155 Being between two lives?unflowering, between The live and the dead nettle.9 This is the use of memory: For liberation?not less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
160 Begins as attachment to our own field of action And comes to find that action of little importance Though never indifferent. History may be servitude, History may be freedom. See, now they vanish, The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
165 To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well.1 If I think, again, of this place,
170 And of people, not wholly commendable, Of no immediate kin or kindness, But some of peculiar genius, All touched by a common genius, United in the strife which divided them;
175 If I think of a king at nightfall,2 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 quiet3
iso Why should we celebrate These dead men more than the dying? It is not to ring the bell backward Nor is it an incantation To summon the spectre of a Rose.
185 We cannot revive old factions We cannot restore old policies Or follow an antique drum. These men, and those who opposed them And those whom they opposed
190 Accept the constitution of silence And are folded in a single party.
9. Eliot wrote to a friend: 'The dead nettle is the family of flowering plants of which the White Archangel is one of the commonest and closely resembles the stinging nettle and is found in its company.' 1. A quotation from the 14th-century English mystic Dame Julian of Norwich: 'Sin is behovabil [inevitable and fitting], but all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.'
2. I.e., Charles I. He died 'on the scaffold' in 1649, while his principal advisers, Archbishop Laud and Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, were both executed earlier by the victorious parliamentary forces. 3. I.e., Milton, who sided with Cromwell against the king.
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2318 / T. S. ELIOT
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us?a symbol:
195 A symbol perfected in death. And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well By the purification of the motive In the ground of our beseeching.4
IV
200 The dove' descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair
205 Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre? To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove
210 The intolerable shirt of flame6
Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire0 breathe, sigh Consumed by either fire or fire.
V
What we call the beginning is often the end
215 And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
220 And easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort7 dancing together) Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
225 Every poem an epitaph. And any action Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them.
230 We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree8
4. Dame Julian of Norwich was instructed in a been told that it would increase his love for her, vision that 'the ground of our beseeching' is love. but instead it so corroded his flesh that in his agony 5. Both a dive bomber and the Holy Spirit with its he mounted a funeral pyre and burned himself to Pentecostal tongues of fire. death. 6. Out of love for her husband, Hercules, Deianira 7. Company; also harmony of sounds. gave him the poisoned shirt of Nessus. She had 8. Traditional symbol of death and grief.
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TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT / 231 9
Are of equal duration. A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
235 Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling9
We shall not cease from exploration
240 And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover
