife,

And mostly married people;

Youths green and happy in first love,

So thankful for illusion;

And men caught out in what the world

Calls guilt, in first confusion;

And almost everyone when age,

Disease, or sorrows strike him,

Inclines to think there is a God,

Or something very like Him.

Arthur Hugh Clough