90 That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge The first-met stranger in the waning dusk I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled Both one and many; in the brown baked features 95 The eyes of a familiar compound ghost9
Both intimate and unidentifiable. So I assumed a double part, and cried And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
Although we were not. I was still the same, 100 Knowing myself yet being someone other? And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded. And so, compliant to the common wind, Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
105 In concord at this intersection time Of meeting nowhere, no before and after, We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy, Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
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7. The pattern of indentation in the left margin of lines 78?149, their movement and elevated diction, are meant to suggest the terza rima of Dante's Divine Comedy.
8. The German dive bomber. 9. This encounter with a ghost 'compounded' of W. B. Yeats and his fellow Irishman Jonathan Swift is modeled on Dante's meeting with Brunetto Latini (Inferno 15), including a direct translation (line 98) of Dante's cry of horrified recognition: 'Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?' Cf. also Shakespeare's sonnet 86, line 9: 'that affable familiar ghost.'
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2316 / T. S. ELIOT
no I may not comprehend, may not remember.'
And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse My thought and theory which you have forgotten. These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven 115 By others, as I pray you to forgive Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail. For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.
120 But, as the passage now presents no hindrance To the spirit unappeased and peregrine' foreign, wandering Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit 125 When I left my body on a distant shore.1
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe2 And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age BO To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
135 Second, the conscious impotence of rage3 At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.4
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been;5 the shame MO Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit 145 Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire6 Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'7
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street He left me, with a kind of valediction, And faded on the blowing of the horn.8
]. Yeats died on Jan. 28, 1939, at Roquebrune in the south of France.
2. A rendering of the line 'Donner tin setts plus pur aux mots de la tribu' in Stephane Mallarme's 1877 sonnet 'Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe' ('The Tomb of Edgar Poe'). 3. Cf. Yeats's 'The Spur': 'You think it horrible that lust and rage / Should dance attention upon my old age.' 4. Cf. Yeats's 'Swift's Epitaph' (translated from Swift's own Latin): 'Savage indignation there / Cannot lacerate his breast.' 5. Cf. Yeats's 'Man and the Echo': 'All that 1 have said and done, / Now that 1 am old and ill, / Turns into a question till / I lie awake night after night / And never get the answer right. / Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?' 6. Cf. The Waste Land, line 428 and its note; also the refining fire in Yeats's 'Byzantium,' lines 25? 32. 7. Cf. Yeats's 'Among School Children,' line 64: 'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' 8. Cf.Hamlet 1.2.157: 'It faded on the crowing of the cock.' The horn is the all-clear signal after an air raid (the dialogue has taken place between the dropping of the last bomb and the sounding of the all clear). Eliot called the section that ends with this line 'the nearest equivalent to a canto of the Inferno or Ptirgatorio' that he could achieve and spoke of his intention to present 'a parallel, by means of contrast, between the Inferno and the Purgatorio . . . and a hallucinated scene after an air raid.'
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LITTLE GIDDING / 231 7
III
150 There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between
them, indifference Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
