Photograph of Lady Ottoline Morrell.
Thomas Stearns Eliot He was born in San Luis on a day like today in 1880. He was a poet, critic, and editor, and one of the most outstanding voices in American poetry in the first half of the XNUMXth century. For his contribution and innovation to the genre he received the Nobel Prize in 1948. Today I remember his work with 4 of his poems shorter.
TS Eliot.
Was formed in Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford. He was a friend of the also poet Ezra Pound, which encouraged him to publish his first volume of poems in England, J. Alfred Prufrock's love song. Later he became a British citizen.
His most representative works are the Four quartets, The wasteland o Murder in the cathedral. And also wrote poems for children such as LBook of the Skillful Cats of Old Possum, the inspiration for Cats, the far more famous musical adapted by composer Andrew Lloyd Weber.
4 short poems
Eyes that i saw with tears
Eyes that I saw with tears the last time
through separation
here in the other realm of death
the golden vision reappears
I see the eyes but not the tears
this is my affliction.
This is my affliction:
eyes that I will never see again
decision eyes
eyes that I will not see unless
at the door of the other realm of death
where, as in this one
eyes last a little while
a little time last longer than tears
and they look at us with derision.
Gallant conversation
I observe: «Our sentimental friend, the moon!
Or maybe (it's fantastic, I confess)
it could be the balloon of Preste Juan
Or a battered old lantern hung high
to enlighten the poor travelers in their distress.
And then she: "How you ramble!"
And then I: «Someone weaves on the keys
that exquisite nocturnal, with which we explain
the night and the moonlight; music we grab
to materialize our own emptiness.
And she then: "You mean me?"
"Oh no, it is I who am inane."
«You, lady, are the eternal humorist,
the eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vague humor the slightest twist!
with your indifferent and imperious air
to refute at once our crazy poetics.
And "But are we so serious?"
Honeymoon
They have seen the Netherlands, they return to the Highlands;
but one summer night, here they are Ravenna,
very comfortable between two sheets, where two hundred fleas;
summer sweat and a strong bitch smell.
They are on their backs, with their knees apart,
four legs swollen from bites.
They throw back the sheets and use their nails better.
Less than a league is San Apolinario-
en -Class, a basilica for connoisseurs,
acanthus capitals shaken by the wind.
They will take the hourly train at eight o'clock and from Padua
they will take their miseries to Milan,
where are the dinner and a cheap restaurant.
He thinks about tips, he does the math.
They will have seen Switzerland and crossed France.
And Saint Apollinarius, right and ascetic,
old factory of God unrelated, save
still in its stones collapsing the precise form of Byzantium.
The first choir of the rock
The eagle hovers on the top of the sky,
the hunter and the pack meet their circle.
Oh incessant revolution of shaped stars!
O perpetual resource of determined seasons!
Oh world of summer and autumn, of death and birth!
The infinite cycle of ideas and actions,
infinite invention, infinite experiment,
brings knowledge of mobility, but not of stillness;
knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
word knowledge and word ignorance.
All our knowledge brings us closer to our ignorance,
all our ignorance brings us closer to death,
but the nearness of death does not bring us closer to God.
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom that we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge that we have lost in information?
The heavenly cycles in twenty centuries
they separate us from God and bring us closer to the dust.