V
Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.
30 And die the death, the long and painful death that lies between the old self and the new.
Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised, already our souls are oozing through the exit of the cruel bruise.
35 Already the dark and endless ocean of the end is washing in through the breaches of our wounds, already the flood is upon us.
Oh build your ship of death, your little ark and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine 40 for the dark flight down oblivion.
VI
Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.
2. Cf. Shakespeare's Hamlet 3.1.70?76: 'For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / .. . When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?' 'Bodkin': dagger.
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TH E SHI P O F DEAT H / 228 5 45We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world. We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life. VII 50 We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship of death to carry the soul on the longest journey. 55A little ship, with oars and food and little dishes, and all accoutrements fitting and ready for the departing soul. 60Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith with its store of food and little cooking pans and change of clothes, upon the flood's black waste upon the waters of the end upon the sea of death, where still we sail darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port. 6570 There is no port, there is nowhere to go only the deepening blackness darkening still blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood darkness at one with darkness, up and down and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more and the little ship is there; yet she is gone. She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by. She is gone! gone! and yet somewhere she is there. Nowhere! VIII 75so And everything is gone, the body is gone completely under, gone, entirely gone. The upper darkness is heavy as the lower, between them the little ship is gone she is gone. It is the end, it is oblivion. IX And yet out of eternity a thread separates itself on the blackness,
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2286 / T. S. ELIOT
a horizontal thread 85 that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.
Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume A little higher? Ah wait, wait, for there's the dawn, the cruel dawn of coming back to life
90 out of oblivion.
Wait, wait, the little ship drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey of a flood-dawn.
Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow 95 and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.
A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.
X
The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely. And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
IOO on the pink flood, and the frail soul steps out, into her house again filling the heart with peace.
Swings the heart renewed with peace even of oblivion.
105 Oh build your ship of death, oh build it! for you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.
1929-30 1933
T. S. ELIOT 1888-1965 Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of New England stock. He entered Harvard in 1906 and was influenced there by the anti-Romanticism of Irving Babbitt and the philosophical and critical interests of George Santayana, as well as by the enthusiastic study of Renaissance literature and of South Asian religions. He wrote his Harvard dissertation on the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley, whose emphasis on the private nature of individual experience, 'a circle enclosed on the outside,' influenced Eliot's poetry considerably. He also studied literature and philosophy in France and Germany, before going to England shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He studied Greek philosophy at Oxford, taught school in London, and then obtained a position with Lloyd's Bank. In 1915 he married an English writer, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was not a success. She suf
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T. S. ELIOT / 2287 fered from poor emotional and physical health. The strain told on Eliot, too. By November 1921 distress and worry had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown, and on medical advice he went to recuperate in a Swiss sanitorium. Two months later he returned, pausing in Paris long enough to give his early supporter and adviser Ezra Pound the manuscript of The Waste Land. Eliot left his wife in 1933, and she was eventually committed to a mental home, where she died in 1947. Ten years later he was happily remarried to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher.
Eliot started writing literary and philosophical reviews soon after settling in London and was assistant editor of The Egoist magazine from 1917 to 1919. In 1922 he founded the influential quarterly The Criterion, which he edited until it ceased publication in 1939. His poetry first appeared in 1915, when, at Pound's urging, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' was printed in Poetry magazine (Chicago) and a few other short poems were published in the short-lived periodical Blast. His first published collection of poems was Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917; two other small collections followed in 1919 and 1920; in 1922 The Waste Land appeared, first in The Criterion in October, then in The Dial (in America) in November, and finally in book form. Meanwhile he was also publishing collections of his critical essays. In 1925 he joined the London publishing firm Faber & Gwyer, and he was made a director when the firm was renamed Faber & Faber. He became a British subject and joined the Church of England in 1927.
