#four quartets

[derangedrhythms]

The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets; from 'The Dry Salvages'

[fatchance]

"Old men ought to be explorers”

A fragment from the poem "East Coker" by T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, 1940/1943.

[aprilsd]

I love listening to George read so I really couldn't not ask him to read one of my favorite poems

Part V of East Coker by TS Eliot from Four Quartets, which I have included under the cut

@gameo-archive

George also read Little Gidding by Eliot and October by Louise Glück

V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

[dk-thrive]

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 . . .

— T. S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding" in "Four Quartets" (Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1942) (via A Layman's Blog)

[molly-bl00m]

T. S. Eliot. Collected Poems 1909‑1962. Faber & Faber, 2009.

#my photo

[dontcxckitup]

Ralph Fiennes Four Quartets

[loveless-endless]

in succession, houses rise and fall

[ralphfiennes-only]

Ralph Fiennes in Four Quartets (2021) Photos by Matt Humphrey