The Waste Land and Other Poems (6 page)

 

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
‘Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.’
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running
along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

 

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
‘Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.’
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.
The lamp said,
‘Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the
wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.’

 

The last twist of the knife.

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement
kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

 

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

The readers of the Boston Evening
Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

 

When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening
Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to
La Rochefoucauld,
¹
If the street were time and he at the end of the
street,
And I say, ‘Cousin Harriet, here is the
Boston
Evening Transcript.’

Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,
And lived in a small house near a fashionable
square
Cared for by servants to the number of four.
Now when she died there was silence in heaven
And silence at her end of the street.
The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped
his feet—
He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred
before.
The dogs were handsomely provided for,
But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
The Dresden clock continued ticking on the
mantelpiece,
And the footman sat upon the dining-table
Holding the second housemaid on his knees—
Who had always been so careful while her mistress
lived.

Miss Nancy Ellicott
Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them—
The barren New England hills—
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.

 

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt
about it,
But they knew that it was modern.

 

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo,
¹
guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.

Ω τnς καivóτητoς ‘Hρκλεiζ, τς παραδoξoλoγíας. εvµnχανoς aνθρωπoς.

LUCIAN.
¹

 

When Mr. Apollinax
²
visited the United States
His laughter tinkled among the teacups.
I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the
birch-trees,
And of Priapus
³
in the shrubbery
Gaping at the lady in the swing.
In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor
Channing-Cheetah’s
He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.
His laughter was submarine and profound
Like the old man of the sea’s
Hidden under coral islands
Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down
in the green silence,
Dropping from fingers of surf.
I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling
under a chair.
Or grinning over a screen
With seaweed in its hair.
I heard the beat of centaur’s hoofs over the hard
turf
As his dry and passionate talk devoured the
afternoon.
‘He is a charming man’—‘But after all what did he
mean?’—
‘His pointed ears.... He must be unbalanced.’—
‘There was something he said that I might have
challenged.’
Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and
Mrs. Cheetah
I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten
macaroon.

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden ...’ I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

I observe: ‘Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
It may be Prester John’s
¹
balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travellers to their distress.’

She then: ‘How you digress!’

 

And I then: ‘Someone frames upon the keys
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
The night and moonshine; music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity.’

She then: ‘Does this refer to me?’
‘Oh no, it is I who am inane.’

 

‘You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your air indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—’

And—‘Are we then so serious?’

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

 

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the
hand.

 

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of
flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a
cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet
³
of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in
London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.

 

Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’
⁴
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the
year
Came Christ the tiger

 

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering
judas,
⁵
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
⁶
Who walked all night in the next room;

 

By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
⁷
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.
Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.

 

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think
now
History has many cunning passages, contrived
corridors
⁸
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple
confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too
soon
Into weak hands,
⁹
what’s thought can be dispensed
with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing
tree.
¹⁰

 

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to
keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and
touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?

 

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel,
¹¹
whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
¹²
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the
windy straits
Of Belle Isle,
¹³
or running on the Horn.
¹⁴
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
¹⁵
To a sleepy corner.

 

Tenants of the house,

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

 

Burbank crossed a little bridge
Descending at a small hotel;
Princess Volupine
³
arrived,
They were together, and he fell.
⁴

Defunctive music under sea
Passed seaward with the passing bell
Slowly: the God Hercules
⁵
Had left him, that had loved him well.

 

The horses, under the axletree
Beat up the dawn from Istria
⁶
With even feet. Her shuttered barge
Burned on the water all the day.

 

But this or such was Bleistein’s way:
A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.

 

A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
⁷
The smoky candle end of time

 

Declines. On the Rialto
⁸
once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The Jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,