but this is the nearest, in place and time,
now and in england
there is a time for building
and a time for living and for generation
and a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
and to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
and to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto if i think of a king at nightfall,
of three men, and more, on the scaffold
and a few who died forgotten
in other places, here and abroad,
and of one who died blind and quiet,
why should we celebrate
these dead men more than the dying?
you'll never see the bright moon again,
you've now achieved the unalterable
sum of moments granted you by fate
they say
the first snow will fall
america waits for me on every street,
but i feel in the decline of evening
today so long, and yesterday so brief
the life of significant soil
who are only undefeated
because we have gone on trying not too far from the yew-tree
we, content at the last
if our temporal reversion nourish
the shame
of things ill done and done to others' harm
which once you took for exercise of virtue the dry salvages - presumably les trois sauvages - is a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the n
the day was breaking
they have found one another the taste of fruit, the taste of water,
that face returned to us in dream,
the first jasmine flowers of november,
the infinite yearning of the compass,
a book we thought forever lost,
the pulsing of a hexameter,
the little key that opens a house,
the smell of sandalwood or library,
the ancient name of a street,
the colourations of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date that we were searching for,
counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,
a sudden physical pain
and those who saw them off have left the platform
their faces relax from grief into relief,
to the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours
when christ has judged me
who knows what they'll see
at the still point, there the dance is,
but neither arrest nor movement
neither from nor towards that i've walked
already one last time, indifferently
and without knowing it, submitting
to one who sets up omnipotent laws
and a secret and a rigid measure
for the shadows, the dreams, and forms
that work the warp and weft of this life
but which let them be
the backward look behind the assurance
of recorded history, the backward half-look
over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror what one had expected
to start again
we had the experience but missed the meaning,
and approach to the meaning restores the experience
in a different form, beyond any meaning
we can assign to happiness
there is yet faith
but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting
wait without love,
for love would be love of the wrong thing or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
i said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing
dying is a habit
that's well-known to many
on the money'
a dignified and commodious sacrament
so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing
love is itself unmoving,
only the cause and end of movement,
timeless, and undesiring
except in the aspect of time
caught in the form of limitation
between un-being and being
yet the words sufficed
to compel the recognition they preceded
and he a face still forming
no occupation either, but something given
and taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
ardour and selflessness and self-surrender