Thomas Stearns Eliot

East Coker (extrait)

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What is the late November doing

With the disturbance of the spring

And creatures of the summer heat,

And snowdrops writhing under feet

And hollyhocks that aim too high

Red into grey and tumble down

Late roses filled with early snow?

Thunder rolled by the rolling stars

Simulates triumphal cars

Deployed in constellated wars

Scorpion fights against the sun

Until the Sun and Moon go down

Comets weep and Leonids fly

Hunt the heavens and the plains

Whirled in a vortex that shall bring

The world to that destructive fire

Which burns before the ice-cap reigns

 

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter

It was not (to start again) what one had expected.

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,

Long hope for calm, the autumnal serenity

And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us

Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,

bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

The serenity only a deliberate hebitude,

The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets

Useless in the darkness into which they peered

Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

In the middle, not only in the middle of the way

But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,

And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,

Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

 

The houses are all gone under the sea.

 

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

 

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