We learn what poetry is – if we ever learn – by reading it.
Well, the Theatre’s certainly not what it was.
Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us – if at all – not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.
Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent.
You are the consciousness of your unhappy family. Its bird sent flying through the purgatorial flame.
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.
It seems, as one becomes older, That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning.
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 Begins as attachment to our own field of action.
I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing.
Old men ought to be explorers Here and 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.
Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du?
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
One must be so careful these days.
That corpse you planted last year in your garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without; For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while there is time of prosperity The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity they will decry it.
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid. And.